Truck and Alain score. Poem on trial

AUTHENTICITY PAYS OFF Grandchild Zach’s birthday. At the toyshop, he was eased away from an 80 cm tractor/harrow combination and guided towards a 400D John Deere articulated dump truck. For which Mrs B handed over a breathtaking £25. This diecast model, 50 cm long, is replete with technical detail but would Zach respond to its authenticity?

The answer was yes. He pushed it slowly along the coffee table apparently revelling in its well-mounted wheels. He tilted the cab up and down. He tipped precisely, allowing the bricks to slide off without commotion. Heck, he can grow up to lead a rock band if he wishes but I was heartened by his response to a well-made – almost adult - toy.

ALAIN, YOU’RE OK Plutarch quoted from Alain de Botton’s recent “The pleasures and sorrows of work”, celebrating the delights of technology. Although I was impressed by his “How Proust can change your life” I fear I responded robustly, implying he was slumming. I was wrong. In a related essay in New Statesman de Botton uses the role of the spotter (of trains, lorries, etc) as a way of scrutinising industrial culture.

“When we think of tourist destinations we don’t think of the places of work,” he writes. “Why, endowed as they are with both practical importance and emotional resonance, do cargo ships, port facilities, airport warehouses, storage tanks, refineries and assembly plants go unnoticed?” Because they require new eyes.

THE POEM Accused justifiably of being a teaser, I report that this was finally completed and has been emailed to Julia who will decide whether it sees the light of day.

Bird thou never wert..... wert?

The Stanley Tools System of Versification is aimed at aspirant poets who’d be better off waxing their cars. Like most ill-conceived tuition it is based on analogy. The completed poem is seen as a wall built from multi-coloured flexible bricks which can be elongated and compressed. The poem’s dynamics are simulated by a wave form which ripples continuously along the wall, creating a rhythmic base and highlighting mismatched bricks.

An early graduate of STSV I embarked months ago on a four-verse poem in iambic pentameter. Since I know little poetry, don’t read it much and know nothing of its making I was, to use a cant phrase, outside my comfort zone. But I felt disadvantaged, surrounded as I was by those who were producing sonnets in industrial quantities, tossing off haikus and terza rima and translating from the Czech.

My proposed poem sprang from juxtaposing a three-syllable adjective with a single-syllable noun. A month later I devised a phrase which summarised particle physics. After a further month I discarded the particle physics phrase. Brick building proved to be a snare. Flemish Bond unites bricks well but makes for monotonous poetry: di-di, di-di, di-di.

The incomplete poem lay rusting on my hard disc, the first two verses apparently unbridgeable. With what now seems like unmitigated gall, I asked Julia if she could help. After deferring to the greater skills of Lucy and Eleanor she agreed but simply publishing this request stirred my somnolent muse and an idea for the link occurred. I presently play with elongatable bricks. “Dodecahedron” takes up half an iambic line and I find that encouraging.

But the coffin they carry you off in

THE COUGH A captain in the Royal Artillery explains:

“A pre-loaded mortar, placed deep in the ventral cavity below the umbilicus, is triggered by a random-number-generating oscillator with an unpredictable output. The charge is deliberately under-prescribed and the projectile leaves the barrel comparatively slowly.

“Initially the diaphragm twitches to the passage of the projectile but as speed increases the twitches become powerful spasms. Sensing these spasms the thoracic muscles contract defensively. The lungs are aware but have no real protection. Impact is at maximum velocity and lung volume reduces to zero at sonic speed.

“Air, also at sonic speed, evacuates the bronchia. Sympathetic laryngeal reaction creates a venturi, raising the speed yet again. Emerging into the spherical mouth cavity the compressed air expands and escapes at a velocity capable of imposing a reed effect on the lips and the tongue. The resultant noise, identified by the subject as “Just clearing my throat” and by concert-hall neighbours as “That bastard should be put down”, has been rated as high as 69 dBA.”

I said I wouldn’t refer to it again but by a journalist’s prerogative I lied. I am told that the performance of War Requiem which starred Ian Bostridge and which I forewent (Is that a word?) was superb.

Paved with bad intentions

Not far from where I live, Morgan cars are built. True sports cars (ie, penile bonnet, spine-jarring springs, impossible to enter with the canvas roof down, ludicrously over-priced), they tend to be owned by post-menopausal men who effect hogging caps. Until fairly recently the driver needed to press a dashboard button every 400 miles, causing oil to flow into the front suspension units.

When I was eighteen I would have loved one. From my forties onward, I held them in disdain. They belong to a tradition which equates discomfort with classicism. An era when breaking down was a form of getting back to nature.

Morgan has unseen links with my first, and worst, car the Austin Cambridge. The days when the customer wasn’t king. The Cambridge had a four-speed gearbox which meant first gear was necessary for some hills. But as everyone knew synchromesh on first failed permanently after a mere 600 miles from new. So engaging first required the driver to double-declutch. Hands up all those – especially Americans – who have even heard of this fearsome procedure.

It was impossible to remove the oil filter without de-activating the handbrake. Coolant replenishment occurred at about the same rate (and volume) as fuel replenishment. The oil system was close to total loss. Engine design had changed little since pre-war times. My present car enjoys, as they say, a charisma bypass yet I love it for its multiplicity, its matchless technology and its willingness to go. It lets me provide the soul.

