Hooptedoodle #263 - The Airline and the Krell

I was not personally impacted by the dreadful systems failure which hit British Airways and their customers a few days ago - my heartfelt sympathy is extended to anyone whose holiday was destroyed, or who suffered personal discomfort or inconvenience - all of that goes without saying. I am interested to see that there will be an independent enquiry into what went wrong - I fear that there might just be a whitewash job, or that some poor department head somewhere will be the subject of a token beheading, but in principle I look forward to seeing what they come up with. This is something of a hobbyhorse of mine. Certainly the current official explanation that it was all due to a power surge of some sort seems so laughable that it is equivalent to the old catch-all, "the dog ate my homework", though, naturally, it would be unwise to pre-judge. Already, there is sinister mention of software support having been outsourced to India - erm - right...

There was a professor from Glasgow University on BBC Radio 4 this morning, talking about the boring but rather essential matter of system resilience. He talked a lot of sense - there is not much sense around on the radio at the moment (don't get me started on the Election).

If you will forgive me, I'll plead for two quick timeouts at this point; the first is a link to a post I wrote here almost 5 years ago - The Banks and the Krell - about the increasing scope for catastrophic system failures in business, and the implications for society in general. If you care to check that out, it will save me saying a lot of the same things again. If you do not care to, that's fine too.

The Krell's computer installation in The Forbidden Planet

The second is a short story about a car I used to own. It was a 1995 Mercedes - only Mercedes I ever owned, and it was a great car - not very exciting, but dependable, and built to last. The date is significant, because it was a period when cars were starting to be equipped with automatic sensors and systems which were intended to make life simpler for the motorist, but also meant that the family car was becoming more and more of a mystery to both the owner and the supposed mechanics at his local dealership.

After a while, my Mercedes suddenly started suffering frequently from a flat battery - eventually it was every morning. The dealer replaced the battery (at Mercedes prices, of course), and checked the car over - no problems. Well - not so fast. The battery was flat again the following morning - that's the new battery with the clean new labels on it. The car went back to the dealer, who kept it for two days and returned it with a clean bill of health. Battery was flat again the next day. A terse phone call prompted the offer of another replacement battery under the terms of the warranty.

In desperation I took the car to a proper automotive electrical engineer somewhere near Prestonpans, and within an hour he had identified the problem. The car was fitted with a special sensor, the entire purpose of which was to detect if the electric windows had been left open when the vehicle was locked with the remote key. If it found that any one was open, it automatically switched in the motors which closed the windows. Great idea, eh? Unfortunately, the sensor had become faulty, so that when the car was locked the system incorrectly detected an open window, and attempted to shut it. Since the sensor was faulty, of course, the car was never satisfied that the windows were now closed, and it continued to try to close them continuously until next time it was unlocked. This doesn't mean that the motors were grinding away - the motor would not actually run if there was any resistance (another safety feature), but it would keep checking and trying - silently - and by the next morning this would have consumed enough power to flatten the battery.

The engineer rang the workshop at the Mercedes dealer and discussed the options with them; I could pay £370 + VAT for a replacement system - no other possibilities. In fact there was one other possibility, but I'll get to that.

I talked it through with the engineer. I was probably going to sell the car within a year anyway, and I had never left - nor was I likely to leave - the windows open when I locked the car. If I did, the worst result would be an open window - without the keys, the immobiliser system (Ha!) would prevent anyone pinching the vehicle.

Thus my £370 + VAT would provide a complete solution to a problem which I was unlikely to have. The alternative was simply to remove the fuse from the bit of the system wiring which supplied power to the Windows-Open-When-Locked sensor - the cost of this would be zero, of course, though I might be at risk, however unlikely, of leaving the windows open by mistake. No brainer - I went for the cheaper solution.

There are many lessons like this, but that one stuck in my mind - someone had provided a costly, over-the-top, luxurious solution to a problem which did not seem terribly serious, and - after it became defective - had thereby generated a much more significant operational problem in my use of the car. Something wrong there?

This whole industry expanded at a crazy rate - huge cleverness being applied to provide solutions to problems which might or might not exist, in the holy names of convenience and (the ultimate trump card) safety. My wife's current car knows when it's raining, knows when you need to change gear, knows when it needs to switch on the lights, knows the numbers in the phonebook on her mobile, will give you running statistics on things you never even thought of, has a built-in satellite navigation system, has an intelligent cruise control system which can be set to maintain a minimum distance to the car in front and - of course - can park itself without your assistance. It's wonderful that a piece of everyday technology can do all these things, and some of them are definitely useful, but what's going on here? If my wife's car suddenly stops running, or if the doors decide they are not going to let her get in, she is well and truly stuck. There is no question of opening the bonnet and spraying WD40 on the plug leads, or improvising a temporary fanbelt replacement. She is stuck. All she can do is phone up on her mobile, and get a mechanic with a laptop to come when he can, and diagnose what the problem is.

