Calling all aesthetes

Been swimming in uncharted water. Poetry is undoubtedly exhilarating but I’m returning for an inflatable life jacket. By which I’m assuming my role as John the Baptist for metal things, for operating systems, for power tools and for the unconsidered technical minutiae of the kitchen. With Avus drinking tinnies in Western Australia I am resurrecting a subject certain to generate a blogwide storm of apathy. Motorbikes.

Except they’re only the jumping-off point. The game is really aesthetics and started with a TV commercial. I am not a lover of these noisy intrusions and since 1984, when I first acquired a remote control, I have always pressed the Mute button when they appear. But there is no button to suppress, temporarily, the images.

In a lengthy commercial charting Honda’s contributions to powered travel a tantalising five or six seconds show a close-up of a Honda racing bike (ca. 1967) followed by a helicopter shot of that bike at speed on a dead-straight road flanked on both sides by lethal trees. My mind clicked up: “racing bike” and “beauty”.

Above is champion racer Jim Redman aboard a six-cylinder Honda 250 cc machine. The thrill for me lies in the sinuous side view of the fairing which starts at the transparent top forming Jim’s “windscreen”, draws backward awhile, rushes forward to accommodate the tips of the handlebars and then sweeps majestically back again – a curve that achingly proclaims velocity – to be unsatisfactorily resolved in two straight bits accommodating Jim’s knees and feet. No other bike has ever quite duplicated this line of beauty. Just thought you’d like to know.

A stimulating chat with your medic

I revel in conversation, most of it mano e mano but not from choice. Certain of my behavioural traits generate an antipathy that is most noticeable among wives (female partners, female co-mortgagees) of friends and acquaintances. Mrs B offers an explanation which I more or less go along with and I accept the failing as ineradicable. But how to widen the field?

Doctors are one answer. They’re articulate, they listen and at my age encounters are always just around the corner. I start the ball rolling with a carefully prepared and – most important – unexpected question. The links between vasectomies and prostate cancer forced one GP to admit he’d had a vasectomy and he wasn’t worried. Another GP explained why the labyrinthine diagnostic procedures in the TV series House are fraudulent.

The subjects must be technical (fine by me) and the talk limited (other patients waiting). But doctors are full of stuff that is of no interest to most patients and enjoy discharging it in short bursts. The House GP, above, got carried away and had to close an ever more recondite discussion of molecules with “But that’s telling you more than you need to know.” When I published a community magazine he allowed me to sit in on one of the practice’s bull sessions as the basis for an article.

It helps if you’re curious about things. The man who paved the area in front of our house with bricks was keen to talk about his wide-ranging skills. As are some car mechanics although here the initial question must be designed to appeal to their amour propre. I’m sorry about the wives but as they say up north, “I’m making do.”

White goods features lie fallow

I’m making do with Windows XP. For me Vista’s siren song is shrill and I suspect lasts longer than the Ring cycle. Vista has also had a bad press.

Eventually Microsoft will force us all to accept to accept Vista or its Elastoplast-ed (US: Band Aid-ed) successor. And we know what that means. A load of features aimed at seven Kazhakstan users; we’ll never identify their existence let alone use them. But this addition of unnecessary bells and whistles isn’t confined to software. It happens in the kitchen. Mrs B has never used the following features:

FOOD PROCESSOR Citrous presser, midi bowl, plastic dough blender, egg whisk with two paddles.
MICROWAVE Sensor cooking, auto weight cooking (sub-divided into Fresh fish, Fresh veg, Boiled potatoes, Jacket potatoes, and many more).
WASHING MACHINE 40 deg jeans, 60 deg ordinary wash, 90 deg boil wash, 60 deg plus pre-wash, Easy care.
NEFF SUPER-DOOPER OVEN Conventional top and bottom heat, Bread-baking position, Bottom heat, Dough-proving setting.

Has anyone – out of a spirit of scientific curiosity – used all the features on any culinary appliance other than an electric kettle?

POEM – latest. Info exchange between versifier and editor. I suggest Julia’s contributions are colour-coded imperial purple with mine in workaday black. Julia says it would distract.

On sealants and scansion

Bonden Minor re-sealing the work surface/wall junction in the Bonden Major kitchen. Theoretically Minor is down for the Hereford Borderlines Film Festival but Major usually twists his arm (a form of noblesse oblige between brothers) into some form of DIY.

The work had its own Damascene moment. Both of us have had disasters before, with silicone plastered to excess round the relevant areas. The answer is to define the area, top and bottom, with masking tape. Then peel away the tape almost immediately afterwards. Preparing the junction takes, say, ninety minutes; applying the sealant takes less than ten. Both the kitchen and the similarly treated bath now look unobtrusively professional.

THE POEM. Julia goes to work – part one. Three attempts to email Julia my unnamed sixteen-liner. None bridged the gap between Hereford and Prague. Why? Because a Prague filter dumped each attempt into a spam waste-bin. Let’s hope this isn’t symbolic.

Finally the grist arrives for Julia’s mill. First instruction: “Write out in prose what (you’re) trying to say, as if… describing it to a class of third graders. Next highlight the fun inner bits, the nuggets the poem is wrapped around. Then look at the prose description and double check if those nuggets are contributing to the meaning, or are getting in the way.”

Hard-nosed sense. Deep down I know the narrative is blurred in verse three. The summary will confirm this. I now enter the post-sealant reconstruction phase.

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.