Blest be the ties that bind

Skype is technology (Yawn!), it's all to do with
computers (Boreeng!), it's a cheap way of making
telephone calls (Hey, I'm a skinflint, tell me more.)
Skype puts you where you want to be and is magic

Three times a week the Robinsons foregather virtually, via Skype. Not every member, ‘tis true, but the absentees’ reasons are understood and have our communal blessing. The family is no less a family.

The distances are puny compared with the USA. Newent, Gloucestershire, is only 25 miles from Hereford where VR and I live. Luton, Bedfordshire, on the other side of the country, 64 miles, and Tavistock, way down the south-western peninsula, 207 miles. Anything other than our electronic umbrella would be impractical.

The Tuesday and Thursday Skypes start at 5 pm and may be comparatively short with meals to prepare. But Saturday, at 6 pm, is special, given that drinks are not only allowed but encouraged. Even more so now, since a Grand Project is afoot, of which I may not yet speak.

Skype demands etiquette. When one Skyper talks over another, the system semi-strangles one or both of the voices and I search the sub-screens nervously for signs of a noose. To speak one must first examine other mouths to check whether words are about to burst forth.

VR and I (Little Grannie and Big Grandpa) remain stationary, fixed to our PC’s monitor. Others, freed by the mobility of their smartphones, ramble freely round their residences, as if in the Titanic as it sinks.

The atmosphere is febrile. Gusts of laughter mingle with half-heard insults. Gossip is endemic, though not pandemic. Those who have facts to dispense have a hard time being coherent. All of us hate the present government and near-obscenities are shouted out, never to be heard in layer upon layer of sound.

The affection is always in what we do, rarely in what we say. Family feeling must be implicit not stated. We are separate yet united, invisibly. It is our way.

Blushing violets need not apply

I’m not one for old things. Notably cars, houses (especially with “character”), cast-iron bedsteads and cooking pans, bone-handled table knives, wooden ladders, AGAs and/or open fires, trilbies and unsmart TVs.

I’ll make exceptions for certain paintings, Bordeaux wines, flagstones, trees (but on other people’s properties), most Ealing comedies and Lloyd Loom furniture.

Which brings us to doorbells. I’ve tried, oh how I’ve tried. Spent scads of money. Embraced modern technology. But I’m on the verge of acquiring a brass wind-up activated by a button which pushes a rod which releases the spring.

Straight off, let’s not talk batteries. Not the tiny sort which help transmit wi-fi signals from the outdoor pushbutton to a receiver/loudspeaker which plugs into the hall ring-main. Nor those bulbous ones which need meters of wire and eventually discharge a white powder which must be toxic.

VR and I are both going deaf. We need a system that is loud and stays loud. What we don’t want is some electronic wonder that secretly defaults to the lowest volume when no one’s looking. Apart from anything else, what’s the point in having a quiet doorbell? Or one where the button is vulnerable to the elements.

We both buy things online. Hereford is not a shopper’s paradise, other than for sausages. We are regularly on tippy-toes for white-van man who frequently requires added guidance. Hence the pic.

If white-van man rings the doorbell and it merely whispers he’s apt to get inventive. Of course they’ll find the package attached to the top branch of the prunus. Or in the garbage bin. We’d prefer to take it from his hands over the threshold. Our doorbell must be extrovert, prepared to bellow out its business.

The wind-up I’m considering is Made In Britain. Is that an advantage?

Words quick as thoughts

Aldous Huxley observed that the only new vice the twentieth century has delivered is an enthusiasm for speed.

My new PC, equipped with Windows 10, boots up in 45 seconds (sometimes in only 10 seconds.)  Boots down in 3 secs. I must admit there's a sensual pleasure to this (not least because the PC's predecessor took several minutes to clear its throat.) Sensual? Indeed, a feeling of release, a sensation akin to... well, perhaps we should leave it at that.

I know no one who isn't irritated when a computer works slowly. Always acknowledging that a computer’s slowness is relative; nothing in common with queueing at the Post Office for a single first-class stamp.

The reasons are obvious. Our world has shrunk to the dimensions of a monitor screen, we are briefly transfixed, we have nowhere to go. And for those of us of a technical bent there's the consideration that behind that screen electrons are moving at the speed of light. Yet Solitaire refuses to appear.