Righto - our cars are very unlikely to conk out, compared with cars we've had in the past - this is the power of technological progress - but if they do then the degree of well-and-truly-stuckness may be of a different order from what we have seen in the past. Not only has our vehicle let us down, an event which we will not have expected and for which we will not have a back-up plan, but our greatly diminished residual experience of coping with emergencies, of applying flexibility and adaptability, of having contingency margins built into our Plan for Today, the unfamiliarity of having to switch on our own lights and wipers, of getting to Lancaster without having a robot tell us what to do - none of these things is going to be a big help.

To sum up - the technology looks after us wonderfully well, but if anything fails we can be more desperately exposed than we used to be.

Consider the mobile phone networks. Presumably your local (or national) service could be impacted by a power surge (surely not?), or a malware attack - it is even possible for natural events like unaccustomed levels of sunspot activity to cause technology headaches. It could happen. If it does, how many kids will be out of touch - lost somewhere on the way home from school? - how many mothers are going to be running around screaming OMG? - how many calls will not be made to rescue sevices in response to genuine emergencies? - how many online banking transactions will fail because the text message to the mobile with the passcode will not work? - how clever is your Apple Pay app going to be in the supermarket? Does any of us have any idea what we could do, in the event of what might be a fairly routine and low-level failure?

Well - you might, quite possibly - but I know that I don't, and I've thought about it - I used to have to think about things like this in my old job. My 2012 post about the Krell was mostly about the fact that we take these advances for granted, and we very quickly forget what it is they are  doing for us, and what it was that we used to do for ourselves before they arrived. We do not understand how the business which employs us works, because normally we do not need to; we do not know how to spell "laughs out loud" in full, nor how to read a map, because we no longer do things like that - there's no demand for that sort of knowledge.

If your airline of choice has a major systems collapse, and they do not seem even to know what it is, or what caused it, you may not find this reassuring. One day, aircraft may be so complex that only the onboard flight systems know how to fly them - with who knows what level of outside communication with global systems. In a world where, to save money, we are trying to achieve UK passenger trains manned by a single individual, how long will it be before the flight crew on a plane are just there to serve the coffee and make sure the computer is happy? At what stage will progress mean that they are no longer able to land the stupid thing without the technology?

Do you feel lucky, punk?

Hooptedoodle #262 - Owls of Derision - plus one more from the Small World Dept

Topic 1: Lately we've been puzzled to hear owls hooting during the day in the wood behind our house - even experienced countrymen like Dod the Gardener are puzzled by such behaviour. Well, we've now seen one in the garden - a couple of visits. The Contesse is still working to get a better photo - this is what she's managed to date.

Online experts suggest that it is a Little Owl, though we had thought it might be a Short-Eared Owl, more renowned for their daylight hunting. In the upper picture, you will notice that the blackbird sitting close by does not appear to feel at all threatened.

Topic 2: I only relate this story because it involves a couple of surprising coincidences - the subject matter may be of little interest, so I shall deal with it as quickly as might be decent.

My view on coincidences is boringly downbeat - they interest me, but I believe that the proportion of truly unlikely events in our lives is about as small as you would expect; when something unusual happens, however, we remember it clearly, so that our perception is distorted - we think remarkable things happen more often than they do. Get to the story, Foy...

Well, I've recently been trying to sort out my mp3 collection of the old BBC radio Goon Shows from the 1950s - many of the official published compilations of these shows were edited to drop the musical interludes, but most of mine are intact - sometimes a bit frayed, admittedly, but all the shows are complete. The Goon Shows had music of a good standard - apart from Wally Stott and the BBC's own orchestra, they also featured Ray Ellington's Quartet, and then there was Max Geldray, the virtuoso jazz harmonica player. All a bit dated now, maybe, but good stuff - and, anyway, nothing could be more dated than the Goons, dear boy.

Ray Ellington had a hot little band - on hearing them again, I was interested to note that his electric guitarist was exceptionally good - in fact he sounded most un-British, to be unkind about it. A little research revealed that he was Lauderic Caton, a Trinidadian, one of the leading pioneers of electric guitar on the English jazz scene in the years after WW2. He was friendly with, and a major influence on, a couple of the other lads of note of the day - especially Dave Goldberg and Pete Chilver. He was also noted for being a skilled luthier, and produced good-quality converted electric guitars in the days when it was impossible to obtain modern American instruments in the UK.

Pete Chilver circa 1948 - with electric guitar produced by Lauderic Caton

Goldberg I knew of - a Liverpudlian - but Chilver was a new name, so I read on. He shared a flat in London with Goldberg for a while, was very highly regarded - even by visiting American players - and played with (amongst others) the Ted Heath band and, for a while, Ray Ellington. Then, it seems, he married the sister of the girl singer in Heath's band (are you taking careful notes here? - there will be a test at the end), moved to North Berwick (which is where I live!) in 1950, retired from playing professionally, and thereafter managed his wife's family's hotel, the Westerdunes (now long gone). He also opened the West End Jazz Club, in Shandwick Place, Edinburgh - a place which I vaguely remember, though it was no longer a jazz club by the time I went there. Pete died in 2008, in Edinburgh.

