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 A tentative blog to test the temperature. |
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Ten years ago I was writing several blogs on various subjects - F1 motor racing, Music, Classic Cars, Great Romances and, most crushingly, a personal journal that included my thoughts on America, memories of England and Africa, opinion, humour, writing and anything else that occurred. It all became too much (I was attempting to update the journal every day) and I collapsed, exhausted and thoroughly disillusioned in the end. So this blog is indeed a Toe in the Water, a place to document my thoughts in and on WdC but with a determination not to get sucked into the blog whirlpool ever again. Here's hoping.     |
| Another Gripe Talking (or not) of words that annoy, one of my favourites is “cheater.” You may be thinking that it means “one who cheats,” but it doesn’t. It’s a made up word and very young indeed. You might find it in the dictionary but they’ll put any old rubbish in there these days. The truth is that the word is “cheetah” and it means an exceptionally fast-running member of the big cat family. If you want to refer to someone who cheats, you should say, “He’s a cheat.” That’s it, simple as that. It’s a word that can function as a verb and as a noun. There was never any need to invent the superfluous “cheater,” because we already have a shorter and more accurate word for that. Why do I mention this today? Because I was just irritated by someone using the non-word, of course. Word count: 145 |
| Weather Here in the not-really-frozen-but-it-gets-pretty-cold-in-the-winter north, we approach the summer solstice with the rest of the world. And once again I wonder, as I do every year, why June is not the warmest month. I can forgive the weather lagging behind events a little, but not even July manages to catch up with the sun. August gets the honour as the sizzling month. And, after August, we begin the downhill slope to winter. Why does it always seem that the downhill side of the hill always seems steeper and therefore faster than the uphill trip? Doesn’t seem fair, really. I mean, spring is a nebulous thing and often lasts for months, teasing and tempting with occasional brighter spells, only to fall back into old habits of rain and coolth. And summer starts like an ancient car with one cylinder not working and a near-flat battery. Don’t get me wrong - I like weather. There is nothing more exciting than a decent thunderstorm, and a blazing hot day in a desert somewhere is great when viewed from the comfort of an air conditioned room. But I do have questions about the weather not living up to its reputation. There must have been a time when weather behaved much more reliably than it does now. The countless medieval rhymes and sayings about how each month will be is evidence enough of that. Perhaps we ought to chant more often the old nursery rhymes about the weather each month will bring. The power of positive thinking and all that. Word count: 254 |
| Another Google A while back the Boy took it into his head to upgrade some of our lightswitches with voice commands. He is like that, always experimenting with new gadgets and seeing what can be done with them. And we became used to speaking orders to an invisible servant who turns the lights off and on for us. It seemed harmless enough, although I noticed that the process took longer than a quick flick of the lightswitch. The point was not that this new thing saved on time but rather that we were spared the journey to the switch. A sort of glorious fanfare for the truly lazy amongst us, I suppose. You might expect that’s about all that need be said about this innovation. But this is merely the introduction. It seems we have welcomed a new individual into the household, a female by her voice (there are options but we never experimented with those). Give her an order and she performs the deed and confirms it by repeating your order. Only she seems a little hard of hearing at times. For instance, she has made me realise that the words “on” and “off” are very similar when spoken. Far too often, we enter a room, speak out the words, “Hey Google, living room light on,” only for nothing to happen while Google pronounces the response, “Living room light off.” Even though this forces us to be more careful with our diction, it still makes me wonder why we continue with the system. The truth is that Google has many other uses, some of which are quite welcome. She can talk of the weather in great detail, for instance. This would be more useful if we went outside occasionally but at least we now know what to expect if we do. And she answers questions on quite a range of topics, almost a vocal version of the computer search engine of the same name. But there are subjects that she turns out be completely ignorant of, unfortunately. Andrea used her for switching on the coffee machine while still abed in the morning (she would prime it the night before) but gave that up when Google started to get the commands all wrong and do strange and unwanted things instead. And she also seems to be determined to play music whether we want it or not. There are times when I swear she deliberately mishears a command so that she can play some weird thing she’s found on Spotify. Of course, once she’s started a tune, she pretends not to hear our orders to stop the music. I use her for timing things like how long to leave food in the microwave after completion. She sounds an alarm when the time is up but then gets really awkward about turning it off. There are even times when she does things completely without any order remotely resembling the sound of an order to do so. It is extremely disconcerting to have all the lights in the house turn off at once. And takes some serious memory work to remember the address of each light that now needs to be turned on. All of which goes to show that this new resident in the house is hardly worth the rent that she doesn’t pay. I have no doubt that we’ll scrap the whole system in the end. But not right now, not right now. Word count: 567 |