I feed on computer speed and I am clearly not alone. Programmers recognise we get caught up in our PC’s vitesse and are only too ready to stab keys we may later (ie, two microseconds later) regret. “Are you sure you want to delete this file?” the prescient programmer asks. We blush at our impulsiveness.

Word-processing speed is essential to journalists. One must cut words quickly to match available space, correct errors to avoid embarrassment. An error departs so quickly we hardly remember we made it. We become smug, imagining we are better instinctive writers than we thought. An old-fashioned pencil would prove the opposite.

Never mind. My new computer is again my slave and not my tormenter. I no longer wait on it hand and foot. Mind and mouse are in step.

Undiscardable

"It's the element," said P. Davies, when the washing machine refused to wash. P. Davies is a nomadic domestic appliance specialist; in another age he would have been an equally successful tinker. Punctilious to a fault, he left the failed element standing up in the utility room sink.

That was several weeks ago and the element is still there. I should have thrown it away; instead I asked VR why she hadn't done so. She mumbled, deliberately being obscure.

Why the reluctance? Has it become a votive offering? (Wiki: An object displayed, without the intention of recovery or use, for broadly religious purposes.) Perhaps. Or do both of us regard it as a lucky charm? - recalling P. Davies's certain diagnosis, and the surgical precision with which he removed the defective unit. Could be. We're both atheists but we're also superstitious about certain matters. Is there an offhand beauty to the element's curves?

Throwing things away is a minefield of human misbehaviour. Given VR gets through about 220 books a year, it's amazing she discards books without sentiment. Perhaps it's just as well. My problem is IT cables. Every computeresque device I acquire comes with a surplus; they're packed together in a cardboard box which resembles a snake's graveyard. They might come in.

But the element... Hey, just a minute; might the word itself be significant? Elements are the universe's building blocks, not to be sniffed at. Or trifled with. I've just Googled a wonderfully coloured, interactive version of the Periodic Table and I'd hate to offend Dimitri Mendeleev, its original begetter, by treating any element as junk.

Perhaps we'll frame it. But all in good time.

Daughter/Dad chat

In endoscopy you swallow a small fibre-optic thingummy plus 1 metre of cabling. A gift subject for a blogger.

Alternatively the thingummy enters by (Ahem!) the basement. Thereafter good taste governs what you write.

I described my top-end job (A journey to the middle of the patient) on May 21 2008 blogging as Barrett Bonden in Works Well. It drew one comment.

Unheralded, yesterday, came an email labelled "Endoscopy" from younger daughter, Occasional Speeder:

Well that was a barrel of laughs... All clear though x

I responded:

Were you told - four times, as I was, and by different people - you would be dosed with something tasting of lemons? The actual taste being definitely acidulé but magnified to the power of ten, intended to put you off lemons for the rest of your natural. And thus you lay and there'd be a little twitch way down; you told yourself "I mustn't gip, I mustn't gip." but you gipped anyway and it felt like you were wearing your backbone inside your throat, instead of outside as is normal.

OS responded
:
They didn't say “lemons”, they said it tasted “agricultural” - which was quite accurate as to me it tasted of the smell of chicken shit. Gipped quite a bit. Eyes watered but yes that weird backbone thing was there. There was a lot of soothing as my leg kept involuntarily twitching. It's possibly in my top 5 horrid things ever - along with childbirth, tooth abscess (in fact most teeth things), finding cucumber unexpectedly in your mouth and the Intermarché at Jct 54 on the A75.

The latter two shockers are deeply personal and need not concern readers. I asked to use OS's emails in Tone Deaf and I'm proud of her style.

Boxing clever

Astronomy's not really my bag.The distances are unimaginable, the universe resembles a bomb-site, theories tend to be over-speculative, and myth-lovers got in first on the names. But I couldn't, in all conscience, ignore today's solar eclipse.

For one one thing it was so damn convenient: five minutes before I was due to leave for French. Also VR loves the heavens.

So I made us a pinhole viewing camera (above) and we pointed it at the sun from our front driveway. Our neighbours across the street were using sunglasses and smart-phones.

Gradually the bite-shaped slice moved in and VR's delight was my just reward. Yet, there was more. One of the girls opposite, dissatisfied with modern technology, ran across for a look via our viewer, saw the slice and said (Bless her!): "That's cool."

I asked for no other encomium.

