This is not about steam trains. Repeat 'not'

If there were a label for this post it might be: Contemplation of, and The Removal of Fluff From, The Author’s Belly-Button – an overt signal to the blogging community that the engine set in motion in September 1951 with a four-line paragraph about a jumble sale at St Barnabas Church, Heaton, is tending towards entropy, that the flywheel is juddering, that there’s little coal left in the tender, and that a blow-torch awaits on a quiet stretch of track in the Trafford Park rail depot. In fact there have been earlier signs: choice of unworthy targets (Huw Edwards) and an increasingly desperate search for source material (renting a plane in a foreign country).

But not quite. Note the punctilious use of commas in the proposed label and the caressing way with verb tenses. Perhaps there’s one more chuff left so let it be over the Ribblehead Viaduct (Note to ed: an easy pic here).

While BB was in Brittany Lucy took photos of him and published them on Box Elder – trampling on his grave, as it were, chortling about breaking his rules. In fact he approved (especially since his three-quarters rear resembles Orca surfacing to shake off marine parasites). The sneakiness echoed BB’s former profession, almost a left-handed compliment.

But (and here comes the piece of fluff) why should Works Well resist full frontals of its progenitor? Vanity? Shame? Apprehensions about BB’s version of “besides the wench is dead”? Explanations have been half-hearted. The need is for what the French call an apothème and the answer came, as it usually does, at 3 am.

“I write better than I look.” Vanity of course but it’s cleverer than it looks. Try disputing it. There is a good put-down but that’s for a later post, assuming such occurs

We do not like thee, Huw boyo

Criticism demands articulacy; single adjective dimissals (He’s rubbish!) are for soccer fans. But why is it difficult to frame the BB family’s dislike of Huw Edwards, main presenter of BBC’s News at Ten? He’s a bollard of man but I’m no Adonis. He repeats phrases (“We’ll be analysing…”, “So, James, give us a flavour…”) but so do they all. He’s Welsh but I’m (God forgive me) West Riding. There's got to be more than that.

He’s portentous but that’s his job. But portentousness could be the clue. He got the job because, in the cant broadcasting judgement, “he’s a safe pair of hands”. Thus his headlines are never violent. His portents are cardboard. For big fixed events (eg, the present Tory party conference) he’s parachuted in to do his anchoring on site. He stands there (to Mrs BB’s mouth-foaming outrage), outside the venue, in his blue suit, muttering middle-class excitement, frowning slightly.

Some day he’ll be required to announce the end of the world (“We’ll be bringing you reactions…”) and it’ll be such a bore. And Mrs BB will be catatonic.

WORKS WELL HITS Monday: 26 (Poor day. Pack it in?). Tuesday: 80 (Looks good. But not for me. Lucy’s Tom writes monster comment on social kissing). Future action: Change blog title to: Works Well by Tom and BB?

NOVELS A Stall Recovered. Plutarch has read full MS and phones with suggestions. Both The Crow (Housing details in Tucson, Arizona; accent/vocabulary for Texan flight instructor) and Julia (US educational system) have helped but by email. This is first time anyone else has spoken aloud on behalf of my characters. P says Christopher cannot lie. It’s as if P’s joined the family. And he’s right

Blest Redeemer 11,993 words.

One way out: a coughing fit

Social kissing: it’s a gender conundrum, a class thing and a north-south divide thing. In the US, the world’s kissingest country, my West Riding upbringing was a millstone which left me confused, terrified. Since terror still surfaces – at age 76 – I will go to my grave bedevilled by uncertainty.

Emerging from a Continental Trailways bus in Pittsburgh in late December 1965 I knew all about real kissing. It was a publically permissible analogy for sex. I didn’t need to understand it because I’d been married five years. Immediately, and for the six years that followed, American women social-kissed me. Some I disliked (which isn’t to say they were unattractive) and this presented problems. Some I liked which raised even bigger problems.

It’s odious to explain why so I’ll resort to examples. Mrs Thatcher was thought to have sex appeal (by Alan Clark among others) but I’d have fainted had she approached me. If Vera Farmiga appeared willing I’d also faint – this time out of presumption. Putting it delicately, social kissing is lose-lose.

