News from the other side of the fence

Since six out of my ten links are women this post should prove esoterically instructive. My subject is public urinals, following a visit to one equipped with a twee little bowl for three-year-olds. Hygienic chinaware is not an obvious cause of poignancy yet this was my reaction, possibly influenced by Blake in the latest and last of The Guardian’s poetry booklets.

The bowl was unpatronised and forlorn, coming as it did at the end of a line of higher and wider orifices for adults. Its tininess spoke of latent persecution. Little child what ails thee? I imagined myself saying to a crying infant whose tears were providing an additional libation to more conventional fluid flow. That I’m here and not on remand confirms I kept this sentiment to myself.

Public urinals are not really for little boys. Some are so austere as to discourage the function for which they are provided. Jugoslavia in 1965 led the world in causing men – in extremis up to that moment – to ask whether they were really capable of discharging their obligations there and then. The most luxurious evacuation I experienced was underground in Germany where there were back-lit niches containing men’s toiletries and an impeccably groomed sixty-year-old Wagnerian lady to receive my pfennigs. There may have been carpets.

Once urinals were flushed by a cistern and ball-cock arrangement. Now some are flushed immediately in response to that which has just happened. This is both abrupt and accusatory. Protection against unwanted splashing is not best served by bowls; stainless steel troughs found in the more rudimentary sports changing rooms are far more effective but have a dismal industrial look. Unlikely to attract a sonnet.

Novel progress 3/2/10. Ch. 14: 0 words. Chs. 1 - 13: 58,239 words. Comments: Roof falls in on Clare but it's not the expected roof.

Stop being cruel to cars

At 11 pm the car in the centre of the car park was a wedding cake decoration. I scritched the windscreen, the driver and passenger windows, the wing mirrors. The rear window was hard iced and beyond me. The engine had been running and I got inside to fiddle with the heater knobs. But the inter-reacting system had a mind of its own and, without any direct instruction, blew the whole of the warm air output against the windscreen. After a few minutes I drove away safely.

During cold spells some do this every morning. It wastes time, the starter works harder against the thickened engine oil and the battery loses efficiency in sub-zero weather. Some people have no garage. But most on our estate do have garages which they fill with cardboard boxes, mowers, superfluous furniture, ladders and detritus. A car costing £20,000 sits outside and junk worth less than £1000 is sheltered. Cold bums too.

MAESTRO Last night he got a standing ovation and Brummies are stingy with those. He’d just played the Emperor, and made me think I was hearing it for the first time. The Berlin Staatskapelle was as much a virtuoso instrument as his piano. But half an hour beforehand he’d conducted Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. Now he was at the keyboard.

It’s one thing to do this with Mozart. Beethoven demands large and varying forces and from the piano the gestures must be unequivocal. He plunged into that initial chord as if entering a swimming pool, later he was a passenger in a motorcycle-sidecar race. He flicked his tails back and, as part of the same curving move, descended delicately on to the keys. The slow movement, always the test, was pure soul. He encored a Chopin Nocturne and the orchestra, now at rest, listened with self-evident and rapt pleasure. Daniel Barenboim’s day at the office.

Novel progress 1/2/10. Ch. 13: 4370 words. Chs. 1 - 12: 52,579 words. Comments: Clare rampant.

Cars come off worst

In Herefordshire you become aware of hedges. A local farmer widened access to a field by extirpating 2 m of hedging. Since he lacked permission he was prosecuted, fined and required to re-instate the chopped-down part. Then he was allowed to apply officially to chop down the re-instated hedge. Which he did, got it, and did.

Many Herefordshire hedges would withstand all but frontal impact from a car. The reason is pleaching. Our estate is traversed by the Withy Brook edged on one side by a line of bushes. These are being pleached and even if I hadn’t reported this for my website, the word itself would have engaged me.






To pleach bushes the trunks are cut by two-thirds to three-quarters of their diameter when sap isn’t doing whatever sap does. The upper part is bent down about 45 degrees forming a messy zig-zag of ravaged wood. Straight 2 m stakes of wood are hammered into the ground at an opposing angle and intertwined with the part-cut trunks. Years later this rural knitting will assume wall-like stiffness. The process is shown in the top photo: note too the gypsy-like tripod for keeping a kettle on the boil and the stake-hammerer who fabricated his own mallet.

