12.30 - 2.30 pm - we are invisible

While we had the house in France my heroes were le plombier, le menuisier (a carpenter on steroids), and le maçon (forget hammer and chisel; this guy could build you a house). All have been feted in Works Well and their brows bound with laurels.

I am more equivocal about le zingueur - technically a zinc worker, more exactly a roofer. (I should add I ignored l’ébéniste, never having needed a hand-carved witch-doctor’s mask in African hardwood.) Drefféac’s zingueur, who had a comical surname which I’m damned if I can remember, was extremely hard to find. Desperate I knocked on his door just as he was about to lunch, a solecism few Brits unfamiliar with France would comprehend.

Monsieur, he shrugged, fighting to contain himself, le téléphone. But I didn’t have a French landline and this pre-dated mobiles. I wasn’t an enthusiast before and seeing his lunch-table was set with something red poured into chunky Cristal d’Arques glasses which inhibit wine appreciation put me off even more.

For me zingueur resonates with tzigane (gypsy) and M. Zincman might have had nomadic blood. His thick curly hair looked like a football into which his head had been partially inserted. His dangling arms and simian gait equipped him well for scrambling up ladders. Although he'd done other jobs for me he refused to suggest a solution to a leaky roof over the lean-to section of the house (see pic). Several years after we sold I stopped to view the house’s exterior noting the lean-to section had a new roof. The Irish buyer had had no French and it’s possible the roof represented M. Zincman’s revenge for that interrupted lunch.

Stick to Racine, lads

Received wisdom says poetry cannot be translated - not surprising since personal reactions to poems vary more widely than those to prose. But how far off the mark? Take Portia's celebrated lines from Livre de Poche:

La vertu du clémence est de n'etre forcée,
Elle descend comme la douce pluie du ciel
Sur ce bas monde; elle est double bénédiction
Elle bénit qui la donne et qui la recoit,
Elle est la plus forte chez les plus forts, et sied,
Mieux que la couronne au monarque sur son trone
etc.

I was surprised. My experience with "poetic" passages of Shakespeare in French is that subtleties disappear leaving more or less factual narrative. The above does a better job even though it occasionally clunks (forcée instead of strained is a bit - pun intended - forced). But then the lines are moderately straightforward in English anyway. "Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I" would be a harder row to hoe.

So I turned instead to the Queen Mab speech from Romeo and Juliet:

Alors je vois que la reine Mab vous a visité
C’est l’accoucheuse des fées et elle vient
Pas plus grosse qu’une pierre d’agate à l’index d’un échevin,
Trainé par un attelage de petits atomes,
Se poser sur le nez des hommes quand ils dorment.
Son char est une noisette vide,
Etc.

This to me is far more a summary. Because French requires most adjectives to follow the noun the rendering of “fairies’ midwife” makes it sounds like a government post. The qualifiers ruin the conciseness of “Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep” and although I know char has other meanings to me it’s a tank (the Army sort). You know, I shouldn’t be trying this on.

Monsieur, I wish to fly

To make up for our uncelebrated fiftieth on October 1 we will rediscover Brittany early next year and, in particular, hire a plane to view its wild and raggedy coast. I’m looking forward to the preparations.

As a former house owner in France I met much fixed opinion there. If not downright stubbornness. The counter-man at Big Mat building materials said he not only couldn’t supply decorative gravel I needed for my garden paths but that such gravel “didn’t exist in France”. He was wrong. At Monsieur Bricolage, the DIY chain, I was told that if I wanted to box in my bath I must (note that - must) encase it in faience (tiling). He too was wrong.

Plane hire sounds like a fruitful area for such blind insistence. Fixed wing vs. helicopter. Aviation law and the sea. Seating capacity. Facilities for photography. But if it can be done I’ll do it. The key is my French: it’s not good enough for natives to be certain I’m being intentionally rude.

LONG TIME NO SEE Eventually the MS of Gorgon Times will be despatched to my agent. I have been drafting the first paragraph of the covering letter:

“I doubt you remember that in 1975 I submitted a novel, BREAKING OUT, written while I was working in the USA. What may make this distant and humdrum event slightly more memorable is that you travelled to Farringdon where I worked as an IPC journalist and gave me lunch. The novel was commended for its technical competence but rejected in that it had little new to say about a woman escaping from a failed marriage. One publisher suggested I consider changing the ending.”

The second para is funnier but I’ll leave it until I’m short of an idea.

Quinquireme of Nineveh

Test-driving my first Lexus I was directed down to Cardiff’s harbour, now overlooked by blocks of expensive flats. The older I get the more the thought of living in a flat terrifies me (I might be closeted next to a Carl Orff fan) but these were tempting. To look down on ships going about their business, a stirring yet comforting prospect. But why are ships so pleasing?

They move deliberately and this confers dignity. A bit like the Queen… no, no, what on earth am I saying? There may be a mathematical explanation. A 10,000-ton ship moving at a mere 2 mph is a formidable force. Watch when a mooring cable is slipped over a bollard and seemingly innocuous energy is dissipated in stretching the new umbilical cord. Most of us respond to power even when it’s only dimly perceived.

Close up ships are often disappointingly rusty; they start donning their make-up at half a mile distance. Many superstructures are still painted white and this is as it should be. At five miles even a container ship has good lines. One reason why those Cardiff flats are so expensive.

