Gardeners waste vital resource

That new presenter, so smug, so egregiously exhortative, resembling a former Scots Guards corporal reduced to teaching PT at a minor public school. And when Carol Klein comes on I go upstairs to put on my pyjamas. No, I’m not a fan of Gardeners’ World but I allow it to flicker at the far end of my focus, earning me reciprocal viewing rights when MotoGP comes around.

I’ve watched GW for years concentrating on the bits I suspect real gardeners ignore. The presentational techniques, the way the camera loved Monty Don, Titchmarsh and Geoff Hamilton and how the simplest of jobs (eg, taking a cutting) was often invested with particle physics mystique. Then there’s the linguistics.

It started with the verb to pot. Quite quickly I learned gardeners potted on, potted out and even potted up. I was never able to discover whether these variants were different or simply an oral tic on the part of the instructor, wheezing as he bent over the terracotta. Digging up and digging in are perhaps predictable but last Friday the PT teacher employed rotted out.

This cavalier attitude has spread like oxalis. New plants are watered in. Lawns mowed over. I tried some inventions of my own based on less promising prepositions. Fertilise between? Didn’t sound plausible. But there are other corruptions. Trees fruit, for instance. Mulch can be turned into a verb and attached to a preposition: mulch down.

The computer industry is rightly censured for murdering English. But try out those ruddy-faced, salt-of-the-earth sons of toil, the aphids of communications. Far from innocent.

A manufacturer for our times

“So what kind of magazine is it? The shitty kind?” Ivor Tiefenbrun opening the batting when I interviewed him in 1987 about his Glasgow hi-fi systems company, Linn Products. No complaints, it was a dream interview.

Linn is renowned for quality and prices. An LP turntable (they still do them) costs £2000, plus £250 for the power supply. But I was there to find out how products were made. Tiefenbrun’s methods were ambitious and techno-sharp-edge. “Automation as the first step to more automation,” Tiefenbrun said. Getting hold of the stuff wasn’t giving him any joy.

Tilting back, feet on the desk, in jeans and an open-necked shirt (both rare among businessmen then) and wreathed in Gauloise smoke, he railed against suppliers’ poor service and lack of realism. “One quote for the automated handling system was bigger than the budget for the whole new factory. Another company was well down on price but they gazumped us.”

And: “Planning delays eroded our budgets and cost us a fortune. All the state bodies have buggered us about. Some 10% of the building cost is related to fire protection; it’s just a joke.”

A lot of it was too technical – but funny and profane – for general consumption. If he hadn’t been someone with a worldwide reputation he might have been seen as a blowhard. But he often knew more about technology than those supplying it. Later I actually paid to hear him speak about manufacturing at a prestige event organised by the Royal Society of Arts. One memorable sentence: “Those that didn’t know about willies would think it was a good thing to have.”

José, can you see....!

Didn’t post yesterday for reasons that become apparent if you click on:

http://bestofnow.blogspot.com/2008/11/portrait-election-celebration.html

So, late in the day, what can technology contribute to the emotions running through the blogs I’m most familiar with? We could imagine a Linn hi-fi chain (Expensive but the best) playing a familiar piece of Beethoven and blasting out those childish but heart-breaking words Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt although I always thought it was fur rather than der.

Fireworks? They’d be good, except I’m ignorant about their creation. I do know the constituents of gunpowder (charcoal, sulphur, saltpetre) but not the amounts. Now there’s a future post: an attack on those oh-so-blasé culinary experts with their esoteric “handfuls”, “pinches” and “soupcons.

Booze (by which I mean anything alcoholic). The obvious grape for toasting Obama is, of course, pinot noir. Its peculiarities previously limited it to the vineyards of Burgundy but now everyone’s at it. California (If you haven’t seen Sideways try, try and rectify that emission), Chile and – especially – New Zealand have all done marvellously and, alas, proved that no one can do burgundy like Burgundy can.

Physiology. When I first managed half a mile of continuous crawl several years ago I left the pool feeling as if my arteries were pumping Alka-Seltzer. “It’s the endorphins,” explained my wife. Dunno what they are but endorphins and Obama go together.

Most watch but who remembers?

Each day my eyes observe two minutes of minor theatricals which, once over, are instantly forgotten. Given my druthers (splendid Pittsburgh idiom) I’d resume my book but my wife insists. Then she too forgets what has been disclosed. I am talking about the weather forecast which follows the late TV news.

It should interest me. It’s based on technology, measurements and science. I assume those frequently mentioned isobars are notional lines linking points of equal barometric pressure and they allow somebody, not me, to analyse what’s going on in The Great Invisible. When isobars are close together it’s going to blow. But why? And do I care?

The French TV weather forecasts are similarly choreographed but the announcers do it at 400 words a minute. With one other difference: they tell you what saint’s day it is.

Britain, whatever the moaners say, is a temperate country and as Robert Robinson of Stop the week fame said: tomorrow’s weather will be like today’s but slightly different. When I first got to the USA in early January I heard a forecast with two salient points: there’d been 103 in. of snow in Oswego, NY, and the temperature in International Falls, Minnesota, was minus 47 deg. Now that’s weather!

