Stupidity leads to rewarding chat

My garage doors are 83 in. wide; my car 78 in. That’s 2½ in. clearance on either side of the wing mirrors. Believe me, it looks less.

Entering and leaving the garage are just one problem. Inside, I ease the car inches to the left so I can open the driver’s door. Chalk marks on the wall help position the car longitudinally; carpet attached to both walls protects the bodywork. For ten years I have managed these mini-journeys successfully but three days ago I scratched the offside front wing (US: fender) on a quite different variant of the exit route.

The man at Auto Chips said it would cost £150. I thought the rate was about £40. “That’s if you’re shortly going to sell the car. If you’re keeping it you need something permanent.” My aim was to obliterate evidence of my own stupidity so I opted for the latter. I asked questions and he answered them fully, pleased at my interest.

The higher cost covers repainting the whole wing and then drying it in an oven. While it’s still on the car! We stood in a car-size chamber heated to 75 deg F. “People get the wrong idea about our oven,” he said, grinning. There was more. He knew his stuff and enjoyed explaining it in detail. It was (professionally), and still is, one my great pleasures to talk to a communicative expert – on anything.

I told Mrs B that the car was destined for the inside of an oven. “Remember to take the long-distance sweets (US: candy) out of the door compartments,” she said.

Time to get out of the poetry game

WHY I AM UNFITTED FOR, AND PROFESSIONALLY PREVENTED FROM,WRITING POETRY
The Rubik Cube is not my sport. The sides
Proclaim restraint, the shape a symmetry.
The garish colours act as childish guides
The aim a transient diversionary.
To write a verse, to form a brick of words
To take on rules that help to close our eyes,
To rhyme (like this) and risk what rhyme affords
We tumble into wretched compromise.
The language of a verse demands a blur
Else why not take the compass point of prose?
Why hint, evade, constrain, fail to concur
When truth and clarity all worth enclose?

For truth and clarity are hard-won gain
And fall in rhythmic rhyming’s false domain.

A plague on both their houses

Shaving – a time when I look deep into my bloodhound face barely able to contain my rage at being the victim of extortion.

A razor resembles that other example of fiduciary cynicism, the computer printer: purchase price suspiciously low, running costs ludicrously high. Razor designers, sniggering, add plausible complexity. From one blade we move to two, to the swivelling head, to three blades, to slender-handled pink jobs fit only for women’s delicate hands. Marketing departments, sniggering in descant, attach childish gamebox names and give away the handle and a couple of blades for almost nothing. Then the real costs become apparent. A replacement blade can cost over £2.

The blades cut bristle, they “work well”. And, since a customer has this niggling belief he’s invested in the valueless handle, he mounts the treadmill. Over the years I have shed many of my West Riding antecedents but I still have an abiding hatred of being gulled.

I have bought alternative blades, conscious that this involves the connivance of the big players. I have bought disposables which only announce their wear by scritching the face. I have dallied with power. Fear has denied me cut-throats. I have had many lousy shaves. This is a rant. This is the end.

BB goes off the rails

THE FACELESS MALE BLOGGER
Deprived of height, of hair, of roman nose,
Of wounding agile tongue, of confidence,
Of bulky menace clad in shabby clothes,
Of old man’s manners hiding fraudulence.
I write. Remotely, tapping on my keys,
Protected by invisibility,
Safe from the snare of facial expertise,
Of smirking physical felicity.
Quite unbetrayed. The words mean what I want.
I'm handsomer and more genteel this way.
Virtual yet virtuous, tolerant,
With time to choose the soothing elegy.

Beware! This safer wordsmith’s life

Could mask a man who loves to beat his wife

Note: Initially this sonnet employed the first person singular. Worrying about the obloquy it might attract I changed it to the third person. But I fear this may not be enough. It ain't true, I tell you. Besides, the man in the inset is far better dressed. PS: Ignore the above note. Plutarch, always a constructive critic (see his comment), suggests the first person would be better. Since some of the details describe me, I think he's right. The I form goes back.

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