ACHES in my back demanded the services of a masseur. The nearest guy turned out to be blind, had fingers classed as weapons, and was built, to quote our friends, "like a brick shithouse." As a novice his chest measurement was in the forties, now the fifties. "For every action," says Sir Isaac, "there must be a reaction."

He shifted my back muscles around as if they were topsoil; the pain was extreme but cleansing. Then he moved down a little and from being merely extreme the pain became grunt-worthy. Astonishingly it also made itself felt on my front, at the bottom of my ribcage - the attachment point for the inter-costals, I believe.

"Now I know what tarmac feels like," I said. He laughed. "Did you expect a pretty girl with a feather?" he asked. No-groan-oh. I didn't.

Growing up - haphazardly

 During WW2 my parents moved to the Bradford suburb of Idle. I was ashamed to admit I lived in Idle, fearing I'd be teased, and pretended our house was in nearby Thackley. These days I regret being born so sensitive.

We had a telephone and that was rare - the number Idle 540. Neighbours who lacked phones entered our living room to receive calls, standing around looking uncertain. I don't think we left the room while they used the phone; we were doing them a favour and this was the West Riding, one took the rough with the smooth.

Aged between seven and ten I answered the phone a lot and this proved useful when I took up journalism. Many incoming calls concerned the Airedale Beagles, of which my father was Hon. Sec. I have since wondered whether any came from the woman my father was having an affair with since she was a whipper-in with the Beagles. This lurid detail became an inevitable source of wordplay later on in my life.

When my mother left my father we briefly stayed on with him under chaotic conditions. It was his job to drive us to school on the far side of Bradford but he lingered, sitting on the toilet reading The Daily Mail. We had no clock and to urge him off the toilet I used to pick up the dial-less phone and ask the operator the time. The operator read it out to me from the clock on his office wall. We were often late for school.

Because my father was absent a good deal I used the phone routinely, as if I were a kid in a US movie. Received wisdom said this was an expensive practice while trunk calls (ie, long-distance) could hardly to be contemplated. As far as I can remember this was one of the few failings my father didn't punish me for.

Scroggie! Give him a knighthood

In The Guardian's series, Books That Have Changed My Life, politico-literary cerebralists admit to being bowled over by The Rights Of Man, Middlemarch, Das Kapital, The Second Sex, etc.

But who comes uninfluenced to such works? I believe these readers' lives were already changing (intellectually) before they turned the first page. That these books, often requiring much effort, were mere confirmation.

And those are the honest ones. Others... well you gotta believe they're flaunting.

I can afford not to flaunt. I arrived at National Service in the RAF knowing, quite frankly, bugger-all. My schooling was a disaster and two years in newspapers had taught me to type and to write shorter sentences. The RAF said I had the capacity to maintain and repair their radio equipment. Eight months of training from the structure of the atom to the tripes of the radio altimeter. Thereafter I took on technical journalism (especially in the USA) that would previously have been beyond me. Later still I started to love science.

Step forward Foundations Of Wireless And Electronics by Marcus Graham Scroggie - a genuine life changer.

JOE’S NUDGE

Hey, poetry needn’t always be solemn and profound. It can be fun, so long as it has something to say. This limerick’s complete:

I wish I weren’t doing Divvers
It honestly gives me the shivers,
I don’t know the facts
Of the Gospels and Acts
And tomorrow they’ll drag all the rivers.

Reasons why. It benefits that the delinquent student is doing a serious subject,  divinity (Divvers) – otherwise theology. But what about the punchline? An effortless bit of compression and an exhilarating leap forward. Good wordsmithing.

Anon

I've gone down with atavism

Barrett Bonden, mechanic-in-chief of my previous blog, Works Well, now lives in a Hastings retirement home, reading Scientific American. His grease-stained overalls hang on my atelier door; occasionally I don them as a pervert might his mother's wedding dress. Here's such an occasion.

MikeM, new to the Tone Deaf parish, asks if I have any thoughts on the Wankel engine. I do. I was working on Cycling and Mopeds when it was launched and one of my colleagues was present at that launch. "There's going to be problems sealing the gap between the piston and the cylinder," he told me. So it turned out.

