Curbing the bending tendency

Another giant step for mankind is imminent and Works Well readers will be informed before anyone else. The new technology resolves a problem British sausage-eaters have wrestled with for decades – the moment when the object of their desires ceases to be a cylinder and opts to become a banana.

There are no doubt good reasons why a sausage, sensing the heat of the frying pan, curls up as if returning to the womb. But for once the physics doesn’t interest me. I am concerned only with the irritating necessity of rotating an assymetrical body through three 90-deg. steps to ensure equally distributed browning (as evidence of having been cooked).

And yes I know such browning can be achieved by baking or roasting the sausages tightly fitted into a small tray with a raised rim. Mrs B. has often done this and I like the result. But such sausages differ from those fried; for one thing the skin is hardened, for another some of the juice dries up.

My solution is hardly revolutionary. Imagine the business end of a small garden fork without the handle. Six 6-in. long x 3 mm wide tines, just over 1 in. apart. The circular cross-section tines, welded up from stainless steel, are inserted longitudinally into the sausages providing an inflexible “backbone” to each. Rotation becomes a simple finger job. I called Downey Engineering of Pontrilas (Tel: 01981-240427) and asked if they were interested. They said they were “provided we get one the sausages”. Watch this space.

Voie sans issue

En essayant saisir le francais
Un rosbif se trouve perturbé.
Mais son prof dit, “Bien sur,
J’ai une méthode moins dur,
On doit trancher le gorge de l’anglais.”

NOTE: C'est une andouillette.

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.