Yearning for the Golden Age

Easier for clumsy hands; authentically coloured

Once upon a time there were “sayings” – oft-repeated phrases and/or sentences said to offer wit, wisdom and comfort in compact form. My maternal Grannie, who lived to be 96 (more remarkable since life expectation, then, was much shorter than now), knee-jerkingly added “All being well.” to any discussion about future events. It didn’t do to tempt the devil.

Now there are epigrams and apophthegms.

Less popular is “Fashion follows form.” which sort of translates as: “Successfully pleasing design must always grow out of being easy to use.” Thus, a hat-stand fashioned out of deer antlers could never be considered fashionable given the antler points would tear the silk lining out of top hats. Something we could all profit from.

Bringing me to my mobile phone which I contemplate with mixed thoughts. Earlier mobiles were the size of house bricks as we sneeringly remember. Manufacturers saw they had to get size and weight down to make them more pocket portable. Thinness became an obsession; ads proclaimed the new Skeleton Phone was 2 mm thinner than last year’s Fatty Phone. Thinness became a quality rather than a mere specification. A bit like opera singers.

And now…? As with other designs the volume control and the on/off switch on my phone are vestigially located on the wafer-thin right-hand side. Ideal for tiny fingers and quite close together. Aiming to turn off the phone I accidentally reduce the volume to silence, leading to reduced info. And angry confusion.

Touchpad controls are so smoo-oo-th, so tactilely sexual but vulnerable to accumulations of sweat. Unthsheathed the oh-so-smooth phone body slips easily between arthritic figures. So buy what could, I suppose, be described as a phone condom. Ensuring our imperfect device doesn’t breed.

No doubt about it, though. Mobiles are utterly fashionable. 

My noisy world

Overhead wires thought unsightly.

Comparative silence was bliss

The sounds of my life, past and present. 

Ѿ Air-raid sirens warning of enemy bombers during WW2. Moaning and wailing. As an infant I asked: why so sinister? Now I see why.

Ѿ Immediately post-war, we were unusual in having a phone. It had a real bell which tinkled, wearily. As if power struggled to get through.

Ѿ Transport was by electric trolley-bus fed from overhead wires via two spring-loaded poles. Gliding past, it hissed and whirred. A more tranquil alternative to the diesel engine.

Ѿ Morning assembly at my secondary school was marked by a quasi-religious service. Strangely, we cynical kids shouted out the familiar hymns. As if finding some kind of release.

Ѿ Producing hourly editions of a daily newspaper requires a fast-working printing press. For fast read noisy, very noisy. To the point of menace and excluding all other sounds.

Ѿ London means underground tube trains. Tube travel sound is regularly captured in movies but it’s the hydraulic (pneumatic?) sighing of doors opening and closing I now remember.

Ѿ Reaching the Continent by car involved a cross-channel ferry. A multiplicity of sounds and shouts of barely controlled chaos. Now I relish the silence of Eurotunnel. Sitting at the steering wheel, advancing my watch an hour

Ѿ My first US flat was on a very steep hill. US cars with huge engines strained at the gnat.

Ѿ US again: the insistence (and frequency) of TV commercials while lacking the merciful mute button.

Ѿ Steel plant, Puerto Ordaz, Venezuela. An unknowable extreme sound as if close to the sun.

Ѿ Distant rumbling and more hydra/pneu gasping as a modern garbage lorry picks up and discharges our wheelie.

Ѿ An unidentified hum if I wake from sleep during the night.

The symbol? Use your imagination. 

Time as a shape

Which subject did you hate most at school? Maths is one popular (unpopular?) candidate. Transatlantic note: We Brits add a terminal s to maths; the US doesn’t. Doesn’t dare, possibly from lack of confidence. Discuss. 

Why might maths be so hateful? Well, it’s a language and very precise. When we speak English we don’t always get it right first time. We resort to “er” and “um”. There are none of these in maths. There’s only the right way.

But, if my experience is anything to go by, there is one form of maths that’s slightly more congenial - geometry. You can see why. Algebra, for instance, is all numerical theory whereas geometry is lines, angles, circles. Things we can recognise and draw. More reassuring.

Which brings me to wristwatches. VR bought me an elegant (and expensive) Longines for a birthday thirty years ago. I love it. Alas, my family responsibilities have recently grown and I now need to tell time at night in the dark. The Longines can’t do this and thus I wear a cheapo Casio-type with a light feature.

A major difference: the Longines expresses time with hands and a clockface (ie, analogue display), the cheapo with numbers (ie, digital display).

Shelving the Longines has deprived me of more than elegance. For me analogue time is often more immediate; I recognise analogue time via the disposition of the hands. In effect, by the shape they form,. Digital time requires my mind to do a sort of calculation.

Shapes are meat and drink to geometry. To which, it seems, I’m more responsive.

Do shapes instinctively mean more to you than numbers?

Tone Deaf: New T&C;

Now under new Reduced-Subject regime. Tone Deaf and – before it – Works Well are and were out of step. Why, I was asked, do I limit posts to 300 words? The reasons were complicated and related to my non-retired life. But I did have a quickie response: writing too much is more likely to draw complaints than writing too little. 

