Alas, some are for the freezer

Kefta is a rare dish Chez Bonden because Mrs BB hates making “the little meat balls”. So imagine my delight when I found her engaged in the Herefordshire equivalent of what lady cigar-rollers do in Havana (but not between her thighs). When I left for the Sunday paper she’d done thirty, when I returned she was finishing the one-hundred-and-fiftieth. Already I was slavering, only to be told some were going into the freezer. There are limits to her indulgences.

Which reminds me of a previous post. In the sixties I was cycling home from London to our cheerless flat in Stoke Newington and saw a chalked-up sign: “Polish eggs, 1s 10d a dozen.” (That’s about 10p now.) I bought a dozen and asked Mrs BB to make me a dozen-egg omelette – a lifetime’s ambition. She refused but after much pleading finally conceded an eleven-egg omelette. Even now I still feel incomplete.

WORKS WELL, DOESN’T LOOK WELL. The plug for our kitchen sink can, if inserted skew-whiff, jam in the hole, requiring huge efforts to yank it free. The original chain broke long ago and my solution, as always, followed the principle: If it does the job who cares about the aesthetics? Mrs BB uses it under sufferance







BIKE PROGRESS My present bike, a nondescript, non-sporting job that cost about £200, nevertheless incorporates a feature that was a luxury item fifty years ago. That’s a quick-release hub which means I can take out the front wheel without resorting to spanners. Alas, for a variety of reasons, there’s no QR for the rear wheel. Guess which tyre is always the one that punctures.
Novel progress 10/2/10. Ch. 14: 3833 words. Chs. 1 - 13: 58,239 words. Comments: Clare transformed, steps into the future

Wheels come off wingéd chariot

Some venerable sayings avoid being clichés because of their bitterness. One such is French: Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait (If youth knew (how to), if old age were able (to)). The likely reference is copulative but not exclusively so. The sentiment plays on all regrets about age. In an up-to-date variant a young man wants an open sports car but can’t afford it, now older, he can afford it but can’t bear the risk of being rained on.

My personal variant is banal but the bitter echo rings loud, hideously out of tune. When we first bought a house we were poor and I was forced to do much (incompetent) DIY. This included drilling into brick walls for which carbon-tipped masonry bits were necessary. Because I was not only poor but lazy I continued using these bits after they’d become blunt. Which meant holes took longer to drill and the bits got even blunter.

Once, I just kept on drilling. The bit became red hot and the carbon tip, which fits like toast into a single-slice toast rack at the end of the bit, dropped out. A shocking condemnation of one who now pontificates about understanding and claiming to sympathise with aspects of technology.

Now glance at my drill-related accessories. All the masonry bits I’ll ever need with lots more besides. Even those circular saw devices for cutting large holes, which I’ve often yearned for. But there’s one thing wrong. Look again. They’re all virginal. A complete collection for work I no longer do. The French had me typed all those years ago.

Novel progress 6/2/10. Ch. 14: 1267 words. Chs. 1 - 13: 58,239 words. Comments: Into the mouth of the unknown for Clare.

Getting to the heart of the matter

Fed up with motorbikes, kitchen utensils and public urinals I baited my hook with technology and cast a line into River Google. A massive tug brought this to the surface:

“… there is nothing too technological about the true essence of technology, as Heidegger has shown that technology's ultimate essence resides in a rather poetic dwelling near the truth of Being.”

EXTRAPOLATION
DELETED
BECAUSE

OF
INCOMPREHENSIBILITY

Novel progress 4/2/10. Ch. 14: 869 words. Chs. 1 - 13: 58,239 words. Comments: Roof repairs for Clare.

Mrs BB's reading progress: On January 25 I asked her how many titles she'd read in 2010. the answer was 24.

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?