Pull this and we start moving

(Left) My brother’s yacht Takista at Royan. (Right) His son-in-law’s Dipper (police launch to the rear) moored at Holyhead

With cars much of the technology is disguised and/or simplified before it comes to the driver’s attention. With a yacht technology is overt.

Take a yacht’s head, for example. Takista’s was fiendish. One lever opened and closed access to the hellhole below; the other provided water so that a third lever could be waggled to provide a flushing action. I think I’ve got this right. After a while I didn’t have the courage to ask further and tended to arrange my bodily functions around visits to the marina.

We mustn’t talk about engines. My brother was highly superstitious about them. Not only were jokes not allowed, he even discouraged casual conversation on the subject. In any case the whole point of a yacht is to derive forward progress from the sails. The foresail is sort of semi-automated and is stowed away by allowing it to roll up round the forestay. The mainsail on Takista was hoisted by hauling on a rope to the side of the mast. On Dipper this task could be achieved by ropes taken to cleats for’ard of the cockpit – less dangerous if the sea was skittish. My brother seemed to regard this as effete.

The yacht’s equivalent of a handbrake is the anchor. Occupying the forward berth on Takista my sleeping head rested uneasily on the anchor chain. The radio was not tuned to BBC3 for Mahler but to channel 16 the universal open frequency on which information about disasters initially unfolds. Depth measurement systems have no parallel on a car.

I came too late to yachts and my enthusiasm has the zealotry of a recent convert. Inevitably I will return to this fascination.

Towards the better burger

What constitutes a good frying pan? Given the obloquy the subject generates perhaps a different name would be a start. The Americans say skillet but I’ve never been sure the terms are synonymous. I’m astonished to find the French have a word for fry (frire); you’d hardly know it from restaurant menus where poelé is the preferred participle. A German frying pan is a Bratpfanne if you can manage those awkward internal consonants.

My director of culinary research tells me this is a good one. It cost nearly £45 and was bought at Hereford’s genuine hardware store, Philip Morris, where the choice is enormous. The pan was made in France and the brand is Anolon.

Contrary to expectations the metal handle does not get hot during frying. In fact it has an extra benefit – when finishing off a Spanish omelette you can stick the whole thing under the grill. However, the handle does get hot then. Note the massive rivets that attach the handle; no need to fiddle with the fat-covered cross-head screw holding on a plastic handle.

With cheap frying pans the bottom eventually bulges upwards resulting in unequal heat distribution. This one’s bottom must be nearly 3 mm thick so bulging is unlikely. The sides are nicely angled ensuring a smooth slide transfer.

Finally, it must be recognised that frying pans – especially non-stick ones like this – are eventually expendable and must be replaced. My DCR recognises this and is prepared to bite on the bullet when the time comes.

Oh, that feels a whole lot better

Today completely unfamiliar technology turned up on my own doorstep. A ready-made blog.

We’d had an outflow problem on Saturday, fanfared when my wife found two dead rats floating in the entrance to an outside drain. “Foul water or sewage?” asked the man from Drain Clear this morning, cheerily offering me the options. The blockage was quickly resolved. Roots from our neighbour’s front-garden conifer had entered the drainage system and dammed off our access to it.

Once the roots had been chopped away our tubes were given their own special enema with a high-pressure water hose. And I mean high-pressure. How about 2000 psi or, if you prefer it, 138 bar? As a comparison my car tyres are normally inflated to just over 35 psi.

The Drain Clear pump has the capacity to go up to 4000 psi. Used in conjunction with what is called a pencil jet this force would apparently cut through a brick wall. Enough to clear the most recalcitrant embouteillage.

Or inflict more personal damage. Operatives must use these things with care. A bit of carelessness and the jet “would go right through a man’s boot and take his toe off.” I’ll take Drain Clear’s word for it. However I must add that having a drain cleared is – almost literally – cathartic.

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.