But that rule broke down re. my blog comments. Often these exceeded 300 words. And now, following my policy announcement about reducing the range of subjects I write about (see Welcome to Vacant Horizons) this has been brought to my attention. Feebly I protested; might comment length be an indication of my interest? But secretly I acknowledged nobody loves a blabbermouth.

Best to comment as if responding by telegram (US: cable) and paying for each word. We’ll see.

For those who’d rather see less than more, the above three paras amount to 138 words. Possible solution: verse is terse. 

Policy query: No pic to this post. Do pix count as words? 

Welcome to vacant horizons

Been reading my posts, going way back. Not from self-love but to check out where I went wrong. Lengthy complicated sentences were one fault, breathless displays of wasted energy another, and – a grievous and unexpected discovery – REPETITION. A dozen or so subjects over and over. Those at least can be addressed.

From now on Tone Deaf posts will be shriven of: journalism, tortured adolescence, my impact on the USA and vice versa, singing lessons, forms of transportation, cancer and its implications, wine, ski-ing, rock climbing, swimming, reports of progress with fiction, DIY, language scrutiny, left-wing politics, family relationships and francophilia.

Already I feel refreshed.

Regular readers - a shrunken group - may wonder what’s left bar brief smoke signals relating to personal change. Having a leg amputated, for instance. Beyond that, a moment’s reflection reveals a billion other things and I’ll go further. Purged, I’ll look only at new areas.

Does this sound too radical? Think of it as a late-life graduation exam. I’m pleased (over-pleased, many would say) to call myself an ex-professional writer. Which should cut out picking material for my own benefit. Thus: this week, 300 words on transubstantiation; next week, culinary justifications for using saffron.

I’ll try hard not to cheat. I’ll not bulk out the prose with egregious lists, fill space with lengthy quotes by others, or invent unnecessary sentences employing the vocative case. The style will be taut and, I hope, hypnotic. I’ll rate it a success if readers start asking: When is he going to trip over himself?

Mind you, it’s possible there’ll be no readers.

Dark thoughts

It’s just after three in the morning. I can’t sleep. As I’ve got older writing has become something of a therapy. So here I am. Wondering where the dead hours will take me.

Not towards fiction, however; that’s far too intense an activity and I may have lost the urge. Four novels completed, thirty-plus short stories. I’ve pecked at my fifth novel, having reached 60,000 words, but I can’t see an ending and it’s languished for several years.

The blog presently consists of 1916 posts; at 300 words a pop that’s rather more than half a million words. Given I started in 2008, not a lot. As a reporter working mainly for a broadsheet weekly I could write 1000 words in an hour straight on to the typewriter.

The blog has taken some twists and turns. Under the title Works Well I devoted myself to broad technology but found it too restrictive and went general. In November 2011 I announced I was ceasing blogging, but resumed twenty-four later. Why? Perhaps I was imitating the courtship routines of a pouter pigeon.

Changed my blogonym from Barrett Bonden (A bosun in O’Brien’s Aubrey-Maturin series of novels) to Lorenzo da Ponte (Mozart’s librettist) when I decided I would write exclusively about music. Ill-advisedly the blog became Tone Deaf. Nobody was much interested. Went general again.

As an ex-hack I know a little about quite a lot. Which means I will never run out of material. Nor do I need the stimulus of “events” in my life. When in doubt float an idea. Once I compiled a list of a hundred written works that had interested me.

In the end the posts are about me. I am not important enough to warrant an autobiography but the skeleton’s here. May I now sleep? 

Getting away with very little

Andouillettes; best say they're misunderstood

The good news from Mr Blazej, (see “Early Christmas card…”) triggered a winter problem: booking a holiday villa for next year. Since several family members will accompany us this is costly. Also there’s time enough for good news to become bad news in the interim. When do I take the plunge?

Since I’m paying, I choose, and for the last two decades it’s been France. Lack of imagination? No; I get to speak French. Others loll on beaches, get drunk on cheap wine, marvel at the countryside, discover that andouillettes don’t bear contemplation, tour the soccer stadia, exercise their culinary skills… I do the parly-voo.

Obviously to show off, you conclude. But here’s the thing. During those twenty years perhaps a dozen French people, from various strata of society, have said I speak French well. Since language has been my tool of trade I can say, with certainty, they were wrong. Close-up my French is fairly primitive; at best stiffly formal.

I’m sure about this because I’ve taken weekly lessons for thirty years and know when progress bogged down. Not all French people are articulate; if they were they’d say I’ve entertained them with a linguistic competence halfway between O-level and A-level. 

More particularly I’ve made them laugh. Laughing, they’re less likely to nit-pick about the subjunctive.

Knowing me as you do, you’ll have realised I’m not abasing myself here. What I do is a rare skill and I’m damn well proud of it. On one occasion, and with time to spare, I tried to explain the situation to a Frenchman far better educated than I was. Silence happened. Accepting my premise would have made him look a fool. Disagreement would be based on an untruth. We went our separate ways.

Might this be cruelty?