Hooptedoodle #182 - Coping with a Small Irregularity

In the course of every day, unexpected things happen, and the occasional emergency arises. It sounds irritatingly worthy to suggest that we should always expect the unexpected – I had years of management courses which took people’s money off them in exchange for advice like that; it differs in degree only from those other all-conquering life strategies, (1) always be right, and (2) win the Lottery every week.

Expecting the unexpected probably just comes down to application of commonsense, don’t do anything too risky, and be prepared to think on your feet. Know where the stop-cocks are for the water supply, have spare car-keys – stuff like that. Do not put the TV in the bath, do not use your food-processor on top of the Himalayas during a thunderstorm – user guides for just about anything you buy nowadays will be stuffed with sound-but-annoying advice of this sort, in 17 languages.

A real emergency, of course, puts everything else into perspective – my wife broke her shoulder recently (she has now completely recovered, I am delighted to say), and we had a couple of months when a great deal of what we regard as normal procedures and normal priorities just went out of the window, yet it all seemed quite logical and straightforward. Most of the time, you just find you know what to do if something goes wrong, but we do take a lot for granted, I think.

A couple of days ago we got a bit of a fright. My son has his “den” on the ground floor of our house – before the property was altered and extended, 10 years ago, this was one of the bedrooms of the original bungalow cottage which forms the oldest part of the house. My son is coming up 13, and he is, to be honest, a bit heavy-handed these days – he flies about the place at great speed, crashing into walls and skating across tiled areas – he opens doors with a karate chop technique which we have discussed at length in the past. Well, it would be unfair to point any fingers, but the lock on the den door finally collapsed two nights ago. Two I-told-you-so’s come to mind:

(1) I told him, many times, that he would eventually bust the lock

(2) More seriously, I told myself, also many times, that the lock didn’t feel too healthy, and I should do something about it before it broke

As with all I-told-you-so’s, repetition did not help – eventually we become deaf to them.

My son had been out all day with his mother, a day which included his swimming coaching session and a visit to a shopping centre, and his tea was being prepared when suddenly he was trapped in his room. The door handle turned, after a fashion, but the lock was unmoved, so to speak. The door-handle turns a square-section bar which fits into a square socket in a cam, which turns the thingme that pushes that wassname that pulls the how’s-your-father that unfastens the door. After we had assured him that we would have him out of there in no time, I removed the brass handle from the outside, took out the square bar and found the extent of the disaster – the alloy rotating cam into which the bar fits had disintegrated – shattered into fragments. There was nothing left to rotate or poke or fiddle with to get the door open.

So you stop, and you think for a moment – there is always a way, if you just think. I was, of course, thinking of solutions which stopped short of breaking windows, removing door frames, cutting through wood panels etc. No good. If we had planned to trap him forever in his room, we could not have done such a perfect job. Since the door was obviously not going to open, the first priority was to get my son out of there so that we could produce a permanent fix with less immediate panic. “Remove any threat to life” – very sound.

The window – he can climb out of the window! Well, the windows have security bolts, and there is no key for the bolts in that room. OK – if he unlatches the main window catch, the window will move about three-quarters of an inch, which would be enough to get a key through if I climb up a ladder and poke it through.

No good. The windows have expanded with the humidity, and are stuck fast, we would have to do a lot of damage to lever them open, even a bit.

We can slide the security bolt key under the door! – no – the floor is tiled, the door is a heavy, wooden panel door and the gap underneath it is tighter and neater than you would expect to see outside of an engineering facility. You could just about slide through a piece of paper bearing a message of hope.

OK – we can break the window if we have to – if we have to get him out, that is a possibility. Not really – this is double-glazed, toughened glass – anything short of a sledgehammer is not going to do much damage, and we really don’t want broken glass flying around the den.

Now I have a long-standing friendship with Ed, who is a joiner and (wait for it) locksmith! Ed has helped me out of a few holes in the past, and I have his phone number on the wall behind my desk. Excellent! The final, cruel, show-closing snag is that Ed had a serious fall from a fire-escape last year, broke his spine in a couple of places, and – last I heard – is recovering slowly (with titanium bolts inserted) and is unlikely to work again in the foreseeable future.

The perfect trap. We reassured my son that we would have him out as soon as possible, and he happily settled down to enjoy the remainder of his DVD.

