A couple more lists

Seen at Borderline Film Festival
March 25 – April 10, Hereford.
Another Year (dir: Mike Leigh) – Middle-class couple view social/emotional failure among friends; first half tedious/repetitive, second more dramatic.
My Afternoons With Margueritte – Illiterate handyman, Gerard Depardieux discusses La Peste with aged woman doctor; completely charming.
Black Swan – Hilariously OTT; supposed ballerina Nathalie Portman is seen dancing, but only from the waist up.
Genius Within – Amusing but overlong documentary about pianist Glenn Gould; few musical insights.
Rashomon – Four views of murder; 60-year-old Japanese classic; still shines.
The Secrets in Their Eyes – Brilliant Argentinian mystery thriller/love story; amusing and profane.
Of Gods and Men – Austere, truth-based account of Algerian monastery monks, facing life or (literally) death decision about terrorist threat.
Biutiful – Overlong, over-miserable account of petty criminal/father of two in Barcelona; Javier Bardem superb.
The Illusionist – Jacques Tati screenplay in cartoon of musical hall musician ceding his profession to rock-n-roll and TV; authentic and beautiful fifties Edinburgh backdrops.
Blue Valentine – American couple marry too young, squabble, separate; much bonking; do not be tempted.

TEARS, BUT OF WHAT QUALITY? BBC’s classical music channel, BBC3, invited listeners to say which pieces made them cry. The choices (a Chopin étude, for goodness sake) raised the suspicion that the tearful were parading their intellect. But I’m just as bad with Strauss’s Four Last Songs and Mozart’s Soave il vento.

Let’s be more vulgar: the Free French singing La Marseillaise in Casablanca, Jo Stafford’s Blue Moon, the Pogues’ And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda, anyone singing My Luve is Like a Red Red Rose and/or Believe Me if all Those Endearin’ Young Charms, Elton John and Kiki Dee with Don’t Go Breaking my Heart (repeatedly on juke box during my first ski-ing holiday), Charlie Parker’s Embraceable You, the Z-cars theme. Salt water a’plenty.

Denied a mobile I deconstruct

Driving away from the toils of the garden centre I look for catharsis and find it in the deconstruction of hymn libretti. Here’s: Oh God Our Help in Ages Past, verse four.

A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like an evening gone,
Short as the watch that ends the night,
Before the rising sun.

The urge to embellish meaninglessly; the second simile evokes a shorter period of time than the first. So why bother with the first?

Eternal Father Strong to Save (ie, For Those in Peril on the Sea) contains a bit of the Town and Country Planning Act:

Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep.

Amazing! The sea apparently defined its own boundaries. And, alas, the bidding didn’t work. Yet as I sing the hymn my throat contracts with emotion; this is a noble tune, I’ll reserve my banderilla for something else.

My final example requires no deconstruction or, for that matter, any further comment:

A message came to a maiden young;
The angel stood beside her,
In shining robes and with golden tongue,
He told her what would betide her.

By now the car is in my own driveway and catharsis is complete. I have passed into the state that follows: the exact word escapes me but it is characterised by a desire to post.

The year of the spoon

These secondhand serving spoons were a gift from my father about fifty years ago. They are silver and when struck ring out with a distinctive light “ping”. Two are plain, one carries a set of initials, the fourth a date – 1818. Despite their age and potential value we have used them for what they were intended and they travelled to the USA and back when we lived there. I Googled the dated spoon’s birth year:

Born: Karl Marx, William George Fargo (co-founder Wells Fargo), Amelia Jenks Bloomer (feminist reformer; must have been tough with that name), Emily Brontë (in Thornton, three miles away from, and 117 years before, I was born), Lucy Stone (suffragist and feminist), Richard J. Gatling (inventor of eponymous gun), James Prescott Joule (experimental physicist; gave name to unit of energy)
Published: Frankenstein, Endymion, Northanger Abbey (posth.).
Written: Hammerklavier sonata.
Events: Thomas Bowdler becomes infamous, George IV orders boots for left and right feet, Bernardo O'Higgins establishes Chile's independence from Spain, Australia Day celebrated.