However there are circumstances when my meteorological atheism becomes faith-based and that’s at sea. The super-condensed information (with its evocative regions) takes on a liturgical tone with implications of life and death. For light relief I’ve been known to listen to it a second time, in French, just to hear peu perturbé repeated over and over.

Maltreating Mozart is a capital offence

Richard Dawkins (Professor Satan as creationists would have him) has retired from the Chair of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford and will be succeeded by Marcus du Sautoy. Mathematician follows biologist.

As if making his CV public de Sautoy has just completed a four-part series The History of Maths on BBC4 which left me with mixed feelings. Television has popularised “dumbing down” but here was a rare example of “clevering up”. And I’m not talking about such brain-crackers as the Riemann Hypothesis.

Earlier du Sautoy paid tribute to work done in the Arab world, China and India (plus Greece of course) on the basics of geometry and algebra. The trouble is he was just too damned quick. There was something about base number systems which he illustrated with pebbles and you’d have thought he was doing the three-card confidence trick. With fifteen seconds on the subject I might have grasped it; given only ten I was lost.

Will du Sautoy be less controversial than his predecessor? I’m not too sure. Parts of the maths series were backed by classical music which isn’t a crime in itself. But it’s one thing to accompany Newton’s fluxions with Bach counterpoint (there’s plenty of it to go around) but it’s quite another to use the initial duet from Figaro as musical wallpaper. Yes I know Figaro was measuring up (Geddit?) his bed but with music like that you’re inclined to attend to the background not the foreground. Next time, Marcus, use some forgettable rock.

Living in the future's an advantage

Does this theory grab you?

Imagine the day computers were introduced to the public and what a struggle it was learning how to use them. Fast forward a year or two. A different set of people are using computers for the first time yet with far less of a struggle. Another fast forward. Now even liberal arts people are finding computers aren’t as difficult as they feared.

Forget technological improvements. This apparent transfer of experience is part of a theory called morphic resonance which received an airing in no less a publication than New Scientist nearly thirty years ago. Its origins lay in the growth of crystals (ie, a new crystal shape took years to appear; thereafter this same shape re-appeared faster and faster). The theory was then widened to include human behaviour.

Sounds a bit New Age, doesn’t it? But it was posited by a scientist called Sheldrake with impeccable academic credentials and although interest has now died down it’s the sort of idea that nestles in your cranium for years after. Especially when watching your grandson coming to terms with a £10 electronic keyboard.

Since it was a genuine double octave job with black and white keys was Zach’s growing familiarity with its potential in line with old Muss es sein? Es muss sein! LvB all those years ago? Nah. I’m clearly not watching enough reality TV.

Romantically sweaty

The cod history, 1066 and all that, first published in 1930 is still in print. It is famous for its definitions. “History,” the authors say, “is all you can remember.” History is also divided into “good things and bad things”.

And that there were two sides in our civil war: “Roundheads (‘right but revolting’) and Cavaliers (‘wrong but romantic’)”. Even as an impressionable young Tyke I was proud to belong to the former. And I’m pleased now to salute the authors’ prescience. Modern Cavaliers no longer cleave to the monarchy but persist with romantically wrong opinions.

A friend suffered from the heat while driving in France. I pointed out that the car had air conditioning. “Oh, I have to have the windows open. I can’t do with breathing that artificial air.”

Once (I don’t make a habit of it) I drove, stresslessly, from the Channel ferry port of Caen to Castelnaudary, 45 miles from the Mediterranean. Some 600 miles made possible by switching on the A/C and closing the windows. No sweat and no exhausting wind roar, just 80 miles hour after hour. Mind you, my car was a Lexus, preferred transport of the US criminal classes.

Artificial air? Well, my air had been shriven of pollen (I’m a hay feverist) and of unnecessary moisture. And like most A/C systems mine offered two options: treatment of self-contained air or of incoming air. Being revolting I chose the latter. Besides, I believe the Cavaliers over-dressed.

Simple's best. And it's nice to hold

Looking for modernity in simple hand tools is usually a chimera. It’s not coincidental that 100-year-old shapes have lasted. I once bought a claw hammer moulded from a single piece of silvery metal. Just two faults: the face of the hammer head was too small, and because the claw wasn’t up to the task of extracting nails one of the tines(?) broke off. Pincers are better for small/medium nails, a crowbar for the bigger ones.

This I believe is a ball peen hammer but how many of us ever use the ball peen bit? As far as I know its primary function is for hammering out dints in sheet metal, a job which is beyond anyone who has not trained as a panel beater. I met a professional panel beater in the RAF and in talking about his craft he mentioned another of his tools as a planishing hammer. I found that adjective mysteriously engaging.

My first landlord in the USA was a great DIY man and he gave me a short-handled ball peen hammer which accompanied me back to the UK and which I used for many years. In an incredible double coincidence I met my ex-landlord on a press trip to Venezuela and discovered he was a journalist. He remembered the hammer.

I’ve never entirely mastered the technique of ensuring 100 per cent security when attaching the hammer head to a new shaft but this one has stayed on for some time now. Perhaps because my hammering days are mainly in the past. I love the subtly shaped shaft and the smoothness of the wood.