| Templates Google Docs has all sorts of templates for various documents. I never use templates but today, being devoid of ideas, I sifted idly through them. There was one for blog posts and I loaded it to see how it performed. It was horrible. The font sizes were huge, the layout was immovable and so far from my blog’s established layout that there was no way I could show it to you avid readers. Just take my word that it was totally unsuitable for my purposes. I wasted so much time trying to bend it to my requirements that I would have been able to write three blog posts instead. If I’d had any ideas, of course. In the end, I decided to squeeze out the one thing the template had taught me. There’s a reason I never use templates. Word count: 139 |
| A Problem That Doesn’t Exist I have been toying with the idea of writing a story about time standing still. It’s a dream that mankind has, for a long time, wanted to be possible (but only if they are in charge of it, of course). So you might think that everything that can be said about it has been said. But it occurs to me that we always look at it from the point of view of the person freezing time. What about all those frozen as a result? Do they lose something? What occurs to me is that they might lose time from their allotment, that their lives are shortened as a result. Which would be the case if their internal clock keeps ticking even though time has stopped in the universe. Obviously, it’s a matter of opinion since we never will be able to stop time. But it’s just something that we might think about if we do decide to write about this. There is also the matter of the person initiating the cessation of time. Presumably, if others lose the their time in stasis from their given lifetime, the same would happen to the person in the driving seat. That might even be the comeuppance visited upon the guy as always happens when wishes are granted. A minor problem would be that he would have to stop time for a long period for his loss to be noticed. There’s another possibility if we think that nothing is lost through time being stopped. Some bright spark, wanting to live forever, might think that this could be arranged by stopping time and not restarting it. It would be a lonely life, however, and would raise other questions. Would he still have to eat and drink, for instance? And would it be possible to do so? Would not all matter have to stay in the form it was when frozen, food becoming hard and inedible as a result? The difficulties mount the more I think about it. Science fiction ain’t as easy as we might think. Word count: 341 |
| Donald Duck Day Yes, The Cramp informs me that today is Donald Duck Day. I told Andrea about this and she answered immediately with the question, "What would Donald Duck sound like if he were James Mason?" Quaaack, quaack quackquack, quaaack. |
| A Delicious Video https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2xD3hqKlMyk Good old YouTube threw this brief video at me yesterday. It really was very kind of them (if I may refer to the programmers behind the app rather than the app itself) since the video reveals something about the aristocracy that is little understood these days, something that I am trying to reveal in my short stories about Her Grace. It is what I call being truly civilised. Below are links to a couple of Her Grace stories. Yes, it’s unashamed self advertisement but hey, sometimes you gotta do it.
Word count: 90 |
| Other Bikes This is more like an addendum to the previous post and it’s more about motor bikes. So, if my Ducati post didn’t interest you, don’t bother with this one. While writing said post, I was going to say that the Ducati was the only motor bike I’ve ever ridden. But then I remembered that it wasn’t. There was a Honda 50 that my father bought for delivering stuff from his chemist shop. On occasion, I was dragooned into making deliveries on the thing. After the Ducati, it was a pretty disappointing machine. Speed was not its metier. Oh, it was fast enough for most things, but that was never going to be enough for a teenager who had ridden a racer. Worse, it was an automatic. No playing with gears then - just the jerky clunk to get moving and then it did the work for you. Buzzing along at thirty miles an hour - it was good at that. Mind you, I am prepared to bet that anyone having a Honda 50 as their first biking experience would be hooked. It’s that two-wheels thing that does it. Then there was the Lambretta scooter that someone gave me as transport when I got married. Poverty is a great teacher and I was grateful for that old, tired machine. Anything beats walking, after all. But it was a death trap. Clumsy, slow, and poorly balanced, that machine made me feel really vulnerable when I rode it. I was not sorry to see it go when I could afford to buy a clapped-out but charming and aged Morris Minor. And that, too, is a story for another time. Anyway, that explains why I couldn’t claim to have only the Ducati on my motor bike resumé. If you count the Honda and the Lambretta as bikes, that is. They are two-wheeled after all. Word count: 308 |