MEAN WON'T FLY Broke off the above to answer a man seeking direct-debit contributions to Herefordshire’s Air Ambulance, unsupported by government funds. I asked about his strike rate. Mid-afternoon most knocking goes unanswered. Of those that open their doors, one in ten respond favourably. Herefordians are notoriously tight. Tip with a note rather than coin at a restaurant and jaws drop slackly.
Novel progress 30/1/10. Ch. 13: 2581 words. Chs. 1 - 12: 52,579 words. Comments: Clare's big interview continued.

Then gi's a hand ma trusty friend

Burns Night quatrains

Here’s my right hand, a sign of amity,
Visual proof of my disarmament.
But leaving little as a legacy
An empty final will and testament.

No lively wood shaped by the chisel’s blow.
No well-worked clay, no comforting caress.
No sketch, no minor key arpeggio,
No actor’s pause, no digital success.

These fingers had a role in writing prose
Yes, yet passively and not uniquely so.
The keys amenable to nose and toes
The words conveyed if need be in dumb show.

And now poor hand, arthritically misshaped,
Dupuytren teased, brown spotted, slow to act,
Inherits that which may not be escaped
A nervousness that breaks the body’s pact.

The hand and mind that worked decisively
Now fear the new and lurch away from change,
New books, new friends are seen as emnity
And outwardness is timid in exchange.

That age debilitates is hardly new,
But age contracts a world we once thought wide
Not wanting to discover me and you
Reveals an unexpected dark outside.

If I must shrink then I must learn to lean
On near and known established quality
And say that bacon comes as fat and lean
And humdrum verse is mere frivolity

Novel progress 28/1/10. Ch. 13: 1253 words. Chs. 1 - 12: 52,579 words. Comments: Clare approaches the crux of the story, or so she thinks.

Confiteor Keatso omnipotenti

Having devised something I regard as clever (My Right Hand) as basis for a non-sonnet poem and irritated it isn’t going satisfactorily I look for an opportunity to be destructive. And here it is. The Guardian is doing booklets on the Romantic Poets, the first on Keats. Let’s look for defects.

Straight off we have the Chapman’s Homer sonnet, world famed. Why don’t I like: “Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.”? Because I feel fealty is a word only poets use. Was it commoner then? I suspect not.

Grumblingly I give him demesne in “Homer ruled as his demesne;” because the fourth meaning in the dictionary is: region or realm. Even so the early definitions to do with land surrounding a manor and landed property have stronger associations which, I feel, may have been even stronger in Keats’ time.

Then there’s Chapman speaking out “loud and bold”. Is there a sufficient distinction between these two adjectives or was he filling out the line? Perish the thought.

“When a new planet swims into his ken;” When did ken become a literary no-no? Before or after Keats?

It’s sad to find stout Cortez staring out “with eagle eyes”. Keats can’t be blamed for creating a phrase which later became a cliché but, come to think of it, was it all that perceptive anyway? What’s next?

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Hah! I set out to break a butterfly on the wheel and the butterfly has hit back. Tell you what: I’ll put My Right Hand away for a while and do an iron-clad, rigidly metred sonnet on A Little Learning.

Novel progress 23/1/10. Ch. 12: 3127 words. Chs. 1 - 11: 48,792 words. Comments: A Damascene moment. But should Hatch be re-christened Patch?

Getting closer to the birds

This photo of the BBs’ binoculars evokes several parables but they won't be recorded here. Parables are so smug. What the binoculars represent is a middle-class tendency towards higher technology and reckless expenditure.

The Praktica pair (8 x 21) in the centre are quite small, a gift from Mrs BB to help explore France before we bought the house there. On the left, the Pentax (10 x 24) were a gift from me to Mrs BB also for use in France. Twitching was in full flow when I bought the RSPB (10 x 42), having just stopped short of going the whole hog with Leica. Two factors worked against Leica: half an hour’s comparison left me incapable of detecting optical values twice those of the RSPB which were half the price. Also, the hideous Bill Oddie uses Leica.

The figures rating binoculars are confusing and subjective. The initial figure represents magnification but is something of a chimera. Going much beyond 10 means "binoc-shake" is so predominant the binoculars are unusable. The second figure is the light-gathering ability (42 is quite high) and thus the clarity of the image. It was this that proved impossible to assess between the RSPB and the Leica. In fact the RSPB have allowed me to stare straight into the eye – perhaps even the brain – of a teal.