Remarkable - so here's an important English jazz guitarist from the 1940s that I had never heard of, and he even became a prominent resident in my own neck of the woods! Only thing to do was email my old chum and former associate Hamish, for many years a hero and stalwart of the Scottish jazz scene, who has now also retired to the North Berwick area. Sorry to bother him, but did he know anything about Pete Chilver? - and I included some background details.

Hamish mailed back to say yes, he did know Pete a little - latterly Pete and his wife Norma retired and moved to Barnton Avenue, in Edinburgh. Hamish had been to his house there.

It seems that the handyman who now helps Hamish's wife around the house and garden used to work for Mrs Chilver - who is now in a care home, I understand - and only recently he had to dump a load of old acetate 78rpm masters of recordings from Pete's professional days [ah - drat]. Furthermore, the very night before he replied to my mail, Hamish had been a dinner guest at Westerdunes House - for many years converted into apartments, but now restored to its original state. Prior to this he had never heard of the place, never been there, and until my note was unaware of the connection with Chilver.

Westerdunes House

Now that is a bit of a long shot, I think. It looks a nice place - must have been a swanky hotel - healthier than the London clubs - a smart move by Old Pete? In passing, his friend Goldberg died of a drug overdose in the 1960s, when he was only 43. The Devil's music, your Honour.

Hooptedoodle #261 - Nellie

This is another farm at another time, but the farm I used to visit had an old
Ferguson tractor - I even drove it a few times. Two gears - one to go along
the road, one to work on the fields. Interestingly, you had to stop to
change gear!

 More ancient history - I last met Nellie nearly 50 years ago (there's a song in there somewhere!), but I was discussing her with the Contesse recently, and thought she might make for an interesting Hooptedoodle - at least I can be confident that I shall enjoy writing it.

Toward the end of my time at university (in Edinburgh) I was "going out" (did we really used to say things like that?) with the young lady who eventually became my first wife. She lived and worked in Edinburgh, but she came from the Borders country - her dad was a farmer. Eventually, as was the protocol in them days, it became necessary for me to visit the Borders to make the acquaintance of her parents, and so a trip on the SMT bus (to Earlston) was undertaken, and I duly presented myself for inspection.

I was completely out of my comfort zone - I was a townie, born and raised - an Englishman, what is more. Her father was nervous about my being from Liverpool - I think he expected me to steal the wheels from his car.

The trip went well enough - everyone was very kind and tolerated my almost total lack of social graces - but it was a real culture shock. The farm was out in the wilds, a few miles from Greenlaw, in Berwickshire - it was so quiet that they had to wake me up for breakfast, or I would have slept through most of each day. The food was a lot better than the Students' Union, as you might imagine, and the Old Man took me to the sheep sales at Kelso Market on the Saturday. Interesting, but all very unfamiliar, for me - like a trip to the moon.

I also had to get the hang of the fact that the locals would consider carefully what they were going to say, and then say it - very slowly. They were, after all, used to weighty matters such as whether it would be dry enough for the harvest in September, whether the shift in market prices suggested that next year there should be less barley and more turnips - that sort of stuff. I, on the other hand, was accustomed to speaking very rapidly, without any thought at all, so communication was something of a problem - I really had to work at it.

In fact, these are the workers' cottages from the farm in my story - I think that
Hector and Beth and Old Nellie lived in the second one along. There was an old
smithy just behind these cottages, but I guess it fell down decades ago.

This reached its most extreme form when I met Nellie, a lady from another age. Nellie lived in one of the farm cottages, with her daughter Beth, and Beth's husband, Hector Small, who was officially the tractor man but pretty much ran the whole farm singlehanded. Nellie was enormous - about 6 feet tall, and built like the proverbial brick outhouse - she must have been in her mid 70s, but she could still lift a sack of barley that I would have struggled with (I saw her in action when I came to help at the harvest). She had hands like millstones, her face was bright red - weatherbeaten, like a trawlerman's - and her teeth were terrifying - she didn't have many, and they were irregularly positioned, but what they lacked in numbers they made up in size - they were enormous - like horse's teeth. If I appear to be painting a deliberately unattractive picture, that's not the case - this is what she looked like. At harvest time, her standard working attire included men's overalls, tied with string below the knee, Nicky Tam style, to keep the mice out, and a man's flat cap, worn backwards. Scary.

This is an 1884 painting of Berwickshire farm workers - I'm sure it is, but
 I understand that the weird sun-bonnet is what is known as an East
Lothian Ugly, so these may be incomers!

