It's no fun at all

Just back from the garden after l½-hr work (my absolute limit) trimming the ivy and other ill-defined tasks. I need to work off my resentment, so here’s a list of horticultural ineluctables.

(1) Why is it that how ever many implements you take out of the shed, you always need another? And then another?

(2) Gardener’s World is like watching sado-masochistic porn when you get the heeby-jeebies over a pin-prick. There are people who seem to relish digging. Mind you, the earth they dig is remarkably free from rocks, roots and compressed density.

(3) Trimming ivy doesn’t sound much. What’s a pain is hooking out the cuttings without wrecking the contents of the flower bed.

(4) “But you enjoy the garden when it’s full of colour,” says my wife. Cruelly I point out that she enjoys using her well-honed teeth but finds it difficult to remain philosophical while the dental hygienist goes a’scritching.

(5) A garden creeps up on you like a mugger. Something that didn’t need doing this morning, suddenly requires attention now you’ve got a belly-full of lunch.

(6) Poets rhapsodise about gardens. But can you imagine Dylan Thomas doing topiary? One Plutarch doesn’t foretell a flock of horticultural rhymesters.

OK, I’m purged. Now for a chapter or two of Walter Pater.

The button that brings peace

Since we were as poor as church mice – er, let’s say freethinking mice – in the seventies we didn’t get a colour telly until 1984. With it came a remote control and a whole new world opened up. Or rather, an old world closed down. For the remote had a mute button.

From that day to this we have seen - but not heard - any TV commercials. I am aware of what Hovis did to Dvorak but we remain happily unaware of the aural evidence. Better than that, we are deaf to the exchanges between young men ogling beer and women in pubs, to the music that accompanies the ludicrous publicity about cars and to the blandishments of the man with false teeth selling sofas.

The mute button has even strayed into the news bulletins and we are no longer cognisant of England soccer fans’ views on Hegel and Leibniz. Not all guests to chez Bonden are comfortable with our censorship. One niece’s hand reached for the remote during what she regarded as the unnatural silence. But I am an unyielding host.

Latterly I have become an equally unyielding prophet for another button on the remote. “Do you realise,” I say unpleasantly to many a neighbour who has invested in a TV screen the size of a french window, “real people do not have flat heads suitable for playing ping pong on and that cars are taller than those flat-headed peoples’ waists. Try the aspect ratio control.”

But I remain a prophet without honour outside my own sitting room and my circle of acquaintances is diminishing.

A glance into the abyss

In awe of? Well, I suppose certain natural phenomena (The Bay of Islands, the Matterhorn from Zermatt, the south Brittany coast from the sea) and certain man-made structures (the Millau bridge, Coventry cathedral, the Chrysler building). Technology though tends to impress me rather than touch my soul. Though there was one occasion, and it was all the more memorable for its moral ambiguity.

For professional reasons I went aboard HMS Renown at Gairloch on the Clyde. Renown is – perhaps was – a missile-equipped nuclear submarine which slips off secretly, sometimes for months, into goodness knows what part of the ocean. Not with me aboard, I hasten to add. My job was ask questions about how she was victualled.

Theoretically my brief didn’t extend to Renown’s nature or to her raison d’etre but the hardware was inescapable. The CPO in charge of catering also had a battle job: operating the hydroplanes to initiate a dive or a return to the surface. Later there was the walk forward to the place where those sixteen (I think) ominous cylinders were installed.

Renown was so well-made, damnit. Efficient. Almost a recruiting exercise if you respond to mechanical, electrical and electronic things. She recalled those cutaway drawings in Eagle designed to excite young readers about technology for its own sake. The excitement reached me for it was possible – for a moment – to separate all this hard-nosed beauty from its purpose. I can’t say I wasn’t in awe of it all. Even now, nearly thirty years later, I remember the feeling. And remind myself feelings are not necessarily trustworthy.

Battle between the sexes - on wheels

This is a pretty old motorbike. The photo dates back to 1957 – 58 and even then the bike was seven or eight. The giveaway is the apparent lack of rear suspension. But in fact the rear end was sprung.

For this is a 500 cc Triumph Speed Twin notorious for its spring hub. How did it work? I don’t know. I was more interested in blaring up to the Lake District on it. My guess is the capacious hub accommodated substantial springs arranged radially and that the spindle “floated” at the springs’ notional junction. A horrifying concept which delivered its horror during cornering.

So long as the bike was upright the horror was disguised. But bikes heel over on corners and the springs could not respond logically to this radical change in applied force. My friend Richard, who sold me the bike, put it this way:

“The rear end of the bike flexed during cornering. These oscillations were absorbed in the hub and then re-transmitted – out of phase with the bike’s forward progress – back to the frame. The bike behaved like an animal having a nervous breakdown.”

Should my old Speed Twin be included in a blog called Works Well? Definitely. On one of those Lake District trips the pillion was occupied by a girl-friend who had expressed an interest in rock climbing. Having survived my instruction in Langdale she incautiously referred to my sedate progress on the way back. I’d been holding back on her behalf. A mile or two of open throttle with the Triumph pythonising its way between the dry stone walls returned our conversation to a more even-handed state.

