Sneaking it in by the back door

VELOCITY’S VICE
Aldous saw paintings - live - through half-blind eyes,
Took dope that opened doors on newer views,
Entrapped the pulse of Razoumovsky’s sighs,
Rendered the latest vice as headline news.
To lust and slander, filthy language, rage
Our modern world, said A, has added speed.
A vice beyond the vision of this sage
Reflective, gentle writer’s formal creed.
But in a youthful, optimistic year,
Unfettered by his cloudy mystery,
I rode astride a source of whining power,
Seeing the corner’s coming trajectory.

Contained, uncertain, in a changing state

Embracing, letting fear accelerate.

Why cider has a low profile

A rare week’s visit from grandson Ian – 23 years old, 6 ft 4 in. tall, manic computer gamer, trawler of popular music’s extremities. I expose him to Billy Bragg singing The International but he prefers one of my more obscure CD tracks - an anonymous choir doing Bandiera Rossa accompanied by a thousand bagpipes. Let’s put him down as inclining leftwards then. His pallor decrees something out-of-doors and we visit Hereford’s cider museum.

As proclaimed I respond to technology but it’s thin on the ground in cider-making. There’s a press, a bottle-washing machine and… well, that’s about it. To ensure Ian gets full value for his £3.50 ticket (as a person of advanced age mine costs £3) we are reduced to reading the info placards in some detail. It seems cider-making lacks mystique.

Industries create mystique by enshrouding themselves in jargon. But prolonged contact with apples rots the imagination. The press is called – dully – a press. Later, in an over-long explanation about reducing cloudiness, there’s a line drawing of a slightly tilted barrel on a rack. The caption reveals this process is known as “racking”.

Jargon is the route to greater earnings: think of doctors, lawyers, computer manufacturers and roof-thatchers. If cider is to prosper it must ape oenology with its vinification, maceration and its heavy dependence on French words. Since Hereford is close to the Principality Welsh words would raise obfuscation levels. Other than that… ah yes, more publicity for an aperitif (called inevitably, Apple Aperitif) bought at the museum’s gift shop. Il vaut le voyage but not if you live in, say, Prague.

More on bikes and ovens, please

POETECHNICS A lyric L-plate holder asks: Does one write a poem? Plutarch and Julia admit to techniques hardly covered by this familiar word. Lucy, in answer to a slightly different question, also reveals a variant approach. But if not write what then?

One compiles a list but this is hardly appropriate for a poem. The raw material of a compilation is surely fusty-dusty data-ish stuff. Assemble? Isn’t that what happens to the parts of a CKD Ikea table or a pile of Lego bricks en route to becoming a mini version of Buckingham Palace?

I offer refine. I know refining is a secondary process but in this case the raw materials are the contents of a big, big dictionary; by refining their nuances and their relationships a poem (verse? doggerel?) may emerge. OK, it’s a slow day at the office.

Below is a sonnet. As I commented in my previous post, adopting this format was like putting on an overcoat which conferred adulthood. Meeting the AB, AB, BC, etc, restrictions is the price paid; the benefit is the horizon shrinks from infinity to manageable proportions.

Coughing, etc
This other voice, this interruptive jolt
This inarticulate explosive bray
This unwarned auditory thunderbolt
That breaks communication by its sway.
An unkempt voice grown ragged down decades
Its origins in poisoned northern fumes
Remote from cliché comfortable glades
Enshrined in chimney stacks and rattling looms.
A wrestler’s hold that forced the primary voice
Through nostrils to evince a captious whine
Removing too the beneficial choice
Of lungs resistant to the breath’s decline

Accent, nasality and coughing can
Identify the true West Yorkshire man

BB takes the hari-kiri route

MAKING AND MADE

Each finds its master. Planed, sweet-smelling wood
Succumbs to the harder, insistent saw,

Shaped and inscribed by synthetic diamonds

Manmade pretenders from no ancient world.

New worlds release an otter-smooth handle,

Hickory heft to the chisel’s sharp thrust.

Numbers define a steel blade right-angled

Aiding precisely our carpenter needs.

Simplicity sprung from myrmidon systems

Intimate gears forcing spiraling drives

Guided by maps of blind printed circuits

Carry a force that restrains and impels

Ultimate beat; the heart of production

Obedient yet to higher commands,

Hidden within the step-function action,

Muscle and sinew to master the switch.

Note: My apologies for flagging this such a long time ago. Its appearance was delayed because, in the interim, Julia had to teach me how to write a poem. Blame for its imperfections should be directed at me not at her for this - let's call it, verse - may well deserve the cliché judgement involving purses and sow's ears. Or possibly horse's...

Picture copyright 2001 by Jim Wilson

Hamlet was such a comfort

THE GOLDEN AGE IS NOW When we were very poor I took a part-time evening job behind a bar in a Tottenham pub. After three nights I resigned. Incompetence was the main reason but, also, for the first time I had to remain clear-eyed while others lapsed into crapulousness. Oh what a (badly put-together) piece of work is man.

These were pre-decimal days. To price “a brown and mild” I had to halve a pint of mild beer (at 1s 11d) and add it to a bottle of brown ale (1s. 3½d) – in my head. And there would be equal gymnastics concerning a gin and tonic or a port and lemon. When I resigned the landlord’s wife told me I wasn’t cut out for this work. In the words of Paul Simon “I took some comfort there”.

Nowadays bar-tending is a doddle. The cash register works it out and for the innumerate touch-key icons augment mere figures. If I were wiped out financially I could present myself for duty at The Dog and Duck, confident that technology would be my crutch. But being able to watch bright-eyed, shouty young men wheedling drinks out of the local second-hand car dealer (a roll of tenners in his back pocket) would be another matter.

WRITING: CRAFT NOT ART
Eclogue 46: English is a plum pudding of different words.
Example: Cyrano: So, insult me. Intellectually inadequate aristocrat: You have… a big nose. Cyrano: Ah, what could you have said? When it bleeds… a river (steps over imaginary river). When it’s blown, a hurricane. Etc, etc.

Caution: Go out there and delight in “jejune” and “mellifluous” while simultaneously exploring the one short step into pretentiousness.

Awake, for morning in the bowl of night

It’s just a digital clock and it cost £8 twelve? fifteen? years ago. It has an alarm system which is never used and a dot which appears for PM and disappears for AM. Years ago the snooze button became wonky and is now held down with Sellotape (US: Scotch Tape). It sits on a chest of drawers at Mrs B’s side of the bed and I view its display turned through ninety degrees since I tend to lie in bed rather than sit up. As a result at 1:08 I see a clown with a wide open mouth, wearing a bow tie.

It was bought when we were elderly. Now we are old it plays a more important role. Sleep is a more fugitive experience and for some reason I’ve never fathomed there’s something smugly satisfying about being able to tell myself it’s now 3.15 AM and I haven’t yet slept a wink.

In the guest bedroom there’s a much more advanced clock which keeps time by tuning to radio transmissions, thus allowing for the hour going backwards and forwards and for leap years.

A related device played a more significant part in our lives when we lived in the Philadelphia suburbs and I had an early train to catch. This time the alarm was operative and switched on a radio. But what music works best for an aubade? Not classical. A Gymnopédie is tolerable but Sibelius Four proved too much of a jolt. In the end I found an MOR station playing the blandest of the bland. I backed off the volume until my transition from Morpheus to Clifton Heights was jolt-free. I once switched on the radio during the daytime I found myself unable detect hardly any sound at all from the loudspeaker.

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.”