Instead of a postcard

Our holiday at the St Jean de la Blaquière villa (36 km west of Montpellier) was fraught with techno:
A PEN? Normally I cobble together poetry on the computer, something real poets disapprove of. Lacking electronics at SJDLB I resorted to pen and paper which means I have a complete record of a fortnight’s second thoughts. I now intend to live to 152, sell my MSs to a Texan university and live off the proceeds.
IT’S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE. OH YES, IT IS. The villa lav had one of those double-button flushers, one for short-term and one for… er, longer visits. Except the cistern valve wouldn’t close and the previous occupants (a rather destructive group of bikers) had turned off the water supply. Simple, I thought, as I lifted the cistern lid. To reveal a sprung cable, a two-stage cam, lots of concentric tubes and an inter-relationship I wot not of. A prayer to the Oc god, Technos, was answered positively.
NEVER TOO YOUNG. BB: “I’m just going out to check the car’s oil.” BB fille cadette: “That doesn’t interest me but there is someone who would be interested.” And so three-year-old Zach watched silently, eyes wide, as the dipstick was extracted, wiped, re-dipped and examined. Believe me, he’s way beyond fluffy toys.

LA VIE EN ROSE Huge quantities of rosé were drunk, mainly from wine boxes – Hey! We were quaffing not tasting and spitting. The economics of a 10-litre (vs. our normal 5-litre) box appeared tempting until younger daughter pointed out a significant disadvantage: it wouldn’t fit into the fridge. She’s her father’s child.

DIY: the fatal flaw is yourself

I hope no one has concluded I’m in favour of - or any good at - DIY. As Hilaire Belloc recommends, my job is to give “give employment to the artisan”. I do this willingly, enjoying the further benefit of watching an expert at work. Grist for the post.

My main failing, discussed before, is impatience. Once the tools are out of the toolbox I can’t wait for them to return. An unfinished project is a Damoclean sword; it’s ironic that, in a casual moment, I chose as blogonym the name of someone supremely efficient at DIY and everything else. But impatient DIY has other aspects.

You’re screwing in a wood screw that is getting tighter because you pre-drilled the hole with an impatiently selected and slightly-too-small drill bit. Sooner rather than later you will have to unscrew and re-drill the hole. But you fatally delay this decision for a further two turns; the effort is enormous and, in applying it, the screwdriver blade gouges the screw-head slot so that the blade no longer fits securely. Getting the damaged screw out takes an afternoon.

A piece of wood is oversize by a tiny amount. The obvious answer is to plane it. But a plane can be fiddly so you use a coarse file “because it’s quicker”. This creates a rounded edge instead of a flat rectangular one. Thus there are gaps at the junction when you mate this piece with another.

DIY, like genius, is an infinite capacity for taking pains. That I can recognise this defect in myself doesn’t mean I am any closer to resolving it.

A sense of touch

Rock climbing
Let you and I decode this wall of Braille
Which hides its clues in its rugosity
A ciphered invitation to prevail
Against the sullen pull of gravity.

Probe fingers test the nature of the holds
From edges that release a grateful bite
To hanging shallow spoons on polished folds
Where faith and friction are the keys to height.

Below, those self-same holds now yield to feet,
A changing notion of security,
From hands that pull to legs that, driving, beat
The weighty torso’s dead proclivity.

The rope’s symbolic link from waist to soul,
A nylon thread of voice that simply tells
Of sharing, unity and safe control,
Hangs motionless above the bedlike fells.

Now - on this barer face - the mind reacts
To heightened thoughts of flight and rustling air,
While scanty touch of hand and feet distracts
The will from this, our self-inflicted dare.

But here’s a move that cannot be reversed
The crux that separates two points in time
I take the step that leaves the past dispersed
Embrace the new and justify the climb.

NOTE Amateurish and, even sadder, obvious. But then I was a fearful and incompetent climber too. The aim is to move on to freer, idiomatic, even slangy verse which does not rhyme. The problem then will be to distinguish between my prose and my verse.

QUESTION
(left) What happened next?

SAUSAGE FORK
Downey Engineering of Pontrilas say the prototype of this revolutionary device will cost £20. However, we're shortly off on holiday so the R&D phase is some weeks hence.

Can numbers be romantic?

My father had a gregarious yet authoritative style which would have suited the armed services during WWII. Profound deafness prevented this so he joined the Royal Observer Corps, spending time with other disqualificatees (mainly businessmen) on windswept Otley Chevin, north of Bradford, noting aircraft movements and acting as first-line visual defence against aerial invasion.

ROC members had to tell good planes from bad and this spilled over domestically. From five to ten I was sucked in and read the necessary publications more avidly than my father, becoming fairly good at what he did. (I may have passed on the appropriate gene: my elder daughter, having beaten her sword into a ploughshare, could differentiate between a Ford Zephyr and a Ford Zodiac, an extreme distinction which depends mainly on a few strips of chrome trim.)

My skills would not have impressed a similarly indoctrinated young American. To me the most iconic (Hate the word but can’t escape it here) US fighter plane was a Mustang which he would have called a P-51. Moving to bombers my four-engine Liberator would have been his B-24. This numerical nomenclature still prevails among US vintage plane fans. A minor mystery, especially since many of the best-known American planes had good memorable names: Corsair, Lightning and Vengeance (manufactured by the equally memorable company, Vultee.)

