With this I brook no argument

My perfect cup of coffee (black, always black) has its roots in the USA and has nothing in common with the doll’s-house cupful which accompanies a digestif. It is comparatively weak and I drink two mugs (ie, a surprisingly large total of 700 ml) with my brunch. Arriving at perfection has taken an adult lifetime and cost several hundred pounds. These are the essential constituents:

MUG Bone china, William Morris pattern, large handle, parallel sides. There should be no compromises – aesthetic or material – with such an item in daily use. Were it to be broken I would need a week in a residential care home.

COFFEE Three moderately heaped teaspoonfuls of Fairtrade Colombian ground, bag secured by a crocodile clip (forget rubber bands, lengths of string, and especially “hopeful” folding), kept in the freezer. This coffee is in fact Guatemalan but I received it as a Christmas table present and the quality is very close.

PERCOLATOR A dozen others, all in working order, were discarded before I acquired this Krups costing £75, about three times the previous average. The most common failing was the manufacturer’s inability to design a valve between the percolator chassis and the jug that allowed the jug to be removed or installed without irritation. The Krups jug, possibly made from an aluminium alloy, is vacuum-insulated and may be set down without harming polished surfaces. A plastic filter is included but I augment this with a paper filter.
NOTE: Those who have read my novel, Gorgon Times, will already have met the Krups which plays an important role in defining the character of Jerry, Clare’s husband. I should add I am not Jerry.

Porn in the utility room

Rouchswalwe, whose sole fault on this earth was to adopt a blogonym that Anglophones found too hard to pronounce (Hence Zu schwer = Too difficult), not only launches regularly into poetry but writes prose that teeters on the brink. Eg:

Once we've touched a thing that feels distinctive… the skin tingles. And if that something is not a thing I can touch with my fingertips?... Sort of like hadaka no tsukiai in a Japanese Onsen [a hot spring bath], where no textiles come between water and skin, making it possible to conversationally commune with any fellow bathers in a state of uniquely textured tensionlessness.

Can’t match that but I have my mini-moments. One of my jobs Chez Bonden is to take laundry downstairs, stick it in the washer, prime the washer appropriately and push buttons. No sweat. But what was once an unexceptional chore has a delicious side-effect. Previously detergent was poured into a plastic container and chucked into the drum. Now it comes in fat squelchy sachets that feel almost organic. I've always regarded detergents as one of the most wearisome subjects known to man, triggering some of the most wearisome TV commercials. Seems that the manufacturer (Ariel) thought the same. But there are limits.

DEAR AGONY VET Occasional Speeder has taken her convalescence to Kenya and we are dog-sitting Missie, the Cairn that cost as much as two cases of Montrachet. I take her on a lead to pick up The Guardian and she sniffs and sprays every two metres of the – fortunately – short walk. But suppose I become impatient and tow her past one of these smelly places: what damage am I inflicting on the inner dog?

Yup, it was definitely smote (smitten)

But it is fed and watered,
By God’s almighty hand.

As usual, a selective view. That same watering God does a lot of smiting and he smote this bamboo good and hard. I take it personally.

Even casual Works Well readers know I am no gardener. But ten years ago I planted the bamboo as a scenic barrier to the sunken patio as seen from our kitchen window. A huge act of faith. Mrs BB told me to split the roots and I am convinced this hindered fructification. Years passed and growth was imperceptible.

Finally we had the barrier though by then Mrs BB, with the fidgetiness of all gardeners, was fed up with the effect and wanted it uprooted. I desisted but it could be the watering God was on Mrs BB’s side. His frost and His snow have made a sorry mess and we must see whether Spring rises with healing in its wings.

In sparring with the Old Testament God I face a conservatism that makes George Osborne the debauched choirboy he really is. But I don’t often have gardening ideas. Given setbacks like this I may insist on concreting over the whole boiling. So much for the green and pleasant land.

HOORAH FOR KINDLE Given Plutarch’s plaudits I bought Mrs BB a Kindle for Christmas. If it failed, well, so be it. The price is down to £109 and that’s no great loss. But with only mild encouragement she trawled Amazon’s lists and yesterday we re-registered the device in her name and she downloaded her first title (One Day, David Nicholls). This could benefit the weight of our holiday luggage.