Very odd, the Wankel. The piston is triangular and rotates in a figure-of-eight shaped cavity - hence the adjective, epitrochoidal. Unlike the reciprocating piston (ie, goes up and down) in a conventional engine, the Wankel piston rotates, with an inner planetary gear ensuring it follows its figure-of-eight path. Rotary motion is more efficient than reciprocating motion. This means the Wankel can go faster, engine speed being a measure of power developed.

One racing motorcycle used a Wankel. Bike races are divided into different engine capacities (1000 cc, 500 cc, etc) and people argued about whether the Wankel had three cylinders or one. Eventually the authorities agreed it had one and the bike cleaned up. Fin.

WIP Second Hand (47,571 words)
(Francine  said) We were fiercely and silently competitive. When a friend of mine got a B in the biology mocks I was secretly pleased. What a wretch I was. Yet we never boasted. It was a given that we were all looking for inhumanly high grades.  I had a single boyfriend during secondary education and he was just as much a zombie as I was. Disappearing finally into particle physics.

Refusing to be stoic

When I started work in the USA (1966) I was paid the same as a first-year secretary. Seemed like millions - four times my pay in London. Renting a flat (centrally heated!) cost less in real terms, as did booze, cars, and white goods.

My employer moved from Pittsburgh to Philly and VR complained the humidity was making life unbearable. I worked in an air-conditioned office so pooh-poohed this. Within two days of holiday I bought an AC. Stuck it through a downstairs window, plugged it in, and lo! - coolth.

Later we moved back to Pittsburgh and I had to modify a window to install the AC. The landlord agreed. Pausing on the stairs ensured a curious sensation: legs and derrière in the coolth, head and trunk in the warmth. In the bedrooms we had huge fans.

We re-emigrated in 1972 (Brits have a bad tendency to do this in the US) and I sold the AC to a man who wanted to cultivate mushrooms.

Years ago we had a hot summer here and I bought a free-standing AC which cost a fortune. Used with a free-standing fan it just about cooled the downstairs. Since then it has lain idle. Serves me right, you all say. End of story

WIP Second Hand (38,342 words)

(Moses Balogun said) "I set my sights higher. Features for the nationals, then the weeklies. Economics to begin with, then African politics, then whatever I chose. In the year and a half left at LSE I had about sixty articles published. However I have to confess:  I wasn’t selling my writing style, rather my sources..."

To the victor the spoils

Gorgeous woman kisses modern-day hero. Why not? She's his wife. Pretty good kiss, eh? The poliziotto seems to think so.

The kissee is Nick Sloane who masterminded the first stage of salvaging the huge cruise liner Costa Concordia beached on an Italian island. That Nick Sloane!

Can a man be a hero just for doing his job? Yes. Presently he's garlanded with media approval. Suppose the ship had broken in two and spilled its mess? Being approved is the other side of being blamed. And the media are good at blaming.

Also he's an engineer who will spend over half a billion quid shifting the Concordia. Ten years ago I reckoned engineers were under-appreciated, certainly in fiction. Last year I finished a novel with engineers central to the plot. Nick Sloane has shown they can hold your attention.

I won't summarise the salvaging; Google does that. Just two points: the scale (It took several hours just to pre-tension the cables doing the pulling.) and the ingenuity (Vast water-filled boxes welded to the ship's exposed flank helped - by their weight - bring the ship upright; emptied they'll add to its bouyancy.)

That, folks, is engineering. The man who repairs your dish washer or attaches a new silencer to your car is not an engineer.

 WIP Second Hand (36,711 words)

Nneoma interrupted. “... Tell us about yourself, Francine. Your name for instance. It’s beautiful. Where did it come from?”

“It has French roots. Popular in the States fifty years ago. It’s always sounded manufactured to me; I’d have preferred Francoise. Better still, Nneoma.”

“Silly! ...”

Milestone on the technie road

I've mentioned the Remington portable typewriter before. Acquired in my teens, it hammered out millions of words during my weekly newspaper days, trailed through most of my RAF service, helped me write early novels, crossed the Atlantic, wrote hundreds of letters home during our six years in Pennsylvania, returned to the UK, assisted with a couple more novels and was finally retired when word-processing simplified text revision and eliminated the irritation of carbons.
      
It is visible proof of a life spent writing; hard to imagine it elsewhere, assuming anyone wanted it. VR suggested it became a monument on a small table (made by my great-grandfather) in the dining room. More recently VR approved the nearby attachment of a brass coat-hook from which hangs my Pentax ME-50 film-based camera, also overtaken by technological progress.
      