Nellie and I really couldn't understand each other at all - not a word - but I didn't see a lot of her. Because of her age she only worked outdoors at busy times of the year; otherwise she helped the farmer's wife in the back kitchen. The house was early Victorian, and the layout was typical for a farmhouse of that period - the back kitchen, the dairy, the passage that led past the room which was called the kitchen (which was really the main living room, but was also where the cooking was done, on a massive range) to the hallway, these were all separate from the family rooms - and had no carpets, no fireplaces. Also the two servants' bedrooms up the back stairs - these houses dated from an age when the womenfolk who worked on the farm would perform manual work when it was the season, but otherwise would do domestic service in the farmhouse. Nellie used to keep out of sight when there were visitors, even wheel-tappers from Liverpool.

Workers near Earlston, Berwickshire, sometime before WW1 - those look more
like the traditional Berwickshire bonnet. Naturally this is long before any
experience of mine, but Nellie must have been a young girl around this time - this
is the culture she came from. We are always about - what? - two handshakes from history?

She spent her entire life working on the land. I'm not sure when the Bondager tradition actually died out in the Border country, but Nellie seemed like the last of a breed (the Bondagers are a worthy subject for a separate book of their own, but you will be relieved to learn that I am not an expert). She had never been to school - she must have spent her childhood moving between farms as the seasonal work dictated. She could not read. She knew everything there was to know about planting cabbages, and how to look after sick lambs, but little else. She used sometimes to travel to Kelso (10 miles away) in Hector's car; she had visited Berwick on Tweed (maybe 20 miles away) a few times, but the last occasion had been years before; she had never been to Edinburgh (40 miles away), though she knew of the place. Every year, when she took her holiday, she packed up an old cardboard suitcase and walked - yes, that's walked - to the village of Gordon, maybe 8 miles, and stayed a week with her unmarried sister.

The wonder of it all is that, in Hector's cottage, there was the first serious colour TV I had ever seen. It seemed enormous (this in the days when TV screens still had round corners), and Nellie was delighted with it. This medieval peasant woman who had never read a newspaper (and could hardly understand the radio) used to sit and watch not only the world news, but also the Martini adverts and the travel programmes, with glimpses of sophisticated living that she must never even have heard of. I still feel giddy when I try to imagine what on earth she thought she was looking at.

The farm was sold off years ago. Nellie must have been dead now for almost half a century; her kind has disappeared. The automation of farming and the better pay and conditions offered by jobs in the textile mills in the Tweeddale towns - all these things changed the economics and the lifestyles of the area. One legacy is the last vestige of a particular housing problem for the local authority; they are dying out, but there are still a good few elderly people who worked all their lives on farms, in tied cottages. When the last family member with a farming job moved off to the town in search of better things, the old folks were often left with nowhere to live. Once they have died off, that will be the end of an age.

Hooptedoodle #260 - The Vaults of Yesteryear

Very pleasant day yesterday - I had to go into Edinburgh to collect some re-glazed spectacles, and my wife agreed to make the trip with me. We had a very quiet, relaxed journey in on the 11:23 train.

The visit to the optician took about 20 minutes, so we decided to get some lunch in town before we made our way back to The Sticks. We went to the All Bar One which stands on the corner of George Street and Hanover Street - one of several places of this name in the city. I'm always a bit wary of big chains/franchises, but in fact we had a terrific lunch, with very acceptable service in very pleasant surroundings. Never been in there before, but one slightly weird aspect of my visit was that this place used to be my bank, once upon a time.

When I first came to Edinburgh as a student, back in the Late Iron Age, I opened an account with the National Commercial Bank of Scotland, entirely because they were the Scottish agents for the old Midland Bank, which was where my family kept their fourteen shillings and elevenpence savings.

The National Commercial didn't last long - they were swallowed by Royal Bank of Scotland around 1969. To prove they once existed, here's one of their old notes:

My account moved (by default) to RBS, but I was not particularly happy with my new bankers - primarily since the word STUDENT appeared in my employment details on their files - in fact it said STUDENT ACTUARY - and thus they refused to allow me an overdraft facility (and quite right too). Thus I moved to the Clydesdale Bank, at the big branch which was conveniently close to my workplace - the building where I had lunch yesterday.

I don't suppose I have been unusually unlucky with banks over the years, but there are certain themes which have followed me in my dealings with them. I left the Clydesdale in a state of high animation around 1978 - I had returned from a fortnight's holiday (in Scarborough, in fact) to receive a registered letter from a firm of solicitors, acting on behalf of John Lewis and Partners, the noted department store. I had, you see, purchased new kitchen furniture for my new house and - as was the way in those days - had signed up to repay the bill over 18 months. A standing order was set up, the paperwork was completed, and money was sent each month to JLP. Alas, the Clydesdale made an honest-but-inconvenient mistake when they cancelled my payment after 6 months instead of 18. Everything was correct apart from the year. The first I knew about it was some 3 months later when I was notified that Lewis's were proposing to take me to court to recover the debt. We sorted it out without too much trouble, and a new series of payments was set up from a brand new bank account at Barclays. Sadly, Barclays were very little use either, but eventually I took my business elsewhere simply because I was generally fed up with them, rather than as a result of some melodrama. In a small way, I guess this was progress.

