The refuge of a scoundrel. Pt. 2

This questionnaire aimed to check whether Powell's A Dance To The Music Of Time series of novels suited the applicant's tastes. I have widened its scope and may provide Anglo-psycho-analysis for those brave enough to respond

● If taken ill in, say, Stratford-on-Avon would you accept medical help from a hospital run on what you considered to be socialistic principles, or prefer to die?

● Do you think Shakespeare is a good or bad thing? If "Good", give three nouns, chosen for their originality, supporting this preference. If “Bad” write as much you dare.

● With a gun to your temple, would you be prepared to eat stuffed heart?

● Define, to the nearest nano-litre, the amount of vermouth in a perfect dry martini.

● What is the recommended speed (♪ = ?) for rendering La Marseillaise?

● Soccer: Vital, Intermittent, “I would rather open my veins.”

● Have you ever used the adjective "parthogenetic" verbally?

● In written form?

● Have you ever posed the question "Er, pardon me, did the Reformation come before or after the Renaissance?" in any European gallery?

NOTE: Be honest. Don't try to divine the questionnaire's intentions. Rationale and "correct" answers ina fortnight.

WIP Second Hand (47,817 words)
As Jennie and Ibanez entered the lounge Francine was struck by the way they matched each other. Both expensively dressed, he in his subtly textured Mao suit, she too in a two-piece, coloured a delicate light brown, halfway between rural and urban. How assured, how adult, they looked, moving with equal grace. While she sat awkwardly, her slung arm across her at an odd angle, her uncertainties probably evident on her spiky face. She the baby of the trio. Waiting to be ministered to by one, protected by the other. The fear latent and unspecified.

Hey, you're a consumer now

When I started work in Pittsburgh on January 2 1966 my nearest were still in the UK. I was alone, living at the Y. Never YMCA, by the way, always "the Y". Later I was to attend recitals at "the Jewish Y".

Not really alone. The whole of suburban Pittsburgh, both genders, all levels of income, took me to its collective bosom. Guiding me not to parade my atheism, not to reveal I'd belonged to a leftie trade union, not to pronounce it schedule instead of skedule (They failed; some out of pure transatlantic good-heartedness adopted my pronunciation), not to sign cheques with an illegible signature.

Most of all they urged a more generous attitude towards spending. They were horrified when I bought second-hand paperbacks; thought I'd catch something. Alarmed when I looked at apartments in "unsuitable" areas. Appalled I'd gone for a party-line telephone. Laughed helplessly when I furnished a bedroom and a lounge with a package costing $300 (£187).

They couldn't understand why I was delaying getting a TV because I lacked the money. Some lurched away when I bought US wine at the state liquor store. Hard liquor they understood; to them wine = wino.

I'm in danger of sounding ungrateful. Those same people took me to ball-games, invited the family to barbecues, introduced us to take-away pizzas (both take-aways and pizzas were quite novel), offered to lend me money when I had to fly home for my mother's funeral, and agonised over the fact that our younger daughter - born over there - hadn't been christened.

But I'd moved from the world's most expensive city where poverty was chronic. Adjustments took time and some never happened. Our daughter flew back to the UK in 1972 still unchristened.

It's what your legs are for

Remember the Golden Age? You don't? How about an all-purpose British Golden Age?

There's crusty bread, England beating Germany at soccer, Forsyte Saga on telly, corner shops full of chat, steam engines, doctors making house calls, an Austin A35 in your driveway, Sam Kydd in his hundredth movie, empty roads, beckoning beaches, trustworthy bobbies, rosy-cheeked milkmen, newspapers without swear words.

Someone on The Goon Show prophetically saying: It's great to be alive - in nineteen fifty-five.

Now you remember. Wonderful. Truly golden. Whoops, I've forgotten one thing: queues (US: lines).

Queues encircling cinemas, queues (in effect) standing in train corridors, sitting-down queues in doctor's waiting rooms, outside fish-and-chip shops, for cheese, for bacon, for fireworks, for going in, for coming out. Definitely the Golden Age of Queues.

Computers? Wouldn't have one in the house. I remember when you waited an hour to renew a car disc. When you saw the main feature film minus ten minutes. When buying half a pound of butter took quarter of an hour. When you "booked" a long-distance call to Liverpool. When you didn't know How? or When? and had to wait a whole weekend to find out.

I read that physicists rarely cite gold illustratively because gold isn't atomically interesting. Tell you what: add me to that long queue of physicists.

WIP Second Hand (Still 47,571 words.
I’ve been blogging like mad)
“It won’t be good news.” Francine shook her head vigorously. “What am I saying? It’s your house. Forget what I said.”

“Not if it worries you. But I think I need to know why.”

“Let me see outside.” Francine got up, created a tiny gap between the curtains. “Hell and damnation. A Morgan in the driveway.”

