Probably worth waiting for

My non-proselytising atheism was under siege last night.

I had just paid my TV licence (£139) online and, yet again, BBC4 justified the expenditure. “How to build a cathedral” started in the Middle Ages when England was a building site devoted to fifteen great cathedrals, intended to create heaven on earth, an aspiration not as silly as it sounds. Some jobs were signed off in a mere sixty years. But when the money ran out it could take two hundred.

Dense technical detail interwoven with vivid upward-looking photography covered the progression from Romanesque (circle section arches) to Gothic (pointed arches) as master masons sought to reduce wall bulk, increase window area and let in more and more light. Some end-products are virtually skeletal, made even more delicate by such ingenuities as fan vaults (the inset is Ely). “The master masons deserve a place alongside Shakespeare and Turner,” said the presenter. That too wasn’t as silly as it sounds.

Sometimes things went wrong. But instead of inveighing against Jehovian whimsy when a tower collapsed the church took the opportunity to order a replacement even more elaborate and employing more recent structural techniques. Flying buttresses, for instance, de-stressed the walls but became another concentration of elegance in the process. No cathedral presently resembles its earliest finished state; all have been tinkered with, no doubt to a chorus of “Vandallyze nott our hovse of Godde”.

To me they are magnificent works of art. But I can appreciate how, if I were a Christian, I might look at them and feel smug.

Low-fi can be bad for health

Here’s a techno-disaster which met its original aim but left me diminished.

In the early sixties I was poor and living in expensive London. Inevitably I was condemned to a record player rather than hi-fi separates. The tiny loudspeaker reacted to certain mid-range horn notes from a Dennis Brain LP with a frying noise which drove me mad. I decided to build a wooden enclosure as host to a proper 10 in. Goodmans speaker.

The enclosure was a metre wide which required a lot of chipboard and the insertion of many 2½-in. screws. At least I pre-drilled the screwholes but parsimony restricted me to the widest bit that came with the drill. It wasn’t wide enough and I compensated with much muscular screw-drivering.

When do you decide that a progressively painful activity has become unbearable? The palm of my hand reddened, became sore, became blistered, became burst-blistered, became raw meat. I soldiered on driven, as always with DIY projects, by a desire to see the job finished. The pain became a pink mist. Afterwards the speaker system worked well but the evidence of my self-harm endured for almost a year. No one to blame but myself.

Moral 1: Ignore my counsel regarding DIY.
Moral 2: This may be sexist but I can’t imagine any woman of my acquaintance having to make a similar confession.

MOTORBIKE QUERY On a fastish bike the hands are the most thermally vulnerable part of the body. I never solved this. Has the passage of time and improved technology provided an answer?

Incompetence rapidly rewarded

Being theoretical rather than practical I have initiated many techno-disasters. This was the most spectacular.

Years ago (“the often times” – as my daughter says) one fuelled a two-stroke motorbike by pouring first petrol then oil into the tank then agitating the bike to mix the two. Frequently neat oil got into the carburettor, snuffing out the engine. That meant stripping the carb and cleaning it.

This happened with my 125 cc BSA Bantam, and I carelessly reassembled the carb so that the slide was at the top of its action not the bottom – leaving the throttle wide open. When kickstarted the engine whined immediately to maximum revs. How to stop it? No ignition, of course, and the twistgrip was inoperative.

So I reached for the high tension lead feeding the sparking plug and wrenched it free. But there were many many volts emerging from that lead and I was thrown across the backyard and crashed into the dividing wall. Painful. I will continue to shrive myself in a continuing if intermittent series on other such disasters.

TECHNO-MUSIC AT CHRISTMAS
For he is like a refiner’s fire. Messiah.

Das sehn wir auch den Rädern ab…
Die gar nicht gerne stille stehn...

Die Steine selbst, so schwer sie sind…
Sie tanzen mit den muntern Reihn,
Und wollen gar noch schneller sein...

(We see this also with the wheels…
They don't like to stand still...

The stones themselves, heavy though they are…
They join in the cheerful dance,
And want to go yet faster...) Die schöne Müllerin.

Without whom it would have been...

Each year my wife and daughter visit the Christmas market in a different German city. This year it was Hamburg. The village is the result of five or six years’ purchases; I stayed at home and made the tray thing.
HAPPY HOLIDAY EVERYONE.

My blog is not yet a year old. The subject matter (and probably its execution) meant it was never likely to be be Top of the Pops but the dialogues have delighted me. So here’s a few virtual Oscars.

Plutarch Introduced me to blogging, thereby extending a conversation which began in 1963.
Lucy Teased me into setting up on my own, then effortlessly (ie, hiding any traces of effort) showed me how it was done.
Marja-Leena From the far side of the world mixed art with technology. Flatteringly believes Brits are from time to time intentionally amusing!
Relucent Reader Found my blog via shared interest in Charles Ives and rated my piece on electricity “clear and concise”. Bibliophile; has driven tanks.
Julia Designed websites, plays piano, rendered Prague’s graffiti world famous and confided an outstanding admission which led Lucy to describe her as “a woman of parts”.
Avus His vehicular and other interests no longer move in parallel to mine but seem likely to intersect (Will we collide?).
Zhoen Admirably tight-lipped comment, searing personal revelations and vivid reminders of what it is like to work in a hospital – not that I ever did but I’m married to a retired SRN.
Herhimnbryn On the other other side of the world. Gradually providing reasons for my previously unexplained enthusiasm for Perth.