Winter's little science lesson

This winter’s low temperatures allowed us to appreciate the Second Law of Thermodynamics (“That you can't pass heat from the cooler to the hotter”- Flanders and Swann). Chez Bonden is only twelve years old but the insulation codes were never framed for the minus teens.

Night after night the furnace’s thermostat overrode the timer to ensure we didn’t freeze our little asses off. Forcing me to turn off two major downstairs radiators at night since they were clearly wasting money. Alone, we closed all interior doors but visits from grandson Zach undermined this.

Two weak points. Heat poured out through the front door letter-slot despite the box which brother Sir Hugh created and installed. Far worse were the dining room French windows. Although double-glazed they offer token protection compared with the triple glazing I noticed on a visit to Sweden where the glass spacing was twice that of mine. The ad hoc solution was to keep the full-length curtains pulled to. Very effective although there was a sense of the Miss Havishams as we gloomily lunched.

I envisage a couple of small tasks in April. For the man I call in, of course.

BETTER IN 2011? The surgeon’s knife struck three times during 2010, annulling the family-wide dinner marking my seventy-fifth and, later, our golden wedding celebrations. After an early hiccup Mrs BB’s sight is back to where it was and a couple of days ago I got this email from Younger Daughter (Occasional Speeder): Went to see consultant yesterday. Had lovely internal examination and lots of prodding and poking. All worth it as absolutely nothing there “Consider yourself cured” he said and I banged my head against the x ray display machine in happiness

Heads can ache as well as backs

Apart from two years in the fifties, I worked on newspapers and consumer/business/technical magazines from 1951 until 1995. When in 1959 I wrote to Mrs BB’s father to ask for her hand (the tradition then) he agreed, even though he was never sure journalism was a real job. He was a chef, working 6½ days a week.

My two-year blip involved RAF national service. After trawling my psyche the RAF decided I was capable of understanding airborne radio equipment. Basic training (Learning to kill with a bayonet. Avoiding venereal disease. etc) added to technical training took almost a year after which I repaired VHF transmitters/receivers in a large non-air-conditioned shed in Singapore. However incurable athlete’s foot took over and after very primitive and futile treatment I ended up near Doncaster modifying radar antennae used on Lancaster bombers (see pic).

None of which is terribly interesting except to prove that in a mainly sedentary professional life I have also worked manually. Received wisdom says manual work is harder than sitting-down work. I didn’t find this so. Admittedly I wasn’t digging holes or assembling Ford Anglias but I used screwdrivers, soldering irons, Avometers, and some delicacy.

The repair work was complex and I needed to study a large circuit diagram. I found it fairly entertaining but, more particularly, it was a finite world. By comparison a thousand-word article on fork-truck masts, initially at least, presents a huge range of options. An inverted pyramid of work, some of which isn’t entirely enjoyable.

No, I’m not saying I’d rather have been a navvy. Hard work’s where you find it, although most sophists work at desks.

Looking back with badly prescribed specs

Everyone should visit the poetic relay race between Plutarch and Lucy. Having read Lucy’s latest contribution (Click here) I left some comments and she responded: I can't really seem to get away from nature imagery… it's just too integral to myself and my experience to lose it.

I am a townie so why not an urban version of Lucy’s piece? Alas this isn’t it. It’s defective (ugly in fact) and I worked on it so long I entered the metrical graveyard of diminishing returns. I think I know why it fails and rectification would require redrafting. If it were prose I would do just that but verse is the lesser aspiration. I publish it as I might add a new wreck to a marine chart.

The two pictures show the Bradford post office in front of the cathedral and Swan Arcade, scene of the city fathers’ greatest act of vandalism.

Bradford. The fifties

The post office is going, Gran, they need,
To clear the view to the cathedral tower.
But that can’t be, she shook her stubborn head,
I saw it built, for me it’s just pre-war.

Which war? Then dainty Swan Arcade went too,
And textiles started failing to the east.
They scrubbed the city’s face as if to woo
All those who look on blackness with distaste.