But not all. The Brewster Buffalo was actually a fighter. Funnily enough its tubby fuselage hinted at the eponymous herbivore. Also an uncertain image springs to my mind when someone says Flying Fortress (US: B-17); all those bricks and mortar! This must seem like the Punic Wars to many bloggers. PS: The silhouette pic is a Macchi, an unlikely visitor to Otley Chevin.

Bank Holiday trifle

Villanelle – Soccer fan

No, look within, this is your darker state
Flagged by the scarf you wear so forwardly
A sentient step towards the insensate.

Having forsworn the gift of human freight
To co-exist, reflect, reach out, then see.
No, look within, this is your darker state.

Instead you urge yourself to harm and bate
The scarves outside your damned fraternity.
A sentient step towards the insensate.

Your sport’s an artificial form of hate
Whipped by the branches of your tribal tree
No, look within, this is your darker state.

For those whipped scarves you attribute their fate
To mythic signals from an enemy.
A sentient step towards the insensate.

But when the tumult clears, fears re-create
The prior world you left so eagerly,
A world away from this, your darker state,
The blinding darkness of the insensate.

NOTE. The villanelle is called a Poetic Trifle in Brewer’s “Art of versification” but it can rise to greater things. Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle…” is a villanelle. Nuff said.

The first and third lines from verse one are repeated throughout. So, fewer lines to write, I thought. It was only after the tenth re-write I dimly began to realise their potential.

This is a joint exercise with Plutarch. The first version, which I have retained, is terrible. Like Julia, Plutarch pointed the way to improvements and I stumbled on, ending up with what you can see. Interestingly both critics frequently drew my attention to defects which, in my heart of hearts, I knew were there and yet I pretended to be blind to. This is the essence of saying: you know you can do better. And this is the best form of encouragement. My gratitude to Plutarch here, and Julia earlier.

Adieu for a while.

When BB was an unlikeable bb

Recently The Crow posted about calligraphy. I mentioned my interest but said it had always been beyond my uncertain hand and that I was flogged repeatedly at school for bad penmanship. This horrified her and she asked what sort of school I had attended. Well, it was fee-paying and, despite my cowardice, I could see some link between the crime and the punishment. What was less easy to accept was when I was flogged for having feet that were bigger than those of the geography master. Lucy admitted herself guiltily amused by this.

The Crow has reason to attach emotional content to handwritten letters and urged me to consider leaving mementos more permanent than a million forgotten emails to my daughters and grandchildren. I may well do this, always assuming I believe they can read what I’ve written. But my memory was sprung. Upstairs in the loft is a box the size of two house-bricks, packed with the letters I sent my mother during my two years’ national service.

While I was training in Wiltshire I had my portable and typed everything. In Singapore I was reduced, like everyone else, to airmail sheets. These consist of very thin paper and I suspect the ballpoint ink has migrated. The letters are over fifty years old and I have never read them since I slipped them into the postbox at RAF Seletar. I was a callow, cynical, self-regarding airman (qualities which have not entirely disappeared) and I am pretty sure I do not want to re-visit that version of myself. However, perhaps my descendants may enjoy examining the feet of clay belonging to the authoritarian figure who impinged irregularly on their lives.

I get the feeling this wasn’t what The Crow had in mind.

Vlad the almost unbelievable

Sonnet – Forked tongue
The mirrored Vlad said this: My thoughts proclaim
My genius, I write at least with “talent”,
(Ironic quotes to mark a word so tame)
But childish chat is my profound lament.

No media man, he asked inquisitors
To write their questions on prosaic cards
Then, face to face, the hopeful auditors
Endured a long exchange for dull rewards.
The eccentricity was rightly earned:
While Luzhin and The Gift were Russian born,
Lolita’s acid laughs, so deftly turned,
Blow like a zestful Yankee auto horn.*
Oddness explains a dearth of oral skill;
Two voices make speech harder to distil.

NOTE I have Plutarch’s authority for using a rhyming dictionary. Rhyming, he says, is an artificial constraint and therefore this is not cheating. One of the several online dictionaries I use threw up the bizarre final three words of the asterisked line. It seemed ungracious to reject this Autolycan gift.

Fitting a doo-dah to the job

Ergonomics has nothing to do with ergo (therefore); it’s a latin/greek trick. The prefix is greek for work and the whole word is the study of man in his workplace. A comfortably grabbable kettle might well have been caressed by an ergonomist but easy to use doesn’t always mean nice to look at. The target rifle above no doubt fits the shoulder of the shooter (it’s adjustable) but it’s hardly elegant.

Ergonomics is often central to industrial efficiency, something I was supposed to know about when I was paid to write. A seminar on the subject I attended proved to be a reverse example of how careful design can help people do their job.

The seminar started – as many do – with a complete cock-up of what Americans call show-and-tell. Slides appeared upside down, in the wrong order, “flopped” or just not at all. Using the projector was non-intuitive; its ergonomics had not been tuned for the non-expert human. Speakers rested notes on a lectern that was too steeply raked; the notes repeatedly slipped off. Hilariously the microphone dangled from a necklace loop; when handed over, the next speaker had hell’s own job getting the loop over his head.

Journalism often means profiting from others’ mistakes. I reported the seminar straightforwardly, then added a comment piece. The Society of Ergonomists replied with a rueful letter which we published. During my career I attended many seminars on many subjects and I’ve forgotten them all. But not that one. Definitely a do-as-I-say, not -as-I-do.