Greed: it has powerful after-effects

Those affected by the financial crisis may be divided into three: those who brought it on themselves (banks, financial experts, tax dodgers and lazy-minded manufacturers), ordinary folk advised by experts and who got reamed (the majority of us) and those who did everything possible to avoid the situation (yet still got reamed). A word of sympathy for the latter group.

While I was still working my magazine carried a story researched by my assistant editor about Nissan’s UK operation. How different it seemed from so many British enterprises. A new factory with a parent prepared to accept losses for a decade, huge and continuing investment in technology and systems, management based on weekly if not daily consultation with the workforce, a reward for anyone whose suggestion helped improve efficiency, training that meant something and involvement in the local community.

Yesterday, Nissan UK laid off a quarter of its workforce. I’m gutted for all those who have suffered but as an observer of industry I’m particularly heart-slufted (a special angoisse experienced only in the West Riding) by this one. It’s enough for me to consider – at least for a nano-second – the possibility of compensation in an after-life.

WRITING: CRAFT NOT ART

Eclogue 27e. Distrust adjectives, adverbs, related phrases and excess.
Before: “Please, please,” she said in a voice that carried a note of entreaty, “reconsider your reckless driving and pull into that safe layby.”
After: “Stop!” she implored.
Note: Eclogue still misused.

Applaud the unapplauded

Those who understand the internet and who pass on knowledge are rarely thanked. Instead, their inarticulacy is derided, their whey faces laughed at and they are accused of lacking a life away from the screen. Rarely does anyone mention their altruism.

I am presently setting up a second blog in French. Seemed easy enough until I discovered the new is joined at the hip to the old. Translate the profile in one and it appears in French in the other. Blogger Help says true separation requires an additional email account. But Blogger Group Help – an impromptu service provided by those with the knowhow and, it seems, lots of spare time – has shown me a way of bamboozling setpiece Blogger so I can be a former editor in one and un ancien rédacteur-en-chef in the other.

Not perfect, but a step forward. More fiddling necessary at the ISP end. But it’s those volunteers, hanging around in space, waiting for idiots to call in who fascinate me. When I used a similar service for website designers the raggedy advice I received was forgivable given that it came from the Ukraine. While a tricky DIY problem involving a router invoked the cadences of a Brit used to talking about “two-bi-fours” and “three-inch slaps”.

But who are these people who advise the unadvised? I know little about the internet and what I do know I hold close to my chest. I assist others only where it suits my need for self-aggrandisement. Luckily the virtuals put me to shame. A small prayer should be composed to celebrate the pro-bonos out there.

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?