Outside the comfort zone

Grandson Zach's life revolves round soccer. I'd never seen him play in an official game since my life revolves centrifugally away from soccer. Yesterday VR and I made an almost fatal decision to rectify this omission.

Fatal in that we risked our lives. Theoretically it wasn't all that cold (6 deg C) but the wind stripped us of all body heat and then seemed set to separate the flesh from our bones. I watched Zach anxiously as the colouring departed from his face, leaving only his nose and the area round his lips a healthy pink.

At half-time I photographed him in case one or all of us didn't make it to full-time. I haven't captured the colours terribly well but there's compensation in Zach's monomaniacal stare as he waits for the second half to start. If his teammate, Euan, (on the right) looks less uncomfortable it's because he's only just been brought on, having spent the first half suitably anoraked.

The events of the game matched the meteorological heroics. The pitch sloped alarmingly and Zach's team initially played uphill. At half-time they were 3 - 1 down. Downhill they showed their class and won 7 - 3. Zach was easily the smallest player yet he was playing defence ("Because he tackles," said his Mum, Occasional Speeder). He showed no interest in wind chill.

We returned home where the central heating was roaring and there was soup (shredded ham with peas), bacon sandwiches, and, for those of an age, the remainder of the cooking brandy.

The missing link

 Very frustrating down in the Languedoc. The wi-fi link was lost and it wasn't just the Brigade of Animated Thumbs that ended up drinking gallons of rosé in compensation. I accumulated unsendable blogposts and unarticulated comments. Now I'm back I await photos that the smart-phone users took and I failed to.

At least I may write about something that cannot be photographed. As the weather grew hotter the Tramontana blew harder - a strong, dry cold wind from the northwest in lower Languedoc. It slams doors, roars and twangs, and once - oh, the shame - it blew a long-stemmed wine glass off the table. The Tramontana disturbs the psyche. A Victor Hugo character says Le vent qui vient à travers la montagne me rendra fou. (The wind coming over the mountain will drive me mad.)

But nothing deflected the soccer-mad members of our party from TV coverage of The World Cup. England arrived in Brazil full of justified pessimism. Played two, lost two; they're out of the competition which has weeks to go. I sat on the balcony in the dark with VR and OS (normally a fan but discontented for some reason) to be joined after twenty minutes by soccer maniac Zach. "Uruguay are just too good," he said. I'd have offered him rosé but he's only eight and had to make do with limonade avec un peu de grenadine.

It's all nonsense about subsisting on salads when it's hot. OS made a massive, elaborate bolognese sauce (to go with macaroni) and it was hugely appreciated. Cleaning the Le Creuset afterwards might have taken a lifetime if VR hadn’t discovered the miracle pot cleaner, Astonish. A truly well-equipped villa.

Survival of the inexplicable

Evolution can inform things as well as organisms. Usefully too. It spotlights anomalies where an item has ceased - for unknown reasons - to develop and has entered an evolutionary cul de sac.

The worst car I ever owned was an Austin Cambridge - by far. As I struggled with ownership I might, if I'd been better educated, have comforted myself with the thought that better cars lay ahead. With the Cambridge there was even more retrospective comfort in that better companies lay ahead and the manufacturer, BMC, then BL, then who knows, was to wither deservedly. A case of evolution acting as it should.

But I cannot say the same about the deck-chair. I neither know nor care when this cynical exercise in bad ergonomics (the science of man's relationship with his immediate environment) was devised, only that it too should have withered. It is difficult to get into and out of, induces agony just behind the knees, and can guillotine the finger-tips of the wary. Yet still it persists. You may say it has a certain gaiety. I would say... no, I won't say it.

Tin-opener technology has a come a long way. Tone Deaf and, before that, Works Well, have celebrated this progress. But a deficient design is still available, notably in French street markets. It is fabricated from pressed mild steel, suggesting it may have appeared soon after WW2 when cheapness and shortage of materials were dominant. The handle is painful to hold, the cutter tears at the tin resulting in flesh-menacing jaggery, and the fold-away cork-screw is based on a helix that is so narrow it often pulls straight out of the cork. Who favours this thing? Those who must have a tin-opener like grannie's? Nostalgia like that can be bad for you.

Dehyd. (poet.): shorter. 2.

Now I remember whence the impulse for a shrunken sonnet competition came. Before taking Holy Orders and emerging as LdP I was ragamuffin Barrett Bonden, blogging about technology. I noticed other bloggers (Lucy, Plutarch, Marja-Leena) were as justifiably proud of their photos as of the stuff they wrote. I invited each to provide details of their camera.