Anyway, that was all long ago, and is only faintly relevant because yesterday I had a very pleasant steak sandwich and a glass of Guinness in the Clydesdale's old Ledger Hall. Slightly odd, unreal overtones - does this sort of thing lay old ghosts to rest? - not sure.

So, if you're in George Street, Edinburgh, around lunchtime, All Bar One is a very fair choice for a bite to eat. It used to be a bank once, but that is of passing interest only to older residents.

Hooptedoodle #259 - Allan Holdsworth - A Unique Voice

I only just found out that Allan Holdsworth died last month, at his home in California. Another guitar hero gone. Oh well.

Holdsworth was never everyone's cup of tea - often too intense, too inaccessible. Of course, the equipment freaks and the technique warriors and all the rest of them (and just about every moron you know probably plays guitar - there's me for a start) have consistently missed the point by an enormous distance over the years - how he played, and the hardware he used, are very small parts indeed of a complex whole; the important bit, in the end, is what he had to say musically, and his was a unique voice - sometimes a breathtakingly emotional one.

He will be commemorated for his pioneering use of polychords, his completely original, alternative approach to functional harmony, his terrifying technique (based on what has become known as the "hammer-ons from nowhere" style of legato playing - no-one ever played like Allan - probably it's just as well), and the characteristically wide intervallic leaps in musical phrases. He developed his own way of playing, and he didn't sound like anyone else. He was born and raised in Bradford, and he took a pride in being an awkward Yorkshireman - he developed his own approach because he didn't find anything else that could produce the music he heard in his head. I guess he really was a genius - we hear a lot about geniuses, but they are thin on the ground.

Even as a (sort of) disciple, I can't take too much of it in one sitting - a lot of the music is very angular - uncomfortable - and if I try to visualise what he is doing I have to go and lie down. If you are a fan, please excuse my bumbling effort to pay tribute. If you are not, then I suggest he was worth a listen. He was never hugely popular - you will see why - but once you've heard him you will recognise him.

Here's a ballad from 1989.

And here's a live piece recorded in Frankfurt 8 years later. The album version of this track (same line-up) uses double bass, which I think is a big improvement (more space to breathe), but this is still good.

 Thanks, Allan.

Hooptedoodle #258 - Woody's Breakfast

Thursday, 4th May 2017 - beautiful morning in South East Scotland - a young male Greater Spotted Woodpecker (dendrocopos major), immaculate in his new Spring outfit, enjoying his breakfast at 6am. I realise that I put lots of pictures like this on here, but I thought the Contesse caught this little chap rather nicely.

Woody knows nothing about UK council elections, or Brexit, or Trump - he just knows he likes peanuts.

Good morning, Woody!

Hooptedoodle #257 - Noddy and the Demon

Yesterday I put on an old sweatshirt - I'm doing some exercise bike sessions to get the old fitness worked up a bit before we start going cycling and hillwalking as the weather improves. I have a silly collection of old teeshirts and sweatshirts, mostly souvenirs of my days touring with jazz bands, which are useful for sweaty workouts. Yesterday's specimen is one of the few surviving long-sleeve jobs - this one from the Riverboat Jazz Festival, Silkeborg, in Denmark's Lake District, from 1994.

That was the trip on which I shared a hotel room with Noddy, the trombonist. Noddy was a gentleman, really - unusually correct for a muso. No trouble at all. He was married to a very loud lady who had been a professional singer of some note (as it were), and he tended to fade into insignificance when she was around. At that time we had some pretty wild drinkers in the band. The jazz festival in Silkeborg was based around a huge marquee venue in the centre of the old town, and there were some very late shows. One night we played a set starting at midnight, by which time a couple of the more seasoned members of the band were already unfit for duty (it's a funny thing, but it was always the supposed professionals who let themselves down in this way...). In particular, Jack Duff, the tenor sax man (an absolute monster of a player, by the way), was staggering drunk - he couldn't stand up but he could still play like an angel - maybe he'd have lived longer if that hadn't been a common situation.

We got through that set by the expedient of lashing Duffo to one of the big tent poles that supported the marquee - he was OK. We released him during the break, and carted him home after we had finished. There were a few characters like that - I found much of this rather unnerving, to be honest.

Anyway, back to Noddy. He was from Kent, originally - he had served as a bandsman in the army, and after that he got a job as a music teacher. I'm not suggesting that there was anything wrong with guys like Noddy, nor with the teaching system at that time, but the entrance criteria for instrument teachers in the schools seemed less rigorously based on academic qualifications than you might expect. I hadn't spent much time with Noddy, so sharing a room with him was a new experience. During off-duty spells we went out for a few trips to local attractions - we went to see Tollund Man (the prehistoric chap they pulled out of a local peat bog), we walked around the big lake, we had some good chats about music and films, and I learned that Noddy was another boozer. Not a raving drunk, like some of them, just a rather sad, quiet alcoholic, who did his drinking in private.

