The cheapest of thrills

I’ve got to get this right: the difference between “sensuous” and “sensual”. But checking the dictionary leaves me lost in nuances. As before I must leave this up to my better-educated wider family out there.

But sensuous/sensual are words that find application when using this type of vegetable peeler, especially with carrots. The key lies in the pivoting blade which effortlessly follows the contours, delivering gossamer peelings. And although carrots provide its ultimate tactile experience the practical benefits are best felt with the most awkwardly shaped potato. A sense of gliding, of frictionless contact – and all for less than a quid.

There’s even a small cup-shaped whotsit which digs out potato eyes. Hey, in a world in which most pleasures will soon be beyond our pocket, it makes sense to take gratification where we can.

WRITING: CRAFT NOT ART
Eclogue 50c. Don’t discard clichés entirely. But always tweak

Example: Having drunk three bottles of Banrock Station, been rejected by my girl-friend and woken up in Victoria bus station, I was – you might say – quite under the moon. Much better example (by a master): Though not disgruntled he was some way from being gruntled. (P.G. Wodehouse)

Note: Yes I know, I’m misusing eclogue.

Trafalgar in reverse

My New Year’s resolution is to use the Net as a source of self-humiliation. How? By issuing comments to French blogs and enduring the subsequent corrections.

First I needed something suitable on which to impale myself. I went to Google’s “Preferences”, switched languages and searched Les blogs francais. Didn’t work for reasons too tedious to mention. Ditched that and tried Les bloggeurs qui voudraient partager (share) leur langue avec un Rosbif. Too long, of course, but it did at least reveal people rather than organisations. Alas, all were ultra-lefties (ie, unreconstructed Maoists) who wanted to discuss politics from a socio-philosophical viewpoint.

So I narrowed it down to the Languedoc, where we spent our last two summer holidays and where we’ve booked for June this year. After sorting through hundreds of thinly disguised publicists for the wines of that region I finally found a spirited lady of 77 who read Jean-Louis Fournier’s last novel with “a tightened throat and a heart full of tears” and who offered for inspection her last poem (“This sky so soft, pale and nacreous, This tranquil winter sky…”). Fine, add her to Favourites.

Then a group of young satirists running a cod poll as to the most appropriate recipient of their Golden Sausage of Political Impertinence. Inevitably a certain M. Sarkozy was leading the field.

But of course the first step is to-do-as-I-would-be-done-by. Hence the new blog. One point: since I share my pseudonym with a fictional Royal Naval bosun who spent the Napoleonic Wars kicking French butt, I felt the need for a less rebarbative flag of convenience.

What industry can get up to

It’s a hand pallet truck (actually, only a model). Slide the forks into the slots of a pallet on the floor, work the pump to raise the forks a couple of centimetres and one person can easily move a one-ton load.

But how do you paint such an awkward shape? Passing it through a paint bath is a no-no. The paint would clog up the raisable undercarriage and the hydraulic pump. Here’s how in a state-of-the-art Swedish factory twenty or thirty years ago.

A skilled sentient being does the job with a paint gun. Attached to the gun is a cassette recorder capable of tracking the gun’s movements. The cassette is transferred to a player which drives a robot. And the robot, equipped with its own paint gun, faithfully reproduces the skilled human’s work. Because the paint, usually in powder form, and the pallet truck are electrostatically negative and positive, very little paint is wasted.

They not only did this but also gave birth to Ingmar Bergman.

WRITING: CRAFT NOT ART
Eclogue 46b. Setting long and short sentences side by side can have a pleasing effect.

Example: With lengthy DIY projects it is quite understandable that the desire to finish the job might outweigh a wish for perfection. It happened to God!
Note: Eclogue is inappropriate but, what the hell, I wanted to use it.

Post-Christmas at No. 56

Finally we caught up meteorologically with Marja-Leena. But only lightly and only, I suspect, briefly. But enough to disguise the fact that the garden looks like a junk-heap without the white dusting.

But all is not what it seems. The top picture has been Photoshopped. Cropped, of course, but also the recipient of Healing Brush Tool. As a result the washing line that runs right to left above the fence has disappeared. So too has the ugly street lamp which dominates pix taken from this angle.

Just in case anyone was in any doubt, the ducks are made of a stonish sort of substance. The bottles – minus two still in the utility room – represent the household’s consumption since December 26 (Boxing Day).

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.