Et voila! I cobbled their answers to create a post which I hadn’t needed to write. A vista of easy-come, easy-go posts opened up as I envisaged a blog written by others, for which I would take credit.

This easeful project failed. Whereas each was prepared to go on (to excess) about their beloved Leica none cared to extend coverage to BSW screws, washing machines, car gearboxes and valve characteristic curves that typified the BB canon.

In musical terms the sonnet comp is a valedictory coda to that blissful expectation. Here’s my bit of dehydration. The rules allowed a title which didn’t count towards the total.

LdP. Blonde angels (probably in fur coats) bid

tearful goodbye to the man who understood

their needs and enhanced their glory. 71 words

Defunct in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Strauss,

Who gave sopranos lux aeternitas,

Stared upwards at vainglorious gloss

Illuminating coifs of misted brass.

Mourning, they’d mobilised their plangency

To venerate his open-hearted art,

Of launching vocal lines seductively,

Enthroning women’s souls in worlds apart.

Progenitor of Rosenkavalier,

Immured below this buxom wall of grief,

This proudful expert German puppeteer

Received a letzte Lied for his relief.

In metamorphosed words, liquidity

Bore Richard’s coffin to eternity.

Dehyd. (poet.): shorter.1

On March 2 I invited a sonnet with the fewest words, the Dehydrated Sonnet. I can’t remember where the impulse came from.

Plutarch wasn’t interested. With good reason. Poetic rules are easily explained, poetic obligations are something else again. Opportunities for betrayal occur between every syllable. Imposing an artificial – irrational - restriction as I had done corrupted the whole process.

Thus: you write a decent line. Then try to compress the wordage, making it indecent. Your options shrink. You become obsessed with long words

I am lucky in that I write verse not poetry (In soccer terms: the conference vs. the championship). My effort appears tomorrow. However here are entries from two bloggers who take poetry more seriously. Both get prizes.

Note 1: To legitimise the project as a TD post, a musical reference was required.

Note 2: Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee…” is 114 words.

Lucy: (Untitled). 56 words

Inspirational daPonte, that
tirelessly charming persiflager,
luminary of my commentariat,
proposes playfully a wager:

reductionistic sonneteering - make,
Italianate Petrarchan, or Miltonic,
Wordsworthian, Spenserian or Shake-
spearian form - example most laconic.

Yet minimalising semantemes, while meeting
pentametrical demands - conjunctions,
prepositions, articles, pronouns deleting -
linguisticality, alas, malfunctions.

Syllabic prodigality alone
provides excessive flesh, deficient bone.

Lucas: Riding the Sonnet. 72 words

…started with microcosmic excitation,

one introverted thought at liberty,

choosing relaxing camaraderie,

not the controlling baton’s orchestration –

initially a steady undulation,

pre-propagating through the qwerty

keyboard, a salon’s tripping melody

melodiously rippling, building, spinning on

until its music flooded, overtaking me

accelerando. A crazy streamer,

stream-lined, concert-hall high, broke free,

roguishingly ascending and getting weightier

above my clipped peaks.

                                                            Diminutively

The salon swam, landfall ever h a z i e r.

Got a big vocabulary?

I can't pretend I take verse writing seriously but I do enjoy using multi-syllable words that fit. The more syllables the better. Recently I contrived to squeeze in "physiology". That's five syllables, so in iambic pentameter there's only five more to find. What's the limit for squeezing? I suggested to Lucy a competition for A SONNET WITH THE FEWEST WORDS and she said she'd be up for that. Hearing of this Lucas said he was game too.

Just a few rules, then. The entries will be published in Tone Deaf, all together, on June 1. "All together" is important. If I posted sonnets as I received them later competitors would have a total to shoot for. Can't have that. All entrants retain their copyright, sonnets must scan and any form (Shakespearean, Miltonian, etc) is acceptable. Because Tone Deaf is musical at least one musical reference should be included.

The LdP Concise Sonnet Competition will be entirely democratic when it comes to prizes. Everyone gets one unless the first-year students at the London Royal College of Music decide I’m ripe for exploitation. And the prize will be worth having: Charles Rosen's book Critical Entertainment. Rosen is a concert pianist, professor emeritus of music and social thought at the University of Chicago and writes about music in a way that makes me weep with envy.

I intend to be the greyhound-track-poop-scooper to the LdPCSC, modestly publishing my own sonnet on June 2. Since I already have Rosen’s book I won’t be awarding myself another copy.