Category: Uncategorized

And, to start with, Where Have I been?

Literal answers or thoughts and dreams?

Where I’ve been. How much detail would you want? Half-an-hour ago I was in the Lidl supermarket in the Anchorage Retail Park in Portsmouth. Christmas 2005 I was in the South Atlantic a couple of hundred miles south of Rio de Janeiro. Mid 1961 I was in Kuwait on Op Vantage.

And when should I start? First memories? First significant occurrence? Or just pick a point? Who would know anyway?

Where I am is in my office, at the back of the house, in Hayling Avenue, Portsmouth, England and, apart from the local shops and the Registry (a building in town – and that’s another story) I don’t know where I’m going except that later this evening, I will climb the stairs, get undressed, clean my teeth, have a bath and spend the night in our bed in our bedroom.

And I have little control over where I go in my dreams – sleeping or waking.

But really, the question means: what have you done with your life so far? And what are you going to do with what’s left of it?

Now that I’ve formalised the questions I’ll think about them and try to answer them.

Tomorrow.

Trevor David Clifton

Motor vehicles should be confined to major roads, except between the hours of ten p.m. and six a.m. I’m unlikely to be out on my bike then.

Currently the recommended clearance between car and bike, when the car is overtaking, is 1.5 metres. Not many drivers know this. And I assume the same separation distance is required if the two are travelling in opposite directions.

In the road where I live there are long rows of cars parked nose-to-tail on both sides. There isn’t enough space in the middle for a bike and a car and 1.5m between them. So, if that recommendation should become law, either cyclists or motor vehicles would have to be banned. So it’s not likely to happen, is it?… Unless … riding on the pavement was legalised. What about that? It would keep the hunters and the hunted safely separated.

The pavement is where parents put their little children on their first, tiny bicycles! So why wouldn’t those toddler cyclists grow up thinking that riding a bike on the pavement is the norm?

If people were allowed to ride their bikes on the pavement, there would have to be rules: there would need to be a minimum distance between a pedestrian and an approaching bicycle, before reaching which, the cyclist would have to ring his bicycle bell. A safe distance between bicycle and pedestrian when overtaking would have to be established, and who would have priority if the pavement was too narrow? What should be the rule for a toddler with a grown-up in each hand? There would have to be a speed limit for the bikes, and the pedestrian section in the Highway Code would have to include the requirement for people to open their front door and look left and right before stepping onto the pavement. There would need to be guidance and regulation for mums with prams, and old people with shopping trolleys. I can see a growing, developing requirement for more civil servants… a ministry even, for the Assessment, Formulation, Implementation and Application of Overtaking Regulations – the MAFIA of OR! Oh! Wouldn’t it be grand? I’d probably get an OBE!

But I suppose, in reality, I will carry on squashing myself against a car – or preferably but not always possible, in the gap between two cars – to watch the drivers of approaching SUVs gripping the wheel and staring straight ahead as they accelerate towards me with the obvious intention of ‘not seeing’ should one of their giant wing-mirrors disconnect my elbow from the rest of my arm.

Maybe I should re-develop my short-term memory to record the registration numbers of these monsters as they approach so that, instead of using up my ration of dying words by asking the gallant passer-by-trying-to-help to tell my wife that I love her, I could keep on shouting the registration number of the nasty driver that ran me over, in the hope that prosecution, conviction and severe punishment might follow and, hopefully, the removal of one more demonic, persecutor of cyclists from the roads.

Of course, when I’m driving my car, I think that perhaps I should get a bigger one and frighten the cyclists into increased narrowness.

This morning began like most mornings. After getting out of bed, paying a visit to the bathroom, getting dressed and unclimbing the stairs, I went into the kitchen and set about gathering the tea-and-toast-making paraphernalia. Then a progression of minor incidents prompted yet another reappraisal of my mind/body coordination efficiency.

I – typical male – have never been good at multi-tasking. Faced with a complex project like making tea and toast simultaneously, I do my best to break it down into simple, individual tasks. I’ve been making tea and toast almost every morning, for years. I can do it without thinking. Usually.