 Ducati 175 In my last post, I promised myself and anyone who read that episode that I’d write about the motor bike that featured therein. It was a 1960s Ducati 175. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? But there are certain facts you need to know. Especially that it was the racing version fitted up to be road legal. Which meant that it had a silencer (muffler). And, as a result, it was fast. More than that, you should understand about that little 175 cc motor. It was an odd size for racing and, because there was no category for that capacity, it had to race against the 250s. But it still won all the races. That little screamer of an engine humbled all that came against it at the time. And now I had the opportunity of riding the beast. The picture up there doesn’t really do it justice. I chose it because it has the right design of fuel tank. Sexy is the only way to describe those curves and bulges and swooping lines. The rest of the bike that I came to know wasn’t nearly as fancy as the one above. It was stripped down of all unnecessary weight and never as well presented. I doubt that my sister’s boyfriend ever cleaned it and it certainly had no parts painted gold! It was a thing for one purpose only and that was to go fast. Okay, it was tiny compared to the 1,000 cc monsters bikers ride today. But bear in mind that the only bike I’d ridden before used pedal power as its motivating force. I loved that bike. I took it on the old Salisbury circuit that was no longer used. Down the straights it was so quick the tears were streaming from my eyes. Goggles? Nah, who could afford real biking gear in those days? I doubt I got anywhere near the lap record but it was exciting and magical beyond description. On the way home, I leaned into a corner and the foot rest scraped the tarmac. That was when I learned about the murderous side of motor bikes. Fun they are and in incredible quantities. But they’re also killers if you make a mistake. The net result was that I elected never to get a motor bike. I bought cars when the time came (before that, actually, but that’s another story) and did all my crazy stuff in them. The glory and exhilaration of bikes I understand but I knew that I’d have killed myself on one sooner or later if I gave the things the chance. My oldest son has owned and ridden bikes for years now but he was always more level-headed than me. Even so, he managed to break a pelvis a while back. He rides the big ones and has taken lessons and so on - should be safe now, I think. So that was the mighty midget, the Ducati of my teenage years. I only got to ride it a few times but it stays in my memory as a bright star that illuminates a brief period in my life. My advice is never ride a motor bike. Why risk the danger of being bitten by the bug and getting one for yourself? They’re more fun than should be legal. And they’ll get you in the end. Especially if it’s a beautiful Italian job, light as a feather, and just screaming to go. Word count: 574 |
| A Tale of Long Ago Magic’s song, Rude, is a pleasant little ditty with a narrative. This is the first time I’ve heard it and I must confess that it made me think of my late elder sister. So here’s her story. When she was in her late teens (I was in my slightly earlier teens), she fell in with an older guy and became quite serious about him. As far as I was concerned, the only reasonable thing about him was that he had a motorbike. A very fast bike, being a racer fixed up to be road legal. And he let me ride it occasionally. Man, that was a fantastic bike and I scared myself at least a couple of times on it. The real point was that it put me on the guy’s side, of course. Maybe he wasn’t so stupid after all. But it did nothing for my father’s view on him. The bike was probably the start of it but their relationship worsened through various events until, eventually, the old man declared that my sister was to have nothing further to do with him. Bad move on my father’s part. It wasn’t long before the young lady declared that she was moving out of the house. Worse than that, she was moving to another town in another country. Having just turned eighteen, she could override my father’s objections and off she went. It wasn’t long before we heard that the relevant boyfriend had also moved to that town. A few years later they returned, my father realised that his tactics had been entirely wrong, and grudgingly he accepted the relationship. They married soon after. So the story tells us a little about humans and their foibles. Make something forbidden and they are bound to desire it even more. Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there. It turned out that the guy was a money-making machine - in a few years he was a millionaire and the couple had produced two large and bike-racing nephews for me. And then the happy couple got divorced. He cared more for making money than for my sister, apparently. She found another guy (much poorer but a thoroughly decent feller) and they lived happily in obscurity. And what I got out of it was that everything was caused by that wonderful bike (Ducati 175). Had its owner not had it, my father would never have objected to him, my sister would have soon forgotten him and moved on to others, and everyone would have had a less dramatic life. Except my nephews, of course. But you can’t have everything. Word count: 431 |
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