“Is that significant?” asked Jennie.

“My past life come to haunt me.”

The refuge of a scoundrel? Pt. 1

I had three goes at Anthony Powell's twelve-volume series, A Dance to The Music of Time, and failed each one. Mainly due to his appalling writing style (eg, His manner of asking personal questions was of that kind not uncommonly to be found which is completely divorced from any interest in the answer.), an upper middle-class avalanche, and a huge cast of characters.

The key turned with vol. 10 (Books Do Furnish a Room), once I discovered how that memorable title came into being. Since then I've read the series two or three times.

Why did I persist? Well, Evelyn Waugh liked the books and reviewed the later volumes as they appeared. For another they are genuinely funny but indirectly, as with Proust's great series which Powell admired. Funny in an English (note: not British) way, often very cruel: for instance, an academic has a stroke at a formal dinner and comedy emerges from the way others react. Vols. 6 - 8 (The Kindly Ones, The Valley of Bones, A Soldier's Art) contain a sharp and frequently mordant account of our country at war. And, overtopping everything else, the series gives birth to one of the greatest fictional creations ever: Widmerpool.

It's a decade since I last read the books and my judgment may be deliquescing. But - how peculiar! - they make me quietly proud to be English. Foreigners (and many Anglos) who have tried and failed may be astonished and outraged by that. In my defence I can only say I am not and never have been a natural patriot; National Service taught me not to be.

Would I recommend the series? Only I fear after receiving satisfactory responses to a set of questions/tests. In short: no. But if your curiosity is aroused, well, let's take partners. 

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.

Perhaps I should bellow louder

A moment of gloom? A time to be philosophical? Goodbyes in the air?

Beth (Cassandra Pages) and Lucy (Box Elder), two bloggers whose stuff I read assiduously, have within the week referred to a  falling-away of blog comments. Lucy hints at the withering away of blogging itself, swamped by Facebook and tweeting.

And I thought it was just me! A month or so ago I posted on a somewhat personal topic and got zero response. Something of a first.

The paradox with Tone Deaf  is that I have disabled the hickie which includes my own visits to the blog and pageview stats are going up and up. The five short stories posted over the last two months scored especially well.

Neither Facebook nor tweeting appeal. I support brevity, hence the 300-word limit, but I'm not into Post-Its. For me blogging is writing or nothing, although writing which no one reads can be uphill.

For what it's worth I'll keep doing what I have been doing, bellowing down the well until the absence of echo confirms that there's no one out there. Then probably write some more.

WIP Second Hand (46,359 words)
In Merton Park, just off Erridge Road, amid vistas of thirties semis as economically remote to Francine as Eaton Square, Fairholt Road mouldered like a graveyard of late Victorian architecture. Three structures – semis but too massive, grey and mournful to be recognised as such – awaited time’s equivalent of the abattoir’s fixed-bolt. Kindly destruction and crass re-development.  Houses that had passed the point at which dilapidation ceases to be passive and becomes pell-mell. In three frontages embracing a total of twelve bow-fronted windows, four gravestone window ledges had given way to subsidence and broken in the middle – like permanently dribbling eyes of the very old.

That wondrous work

Pet owners gradually resemble their pets, it is said. But what about car owners and cars?

BMW A medieval link here - an instinctive belief in droit de seigneur. True, maidens escape depucelation but drivers assume an absolute right to go first at T-junctions, to overtake on roundabouts, to take the only parking space, etc. I know. I owned a BMW. Traces of its influence still linger.

AUDI Now challenging BMW for the seigneurial role. Never seen travelling at less than 90 mph on motorways. I owned one of these too. A coupé yet. Say no more.

VOLVO The safe large ones. Car of preference for managers of funeral homes. The automotive expression of - in the midst of life we are in death. Always black.

SUZUKI SWIFT Very small women. Without a substantial cushion drivers are doomed to see life through the steering wheel.

LAMBORGHINI Wealthy people on a diet. Getting into and out of these subterranean cars constitutes the owner's sole exercise.

MORGAN Bald men over fifty who endured a circumscribed childhood and are unaware the car top is erectable.

SSONGYANG Therapeutical transportation for those with speech defects.

SKODA Octavia with turbo-charged diesel engine and six-speed auto/manual gearbox. Men who believe they are at Level 5 (Jacques, etc) but who are in danger of leaving Level 6 behind.

ANY FIFTIES UK CAR Poets and others uninterested in movement.

WIP Second Hand (46,129 words)
His clothes were casual but they involved a degree of calculation. Light beige chinos with an expensive shirt, tailored to show off the flatness of his stomach and the pinch of his waist. Hair styled to look ragged. On the walls enlarged photographs of bridges… Bookshelves but no books. Why bother when a mouse got there quicker than flicking pages?