This morning the process went wrong from the start – only slightly at first.

I checked that there was sufficient depth of water in the kettle and pressed the button. The controls, all two of them: ‘lid-opening button’ and ‘poweron/off button’, on our new-ish electric kettle are different from the old one. I’d pressed the wrong button so the lid opened. I didn’t notice because I’d already moved on to the next task which was getting out the bread bin and extracting a slice for the toaster. That became the second divergence from the standard programme.

There were two types of bread in the bread bin: nutty brown, usually my favourite, and standard white. Of the white loaf only a thick, end-slice remained. Now, I’m a dab hand, even though I say it myself, at placing a cob-end on the chopping board and, keeping the breadknife perfectly horizontal and at a constant height, sawing off a thin layer of crust, leaving a tasty, soft slice to be cut in half and toasted. I loaded the two pieces of white bread into the toaster and returned to the tea.

I should have taken two cups from the cupboard immediately after loading the toaster. Normally the toasting process provides sufficient time for me to finish making the tea before the toast is ready for butter and marmalade, but on this occasion, diversion from ‘normally’ had caused a little deviation from the usual programme. The kettle had failed to boil. I checked it for water and electrical connection before closing the lid and pressing, this time, the correct button.

I stood for a moment, listening to the sound that the kettle makes as it gets hotter and hotter, when there was a sudden click and a scraping sound as two, small pieces of toast were flung into the air, ejected by the toaster, hardly toasted at all. The toasting-time-adjuster-knob was on ‘low’.

Now I was faced with a dilemma: would it be more time-efficient to deal with the toast first? Or the tea? My already overloaded brain was not up to the instant mental assembly of the sum of probable times for each group of actions necessary for accurate comparison.

I guessed. The tea. I took two mugs from the cupboard and placed them on the worktop near the kettle. I selected two teabags from the caddy in the same cupboard, and tried, as usual, to fling them, one at a time, skimming aerodynamically, across the kitchen, into the cups. Missed, as usual. But they’d landed near enough so it was easy to pop them into the cups and pour on the now boiled water. The milk was in the ‘fridge at the other end of the kitchen. So was the butter for the toast. Another decision. I took out the butter.

I went back to the crockery cupboard and took out a small plate. I put one half-slice of half-toasted toast on the plate and carried it back towards the ‘fridge. I remembered to take a knife out of the cutlery drawer on the way, and the marmalade from the cupboard opposite the ‘fridge.

I buttered the toast. It’s quite difficult to scrape the knife through the butter and pick up just enough to cover the upper surface of the toast all the way to all of the edges without having to re-dip the crumby knife into the butter or worse, pick up too much and have to deal with the excess: putting it back into the butter container is frowned upon due to the rather disgusting appearance of toast crumbs (especially slightly burned toast crumbs, which are usually the type that stick to the knife) stuck all over the butter. Eating it is fattening.

Then I spread on some marmalade. That’s not easy either, although excess marmalade is much easier to disguise in the shadowy light in the kitchen early in the morning. (Saving electricity by only turning on the little table lamp, instead of the ceiling array, is seen as a worthy practice.)

All that remained was to extract the de-tea’d tea-bags from the cups, pour in a little milk, stir, then drink the tea and eat the toast.

I walked back to where the cups were, took out the soggy tea-bags and transferred them into the waste-food bin. As I carried the cups of as-yet-milkless tea back towards the ‘fridge and the toast I reflected on the possibility of it being more efficient to have carried the milk from the ‘fridge down to where the cups were when I went that way to extract the tea bags.

Before I’d come to a conclusion my wife walked into the kitchen with a cheery ‘good morning’ and ‘thank-you for making my tea’.

“You’re welcome.” I said with a smile. I didn’t mention how difficult it had all been.

No bogies last night, but vivid dreams! I can’t remember anything about them now, except that they were vivid.

Odd that I can remember a dream I had towards the end of the second world-war, not that I knew then that the second world war was still raging, I was four years old. But I can remember being with my mum in Victoria Park, we were sitting on a park-bench. It was dark under the big trees and the sky grew darker. There was a brilliant flash of lightning, I don’t remember any sound.