It was worth a shot – I rang Ed’s home. His wife told me that Ed had started doing some light jobs again, but that he was out in his van – I might get him on his mobile. It was now 6pm. I rang him on his mobile and – a rarity – actually got to speak to him. Normally in the past I have merely got to develop my relationship with his answering service.    

Suddenly things started going right – very like the old children’s story about the old woman who couldn’t get her pig to jump over a style until a whole string of other prerequisites fell into place. Ed agreed to come around straight away, and duly turned up within 25 minutes. I had spent the 25 minutes steeling myself for the mess and expense of what was obviously going to be a bit of a demolition job.

"Dog! Dog! Bite pig!"

Ed arrived, took out a single sheet of flexible silicone, wiggled it round the angle between the door and the frame, and bingo – the door opened. No fuss, no damage, no drama. I would not have believed it was possible. My son had to interrupt his DVD and get his meal after all, and I paid Ed for his time and the call-out, and subjected him to an embarrassing amount of thanks.

Next morning I went off to a wholesale hardware store in Edinburgh and bought nine (that’s NINE) lock inserts, same size and spec as the broken one – the locks are almost all the same type in our house, and they were all installed ten years ago. I am now going to work my way around the place systematically and replace any unit that is showing signs of wear or not turning properly. I have done two so far – I’ll work away at them. It’s fiddly and sometimes surprisingly mucky, but I’ll keep at it. I’ve also ordered some silicone sheet (in passing, I find it slightly alarming that you can purchase burglar’s kit on Amazon, but I have no complaints) and two types of lock lubricant.

Panic over – on a world scale, this was an insignificant event, and it was solved quickly and simply in the end, but just for a little while I couldn’t see what we were going to do. We watch disaster movies about earthquakes, we hear on the news about tidal waves and the chances of an asteroid hitting Philadelphia, but it comes to something when you suddenly can’t open one of your doors, and a member of your family is trapped. I, for one, have to learn to cope with the small stuff rather better.

My grandma would have told us, "Don't wait until it's raining before you fix the roof". She was a smart woman, my grandma - infuriating, but smart.

Hooptedoodle #180 - Donkey Award - Performance Parenting

Yesterday I drove into the village, to visit the Post Office in order to mail a couple of parcels. Yesterday was Monday.

Monday morning is not recommended in our PO. Monday is Pension Day, and the place is filled with queuing seniors, complaining about how cold it is, or how hot it is, or how wet it is, or how expensive everything is now, or about the ridiculous time they have to spend queuing for their pension each week, listening to all this moaning.

Thus I did the smart thing, and went in the afternoon. The Post Office was pretty much deserted. I was vaguely aware that there was one person being served already, and I was next in the queue. As usual, I went into a sort of dream, half watching the TV screen in the corner, which shows ads for a local restaurant which closed last year, and promotes a foreign-currency exchange deal the Post Office was running a while ago – probably last year, in fact. You know the type of thing. I rely on public information services like this to keep me on the ball.

Then it was my turn, and the previous customer – a young woman with two very small children – came past me with a pushchair, conversing loudly with someone else whom I had obviously not seen, so I stood aside to allow her companion to pass. There was no companion. This lady was involved in a remarkably voluble conversation with her children, though she was not, in fact, looking at them. She had with her a little girl toddler – maybe 15 months (I’m not good at this stuff) – who clung to the handle of the pushchair, and an infant of just a few months in the chair itself. The little girl was muttering incoherent monosyllables, which had no apparent place in the conversation, and the younger child’s repertoire was probably limited to vomiting and crying, not much else.

One doesn’t like to gawp at the afflicted, so I got about my business, while the mother was engaging the kids with an explanation of how Mummy would have to go to the organic delicatessen, since their vegetables were so much nicer than Tesco’s, and they had soya milk. I could still hear her after the door closed behind her. I exchanged a quick glance with Amir, the postmaster, but Amir is a gentleman, and he merely rolled his eyes upwards very slightly. You would have to know Amir to detect it.

My business was simple and quick, and I left the Post Office to find that I was directly behind the mother and kids in the street. She had a triangular rucksack on her back – as many organic vegetable eaters seem to carry, I find – it may be an item of official issue, though it might also have to do with the need to cart around everything required to ensure their kids are protected from the toxic world of fluoridated water and environmentally-hostile detergents in which the rest of us have to struggle.