NOT ALWAYS FOR THE BETTER Blogger keeps changing. Installing an image now involves a slightly different procedure which is not as intuitive, not as handy. A few moments ago I discovered that my age is no longer listed in my profile. Perhaps Google is trying to protect me from ageism. If so I am denied a simple pleasure: having my span notch up another year on my birthday. Damn it, I need that confirmation.

Help BB sleep o'nights

Can anyone help? I need a pyjama top, but not any pyjama top. I need one that is anti-fashion, one that meets my exact requirements. I will pay good money. You want proof of my willingness to spend? See my previous post under Healing Bubbles.

Neck depth is vital; typical V-necks ride up and saw at my neck. It’s got to be really deep. Nor do I wish to be garrotted in and around the armpit region, Big, big gussets. Long sleeves for winter. Long top-to-bottom since my umbilicus is not my most charming feature.

The successful applicant will be paid right royally and will be obsequiously publicised on this blog. I am prepared to accept any embroidered advertising. My plight is desperate.

The terror of the suburbs

Solar keratosis (“sometimes unsightly”) will shrink my social life – never extensive – even further. Luckily the twenty-first century has created its own anchorite’s cell and here I am, illuminating a posted MS, aided by a Saitek keyboard and a 22 in. Ilyama monitor.

Initially I applied cortisone cream and requested a second tube when filling in the online prescription for my gout pills. But Dr Jones wasn’t having any. Cortisone is powerful. Used to excess it’s likely to make my facial skin thinner. I’m not vain about my appearance (I’d be delusional if I were) but this brought me up with a jerk. Steve Bell, The Guardian’s malicious cartoonist, sees our prime minister as impossibly smooth and caricatures his face squeezed into a condom. I didn’t like the parallel.

But I did like Dr Jones’ solution. DiproBase contains white soft paraffin and liquid paraffin and is labelled an emollient. Just think, after all those years of being nasty about people in print and there was a cure close at hand.

LOST IN LA MANCHA I’m devoting myself to unread classics. With War and Peace, A la recherche and Ulysses out of the way I’ve started on Don Quixote. It’s quite entertaining but for one defect: the shortest paragraph is 500 words and I constantly lose my place on the page.

HEALING BUBBLES Surgery - twice-over - for younger daughter discouraged elaborate celebrations for the fiftieth and we reverted to the default state. A 2005 Charmes-Chambertin was too young, sad given the £63 price tag. But a bottle of Krug (drunk before the red burgundy, of course) came close to justifying an expenditure of £110. Accompanied by a somewhat predictable DVD movie about Tolstoy enlivened by stellar performances from Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren.

Technologically flows the Rhine

Yesterday in Malvern we watched Rheingold. There were some glitches, the prompt was audible, but there wasn’t a single duff voice and Alberich was definitive. Yet when the performers took their bows half the Malvern audience clapped and half didn’t. Why? Because although the performance was live it originated at the Met in New York. I for one felt foolish clapping a cinema screen.

Technology was rampant. The high definition TV link meant I was able to admire Wotan’s (ie, Bryn Terfel’s) orthodontics and, had I wanted, his uvula. Despite heavy make-up Freia had an indifferent complexion. The sound was gigantic.

But the most impressive technology was on the stage. There a 45-ton device consisting of a hundred connected and manipulatable planks, affectionately referred to as The Machine, allowed scenes to be changed remotely. The plank edges could be made to ripple, to create staircases and to form precipitate underwater cliffs down which the Rhinemaidens (not without trepidation) disported themselves on wires, flicking their feet flippers and blowing heat-generated bubbles.

Ingenious and monstrous The Machine allowed performers to be positioned for high drama but wasn’t without drawbacks. Loge emerged, wire-supported, walking backwards up a 75 deg incline. He never looked happy. The Rhinemaidens, later occupying geometry impossible to interpret visually, had to take great care that their wires – made more obvious by HD TV - weren’t tangled. On the other hand Fasolt, killed by brother Fafner on a horizontal part of the stage, slid eerily into oblivion as the stage was slowly inclined.

We’re down for Lucia di Lammermoor in March and Walküre in May but will add Nixon in China and Capriccio. All by the Met and all with stratospheric casts.

A musical morsel

I don’t care for Verdi’s operas, for anything by Khachaturian (especially the Sabre Dance), for Bizet’s Carmen or for le tout Berlioz. But none of my blind spots are interesting since I am a musical ignoramus. What’s fascinating is when someone who knows music says “I don’t like…”

Julia did music at uni and limbers up regularly at the piano. Months ago I tried to get her to blog about music but she refused. With an apprehensive Mrs BB at my side when we were in Prague, I asked Julia why. Seems she has friends who are professional musicians and fears their critical reaction. I sighed, said it was a terrible waste, suggested she was denying her elitism – all the usual journalistic ploys.

But Julia is not a natural refuser. She pondered then let slip a morsel – about Mozart yet. In playing string quartets (You didn’t imagine she was limited to the keyboard, did you?) she’d noticed WAM’s cello writing wasn’t up to much. Bingo! We both agreed this was a price he’d had to pay for ennobling so many soprano roles in his operas. With Beethoven things are the other way round; his sublime quartets were paid for by an inability to come to terms with the human voice, except in the Prisoners’ Chorus.

An important discovery not otherwise available to an ignoramus. Retired fifteen years now, I still have this urge to pry. Mrs BB hates it when I do. I tell her it will be harder next time.

PRAGUE PERSIFLAGE. Lunch on periphery of Old Town: half a duck, red cabbage, potato dumplings – Czk 205 (say £7). No need for dinner but somehow I forced it down.