Not much of a memory but it’s been with me all these years.

Now I can’t remember what I dreamt about a few hours ago.

Yesterday a small parcel was pushed through our letterbox, one amongst many at this time of the year, it was addressed to Ida and me. We took no special notice of where it had come from and opened it up to reveal what looked like a small screen — about 100x85x5mm in size, two cables with a standard USB at one end and a mini-USB on the other end of the black one and a USB type-C on the white one. When connected to a laptop, the screen lit up. There are also five small ‘pads’ of what feels like photograph paper in the box and a small, stick-on panel of incomprehensible instructions.

In the later days of my army service we’d have called the bomb squad!

0330 Sat 12 2020

Woke at 0300.

Bogie time.

‘A man who never made a mistake never made anything.’ Einstein and Roosevelt are both credited with that statement, and I think Churchill borrowed it too. And it’s a favourite saying of mine.

But it doesn’t carry much weight at 0300.

I used to sleep like the proverbial log, but recently I’ve been waking up two, or sometimes three times a night to go to the loo, I’m sure you wanted to know that — coulda done with brackets there, I’ll use dashes instead — old-age I’m told. And sometimes the bogies attack when I return to my bed, memories of mistakes I’ve made over the years. And when I analyse my regrets I realise that the only person that has suffered from them is me! So why worry?

Bogies.

Maybe I’ll write them down one day, print them and then ceremoniously burn them in the garden waste incinerator. But not now, it would worry the neighbours.

And now that they’ve retreated, the bogies, I’ll get back to Christmas cards. That means a trip to the garage in my pyjama shorts, thick cardi and thermal slippers — something else for the neighbours’ interests, although I expect that they’re all asleep — unless they have bogies too. Maybe everyone does.

I went. There’s just a glimmer of light in the sky and an ever-so-slight drizzle. Fortunately my slippers have a plastic sole.

You might have wondered about the connection between Christmas cards and the garage. Well, I needed my Stanley knife and it was in the garage. Be patient. I’d drawn three cards to an A4 sheet of glossy, photo paper and a Stanley knife, steel rule and a cutting-mat are the best tools for cutting them out — if you don’t have a guillotine, which not many people do these days due, I think, to the perceived danger of cutting fingers off, if not heads.

So, do it now!

Why would I want to take on another task?

I’m asking myself. I’ve already got a job-list as long as both my arms, and a few of my legs, and there’s no doubt that some of the jobs will, eventually, have to be ‘struck-off’ without ever having been started.

So why more? I’ll answer, if only to, sort of, put a lot of thoughts into one basket – to mix a metaphor – or create a new one. How is a new metaphor created by-the-way? I would have put that in brackets but I’ve decided to stop using brackets unless absolutely necessary, because they are so often a means of making a description or instruction clearer, when what was being written should have been written so that it was clear, without further explanation, in the first place.

‘Huh!’ I can hear myself thinking, ‘easier said than done. Probably’.

Answer. To the question ‘why more?’ That could have been in brackets for better effect, couldn’t it? I think a lot when I wake up and I often thrust those thoughts aside by getting up and getting on with something useful like one of the jobs on the jobs list, a good antidote against thinking about all the things I could or should or ought to have done. Or, much worse,

So, what’s high on the thoughts list? Three things stand out at the moment:

      Get John back into circulation again.

      Get Cracklin’ Rosie sailing.

      Finish my novel.

All three enjoyable and do-able, they just keep getting interrupted with things that have to be done NOW. Like designing, drawing and printing our Christmas cards – and then having to write on them as well! This year I drafted the idea quite quickly. Getting it drawn required serious concentration, but it was enjoyable work. Two-and-a-half days fairly solid at the desk, seeing in my mind’s eye the finished product and having to draw and, more time-consuming, shape it up for printing. It is always frustrating when reducing things to fit a given size that the drawn shapes shrink so smoothly but the text font size has to be adjusted, so that when I think I’ve got the drawing right, the text either won’t fit or it’s too small for easy reading – and what’s the point of posting text if no-one can read it without adjusting their picture?