The war we all have to fight

Relucent Reader, lives in Mechanicsville, Virginia, and worries about the threat posed to libraries by the wonky economy. I sympathise. The best public library I’ve used was at Mount Lebanon, a Pittsburgh suburb. Light and airy, well endowed (it was a swanky suburb) and it had a monster letterbox down which you could avalanche your returns at any time. A first for me then.

The assistants were predominantly women, living tributes to the high standards of orthodontics in the USA.

What I can’t recall is the check-in/check-out system which is one way of marking the passage of time in any country. Scroll back several decades and my UK library ticket consisted of a paper pouch. Inside the library book cover was a similar pouch holding a card that identified the book. When I took out a book the card was transferred from the book pouch to my pouch and was stored in a shallow rack.

Processing a returned book the librarian riffled through the stored cards to find the relevant one. This took time. The cards developed a furry look from being riffled. Frequently they weren’t where they should be. More time.

Now the bar code and the computer have speeded things up. But our reading habits are recorded as are the number of fines we've incurred. There’s a price to pay for progress. Also, no one has yet computerised the need to stamp the return date on the book.

Libraries have a special smell, the same on both sides of the Atlantic: dust combined with something sharpish which may be the glue used in book production. I buy more books than I borrow these days but would go to the barricades to protect the library concept.

Biking and a bust string

A gears tutorial. Avus is the progenitor of the blog Little Corner of the Earth which shares a number of interests with Works Well. Apart from a motorbike Avus has at least two pedal bikes which may be indicative of the extremes of his character. The first is a vintage Rudge, in beautiful condition, equipped not only with chain-guard but also with a chain-bath. It is intended for stately, if not majestic, progress and I can imagine it being used for the trip to Buckingham Palace, were Avus to be awarded an OBE.

The other is a drop-handlebar Dawes which he uses for serious outings such as a recent 51-mile tour of some of the loveliest parts of Kent, now photographed, described and posted. Since the Dawes is multi-chainwheel, multi-sprocket (like my bike) I asked him what was the lowest gear he would consider using, consistent with maintaining sufficient forward motion to prevent falling off.

His answer pre-empts a subject I may well have tackled myself. So in the interests of ecumenicism let me provide the link.

Techno-musical moment. At a concert last year in St David’s Hall, Cardiff (programme and orchestra name now forgotten) I noticed something irregular. A string on the leader’s violin had bust. Calmly the leader whispered to the deputy leader who slipped her something out of the pocket of his soup-and-fish. Within less than a minute she’d installed the new string, tuned it and was ready for work. Remarkable enough but it all happened during a period when the string section was inactive. That’s what I call professionalism.

The 21st century pen

It was like a secondary-school reunion, being surrounded by dimly remembered names. Except these were makes of pen. Parker, of course, I knew and Waterman had a classical ring. Shaeffer I associate with the USA but what about Platignum with its curiously intrusive g? Nor did I realise that the brashly pragmatic propelling pencil manufacturer, Yard-O-Led, did pens.

I was looking into the evolution of the fountain pen at the behest of my blog commentators. Surely things had moved on since the days when one lifted a small lever on the side, depressing a rubber bag and creating suction which drank ink. They have. Cartridges are less messy but there’s also a thing called a convertor which is unscrewed to reveal a plunger. With which one plunges.

Inks? Once there was simply blue, black and – for the ultra-fastidious – blue-black. Now you can get brown, green, purple, red and turquoise, the latter for anonymous sex scandal notes. The nanny state is at our elbow. You are warned that changes in cabin air pressure on planes may cause your fountain pen “to leak”, coded manufacturer talk for “explode”.

Roller balls seem to cost more than nibs. A cool £215 if you want to rotate with Shaeffer. Waterman’s Carene de luxe is nibbed and a snip at £146.50.

My research was entirely altruistic since I am not in the market for one of these devices. If I wrote with a fountain pen people might expect me to write better. I’d rather they offered up oblations (The first time I have used that word. Now there’s a thing.) celebrating the invention of the word processor.

Theoretically wonderful, actually banal

Here is my new rinky-dink mobile, bought last Saturday under close instruction from the experts – my daughter and granddaughter. Not a big deal in most people’s lives, but seismic in mine.

Its predecessor was eight years old and would still be in use if it hadn’t tumbled to the floor in Diafani. Twenty minutes after being switched on it flags up “Insert SIM card”, even though the SIM card remains in place.

As far I am concerned, advances in mobile phone technology could well have featured in the Rubaiyat:

Like snow upon the desert’s empty face,
Lighting its little while is gone.

I make twenty calls a year, half to logis in France. In a truly busy year I receive one or two. I am of course a pay-as-I-goer and, in one of my life’s little tragedies, I regret keenly that I topped up before Diafani (but failed to use the phone once while there) and the present £43 credit is beyond retrieval.

For me, mobile phones allow me to pass on terse announcements about my whereabouts and my ETA. A vital function yet somehow uninvolving. The seemingly obligatory camera on the replacement is likely to remain unused. Two pluses: the new phone is smaller and lighter and the address book design is greatly improved.

Mobiles should excite me but don’t. The stupendous technology is somehow blurred by users’ fascination with ringtones and overheard semi-dialogues at blare level.