There are others but they must labour under the banner of The Usual Suspects. Here’s to further internationalism.

Switching off Coronation St ain't cute

Trawling Herhimnbryn’s blog about life in Perth, WA, I came upon a photo of possums sitting on a telly aerial. Of the commenters who referred to their cuteness it’s unlikely any came from New Zealand.

Here’s a baby possum from the Golden Bay area of NZ’s South Island. On three trips to NZ this is the only one we ever saw alive. The others had been reduced to poignant layers of fluff by car tyres and most Kiwis wouldn’t have it any other way. Possums were introduced into NZ as a solution to some vermin problem, long forgotten. It’s the possums who are now the problem.

Apart from the disruptions they cause in houses they like to climb up power-line poles and create a low-resistance path between the insulators. As a result electricity may be blotted out over very large rural areas. To prevent this metal collars are attached to thousands (millions?) of utility poles. NZ is not a rich country and providing these collars prevents expenditure on raising the efficiency of the All Black rugby team

FAUX-SMELLY LAV (see December 17). Sir Hugh wanted to know how we eradicated the carpet smell. I’d forgotten and had to check out the technology. An application of Spray ‘n’ Vac followed by a quick pass with the Dyson. Several times. Bit of an anti-climax really.

Oh, the stigma. Ah, the eeease

All my cars bar one have been what Americans – with admirable directness – call stick-shifts. Initially I had no option, the alternative was too expensive. Later, sharing a deep-seated prejudice with many other Brits, I rejected automatics on the grounds they were somehow louche. My penultimate car, a six-speed manual gearbox Lexus, was the most satisfying I have ever owned.

So why for the last two-and-a-half years have I owned an automatic? To encrusted types the answer is brief: it’s an old man’s car. But an equally truthful response might have been: I like the technology. I need only flick the drive selector a few centimetres towards the passenger and it becomes a manual gear-change, albeit without the need for a clutch pedal. The first car to offer that system I know of was a Porsche and it probably cost zillions. My present car is not a Porsche.

Take a trip inside the gearbox and there are more wonders. Traditional automatic gearboxes (called slushpumps in America), consist of two opposing but separate propellors linked by surrounding fluid. Such systems are wasteful of energy. Fine if you have bhp to spare, as most Americans cars have. Less so with European and Japanese hatchbacks.

But my car has a truly automatic gearbox. It incorporates two clutches, one for the odd-numbered gears, one for the evens. As a driver I remain blissfully ignorant of their function as they help change the six gears in milliseconds. Oh, I almost forgot: my present car cost two-thirds the price of the Lexus. More later about its remarkable engine.

Here's to my infallible nose

The previous post here dealt with house re-wiring and subsequent comments raised the subject of its legality when done by an amateur. Rather than appear to endorse the practice I pressed Delete. My thanks to Plutarch, Zhoen and Marja-Leena who responded and whose comments I have also deleted.

MORE CULPA MEA It seems only fair to replace it with another story where I ended up with egg on my face. So let’s start with my sense of smell and its sibling, taste. Both are well enough developed to identify why I dislike Beaujolais and certain red Loire wines (the Gamay grape), to predict the inherent disappointment in many petit chateau Bordeaux (excessive tannin) and to celebrate the emergence of the pinot noir all over the world without for a moment confusing it with the grape’s greatest expression in Burgundy.

But the application of smell/taste frequently depends on context. And pride, as they say…. A few days after we moved into our present house we discovered an unpleasant smell in the bathroom, seemingly coming from the toilet. The builder’s jack-of-all-trades was called in, used putty to seal the toilet/sewer junction and performed other stabs in the dark. The smell remained.

My daughter phoned and I mentioned the problem. What about the recently laid carpet? she said. Couldn’t be that I said; it’s something to do with poo. But once the phone was back in the cradle I stole upstairs and bent low. It was the carpet! The toilet (It’s so easy to give a toilet a bad name.) was blameless. And I felt like a complete prat.

Use 'em but don't love 'em

A dictionary’s most important quality? It must be accessible. If the explanation’s more than an arm’s-length away the word isn’t checked. Chambers is housed downstairs in the living room, Penguin here on a shelf over the scanner. Collins-Robert lies on the same shelf above the monitor.

Both are heavy to lift down and I’d prefer them to hover on either side of my head at temple height.

Foreign dictionaries need replacing. That’s the fourth or fifth Collins-Robert in two decades. The paperback French-French Dictionnaire Universel cost €2 off a market stall. It claims 40,000 definitions which I doubt but it’s mainly for emergencies such as discussing swimming pool filtration systems.

Dictionaries are systems rather than books and typography plays a vital role. The defined word in Penguin appears in an extra-bold sans serif face with the definition in a serif face, possibly Times New Roman; similarly with Collins-Robert. But the presentation differs radically. A long entry in the former (eg, “be”) occupies only half a column, in the latter “etre” covers a page. Penguin is initially clearer but C-R gathers useful related information into a single area.

Never become sentimentally attached to a dictionary. None is perfect and the faults can be infuriating. To be told (by C-R) that raki is raki is only a tiny step forward. On the other hand being laconic is a virtue. Penguin says an “erk” is a person holding the lowest rank in the air force (short for aircraftsman). As an ex-erk I didn’t know that.