Tollund Man

When we went out for our walks around Silkeborg, Noddy would always excuse himself just as we left the room, claim that he had forgotten something, and go back. When he joined me downstairs, he smelled of whisky.

In his wardrobe he had a secret bottle of Canadian Club. As the week went on there were a series of successors to this bottle. I only knew the whisky was there because his wardrobe door swung open on the first day (by itself!), and there it was. I was fascinated, because Noddy obviously carried a chinagraph (wax) pencil, with which he recorded the level in the bottle each time he took a slug.

I was sorry that he had to keep his drinking a secret, and slightly miffed that he kept a check to make sure that outsiders (such as myself) were not pinching his booze. If he had simply told me that he liked a drink when on tour then I wouldn't have cared - would not have disapproved, and certainly would not have raided his supply. I mentioned this to Fergie, the trumpet player, and he came up with what we considered a great prank. He and I jointly purchased a half-bottle of Canadian Club of our own, which I kept hidden away, and for a few days I used to sneak a bit extra into Noddy's current bottle, so that the level was appreciably above the latest chinagraph mark. We were interested to see what happened - it seemed unlikely that he would accuse me of putting whisky into a bottle of whose existence I was supposed to be unaware. He would, in any case, have to out himself as a secret boozer to do this. We didn't go crazy - there were just a few days when the whisky level definitely went up instead of down.

If Noddy noticed then he didn't say anything. Disappointing, really. When the half bottle ran out I stopped, and presumably he just assumed he had made a mistake with his pencil. Ultimately it wasn't as much of a laugh as we had hoped, but since it would not have been a very kind sort of laugh maybe that's right and proper.

All long ago - Noddy, like so many others in that band, is no longer around. He died, quietly and politely, of early-onset dementia a few years ago. I hasten to add that I was very much a relative youngster in that company!

Hooptedoodle #256 - Demography at the Kitchen Window

Yet another Hooptedoodle post is a sure sign that not much is happening here on the hobby front - I am quietly doing some lightweight sessions of painting of Spanish grenadiers, but there won't be much to see of them for a little while.

As anyone who has read this blog before will realise, we are very enthusiastic about the garden birds here at Chateau Foy - since we live on the edge of a decent-sized wood, our bird feeders are very popular at this time of year - especially the sunflower hearts - they are definitely on trend - and there is always something to look at.

Among so many visitors, we are bound to get some oddities, and over the 17 years or so we've lived here we have, I think, seen three examples of albinism. There was once a completely white sparrow, and then there was a male chaffinch with a large white patch on his upper body - they both seemed quite healthy, and were around for a complete season without seeming to get picked on by the other birds.

Now we have this fellow - never seen one like this before. This, clearly, is a common-all-garden European Jackdaw, corvus monedula to our Roman chums, but he is supposed to be all black - his plumage is definitely non-regulation. Rather distinguished looking, maybe?

I am interested that we have seen so few albino specimens - I have no idea how many birds we see in a season - there are many millions of visits over the years, but many of these will be regular returners - at any moment on a sunny day we can see maybe 30 or 40 bluetits, maybe slightly fewer goldfinches, maybe the same again of chaffinches, and so on and so on, all in the garden at the same time, which is the sort of guide to numbers that the RSPB are interested in. How many of these were here this morning, yesterday, last year is unknown, though interesting. An albino is recognisable - you know there's only one of him - so it is hard to get a true impression. Whatever the lack of precision, albinos are obviously rare.

Which begs the further question - are they rare because there are very few hatched, or because they may be weak individuals who do not survive for long? No idea, obviously. The examples we have seen on our feeders seem vigorous enough, but then they would, wouldn't they?

Anyway - this is our current albino jackdaw - say hello. Seems a nice enough chap. It is tempting to give him a nickname of some sort, but it occurs to me that if this nickname made any reference to the colour of his plumage I might be in trouble.

So I shall call him Herbert. Make something of that, if you will.

Hooptedoodle #255 - Goodbye, Johnny B Goode

I would be embarrassed to be seen to offer up another me-too tribute - it's an activity I disapprove of. Private feelings are nicer and somehow more sincere when they remain private.

I am reminded by yesterday's news of the passing of Chuck Berry that - rather to my surprise, in the long run - he was a sort of hero of mine. Someone who made my life a little richer, in the influence he wielded as much as by his own work.

Already the media are wheeling out all sorts of has-beens from show business to make over-inflated utterances about pop music as Great Art, and all that. I really wouldn't know, and would hesitate to attempt an academic assessment.

