Anyone know this weirdo?

Eighty-five quid spent on five series of The Wire was a wonderful investment. Great three-dimensional scripts, if not for the faint-hearted. Plus a revelation that computers can be used by non-experts for Identikit work.

But how good are we at describing – even remembering – faces? Right now I’m trying to remember my own. As a conceit I say it’s gaunt but that’s vanity. Lengthy, cylindrical and lugubrious are better.

The ears were taped flat to my head when I was a baby. This has streamlined me for swimming but the ears don’t work well as sound collectors. Bags under-identify those hanging gardens beneath my hazel (Hard to live with that adjective at school) eyes. A long forgotten author, John Lodwick, used “cement sacks” in painting a debauched character’s face and that phrase does the job.

My hair went grey in my twenties but it stayed put. It’s now white and is deliberately left uncombed to cultivate the hand-on-the-tiller/spume-in-the-face look. It is merely untidy. The mouth? Here objectivity begins to fail. The lower lip has links with that of Oscar Wilde. It could be described – by someone without my interests at heart – as that of a sensualist. From the West Riding?

Let’s finish upbeat. The nose is a success. Straight, incisive, right off the face of John Neville. Women have praised it, though possibly in default of anything else. Have you got all that? Combine the details, create a sketch and I’ll publish the one that comes closest.
Note. No help from the inset. I chose it because of its inappropriate name – Dudeman.

Worth the warmth. Or perhaps not

Been baby-sitting our daughter’s Cairn. A difficult time.

The dog fidgets. Is it thirsty? Does it want to go outside pour faire le pi-pi? Or does it merely want to dump its sense of unease on us?

Going walkies requires a plastic supermarket bag leading to the unspeakable detection of warmth as one fulfills one’s obligations as a good citizen. But this is a story with a happy ending.

It became obvious that the dog (It’s a bitch actually but that word carries semantic risks) needed to be corralled briefly in the kitchen where the tiled floor would provide a more hygienic alternative to the carpets elsewhere. But the kitchen door hasn’t closed properly for ten years and the dog could bounce it open. So I took the door off its hinges, placed it on trestles in the garage, sawed 4 mm off the bottom edge and re-installed it. And now neither of us can get over the sheer pleasure of simply shutting that door.

WRITING: CRAFT NOT ART
Eclogue 1. Easy writing, hard reading (Not mine, alas)
Example: Emotion should be implied, never described. As in Hemingway’s wonderful short story: “Baby shoes for sale. Never used.”
Note 1. All my novels remain unpublished.
Note 2. I sort of have Lucy’s (implicit) permission to stop apologising for the misuse of “eclogue”.

Blériot was even worse, I suppose

It took three holidays in New Zealand before we learned the best way of enduring the journey (ie, by over-nighting in a Kuala Lumpur hotel with a swimming pool). The other two were nightmares: squeezed into a Japanese Airlines quasi-coffin with a l½-hr stop in Tokyo, and a “wrong way” option via San Francisco which involved an interminable Auckland – Chicago return leg landing in a blizzard.

Even so these were improvements on my first flight – Heathrow to Singapore, February 1956 - travelling to RAF Seletar to practice my newly acquired radio-repairing skills.

The propellor plane (type forgotten) flew slowly at 9500 ft. That microlight altitude exposed us to eight hours of heavy turbulence over mainland Europe until we landed thankfully at Rome. Ninety minutes later, after a fried-egg breakfast, we left for Cyprus for another egg, deep-fried in oil and eaten at about 3 am. Again we were back in the plane within two hours to land at 120 deg F Bahrein. Guess what we had for breakfast.

Another eight-hour flight saw us in Karachi and an overnight stop. Landing next day in Delhi I dimly perceived what I took to be the Himalayas. A quick eggless meal and we were en route for Calcutta where there were four or five hours to kill, but in the late afternoon. In Bangkok I saw an air hostess wearing a cheongsam. Very shortly after arriving at Singapore I went down with an exhilarating attack of the runs. Jumbos do have their advantages.

Beware the electro-mechanicals

Imagine a DIY job you’ve never tackled before. Most of us would botch it, saying we’d do better next time. But some get it right from scratch – always! A very special talent.

My friend Richard figured in earlier posts and had that talent. So has Graham whom I interviewed this weekend for the local website. It was Graham’s second time under the website’s scrutiny: first for his remarkable skills as a taxidermist, now as a juke box restorer. During the day he services domestic appliances.

RAF national service taught me to distrust electro-mechanicals; in any electrical system they tend to be the weak spot and are often fiendish to repair. Juke boxes, especially those made during the Silver Period prior to 1965, are almost wholly electro-mechanical. Not only the arms that pick out the 78 or 45 rpm records but even the systems that convey the choice of record provided by the push-button.

Graham faced such a moment when renovating a 1957 AMI Model H. In brief when he chose Elvis the ‘box played Bill Haley. These days a quick twiddle with the electronics would sort things. But this AMI had been repaired with parts cannibalised from elsewhere and a spinning disc which selected the correct solenoid from a circle of sixty consistently betrayed the punter. Needless to say Graham worked it out. I’d like to say it would have taken me much longer but I’d never have dared take the back off the thing in the first place.