MACHINE BETTER Everyone complains about dealing with machines, recorded voices, etc, rather than humans. But there are advantages. Throughout Hereford’s film festival we needed change for parking meters. Even counter operators at the Tesco filling station frowned when I repeatedly bought a paper with a £20 note. But the automated check-outs at the supermarket proper didn’t grumble.

THE LOVE PROBLEM 47,971 words (ie, almost half way). Jana’s student, Didi (a woman), goes solo. Her other student, Matthieu (a fella), struggles.

Dumbness: a lifestyle choice

Ignorance comes in different forms. As a child I was unaware of how the gyroscopic top (see inset) or the radio worked. Magic, I said. But fate in the form of RAF national service forced me to recognise that the radio is not magic. By arranging electronic components - resistors, capacitors, coils and (in those days) thermionic valves - in a certain manner you can create a superhetereodyne, a name more exotic than the circuit’s comparatively mundane function.

An aerial responds to electro-magnetic waves sent from afar. The aerial is linked to the superhet which is adjusted to pick out a selected frequency from these waves. This tiny signal is made more powerful and its variations are duplicated in the coil of a loudspeaker. The coil vibrates the speaker cone, duplicating sounds imposed on the EM wave. Thus Desert Island Discs.

Since no one forced me I never bothered to explain the top although I think I could. Left to myself I might have investigated the radio. One was a visible mystery, the other invisible. Watching and touching the spinning top taught you things. The radio remains inert and getting to know it involves maths which usually blunts casual curiosity.

Understanding electronics is chic and I’m vain enough to want this. The forces at work in the top are strange but not, it seems, strange enough. I’m at ease with my ignorance.

GORGON COVER The pro tem design for my novel Gorgon Times cost £100. I challenged commenters to better it for the same sum. FigMince responded and here is his idea. He says he doesn’t want the money, but we’ll see about that. Anyone else?

Higher matters and hackery

CULINARY DIALOGUE “I’m going to turn the rest of the ham hock into a sort of galantine,” said Mrs BB. The words dimly registered. Later I came across the dish in the fridge and asked Mrs BB, “You said ‘sort of’; could this be legitimately called a galantine?” Oh, yes, skin and bone give off a fluid that sets like a perfect jelly; so what you see is definitely a galantine. Why was I asking? Because I was not only prepared to eat the stuff itself, but also to consume the word as a word. A lovely word. The g’s saltiness was ameliorated by a potato salad.

THE LOVE PROBLEM I’m torturing myself. Present wordage is 39,882 and I’m listing it as that rather than adding another 118 to take it past 40,000 words. In a novel each 10,000 words is a milepost to be celebrated; ten mileposts and I’m done. But I can afford the mild pain. The next 118 words, plus quite a lot more, are clear in my mind and only need transcribing. A luxury moment.

GORGON TIMES Still no word from the agent, no reassurances. Best to plan for the worst - a DIY publishing project tied in with sales and publicity via Amazon. As a result I’ve had a front cover designed. Sharp-eyed readers will notice the author isn’t Barrett Bonden. Most commenters will know the name shown. It belongs to another person entirely, unblogged, a bitter anchorite who envies BB’s wider social existence.

Put not your faith in chic plumbing

FASHIONABLE SINK, part 2. Installed in the en suite at a high level so I may spit toothpaste accurately without bending. So high that Grandson Zach cannot reach the taps and has complained. What the heck, there are other sinks in the house. A plug and chain would be atavistic bling so the plug is a pusher: down for closed, down again for open. Now the plug action jams. Fashion failing to follow function.

FOUR STARS Social Network is a movie about the evolution of Facebook, an Internet facility I have never used. It got rave reviews but it’s about youth’s arrogance and I didn’t expect to like it. The first ten minutes, where two Harvard undergrads destroy themselves socially in a noisy restaurant needed sub-titles. The movie is ugly, monomaniacal and esoteric; it is also a brilliant take on one aspect of life in the twenty-first century. The script, where heard and decoded, was utterly inevitable and written by Aaron Sorkin, who famously wrote The West Wing.