They're on show because they are well-made. That’s all. Other kit does the work better.
   
A BRO BASH We’ll be seeing my brother, Sir Hugh, soon. He lives near the Lake District and I suggested visiting the pub at the head of Wasdale, a blind LD valley. The name of the nearby lake, Wastwater, hints at the area’s austere grandeur. I recall the pub as a scowling sort of place with stone slab floors. Looked at the pub’s website and quickly withdrew the suggestion. Gentrification has descended like particles in the emollient voice of Huw Edwards.

WIP Second Hand (36,203 words)

“A New Zealand pinot, if you’ve got it.”

“We have,” said Moses, speaking carefully. “And you may certainly have it. But would you prefer a pinot from the people who made pinot famous.”

“Put him out of his misery, Francine,” said Nneoma.”He’s dying to syphon Volnay down your throat. I wonder why he bothers with wine from any other countries.”

International conspiracy

Printers irritate the hell out of me. The economics are such they could be given away free since extortionate cartridge costs quickly match the printer’s purchase price. What my mother called "a ramp" and I, youthfully, "a swizz". A con.

I am publicising a show by VR's painting group. My Canon printer plays up; a repair would exceed the £80 cost price. Worse, a dozen unused cartridges will go to waste. The sense of being defrauded combined with an  attack of blepharitis, a corn that comes and goes on my left  foot, and the side-effects of bronchiectasis, now designated  as chronic, cause me to rail against dark forces. And, come to think of it, the forces of light.

The Hewlett-Packard replacement has touch-screen controls instead of buttons. Whoopee, oh whoopee! Said ironically. A warning on the box says it lacks a USB cable without which it won't work. The cable, a paltry thing. costs £13, causing me to rail some more. I feel like Monty Python's little man in the off-licence. The HP is, however, better designed; I no longer need pianist's fingers. Within minutes I'm trucking.

That was twenty-four hours ago. The HP crouches, 50 cm away, and my resentment is starting to fade. It's just a thing. I'll never love it but it does a job. I bought it with my credit card and that's good; it didn't cost me real money.

WIP Hand Signals
Francine went straight to Roger's most worryng patient, a splenectomy who might have picked up an infection. Temperature up slightly, passed a poor night, winced slightly  as she ran a gentle finger over his dressing.

“How're you feeling Mr Daley?” she asked.

“I'm scared,” he said. “Should I be?”

“There's nothing scary as such...”

“All surgery's a risk,” said Daley fatalistically.
 

Parental Guidance possible

Can a computer generate sensual experience? Not by regurgitating porno downloads or trawling fifties Hollywood pulchritude, of course. But by just doing what computers do.

The answer is yes. It happened yesterday.

VR's desktop, which was my cast-off, was suffering the electronic equivalent of Cheyne-Stokes breathing - prelude to interment at the dump.

Barry's diagnosis left no doubt: "... very slow boot time...", "... warning message displayed: registry corrupt...", "...could not read disk...", "... probably motherboard intermittently defective..."

My atheism does not extend to failing domestic appliances and I would have allowed it a final go at the B-minor Mass. But it could no longer read disks, poor thing. So I detached  its peripherals, read it the greatest expression of love I know of (Lady P; see home page display above), and bid it goodbye.

Barry's newly built replacement occupied the former tin box so the transition was muted. Then we started to check the features, notably the four USB sockets at the front. My camera was handy so I linked it up.

We were moving towards an epiphany.

The Canon Sure Shot presently has 155 photos on its chip. My desktop, also built by Barry, is still pretty quick. When attached to the camera it transforms the blank panels into photo thumbnails as I scroll down.

VR's new pal does the whole lot - Zap! - in a third of a second. In my book that's sensual, tending towards erotic. I wound down later with a Saint-Romain, a quite pricey white Burgundy.

PIC: The new computer occupies a humble place in VR's atelier. Her other interests are more elaborately displayed.

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.

Such stuff as dreams...

 

Where is the life that late I led?
Where has it gone? Totally dead.
Where is the fun I used to find?
Utterly gone. Gone with the wind.
Courtesy Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate.