Interment "at today's prices"

“Pre-arranging your funeral means peace of mind…” Post-arranging it may be tricky, I suppose.

I can’t really justify this post other than to say language is a first step in communications and comms is regularly dealt with here. A weasel argument, I fear.

The quote comes from RIAS (Insurance for the over-fifties) who recently went the extra step by linking up with Dignity (Caring funeral services). Note, uncaring funeral services turn you into a hotpot under the cover of darkness. RIAS guarantees my funeral “at today’s prices” but recognises it’s never easy bringing up the subject of funeral planning. “So if this letter has arrived at an inappropriate time” ( Whoops! The corpse is on trestles in the parlour.) I’m to accept their apologies.

The offer will save me woe since “many funerals do not proceed as the deceased would have wished”. But what about the wishes of the living? Are RIAS and Dignity going to prevent them from getting smashed out of their minds or are they aware this is what I may have planned? For the record (I repeat a disclosure I made to Lucy who will think I’m getting obsessional on the subject), the coffin will be cardboard, the Humanist eulogy will be written by me to ensure correct punctuation, the music will include the trio from Cosi, the list song from Don Giovanni and Kodachrome by the guy what wrote it. To drink: real burgundy (Imagine RIAS’s premium!). To eat: Glasgow mutton pies. Those with good memories may recite prose and/or poetry.

What’s more to pre-arrange?

You are old, Father Bonden

I’ve used Word for Windows and/or MsW for a dozen years now, aware that I’ve only scratched the surface of its vast collection of functions. Where I’ve needed to I’ve (reluctantly) taught myself new tricks. As now.

The MS I’ve been editing for two years (a biography) needs converting into book-page format – chapter titles, page numbers, justified text, etc. Word can do this but you must first learn what keys to press and then remember what you’ve learned. I confess page numbering defeated me and I had to call for more skilled help. I was impressed to find that giving chapter headings a style code causes them to appear as page headers.

The problem – as ever – is that complex software needs regular usage to prevent it from lapsing into a set of forgotten rules. When I was still employed Quark Express was the lingua franca of publishing and even the slowest amongst us eventually picked up this demanding DTP package. The contrast came after retirement when I had to teach myself Dreamweaver in order to create the community website I edit. Dreamweaver is based on HTML which, despite Julia’s kind explanation, always seemed like ten steps backwards and I struggled with it. Even now when I return to the website I need a ten-minute tutorial to remind myself about such things as “named anchors”.

Perhaps septuagenarians exploring software represents hubris in its latest form. We should know our place and lie a’bed reading Trollope.

A rare plus for capitalism

On May 19 2005 I bought a Navman satnav (left) that could be transferred between cars. On January 5 this year, as a belated Christmas present, my wife bought me a similar device by TomTom (right). There’ve been major changes in the technology during the forty-four months between purchases.

Price. Since I wanted mainland European mapping I paid through the nose for the Navman: £691.86. The TomTom has this feature and cost £117.47 or 5.88 times cheaper.

Weight. The lighter the device the easier it is to install securely in the car. The Navman weighs 0.49 kg, the TomTom 0.27 kg.

Operating simplicity. The Navman has a four-way joystick button, two increase/decrease buttons and four other conventional buttons, several of them dual-function depending on the menu. The TomTom is accessed via six icons on a touch-screen.

Display simplicity. The full range of travelling info on the Navman requires the selection of six separate “pages”. Virtually all this appears on the main TomTom page.

Locking on to satellites. The Navman sometimes takes minutes; with the TomTom say three or four seconds.

Speed camera warning. Navman, no; TomTom, yes.

Strange lapse. Under Points of Interest (Places of worship) TomTom would have me believe Hereford lacks a cathedral. This may or may not be the case with the Navman POI system but its complexity has prevented me from finding out.

Spending money to save money

On the pavement (US: sidewalk) this morning there’s an unmistakable shape at my feet: the truncated L of an Allen key. It triggers memories of reassembling Ikea knocked-down furniture, especially to furnish the house in France. I’ll withold the joky stories this topic usually engenders in what Damon Runyon used to call “the blatts”.

I’m struck by the techno-financial equation it represents. Allen-headed screws are I suspect more expensive than conventional slotted and/or cross-head screws, and Ikea is renowned for its parsimony. Yet opting for this design allows flush fixings which aren’t visually disagreeable together with the provision of the cheapest of all screwdrivers – so cheap, in fact, it can be regarded as a disposable. But which does the job perfectly.

I once visited an Ikea warehouse in the midst of rural Sweden. The blue and yellow that seem so garish in this country blended rather better with the conifers and silver birches. But then they are the national colours.

WRITING: CRAFT NOT ART
Eclogue 77. Semi-colon pundits should be required to prove the point.
Example: In 1957 I bought my first car; until then I’d ridden bikes. (Using a full stop would turn the two short sentences into telegrams – remember those?)

Note: Virgil wrote eclogues, or pastoral poems. It must be clear I’m not seeking to compete.