Idle holiday thoughts

THE POOL
The pool was more or less a bagatelle
Despite its pumps and pipes and ad-hoc stock
A cheapjack blue within a rough stone shell
Shabby costume jewel of Languedoc.

Ten metres long, a mere half-dozen strokes
Of breathy crawl to carve a hand-strewn wake
Each length an overtaken drain evokes
The body’s needs, imagination’s brake.

But pools – all pools – enclose an inner space
That holds the swimmer like an ambered fly.
Seen from within the water’s silvered face
Casts back a diamond’s faceted reply.

A gesture from a bubble-beaded hand
Reaching to launch more bubbles from below
As active forms from this unlikely band
Of prism-managed light in cut glass show.

Between these metal plated surfaces
The inner pool takes gravity head on
Suspends the swimmer in near weightlessness
The hinted ecstasy of mass foregone.

Mishaps add interest

Marja-Leena asked if I'd got any regional snaps from our holidays. Since our aim was to devote ourselves to sensual pleasure these are rather rare. In any case I'm aware of my shortcomings with a camera and only reluctantly unship l'appareil. Hope what follows gives some idea of what we were up to.

View from restaurant just below Mont Aigoual observatory (1567 m); for all I know Kanchenjunga was visible. BB's younger daughter provides frame

Zach the juvenile mariner; his ma on Li-Lo behind

St-Guilhem-le-Désert a touristy but well restored village

Mont Ventoux in Provence, a trial for TdF racers

View from the villa's balcony - good for getting loaded to

The narrow streets of Couvertoirade, a walled village

Zach unimpressed by Grandpa BB's progress through the billows

More from the Villa Bonden:

OH WHAT A FALL Shuffling past Lodève’s hotel de ville and more than a little conscious of the seventh phase of Jacques “Ages of man” I stumbled over a bollard and fell on to my nose, the basis of my only true claim to physical beauty. The tentative attention I received from French teenagers and octogenarian concierges confirmed I’d been right about Jacques. The nose survived but my left wrist was sprained and led to my forcing my way through the rapidly closing door of a pharmacie, the time being 11.59, a minute before France’s sacred lunch break. Normally I am able to turn my physical failings in France into rewarding conversational opportunities, but the grumbling stomach of the pharmacienne prevented this. The wrist-support cost a shocking €41. Un prix énorme, I said, demanding a receipt prior to a claim on my travel insurance I know I will never make. My hungry saviour nodded.
LE STYLE C’EST L’HOMME Lodève was also the scene of a lost purse which necessitated a visit to the police commissariat (in the vain hope that someone might turn it in) and to the gendarmerie (to obtain a temporary driving licence replacing the one that had disappeared). The police were mainly overweight, sweaty and worked in a paper-strewn cavity that looked a hundred years old. The female gendarme wore a blouse with creases so sharp they could have been used as weapons.
CHARTRES Quite a different experience from those which uplifted Lucy recently. The Hotel Marmotte is located on the rue Charles Coulombs, but Chartres has another similarly named street which only lacks the final s. Satnav obediently took us to the first in the town’s traffic-crowded centre before, contritely re-programmed, taking us to the correct address in the midst of an industrial estate. Cheap, though.

Sorry, couldn't help myself

Blogs subvert Euclid: they cause intersections in what would otherwise be the parallelism of our separate lives. Relucent Reader, who frugally writes one of my must-read blogs from Mechanicsville, Virginia, recently celebrated Bloomsday, June 16, the day on which Joyce’s Ulysses unfolds. I responded. In his re-response the subjects he touched on were like a descant to my own concerns. I’m taking a one-day break from my holiday diary to re-re-respond. As Luther said: Ich kann nicht anders.

First Ulysses itself. The greatest novel ever written; alas, I am not open to negotiation on this. RR’s post confirmed that on this year’s Bloomsday I was actually re-reading the book, though being in France, I was temporarily unaware of the date. RR believes: “some passages… lend themselves to reading aloud and, at least in Boston (RR has New England connections) it was a bit of a tradition on The Day.” I shall continue re-reading with that in mind.

RR liked C. S Forester’s Hornblower novels but couldn’t get on with O’Brian (arguably a Forester evolution) from whom my blogonym is derived. He promises to “have another run”. RR is frighteningly well-read and I’d hesitate to diagnose his problem. Possibly the stumbling block is an important O’Brian theme of class differences, something many Americans refuse to take seriously.

“Never been to France, would love to some time (I should add RR gets about quite a bit), tho the Missus is less enthusiastic about the project.” Ah yes, I’ve lived in the USA and owned a house in France. How can the two be reconciled? Perhaps on the matter of friendships: Americans can be masters of the instantaneous rapport, the French tend to edge in sideways.

RR mentions Stephenson’s Kidnapped. I was using my ebook reader in France to creep up on the passage where Alan Breck takes on the ship’s crew – cited by Graham Greene as perfect action writing.

RR approves of Belgian beer and in another allusion to reading aloud (“when I had the breath”) reveals he used to do just that “to a captive audience at the juvenile detention center”.

Given the subject of my blog, I suppose I was drawn to someone writing from Mechanicsville but there is another link. RR’s initials are those of my real-life name. Go figure.

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.