Berry is especially significant for what he represents. A black man from St Louis, he began recording for Chess Records in the mid 1950s. Chess, bear in mind, were a specialist blues label who published artists like Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and Bo Diddley - primarily for black audiences - and a worse fit than Berry with the accepted marketed image of the popular music world of the day is hard to imagine. The spending power of the record-buying teenager was a new phenomenon, and major record labels in the US were struggling to push coiffed, sterilised, parent-approved products such as Johnny Tillotson, Fabian and similar - white, acceptable to the church, not overtly masculine. He was surprisingly old, too - if I recall correctly, his first commercial success, Maybelline, was released in 1955, when he was 29. That is positively ancient.

He was not an admirable character, in many ways. He had spells in prison - notably for tax evasion and (once) for statutory rape (a charge which looks a bit like police entrapment, all these years later). He is famous for being difficult to deal with, complicated, devious. I read his autobiography some years ago and was disappointed - it wasn't a great read, overall, and he came across as an unusually self-obsessed character. I suspect that I wouldn't have warmed to the great man's company. I saw him once, live - he was excellent, a consummate showman, but he was accompanied by a disappointing English tour-band which did nothing for him at all.

There is a definite thread of racism through many of the bad breaks which he suffered - especially in the early years, though his combative personality cannot have helped. He came through a hard school. I read that in the dance-halls and the provincial theatres he got into the habit of threading his guitar lead through the handle of his guitar case before plugging into his amplifier - thus making it impossible for anyone to steal the case without the matter coming to his attention. He also would not play until someone put actual cash into his hand. Incongruously, he still insisted on these technical safeguards when he was appearing at the Paris Olympia - a quirk which is not without a certain rough charm.

It would be wrong to claim that his records were history-changers in their own right - famously, he was very fortunate in that his music impressed the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the (white) rock bands that swept to power in the 1960s. Without that connection, Berry and a lot of his contemporaries would probably have disappeared without trace decades ago. This has all been much-discussed in the past - however it worked, it worked. I love him because of the unpretentious nature of the music (though he did tend to release thinly-disguised rehashes of his earlier successes), and his cute, street-poet lyrics, which offer an interesting social history of American youth.

This is getting close to a tribute, and I wouldn't want that.

Thanks, Chuck. That's really all I wanted to say.

Hooptedoodle #254 - Accidental Science Project

Today the Contesse visited her elderly mother (la Duchesse Veuve de Culdechat, who has graced these pages before) in a seaside town not too far from here, on the way to Ingerland. Alas, the poor old lady is not keeping very well these days; one result of this is that she has a house in this seaside town which she does not get to visit very often. In consequence, today my dear Contesse had to meet with an engineer, who was to service the heating system, and - as ever on these visits - a few oddities came to light, all connected with the strange, twilit world which surrounds houses which are mostly unoccupied.

[At night, they say, the stones do not sit peacefully with one another; the customary laws of Nature only apply sometimes, and grudgingly...]

For a start, it seems that the telephone at Maison Culdechat had not only disconnected itself, but may even have changed its number without outside encouragement. This may seem odd to the casual outsider, but to those of us who are more familiar with this twilit world it is just another example of the sort of thing for which we have to shrug and suspend judgement.

However, today's pièce de résistance (or "fixed impedance" as Marconi would have termed it - and, yes, that's Marconi Cheese) turned out to be a pork pie which had been in the fridge since some time before Christmas, we think. If you have ever wondered what such a thing might look like, here it is...

The Contesse was understandably aghast. With rubber gloves and anti-bacterial cleaner she removed the offensive object. The next twilit snag, of course, is that the Duchesse's dustbin almost never gets emptied, so the normal arrangements for domestic waste disposal in this case would fail to cope with an item of such toxicity. We shall draw a discreet veil over the actual steps which the Contesse took to get rid of it - let us simply say that we trust that Nature will, in fact, look after her own and reclaim the pie in the traditional way.

As a potentially useful byproduct, we may have unintentionally helped a local problem with excessive numbers of marauding seagulls - some herring gull is going to have a mighty sore gut by tomorrow. Or else he may have become resistant to all known viruses.

Hooptedoodle #253 - One for the Film Buffs

I was looking for old pictures of the area where I live, and - quite by chance - I came across this:

[Good grief, Foy, now what? You cancel the Siege of Newcastle, claim force majeur, and now you're fiddling around with... what, exactly?]

Well, actually, I have to explain that this is a photo of Brigitte Bardot (you probably worked that bit out), but it's taken on the beach behind my house - right here on the farm. This is quite a shock - I've grown used to thinking about General Monck and Robert L Stevenson and a few other notables having been around here, and I can cope with having a previously unknown castle within 600 yards of my house, but I never once thought of Brigitte. Well - not in that context.

It seems that in 1966 she was involved in a film titled A Coeur Joie (released in the US as Two Weeks in September), and this film was shot at a variety of places I know well, including Edinburgh Zoo (apparently), Dirleton and (ta-da!) our own Seacliff Beach, as seen here. These pictures also show her co-star, Laurent Terzieff, and blooming cold they look, September or no.

