Distance adds charms

Can you eat and drink vicariously? For a decade Mrs BB and younger daughter have visited continental Christmas markets (Cologne, Aachen, Brussels, Valkenberg, Coblenz, Rudesheim, Bruges, Dusseldorf, Stuttgart) for which I supply some cash and search out a restaurant online. I refuse to accompany them. Why? Because there's more fun in listening to their adventures afterwards than being in charge.

In Prague there was the attraction of meeting Julia under the Christmas tree, drinking gluhwein and telling stories "about the missing person at the table". Julia also emails: "I recognised Mrs BB straghtaway from her poem picture". Since this is a photo taken in 1959 which accompanies a sonnet written for the blog two months ago, Mrs BB's reaction (you can see why we married) was: "I think that's very unlikely".

Dinner was at La Dégustation, a seven-course tasting menu with four amuse bouche interpolations. I'd seen the wine list online so compensated for my absence by financing two bottles of burgundy: Corton-Bessandres, Grand Cru 2005, Dom: Edmund Cornu and, rather more showily, Vosnes-Romanée, Les Chaumes 2006 (the 2005 had run out). The sommelier began explaining their provenance then, becoming aware of my virtual presence at the table, stopped and said, "But then you know about them". I then vicariously sipped the Vosnes ("absolutely luscious") and the Corton ("somewhat more austere") - both judgements courtesy Mrs BB.

Just in case this is becoming too hard to take, let me add I do give to charity. "Too much" to Amnesty International, according a friend of mine with left-wing tendencies.

Came the choice of pudding wine the sommelier offered two: one Czech and one (he started laughing) a sauterne. A no-brainer.

Novel progress 19/12/09. None so far. During the feat at La Dégustation I ate two fried-egg sandwiches.

Time like an ever-rolling stream

Since we're getting near to a celebratory time of year here's a list of Golden Transitions by which my life was improved. Most have appeared before; so I repeat myself.

Power drill (vs. hand drill). Ten holes straight off without palm blistering. Even in brick.
Microwave (vs pan). No stirring, no tenterhooks, no boiling over (unless you're a real clawpoke).
Word processor (vs typewriter). No temptation to ignore errors.
Word processor (vs carbon paper). The "black" is never the wrong way round.
FM (vs MW). Hear the singers drawing breath.
Oz wine (vs cheap French/Bulgarian/Austrian). Forced others to raise their game.
Multi toilets (vs just one). Book reader comes into his own.
Bike toe clips (vs bare pedal). Force applied as it should be.
CD (vs LP). Welcome to the two-disc opera.
Cellular blankets (vs Wilton). Insulation without weight.
Quilted toilet paper (vs San Izal). No more slipping.
Sliced bread (vs the bloomer). Boon when toasting.
Touch phone (vs dial phone). No more arm strain.
Consumer units (vs fuse boxes). Just flick the switch back up.
Comfortable income (vs poverty). Makes old age more bearable.

Novel progress 17/12/09: Ch. 8: 2425 words. Chs. 1 - 7: 33,000 words. Comment: Clare to face the camera! Literary invention was required elsewhere today but managed to squeeze in a few words at the end.

WW goes back to its roots

Works Well has lost its way. It has got itself tangled up with effete stuff like sonnets, novel writing and (most baffling of all) gardening. WW was founded to celebrate technology, to detect beauty where it might be least expected and to leave Elizabeth Barrett Browning dead and buried. Time for a retrospective.

Where's its jet engine? Corsair US carrier-based fighter-bomber, flown in the Pacific during WW2. OK, it's a killing machine but it's muscular, looks right for the job and weren't we then fighting a "just" war?

Whatizzit? It's a winch used for rope-hauling on yachts. Costs a fortune but I'd have it on my mantelpiece.






Uh? A quaver rest and a crotchet rest that fill out the sung first line of the Everly Brothers' "Bye bye love." Here the beauty is in the shapes and their concise expression.


Bit humdrum. And only lovely to those who need to shift a recalcitrant tube. Yet the Stilson wrench (pipe wrench in the US) has never been superseded and the patent dates back to 1869.










Bet they stink. Oh yes, of me and my inglorious history as a rock-climber. Discard them? I'd rather open
my veins.




Novel progress 17/12/09: Ch. 8: 2425 words. Chs. 1 - 7: 33,000 words. Comment: Clare to face the camera! My literary invention was required elsewhere but I managed to squeeze in a few words at the end of the day

Later, I went Gregorian

An unpleasant image pops up. Primary school during the war with one of our class being disciplined - a girl from the privileged back row gets something wrong, is hauled into the front and starts crying. The teacher, a shriek-voiced harridan called Cox, has wittily taken a bucket and is inviting the girl to fill it with tears. My reaction? There but for...

Zooming back I see more of the classroom. Hung on the wall are lengths of stiffish pink card carrying multiplication tables. I remember what preceded these aides memoires. Without telling us why the aforesaid Cox asked us orally to multiply pairs of numbers and then chalked up the answers. From the new cards we learned the sequences as if they were plainsong and I can hear those rhythmic treble voices even now. For some reason seven-times was the hardest.