This later irony was lost on me,
I’d turned my back on urban soot-stained stone,
On mills like keeps, on old formality,
On pride in status lost, mere pride alone.

And now only a word or phrase survives:
Brown Muff, a store - how times were innocent!
Lumb Lane - an ancient memo that revives
Dislike for ugly names and sentiment.

Grotesquerie? Let’s go to Buttershaw,
Or Wyke, or Shelf, or Clough, or Heckmondwike,
This wearying pig-headed northern flaw:
“Why dream up titles you’re inclined to like?”

But honesty compels and I must try,
To re-examine that unfavoured place
In callow youth I tended not to sigh
Nor look for subtleties in time and space

St George’s Hall, at first a cinema,
Then concert hall, a new enlightenment,
And Woods for records heard in camera,
In booths we looked for mutual assent.

From steep-tracked Darley Street a door gave way
To dust on dust, the central library:
Brass steps on shelves to reach the higher prey,
The books new-bound to add longevity

Now honesty has grabbed me by the wrist
And dragged me to the place of my rebirth,
In dull Hall Ings my schooldays were dismissed
And I at last unearthed a crumb of worth

The pits and the epiphany

Went to bed in a foul, self-critical mood, grinding out a mantra: no more about ageing, no more about bloody ageing. Until Younger Daughter and I flipped through some of my recent posts, courtesy of her Iphone, I hadn’t realised how the subject had tainted the latter part of the WW year. Ageing isn’t fun, but it’s even less fun to read about. Too late Plutarch came up with the following from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book of aphorisms, The Bed of Procrustes: “Here's another, which I personally find rather close to the knuckle, and therefore all the more true as far as I am concerned: The only objective definition of ageing is when a person starts to talk about ageing."

So from now on imagine me as I was in 1975, forty years old, full of professional arrogance, just awarded my first editorship – which is how I still see myself when times are good. Not likeable but likely to say something unexpected. A constantly spiky terror to those who were in charge of me.

But I must be honest. Knowing I could purge this discovery, as I am doing now, I relaxed to a newly remembered experience. At midnight we crowded round the French window to watch the New Year fireworks. There were fewer this year but we were compensated - sky lanterns, released in dozens, elegant domes of flame floating determinedly north towards the Malverns. At first I was struck by a sense of community (the kids released one of their own) but the word is too passive. What we were seeing was a dynamic community, one on the move. An affirmative display. And on they flowed.

Change and decay - not all bad

The one form of headgear I can accept: Breton marine cap (or its sibling worn by Rhine barge captains). Gift from Mrs BB.Great source of quaint lapel pins once awarded to pliant proletariat, now keenly priced for tourists

AGEING Evidence may be sudden and poignant. As when I heard trebles singing a descant to Adeste Fideles, a skill I lost sixty-five years ago. But it is, in the end, a balancing act.

Indent left: Former German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt

CAN’T: ● Regularly swim a mile in the pool. ● Ski. ● Go rock-climbing. ● Drink to excess. ● Eat to excess. ● Interest myself in most UK TV sitcoms. ● Sleep more than five hours a night. ● Pick up conversation in noisy environments. ● Endure the middle-classes en masse. ● Remain calm during conversation about soccer, pop music. ● Behave civilly to suspected Tories. ● Restrain myself from asking questions. ● Show enthusiasm for the Iberian peninsula. ● Fly long distance. ● Tolerate evangelists. ● Willingly regard the faces of Huw Edwards, Kevin Geary, Alex Ferguson, Sue Barker, George Osborne, Arianna Huffington, John Pilger ● Empathise plausibly with youth.

CAN: ● Feel untouched by many of the above. ● Compensate for not drinking to excess by buying expensive wine. ● Revel in shabby clothing. ● Take pleasure in academic accounts of history. ● Luxuriate in near silence. ● Respond to the appearance and songs of birds. ● Spend more without caring. ● Consider death unselfconsciously. ● Find myself becoming more generous (with cash). ● Imagine I understand maths and physics - and the structure of music. ● Write better. ● Ignore changes in the weather. ● Benefit from advanced car technology. ● Exercise curiosity about the nature of womanhood without being thought a menace.