THE LOVE PROBLEM 38, 348 words. Chapter Seven: No flying; Jana involved in Sunday lunch at the Bayonne house where she lodges with a French family. Terrible wine. Flowers for grandmother’s grave.

Imaginary birthday present for me: Magician directs Jana to a diner in New Jersey where we meet in the flesh for breakfast. Juice and the cornucopia-coffee-cup to begin with. She reserved and slightly suspicious, no less so when I reach out, take her hands and kiss her stubby finger-ends, saying: “Speak, angel!” (Angel is her loving mother’s preferred term of affection).

Germ of the next novel: A handsome, skilful woman is struck down professionally and rehabilitated.

A small detour round present times

Can one – should one? – look for entertainment amidst imminent family grief? In the end we did. It was after all Mrs BB’s birthday and surgery deflected last year’s celebrations. Among the cards is a model of The Armillary Sphere, a gift from me.

The road north to Shrewsbury, while pretty, can irritate me with its curves and heavy traffic. This time I was more philosophical; less so on the A5 with its twelve roundabouts over twenty miles. Fantastically spelt Froncysyllte made us laugh. Then we entered the drive of Tyddyn Llan, a country house in the valley village of Llandrillo. Only the Welsh do daffodils like this, close-packed platforms, substantial enough to support a pedestrian.

The meal was self-indulgent, the burgundy even more so. We deliberately limited our conversation and let it meander as usual round the London of our youth, a backdrop more intense, more evocative the older we get. Another restaurant memory encouraged me to offer a taste of the burgundy to our waiter, a cheerful yet skilful Pole who was leaving Tyddyn Llan the following day, after six years, for Paris.

Refreshed to excess I couldn’t sleep in our gigantic bed and plotted a forthcoming novel scene told in flashback. I needed a bastard who started out likeable. Why not a vet? But do Americans call vets vets?

Humdrum events re-acclimatised us on the way back. Mrs BB needed a plain cushion on which to mount some of her tapestry work. I picked up a repaired hi-fi loudspeaker. Waiting for us were emails on medical matters, phone calls which brought back the agonised emotions we’d temporarily left behind. That evening we watched University Challenge and shouted out the answers where we could.

Meet you in the garage, Dr Freud

Even by my deplorable standards this is a terrible photo with its uncontained and out-of-focus subject. I should say this small parts bin-rack is attached to the garage wall and the garage is full of car so photography was fraught. But the result is not offered for its aesthetics. It’s evidence in an act of psycho-self-analysis.

The plastic bins contain screws of differing size, panel pins, washers, tin tacks, etc, an attempt to systematise DIY Chez Bonden. But note the Elastoplast labels attached any-old-how, note the dust, note the unnecessary packaging stuffed into the bins, note the air of desuetude.

The photo is truthfully symbolic. It captures both the commendable impulse towards efficiency and the slipshod methods that undermine the impulse. The rack is the work of someone long on theory and short on practice. One who subscribes heavily to the principle: if a job’s worth doing, let’s half do it. My father who, to my knowledge, never knocked in a single nail would approve. I’d invoke Lord Finchley if I didn’t think he’s over-invoked on the Internet. Presently I am up in my loft reading Barry Bucknell's autobiography.

THE LOVE PROBLEM 29,106 words. In Chapter 6 (unfinished) Jana provides a flying lesson for a wealthy, somewhat unlikeable young man who’s slow at learning. It’s common knowledge that Barrett Bonden is of the male gender yet future readers, if any, may wonder. From time to time BB is Jana, port wine stain and all. I had relished spotlighting her advantages during this flying lesson but my fingers were guided elsewhere. Through Jana’s sympathetic teaching the man improves, making the larger point: Jana is professional and I’ve no business practising vengeance on the sort of men I can’t stand