Well, I finished it just before writing this. I printed three copies and am now awaiting my editor’s approval. Leisure-time.

From Seven Pillars of Wisdom

By

T. E. Lawrence

In the very outset, at the first meeting with them, was found a universal clearness or hardness of belief, almost mathematical in its limitation, and repellent in its unsympathetic form. Semites had no half-tones in their register of vision. They were a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns. They did not understand our metaphysical diffculties, our introspective questionings. They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades. This people was black and white, not only in vision, but by inmost furnishing: black and white not merely in clarity, but in apposition.

Their thoughts were at ease only in extremes. They inhabited superlatives by choice. Sometimes inconsistents seemed to possess them at once in joint sway; but they never compromised: they pursued the logic of several incompatible opinions to absurd ends, without perceiving the incongruity. With cool head and tranquil judgement, imperturbably unconscious of the flight, they oscillated from asymptote to asymptote. They were a limited, narrow-minded people, whose inert intellects lay fallow in incurious resignation. Their imaginations were vivid, but not creative. There was so little Arab art in Asia that they could almost be said to have had no art, though their classes were liberal patrons, and had encouraged whatever talents in architecture, or ceramics, or other handicraft their neighbours and helots displayed. -Nor did they handle great industries: they had no organizations of mind or body. They had no systems of philosophy, no complex mythologies. They steered their course between the idols of the tribe and of the cave. The least morbid of peoples, they had accepted the gift of life un-questioningly, as axiomatic. To them it was a thing inevitable, entailed on man, a usufruct, beyond control. Suicide was a thing impossible, and death no grief.

They were a people of spasms, of upheavals, of ideas, the race of the individual genius. Their movements were the more shocking by contrast with the quietude of every day, their great men greater by contrast with the humanity of their mob. Their convictions were by instinct, their activities intuitional. Their largest manufacture was of creeds: almost they were monopolists of revealed religions. Three of these efforts had endured among them: two of the three had also borne export (in modified forms) to non-Semitic peoples. Christianity, translated into the diverse spirits of Greek and Latin and Teutonic tongues, had conquered Europe and America. Islam in various trans-formations was subjecting Africa and parts of Asia. These were Semitic successes. Their failures they kept to themselves.

The fringes of their deserts were strewn with broken faiths. It was significant that this wrack of fallen religions lay about the meeting of the desert and the sown. It pointed to the generation of all these creeds. They were assertions, not arguments; so they required a prophet to set them forth. The Arabs said there had been forty thousand prophets: we had record of at least some hundreds. None of them had been of the wilderness; but their lives were after a pattern. Their birth set them in crowded places. An unintelligible passionate yearning drove them out into the desert. There they lived a greater or lesser time in meditation and physical abandonment; and thence they returned with their imagined message articulate, to preach it to their old, and now doubting, associates.

The founders of the three great creeds fulfilled this cycle: their possible coincidence was proved a law by the parallel life-histories of the myriad others, the unfortunate who failed, whom we might judge of no less true profession, but for whom time and disillusion had not heaped up dry souls ready to be set on fire.

Our garden gate was broken, had been for some time. Stalactites of rotten wood dangled from just below the lower, cross member – what a delightful name for a piece of wood, like an angry, red-faced Member of Parliament shouting at the Speaker! Its alternative name – ‘cross brace’ – is less exotic but a bit more usefully descriptive.

Most ‘door-sized’ garden gates have an ‘upper’ and a ‘lower’ cross member, they hold together the vertical planks of the gate – which, by the way, are called ‘fence boards’. Anyway, the rot had reached the angry MP, his lower edge was decaying.

I’ve made running-repairs to the gate a couple of times in the past but, finally, something had to be done before it fell off its hinges.

The little car that normally lives in the garage was in a care-home, temporarily, so the garage was empty and eminently suitable to host the garden gate and the wood sculptor. (The car which is classified as my car has to live out in the rain, all the time, poor thing.)

I erected two work-benches in tandem in the empty garage.

Estimated time for gate repair? One day.