In Bradford the lower middle classes (my lot) didn’t do it; those higher up did it a bit. The Home Counties did it more. A callow youth, informed only by movies, about to be social-kissed, was entitled to ask how this fitted in with closeness being regarded as a good thing.

Have I betrayed those women who have social-kissed me? No. I’m gratified they were prepared to try: good sports. Etiquette has to be the reason, there can’t be other benefits. I’ve also sympathised with women who actively avoid social-kissing me. I admire their toughness. No hint I might do the initiating. I’m a Bradford Grammar School old boy. Hand-shaking I do.

Pic note: Not social kissing but she looks like Stephanie Flanders

No pictures, but you'll understand why

Two strange occurrences.

WE LIVE in a suburb with two community halls. One has seen much administrative turmoil which led to angry emails on the local website I used to run. Very angry indeed. Latterly things have been quieter.

Mrs BB. “I met X (Chair of the committee running the disturbed hall) today. I’m told the hall is to be exorcised.”

BB (Recently started writing a psychologically adventurous novel). “What was X’s demeanour when telling you this?”

Mrs BB “Confidential.”

BB (Ponders if there’s a place for this in the new novel. Decides not.). “Does exorcism cost a lot?”

Mrs BB “It’s free. But clerics don’t like getting drawn in.”

BB (Interior dialogue: Novel? Nah! Works Well? Perhaps)

RETURNING from Brittany we stayed the night in a town in Northern France which accommodates the French outlet of The Wine Society, a British organisation which absorbs much of my disposable income. I intended to buy good expensive wine duty-free.

The hotel was chosen via a guide I have used for decades and which is ultra-reliable. But there is always an exception. The hotel was scruffy, the patronne abrupt, the bedroom tiny. Also The Wine Society had moved to another town.

I was lying on my bed reading and rolled over on to my side. A heavyish “thing” slid under my shirt, down from my chest to my waist. I stood up, shook out my shirt, then looked on the floor. Nothing. Later, with the light on, I discovered a recently dead mouse. It looked incredibly poignant. I laid it on the outside window sill.

A better window on the world

Because cataract operations are performed under local anaesthetic in Asian railway waiting rooms they are sometimes pooh-poohed as minor surgery. But it only requires a 20-word description of the procedure (which I am choosing to omit here) to emphasise how audacious – and thereby horrific – they truly are.

As a follow-up to earlier eye surgery, already mentioned, Mrs BB submitted to cataract removal from her left eye yesterday. Her experiences as a state registered nurse in the fifties and sixties increased rather than reduced her apprehensions about surgery and I was impressed by her stoicism, given her fearfulness towards dentistry.

The passage of time favoured her. During training she worked in an eye unit and then the operation (on both eyes) took an hour followed by ten days of immobility. On Monday she had a choice of music (refused) and was back with me in the waiting room in fifteen minutes. A face mask prevented her better right eye from following what was going on inches away – for which much thanks. One of Mrs BB’s jobs during training was to hold the patient’s hand in the theatre; this time someone held hers.

That isn’t the end of the matter, alas, since a further operation will be necessary on the right eye, again followed by cataract removal. But she is reasonably sanguine about this and it was cheering last night to see her reading the Kindle, albeit with the type size wound up.

As we got the paper this morning we reflected on this twentieth century marvel: a procedure so quick and so simple (in surgical terms, anyway) that thousands, if not millions, of poor folk who would previously have had to accept blindness, now see. No miracle needed.

Did we set the world to rights? No

Nothing sadder than an empty. This sloe gin from Lucy should have been traded for a jar of Mrs BB’s marmalade. But we were less happily engaged during the narrow 2010 marmalade-making window and anyway Lucy made her own marmalade that year. I offered (sort of) to return the bottle but Lucy said it was OK. The sloe gin was multi-layered and adult in flavour which was to be expected, given the source.