“THE REST IS NOISE” By the time it gets on to atonalism and beyond it's hilarious. This is the period when composers made music (sounds?) out of anything, provided it wasn’t tonal (ie, tuneful). Pierre Boulez bullied and fell out with everyone and now does a good job conducting other’s (tonal!) stuff - Wagner in particular. Atonalism moved on to minimalism and goodness knows what. One quote: “The tenuous situation of classical music in America was (for Partch) not a deficit but an advantage. In one essay he wrote, ‘There is thank God, a large segment of our population that never heard of J. S Bach.’” Sheer fun.

Novel progress 21/1/10. Ch. 12: 2389 words. Chs. 1 - 11: 48,792 words. Comments: Just broached the idea on which the whole novel was based.

Bit of a ragbag

Sonnet - Metamorphosis

I am the victim of time’s violence.
This pressing sky, these over-sleekit roads
These blizzards of ebullience,
This rain, this fog that frequently forebodes
Much worse. All kept me from the barber’s chair
And let my hair presume to reach my brow.
My gliding form has lost its athlete’s flair,
And, seaweeded, retards the forehead’s prow
When cutting through the pool’s décolletage,
Requiring several towels to get it dry.
A Neptune slowed to Saturn’s gnarly age
My crawl-stroke wasted, power gone awry.
But could my new-born wastrel turbulence
Proclaim a poet’s mane of consequence?

NOTE: Not to be taken seriously. An attempt to break away from the 3½ quatrains that the sonnet form tends to impose. To me, habituated, it forms a different straitjacket.

UNAVOIDABLE Twentieth-century music! Twelve-tone shivers down the spines of those who drew up the drawbridge with Brahms. But the century includes Strauss, Elgar, Sibelius and Mahler. If you want to know how it all fits together (including jazz and pop) “The rest is noise” by Alex Ross, music critic of New Yorker, was enthusiastically reviewed in the UK and is brilliantly written – a must read. Your stepping stone to the Berg violin concerto, which, like Naples, you must experience before death. Or afterwards if there are suitable facilities.

DARWIN UPDATE BBC4 yesterday continued its wonderful series on hard science with, in effect, a lecture on the origins of chaos theory. Ah the mind of man. Ending with an unbelievable piece of software containing an algorithm which simulates evolution, a process which in real life takes millennia. An incompetent cartoon mannikin trips over then learns to walk with confidence and it’s the maths what done it.

Novel progress 20/1/10. Ch. 12: 1724 words. Chs. 1 - 11: 48,792 words. Comments: Unproductive day. Still on the M6.

Sentimentality takes different forms

Months ago I asked whether boy-babies responded more enthusiastically to toys rich in technical detail compared with those carved out of wood and sold for mega-pounds at Early Learning Centre. The post went to hell in a hack when Lucy and other former girl-babies revealed they’d preferred six-shooters and fire engines to dolls anyway. But atavism is never far away at Works Well.

Similarly I wondered why those fascinated with WW2 planes lost interest in the civil aircraft that succeeded them. I daydreamed whether boy-babies, now man-babies, felt more romantic about the utilitarian interiors of warplanes as cavities designed for one purpose alone. Having once sat in the cockpit of a Lancaster bomber during my RAF service I Googled the image (see above).

But forget all that. Almost adjacent on Google was this picture – the T (for transmitter) 1154 and R (for receiver) 1155 whereby the Lancaster kept in touch with other planes and the land it had left behind. Oh gentle but tolerant reader, believing old BB to have devoted his life solely to indulgent wordsmithing, I HAVE REPAIRED THAT KIT, blue/red/yellow knobs and all.


UGHHH Mrs BB, still a little fragile, made her first trip out today on snowy Hereford streets. We walked arm in arm encouraging a neighbour to comment on our decreptitude and triggering these alien Cockney words:

We've bin togevver nah for forty year,
And it don't seem a day too much,
There's not a lidy livin’ in vuh land
As I'd swap for mi dear Old Dutch.
(Altogevver, nah...)

Sometimes the cold dash of West Yorkshire tradition has its place.

Novel progress 12/1/10. Ch. 11: 3110 words. Chs. 1 - 10: 44,765 words. Comments: Hatch needs a woman, for various reasons.