I took out the electric drill, rigged it into screw-driver mode and began. I was surprised that the screws affixing the gate to the hinges, (or the hinges to the gate?) came out quite easily, they’d been there for at least twenty years to my certain knowledge.

I had, untypically, had the foresight to slide a thin piece of wood under the gate before removing the screws so it didn’t immediately fall down, but then I had to carry it to the garage and lift it onto the work benches. It was heavy! I struggled a bit. ‘Probably waterlogged’ I thought secretly. I didn’t mention that in public though because of the risk of being sent out into the Covid 19 jungle to buy a new door.

The first job was to cut off the rotten bits. I grabbed the long saw, the silver-coloured one with the red handle, lined it up with the top of the lower cross member and began to saw with gusto. The saw jumped out of the groove it had just cut and landed on my left forefinger. ‘Ouch’ I said enthusiastically and loudly enough for the nurse to come running with a plaster. After a suitable period of convalescence with cups of sweet tea served by the same nurse, I returned to the garden gate and operated the saw a little more carefully.

The lower cross member fell to the floor and the remains of the lower parts of the fence boards disintegrated as I pulled them off.

My plan was simple: cut fence board extensions to the correct length and attach them to a new cross member which would be wide enough to be screwed across the bottoms of the still existing fence boards. I had some unused Danish-oak floorboards, had them for years, too good to throw away but unused for want of a floor missing half-a-dozen Danish-oak floorboards.

I carefully measured the width of the old cross member and marked off where the first cut would be made on the first length of oak.

At this point I doubled my estimate of how long it would take to mend the gate. It was getting dark and, despite the long, fluorescent light in the garage, the dark was creeping in, making accurate saw cuts more difficult to achieve.

I parked the tools, carefully noting where each one was before turning the light off and closing the garage door.

I could look forward to a successful tomorrow.

The day started with a light breakfast and the prospect of cleaning up and painting the newly repaired gate.

I whistled my happy way down the garden path, opened the garage and turned on the light just to add a little to what Mr Sun was pouring onto my bit of the world at that moment.

I placed the oak board on the bench-hook and began to cut where I’d marked the evening before. There were six to be cut. Of course, the first one is easy, the second and following pieces have to be exactly the same length. I cut them all carefully and, lo and behold, they all lined up perfectly, there was just one that protruded a little from the perfect line but a few minutes with the sanding block resolved that. There was one more small piece to be added as the six lengths I’d cut didn’t quite make the full width. Even that one fitted.

I offered them up to the bottom edge of the now, much-shorter gate…

Next instalment tomorrow:

or the next day,

or the day after that…..

……

Perfect.

I laid them, carefully held together, on top of the ‘table’ created by the gate lying across the two work-benches. I cut a thinnish strip of wood to the length of the width – if you get what I mean – and drilled and screwed it to the six-and-a-bit fence board extensions so that, effectively, it was one, homogenous bit of gate.

Now, one bit of the make-up of a gate that I haven’t yet told you about is the diagonal member. That sounds a bit ‘parliamentish’ too! like a Cross-Bencher leaving one side of the chamber and walking diagonally across the floor to the other side, like the middle bit of a ‘Z’. On a gate the diagonal member is there to keep the fence boards in their place. And, although my new extension would fit below the lower end of our gate’s diagonal member, the new cross member – that I would have to fit, in order to join the now homogenous fence board extensions to the existing, now shortened, fence boards – would need to be shaped so that the inner, or hinge-end would be a ‘wrap-around-the-lower-end-of-the diagonal-member’ fit. You’d probably already realised that.

I made a template out of a piece of cardboard and laid it on the end of the chosen, about-to-be-the-lower-cross-member plank. Carefully I sawed out the shape of the lower end of the diagonal member, offered it up to the cut-off bottom of the gate, and it fitted perfectly.

Technical note: within the meaning of the term ‘offered it up to’ are included: lowering it into position – as in this case, and pushing it on sideways.

I checked the measurement of the height of the frame of the gate which, of course, hadn’t moved, against height of the horizontal gate in the garage with its new fence board extensions lying ‘offered up’ to the cut-off bottoms of the originals.