Ski-ing: gateway to other pleasures

How could Keats write “Pale, latticed, chill and silent as a tomb.” having stared gloomily into his handkerchief? Perhaps because his handkerchief often got the upper hand: “And beard them, though they be more fanged than wolves or bears.” Verb. sap.

Cooking can qualify for Works Well via chemistry. Here the justification is DIY. The setting: a self-catering ski-ing holiday at Sestrière. Dramatis personae: BB and his then son-in-law. The task: creation of escalope de veau à la Zagreb from rolled-up veal, ham and cheese. The problem: despite pummelling with a wine bottle the veal refused to expand sufficiently to contain the other constituents. The solution: open up the hussif (a must on ski-ing holidays), equip a large eyed needle with linen thread, suture the veal.

Deep frying is recommended but, lacking oil, we shallow fried. As this was happening we were visited by a bouncy young woman from the ski holiday company who said, “That smells nice.” I mumbled the French phrase and she nodded: “I am impressed. Sounds as if it would be good to eat.” A pause that could only be described as pregnant developed. But we had done the work and both of us, without reference to the other, hardened our hearts against an invitation to share.

Would a woman have sutured the veal? My instinct is to say no. But this is no male supremacy kick. A woman would have been better informed as we were, the following morning, after we explained things to the butcher. “If you’d only told me I would have rendered it flattened (aplati) with this,” he said, waving his pointy-faced wooden mallet.

Just copycatting

Like James Mason (“Halifax is merely the town that spawned me.”) I have publicly renounced my West Riding birthright but am paying the price. Those years spent breathing Bradford’s uncaring air means my head colds now develop into weeks of coughing that scour my bronchia and force me into bed with that hag Catarrh. This evening I had tickets for War Requiem but I detest people who peff-peff during the quiet passages and I have given them away.

I lack the energy to be original but luckily I can fall back on a journalist’s most convenient skill: plagiarism.

Back to that cat. Here’s why quantum mechanics is such fun. At one point Dirac (whose recent biography we must all read) needed some matrix theory. Oh woo-ah but stay with me. The result was this deceptively simple equation: a x b ≠ b x a. But whatizzit? Briefly: a multiplied by b is not equal to b multiplied by a. As the hateful Richard Littlejohn would say: you couldn’t make it up.

My final paid job was to edit a logistics magazine and it’s a field strewn with pomposity. Road hauliers became logistics experts by simply changing the words on the sides of the lorries. One rolled past me today bearing the stultifying slogan: Delivering Global Solutions. Abstract and meaningless. I much prefer another outfit which specialises in transporting chickens: Poultry in Motion.

Take a trip round my head

When I said I was reading John Gribbin’s In search of Schrödinger’s cat. Plutarch said, “Regardless of the outcome of the hypothesis the poor creature must die, in its sealed box, of starvation or asphyxiation or both.” This is not true and there is good(ish) news if you accept the parallel world theory: in one world the cat is, alas, definitely, dead (from rapidly acting poison) but in another it is, happily, alive.

But here’s something else. Lacking formal instruction in ”books” I have discovered there are those I cannot read. Conrad’s Victory, Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings are among them and I’m talking deep, second-page antipathy. The Conrad shames me most. Gribbin deals with quantum physics and I am severely under-educated on that too.

But then most of us are. Einstein spent thirty years writing to Niels Bohr, an über-quantist, suggesting experiments which would invalidate quantum mechanics. All were scientifically refuted. For me to read Gribbin is like dosing the baby with gin. Yet I was pulled along by a narrative tension found in the best books.

Did I understand the book? QM is possibly the hardest subject in the world and I’d be a fool to say yes. But I read on, closed in by mist most of the time but occasionally seeing the mist thin. Am I boasting (I’ve done that before)? I hope not. I’m astonished such an abstruse subject could hold my attention for 275 pages. In positive support I acknowledge I bought the book and wanted to read it. Also it is a deliberately simplified account. But what goes on in our mind when we read a book we don’t really understand?

Calling Gardener's Question Time

NUMBER THREE IN AN OCCASIONAL AND RELUCTANT SERIES Anyone mildly familiar with Works Well knows I am temperamentally unsuited to gardening. Physiologically too. My pendant stomach gets trapped between my rib-cage and my thighs; I cut a poor figure among the blooms.

But to earn sight of the rugby this afternoon I was honour-bound to garden this morning. To dig out a clump of rampant marguerites I reached for the fork but I don’t know why. Forks simply bend in the face of hard toil – a bit like me. Useless. Then I remembered the narrow-blade spade I’ve already blogged about. Unlike its bigger brother it doesn’t bite off more than it can excavate. And it’s more agile when delivering the vertical thrusts that chop the subject into manageable squares.

The marguerites (I refused my wife’s first explanation of what I’d done; even by my standards digging out daisies sounds like pie’s-ball work) are now in the green bag and my heart rate is down into the low hundreds. But someone tell me – what are forks for?

PLUS A BONUS And perhaps I needn’t wait for post-mortem paradise to be rewarded for my horticultural efforts. Remember the Cote de Beaune Villages bought in the 1990s to decorate the French house? Opened a few minutes ago, it poured out light brown, had an encouraging citrousy bouquet and tasted… like burgundy! My wife who’d agreed to taste it after I’d done so (no fool she) upped her thumb too and it’s going into a daube.