In fact the singer is mourning the passing of more fleshy pleasures. Common decency prevents me taking up that theme but once forklift trucks ran sex a very close second in my earlier life. To the point where I must call a pedantic intermission: these models belong to the genus, Truck, Forklift, but some (notably the orange to the right of the green on the upper row) are more precisely described as Truck, Reach. I could explain the difference but won't. This is a time for nostalgia, not nuts and bolts.

Once my life was governed by the practice (It isn't a science.) of logistics which I will also avoid defining other than to say it is at the heart of industrial efficiency. Forklift trucks (FLTs) are an important tool in ensuring good logistics. And away with the blackboard.

FLTs are made in a cluster of developed countries and their names may be faintly familiar to you: Yale, Caterpillar, Lansing-Linde, Mitsubishi, Rolatruc, Hyster, Fiat, Toyota, etc. I wrote about their differences and photographed their liveries. The work took me round the world, wasn't over-demanding and allowed me to believe - briefly - I left behind the spoors of an expert. Certainly I was remembered but that was because of my coarse Northern upbringing.

FLT manufacturers have pleasingly detailed models made for publicity purposes. My collection amounts to thirty. When Zach enters my atelier his eyes rise yearningly but on this matter - if on no other - I am briskly discouraging: no you can't, and that's that. They're part of my past fun.

The Playstation imperative

I realise there are those who, having read my previous non-post, will think it was a scam - to discover how many comments might be generated from failing to post. It wasn't. The subject was prayer and it was deadly serious. VR warned me I was a fool to try, we went out for lunch at the idyllically tranquil Kilpeck Inn, driving back in an equable frame of mind I decided she was right.

Besides the roof had fallen in. Something horrible had happened to Zach's other grandmother, Nanna, while in Kuala Lumpur, this had impinged on Zach's parents (Occasional Speeder and D) and we found ourselves looking after Zach for two or three days. No sweat except that this time he came with a price tag. He had brought his Playstation and was insisting he be allowed to play it.

I must confess there is a TV in the room Zach uses. Hey, I know we should be feeding his ear'ole with a Strasbourg Goose diet of Lamb's Tales From Shakespeare. But Zach's a child of our times. This time next year he'll probably be watching The Killing, Episode 4.

The Playstation needed plugging into Z's TV.  Easy. But despite OS's best efforts it wouldn't work. Time for a phone call to the Ultimate Source, OS's husband D. Had she done this? Yes. Had she done that? Yes. Had she disconnected the digibox which ensures that the TV can receive digital transmissions - ie, work as a TV. No she hadn't (and neither had I, in my wildest dreams, imagined this might be necessary). So OS unplugged the digibox and, lo...

In retrospect it may have seemed callous that we were worrying about Playstations while Nanna was suffering, but of course there's a simple answer. Nanna wouldn't have profited from Zach's deprivation. Me? I was glad I'd pulled the piece on prayer. Cursing would have been closer.

Boring, and mean with it

Apologies for this post – it’s gonna be dull, I feel it in my bones. Or perhaps, more mysteriously, in my water.

I launched Tone Deaf to see if I could write about music. However musical examples are essential. YouTube works and there’ve been fascinating chases (eg, linking up with The Crow to find a decent Dvorak American quartet).

But, as my home page pic shows, I have my own resources. I could post via YouTube but techno-reasons discourage this. Instead, following Blogger, I have set up an intermediary site where I can store linkable files. I did this aeons ago when in a fit of hubris I recorded my own sonnets and I’ve resurrected the practise with Dame Janet (see Gilding the Gingerbread?).

This facility, provided by Box.com, is free but clunky. Click the link, then click Download, then click Run. This clunkiness is intentional since Box.com would love me to opt for smoothness at $15 a month. Believe me, I love you all but to the tune of $180 a year? Do you – after all – love me that much? Course you don’t. We’re very platonic here at Tone Deaf.

I mention this to explain the clunkiness and to ask you to forgive my parsimony. Incidentally, I get emails each time this facility is used so if news eventually percolates that I’ve cut my throat you can guess why. Oh wah! I wasn’t expecting love but wasn’t I worth a smidgeon of clunkiness?

Not only dull but maudlin. I’m ashamed. You all need something to help you wash out your eyes and ears. How about: the flute and harp concerto (WAM), Caravan (Joe Pass), Ticket to Ride (The Carpenters), the prisoners’ chorus (LvB - Ignore chat, coughing, metallic acoustic and too-quick tempo - it's got passion!). Links are all - ironically - YouTube.