They weren’t the same.

They weren’t the same!

My brain was suddenly in a whirl, bouncing from the gate frame to the lower cross-member to cut-off fence boards to newly created, now homogenous, lower fence boards and the nasty, yellow, builders’ tape-measure.

Gradually the ‘whirling’ slowed. My mistake became clear. I’d calculated the required length of the now homogenous, lower fence boards as being the same as the height of the width of the old, rotten lower cross member.

‘Oh bother!’ I said quietly.

I would have accepted that there would be a three-inch gap between the bottom of the gate and the surface of the stone pathway, BUT, when repair of the gate had first been mentioned in public, the nurse had reminded me of her specific requirement that the gap at the bottom of the gate has to be too small for rats to be able to get in.

So, day three was occupied by the cutting up of more Danish oak planks. I’m glad to say that the new pieces finished up even more accurately cut than their too-short predecessors. I put them together, drilled, and screwed them to the lower cross member and then screwed the newly homogenised, lower cross-member to the gate.

Nearly done. Except for the remaining holes in the woodwork and putting on another cross member, on the outside of the gate – a recently designed modification which makes the repair stronger (and the gate heavier).

The holes were a blessing in disguise: The nurse, in her painter and decorator role, found a tube of filler from which she squeezed a sticky paste, some of which went into the holes in the woodwork. It’s messy stuff and it hadn’t ‘gone off’ by morning so we had a holiday. Ditto for the next day.

I’ve now lost track of the number of days I/we have spent on the refurbishment of our garden gate.

On the first day back, after our little holiday, we sanded the front and the edges and the back, ready for the paint.

We’d chosen Terra Cotta.

Ida opened the tin.

“it’s red!” she said, instantly, disapprovingly.

“It’s too late” I said quickly’ followed by “It’ll be OK when it’s dry. Anyway, I like red.”

Still doubting, she poured some of the paint into her roller tray. She’s almost a professional painter and decorator, she has two different sizes of roller tray and goodness knows how many rollers!

I was given the task of reaching, with a brush – dipped into the paint in the tray, in case you thought that I hadn’t been considered responsible enough to do any real painting – and applying paint in all the nooks and crannies.

Meanwhile, Ida was applying splashes of ‘imitation blood’ to the garage floor by walking around with the paint tray at an angle differing somewhat from the horizontal.

I was helpful and sympathetic. Of course. I fetched a bucket of water.

The floor was clean and dry within a short time and we applied a second coat of paint to the gate.

Having successfully demonstrated my skill and steadiness of hand, I was allowed to paint the gate frame. Two coats… Two splodges on the brickwork and a couple of Cyclamen leaves suddenly changed from green to red were my only deviations from the perfect finish.

I would all be dry by the morning.

And it was.

We turned the gate onto its front and painted the back.

Sunday morning, yesterday as I write, eight days after the beginning of the great gate-renovation, we carried it out of the garage and stood it against the gate frame.

The paint had dried to an attractive and approved, Terra Cotta colour.

But the gate wouldn’t shut! How could that be? I’d screwed it back onto its hinges – which hadn’t been moved – even used the same screws! But ponder the problem as I might, the gate wouldn’t shut.

I had, only a few days previously, discarded my old, Surform rasp, the broken handle made it so uncomfortable to use. So I set to with 60 grit sandpaper.

Just at that moment our neighbour strolled by, “I have that problem every winter,” he said, “I must have made my gate smaller by half an inch over the years.”

How encouraging!

Two hours later the gate sort of fitted. By now it was dark. I went indoors and fired up the PC, Toolstation sold rasps, I ordered one, ‘click and collect’.

First thing in the morning I collected. I sliced off the last micro-millimetres of gate. It was almost perfect. A few more strokes and… the blade broke! A quick check online and they’re out of stock! Everywhere!!!

I reverted to sandpaper and, half-an-hour later, to my great relief the gate fitted in its frame!

I can expect dinner tonight.

Should you need, in the future, advice on garden gate maintenance, I know a jobbing handyman, his rates are quite fair.