Since we are now into the holiday period, and our village is a seaside resort, I had parked my car about half a mile up the High Street, and I now found myself heading in the same direction as Mummy and the kiddies. She was deafening, and still she went on – and still her monologue seemed somehow to be directed at everyone around. I crossed the street to get away, and strode past them, but I could hear every word. I don’t like to find that I am irritated by things like this – it provides more unwelcome evidence that I am an antisocial old hermit – but I was definitely nettled. Maybe it is my upbringing, maybe it’s the generation I come from, maybe it’s something more instinctive and older than that, but there is a certain hectoring tone of female voice which just oppresses men, I think. It is probably designed specially, through years of research, using audio spectrometers and electrodes on volunteers’ scalps. It is found among schoolteachers, librarians, council employees, committee chairpersons and, frequently, young mothers with more education than they require for the job. As an aside, I might mention that, in her day, Mrs Thatcher on the radio could trigger the same response. I must hold several world standing-jump records from my attempts to switch her off before the third word came out. That, of course, was when I was in my jumping prime.

Back to the High Street…

“Oh look,” roared Mummy, “we are going near Daddy’s office, aren’t we? Daddy’s got such a lovely new office, hasn’t he?”

“Bubbubawama,” said the daughter.

“Yes, of course he has,” thought every passer-by within 100 yards.

By the time she reached the Golfer’s Rest, an inn, I was well ahead, but she was still in full flow.

“Oh, look at all the men standing outside the pub with their filthy cigarettes – how horrible – they will all become sick, won’t they?” This easily loud enough to carry to the little group outside the pub.

I couldn’t hear what the daughter said this time, but I’m sure it was profound.

Yes, yes - quite so, but could you do it quietly, please, and give us all a break?

I was delighted to reach my car, and drove home with the music turned away up – yesterday it was Ray Charles.

All right then. What is wrong with this picture? This young lady obviously has the very best of intentions, and we know it is important to speak to little children, since that is how they learn about the world. We may debate this particular Mummy’s views, but why would little children need to be taught that it is acceptable to address one’s opinions and life-values in a pompous, self-important manner so that everyone within sight can hear them? Just whose benefit is this little show for? The kids? The passers-by? Mummy herself?

I really don’t like to be a grumpy old sod, and I’d prefer not to pass unqualified judgements on people I don’t even know, but what is all this about?

Opinions, please, on a used £10 note to the usual box number at Chateau Foy.

Hooptedoodle #179 - Unky's Accident

Liverpool Tramways' Lambeth Road Depot - Unky worked here and at
Edge Lane Works in the 1920s and 1930s

In a previous post I told of what we managed to piece together of the war experiences of my Great-Uncle Alf (always known to my immediate family as Unky). I was reminded of a further story of Unky while talking to my mother recently, and I thought it was amusing enough to add to the library of tales of my long-dead kin which feature here from time to time.

Unky came from Preston, in Lancashire. He and his father (and thus the whole family, including my maternal grandmother) moved to Liverpool in the 1920s. His father (my mum's Grandpa Hindle) had worked with the railways for most of his life, and the family had moved between "railway" towns with his job over the years. My grandmother, for example, was born in Nuneaton. Anyway, Unky and his dad came to Liverpool in order to get jobs with the Liverpool City Tramways, and in fact Unky worked for them (and their successors) until he retired. Because of the move to Liverpool, some years later my grandmother (Unky's kid sister) met my grandfather, without which fortunate circumstance this blog wouldn't exist, for one thing.

Velocette like Unky's

He was always a natural mechanic, Unky - always a petrol head. He was already getting on a bit when I knew him, but he still had a Norton motor-bike, and at some time I remember him having a water-cooled Velocette. He rode motorcycles until he reached an age where he could no longer stand them up again if they fell over, and then he bought himself a car.

Well, actually, he bought a van. After working out what was the cheapest vehicle available, taking into account second-hand price, fuel economy, insurance and taxation, he bought himself a Reliant 3-wheeler van - a grey one. I remember that it always stank of petrol, so presumably something leaked, and my mother wouldn't let me travel in it in case it exploded. The back of the van was always full of bits of motorcycles and old rags.

Reliant van - obviously this is not Unky's actual van, but it's
about the right year, and I think his looked like this

[Before we get into the Tale of the Accident, I can tell you that it was all right in the end - he wasn't injured - so now you may relax and enjoy the scenery without getting anxious.]