I was gently intrigued. I had a quick look around for reviews of the film, and to see if it is still available (only, you understand, because I wish to see some shots of our beach...), and found that the film is still available in French, without subtitles. There are some Region 1 editions of the English language version, but clips I've seen on YouTube suggest that the dubbing and reshooting with English dialogue is a thing of major embarrassment. So the French version seems a far better bet. However, reviews I've seen also suggest that this may be among the worst films ever made. Thus I am - how do you say? - put off a bit.

This shot shows, in the background, the end of the path by which we walk to our beach.
I never thought of La Bardot sitting there. The slope and the terrain vary from year to
year, depending how much of the beach is left in place by the Spring tides. Obviously
they had a fair amount of sand in 1966, but sometimes it's quite stony. I have to add that
the Contesse Foy's mother fell rather spectacularly at this very spot some years ago; fortunately
she did not injure herself, but we still treasure the memory...

Given a free choice, I would prefer not to watch Brigitte in an embarrassing movie. Not that I am a fan, of course, but because of my love of the art.

Anyone have any views on this minor classic of French cinema? It really doesn't matter - yesterday I didn't even know that a film goddess had once walked among our sandhills, so I can forget all about it quite easily. But, there again...

Hooptedoodle #252 - Hair, or Why I Never Made It in the Movies

This is not me

When I was five I had never thought about my hair. It was curly and a bit lumpy, I guess, but it was just something that my mother fussed over and brushed into shape. Then I went to school and there was a boy in my class named Alan Pashley. Alan had flat, shiny, black hair – it never moved, and you could almost see your reflection in it. This was my introduction to the world of Brylcreem, the world where some men just had it and other men just didn’t.

I wanted hair like Alan’s – more than anything in the world. I was so envious it hurt.

Denis Compton

At five I was not interested in girls, obviously, but even at that age I was sufficiently aware of the power of advertising to know that they would chase you down the street if you put some branded gloop on your hair. From that time on I always wished I could look like someone else – almost anyone else, in fact. I once tried a secret experiment with a blob of my dad’s Brylcreem, but it just produced a greasier version of the same chaotic, lumpy mess, so I then knew for sure that in my case this was not just a matter of grooming, it was simply that the raw material was hopeless.

Robert Beatty

Things were not helped by the fact that my dad devoutly believed that boys should part their hair on the left, same as they buttoned their coats left-over-right, without regard to which direction the hair grew in. It was a manhood thing.

Johnny Haynes

Like everyone else, I spent my youth agonising about my unattractive appearance – things improved very slightly when I was nineteen and I dared to change my hair, and get it parted on the natural (girl’s?) side. I’ve never been a big fan of the way I look, but you sort of get used to it as the years pass, there are other things to fret about, and you probably reach a stage where girls chasing you down the street would be a nuisance. And, of course, eventually the damn stuff starts to fall out, so the problem will be replaced by another…

Good Grief

Time passes.

My youngest son is now fourteen, and he doesn’t like his hair. It makes him miserable. Now there’s a surprise. Nothing is new. He was horrified by a recent photograph of himself, and when we reassured him that it was actually a good photo, and he looked fine in it, he was furious – our naïve approval of his hated appearance was the final straw. There is almost no limit to the things he has to put up with. No-one has ever been this wretched.

Maybe, come to think of it, some things have changed a little. When I was five, or even nineteen, there were very few actual film stars around – the rest of us did not expect to look like that – we all had crooked teeth, dodgy hair, moles, all that. Now the world is run by viral photos on social media – “products” are available to sort out your hair, everyone is expected to have good teeth, wear the right labels, cover themselves in tattoos, circulate hopeful selfies of themselves. If you do not look like a film star, pal, you are not trying. Maybe failure is more absolute, less excusable than it was in my day. Do not be ugly, have a pimple on your nose, etc, because not only will you feel bad about it, but your friends will crucify you on Instagram.

So we are trying to come up with a supportive, workable strategy to help our son. The first, and maybe most obvious idea is that he should get his hair cut rather more frequently, and keep it a little shorter. It might help – at the very least, you would think, he will have less of it to be offended by. He could try to get it re-styled, or set up some heavyweight grooming programme involving gloop and conditioner (and cost, and crap, and frustration, and effort, and wasted time in front of the mirror), but that is unlikely to work out well in the longer run, and merely adds layers of paranoia and hopeless struggle to the existing problem. We need to identify a calm moment, and try to form some sort of plan. Feasible would be good.

I fear that the grooming/gloop approach has become a colossal industry – the default way of life – many and vast are the fortunes made by exploiting personal inadequacy. The world is filled with pictures of kids who miss the point – selfies of 300-pound clones of Paris Hilton abound, daft photos of boys with a poor copy of someone else’s beard stuck on the front – just have a look at your Facebook friends’ friends’ friends…

Prayer for a fine Monday morning: Please send us a little peace. Let us remember that there are people in the world who have far worse problems than untidy hair – let us try to focus, just a little, on things that actually matter. Let us see heartless, exploitational advertising for what it is.