Since my education was all downhill from then I'm ignorant of what schools get up to but I understand plainsong was junked. Dismissed as learning by rote, and the emphasis switched to an intellectual understanding of numerical relationships. If I'd been born thirty years later perhaps I'd have picked it up but I doubt it. Another burden to carry into adult life. Whereas chanting was an unequivocal success. Eleven-times? Ah, we didn't go that far.

Novel progress 13/12/09: Ch. 8: 1209 words. Chs. 1 - 7: 33,000 words. Comment: Visit by Zach no spur to literary creation; caught up a little afterwards

Through the looking glass

Sonnet
Ceasing,
briefly,
to be hard
on myself

I am a living Ozymandias,
The trunk still yoked to legs that force the tide
The lips egg smooth, the sneer a mobile alias
Where intellect and moral power reside.
My verse is latent but my prose takes flight;
My uncombed hair, my brow, my Caesar’s nose
Match acts and thoughts to arms in that stern fight
Against inertia and the clichéd pose.
Women I fear but with that gift I earn
Some passing loyalty, some low regard,
Polite approval for my comic turn,
A welcome unexpected picture card.
It cannot last; ahead I see decay,
The legs detached, the sand, the eggs mornay.

Note: What kind of a name is Bysshe?

Novel progress 11/12/09: Ch. 8: 642 words. Chs. 1 - 7: 33,000 words. Comment: Sonnets bog you down

The road not taken. But let's imagine...

A week before I became sixteen, when hangings were still public and packs of wolves roamed the Dales, I started work. Forty-four years later I retired. Two years of freelance followed as I waited for Mrs BB to join me in retirement. End-to-end scribbling except for two years repairing RAF radio equipment and perhaps an accumulated six weeks spent looking for work. But suppose I'd done something different?

Ian Jack, Guardian columnist and former editor of Granta was reflecting on an alternative life as a plumber. A craft with none of the basket-weaving associations the word so frequently attracts: intellectually and manually demanding (think of central heating systems), useful to society, well-paid, independent. I would be a bad plumber but that's because I lack training and experience. With them I might still be a bad plumber. But it's an interesting thought. How about you?

Jack ends his piece with the most English of questions: How would you feel if your daughter decided to become a plumber? Ah, England.

Novel crib as promised. Provisional title "Searching the Daily Telegraph".
Andrew Hatch, fortyish, divorced, tumbles from production engineer to welding consumables salesman. Loses job, exposed to the chill winds of Thatcher Britain.
Clare Lowther, fortyish, from wealthy family, physics at Wadham, stratospheric IT management jobs. Unsatisfactorily married (three-year-old son) following quixotic gesture to present spouse. Unemployed, looking for change. Both meet (not necessarily carnally) under unforeseen circumstances and in unfamiliar environment. CL - Physical details: thin rather than slender, no bust, slightly elongated face, small upwards curving mouth which appears to emphasise two central incisors, large dark-ringed eyes, curly hair cropped close with some grey, competent and confident (sexually and professionally), impatient with idiots, breathy voice.

A thousand faces

Soon the novel will require me to be plausible about women's make-up.

Such technology! Such techniques! Masochistically shaped eyebrows. Pornographically shaped lipstick. Blusher (On and off like a traffic light?) The deliberate wickedness of eye-shadow. Foundation that wots not of foundation garments. Gloss like lubrication. Lashes heavy with soot. Cheek contours with colour gradations. Spangles. And where does make-up end? On the jawline? Just underneath? Round the back?.

More important: what's it like to have two - or more - faces? I speak as someone who fears barriers between himself and his self-imagined image. An incautiously bought trilby, quickly discarded. Tight shirts. Even an abhorrent wedding ring, especially if it no longer slides off. Yet a woman may transform herself with lipstick alone. Smudge it for pathos. Sharpen the outline for ruthlessness.

My criteria for feminine looks belong to the era when make-up predominated. I failed to respond to Julie Christie and her tousled naturalness. I am sidelined, emasculated but fascinated.

Novel progress 8/12/09. Ch. 7: 4463 words (finished, unread). Chs.1 - 6: 28702 words. Comment: Hatch: bright light and darkness.

Caveat emptor

Sonnet – My written self

My written self takes to the boulevard,

No dozing couch, no thick-thumbed oyster eye,

No raddled failing sense of self-regard,

It smiles, is welcomed, waved to, seen as fly

My written self can help and sympathise

Unburdened by my masculinity,

Can speak with tongues and even improvise

A risky link with femininity.

My written self is sleek and plausible

A world aside from knobbled northern clay

Sneak-thieving, seeming quite adorable

But seeking love without intent to pay.

I am both things: the skills, if such they be,

Within the hulk of incapacity.

Last night: A modern piano - absolute yet unostentatious

virtuoso technique - a piece composed for just that instrument.

Yamaha, Stephen Hough, César Franck’s “Prelude, chorale and fugue." Turned mi backbone to jelly.

Novel progress 3/12/09. Ch.7: 333 words. Chs. 1 - 6: 28,702 words. Comment: Hatch in The Big Apple (make that Crab Apple).