Ginned up yesterday I reflected on meeting blogging acquaintances. One bonus is that the stage-setting questions (When? Why? How?) can be junked because both sides know the answers. With Lucy the introductory/felicitative phase added up to zero: she phoned us at 7.30 am then dropped into our car an hour or so later. In both cases it was like resuming a conversation broken off ten minutes previously.

No time to wonder whether we would get on because “getting on” was already happening. Engine noise precluded plane chat and interrupting the Lumix would have been cultural vandalism. At lunch I may have prepared several devastating questions but already Tom and I were wallowing in the RAF and electronics. For the Mol-walk afterwards we split into same-gender couples and lo we were soon saying goodbye.

Where had it all gone? Of course there were remembered characteristic flashes, exchanges which confirmed, IMHO, things were working as they should but – goodness me! – it seemed we had devoted ourselves entirely to pleasure. And my knowledge of Rilke hadn’t advanced a bit. Shame, really. Query: Are the best social encounters those that pass in a blur?

NOVELS Gorgon Times - with several agents (three have turned it down). A Stall Recovered – now being assessed by Plutarch. Blest Redeemer – 1423 words.

This is about rhyming, not warfare

Time for a feuilleton (writing genre that allows for much journalistic freedom as far as content, composition and style are concerned – Wikipedia.) on my verruca.

Verrucas, like backside boils, hernias, kidney stones and ingrowing toe-nails carry no social cachet and very little literary potential. They lurk, infect other feet and are hard to get rid of. The word sounds faintly risible (perhaps because it rhymes with bazooka) but it is Latin and preferable to its English translation – wart. There is one bonus; in making this admission there is no way anyone can accuse me of advancing myself aesthetically, intellectually or socially. A man with a verruca is without doubt diminished, commonplace and unlikely to be asked to parties.

During and after the Brittany flight (qv) I talked freely but there was one subject I held back on. You may be able to guess what this was.

Treating a verruca is a right royal pain, especially if you’re fat. When Rupert Murdoch appeared before the select committee to utter monosyllables about phone hacking he said it was the humblest day of his life. Me, I just thought about my verruca.

Apart from filing the surrounding skin and immersion in boiling water one covers the verruca with a transparent paste which smells (entrancingly I must admit) like the glue for model aeroplanes. After a month I am told it will drop out of my foot like an upside-down mushroom. Can’t wait.

Why all this? Having regularly majored in self-aggrandisement I thought I’d try out humility but that got lost in the wash. Verruca is hard to spell and that displaced being humble. Cromwell, sitting for his portrait, told the painter to do it “warts and all”. Like The Great Commoner I do have other defects.

Bliss it was, indeed

The novel is finished (for the moment!), revised right through three or four times, sent to Amazon as a Word document, transmitted back to me - converted - so that the italics show up on Kindle, emailed to Plutarch for structural assessment. The opening chapter is too tight, too brusque (two Americans talking to each other) but I cannot presently tease it into relaxation. A lifetime’s conviction that all articles are too long leaves me deficient when asked to add rather than cut

I am under-employed. Wrote a post this morning, here’s another. Nobody’ll read them when they are jam-packed like this. But this is different, this is bliss.

Bliss means music, the greater power that leaves prose – even poetry – rocking in its wake. Nothing high-flown, just the sea-shanty/lamentation, Tom Bowling, where lines like

… lies poor Tom Bowling
The darling of our crew;
No more he'll hear the tempest howling
For death has broached him to….

Thus Death, who kings and tars despatches
In vain Tom's life hath doff'd
For tho' his body's under hatches
His soul is gone aloft

are matched to a simple, unsimple, desperately sad tune. Which I faintly know but have never learned. I listen to tenor Robert Tear, boy treble Lewis and a school band and – oh joy! – ensnare and hold the first eight bars. But the next eight rise gently, subtly. Just the first two notes - that’s all I need! Got them! Can sing them. On to the keyboard and – ah! – that’s it, the song’s heart laid bare, it’s mine damnit. And now I can take it with me to the kitchen, fill the coffee percolator, sing it confidently in the sharp acoustic and snuffle at its sadness.