Unky used to go everywhere in an enormous, smelly old raincoat - apart from the smell of petrol and engine-oil, I think it must have been rather like the coats worn by cavalry in the ECW - capable of standing up on its own - maybe even of walking away on its own. He had worn this coat throughout his biking days, and now he drove his van in it.

One day, in about 1958, he was driving his van along the East Lancashire Road, which is a sort of expressway which connects Liverpool and Manchester, and he was lighting a cigarette (Capstan Full-Strength - always) when he dropped his lighter, and it rolled under the passenger seat. Unky reached down with his left hand, behind the seat, to retrieve it, and his arm, in the thick coat, became stuck behind the passenger seat - he couldn't get it back, so he was now driving one-handed along the East Lancs, with his left arm jammed down behind the passenger seat.

We know exactly what happened next, since he dined out on the story for some years afterwards. He took his feet off the pedals, placed them flat on the floor and lifted himself so that his backside came clear of the driver's seat, and he levered himself up on the back of that seat (no seat belts in those days).

He never found out whether this would free his left arm, because at this point the back of the driver's seat (which was a very crude fibreglass moulding, underneath the upholstery) snapped off with a noise like a rifle going off, and Unky shot backwards into the rear of the van. The vehicle, out of control, tipped over onto one of its front corners and one rear wheel, and described a graceful circular path until it came to rest in the middle of a flower bed on the grass verge, just outside the town of St Helens, fortunately without hitting anything.

A passing motor-cycle cop saw the whole incident, and rushed over, but was temporarily nonplussed to find that there was no-one driving the van, since Unky was lying in the back in some disorder, under a pile of junk. The van was recovered, but was written off. He was subsequently charged with driving without due care and attention (or whatever the offence was called in those days), though he was never fined or convicted, and he was charged four pounds seven shillings for repairs to the municipal flower bed.

Capstan - Unky chain-smoked Full Strength; he survived the motorbikes
and the Wehrmacht, and even getting bombed at Dunkirk, but the Capstan
got him in the end

The Pride and the Passion (1957)

I was reminded by a post on Stryker's splendid blog of my appreciation of CS Forester's two novels of Napoleonic land warfare in the Peninsular War - Death to the French and The Gun - and of the travesty of a film version of The Gun which staggered into cinemas in 1957, under the title The Pride and the Passion.

It would be possible to devote a very long criticism to this film, highlighting the complete lack of respect to both history and Forester's fine book, the awful characterisations and accents, the unrelenting flood of moronic national stereotypes and, especially, the spectacular switch of the plot to replace one of the guerrilla leaders with Sophia Loren; I shall rise above all this, and I merely offer a couple of glimpses, for those who have not seen this epic and for those who, like me, have seen it but may not be able to believe how bad it was.

Behind the impressive branding this was, as you will observe, a joint production by the Reader's Digest and Miss Bentham's class at Beaconsfield Primary School, but it cannot be faulted on expense or dedication to tasteless excess. Here is the assault on Avila, which is stirring stuff, though you may feel that the French could have been a bit more businesslike about the defence. I recall that my cousin and I, after we had seen it, were not surprised that poor old Sophia was wounded in the chest, since, if only from the point of view of proportional surface area, that seemed a very high probability. Shame, though.

Whatever else the French could have done better, I certainly hope they executed the uniform consultant - and you've seen nothing - wait till you see the cavalry. I was tempted to see how cheaply I could get a DVD of this film, but I haven't found one cheap enough yet. I shall continue to keep an eye open. In the meantime, perhaps you would join me in a quiet salute to the real CS Forester.

Waco - again...

Still trying to get my head around breaking news of the biker shoot-out in Texas. Someone will be making a note of the casualty figures. All we need now is for some hero to start reminding us how the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution allows (as a divine right) something which was originally intended to let the militia carry muskets.

Waco - how aptly named

I realise Texans are very keen on their guns. I just wonder, are there any grown-ups at home?

Hooptedoodle #170b - Scammers - Thoughts at 3am

Well, I’m now getting daily phone calls from the scammers, so I guess we must be on some priority list or other. Unless something remarkable happens, this should be my last mention of phone scamming – these guys are already a huge drain on everyone’s funds, time and patience, and I’m probably one or two posts past the point of having said quite enough.

However, I do think that anything we can do to maintain awareness is worthwhile. I had a couple of emails in response to the Donkey Scammers posts which described some very tragic instances of people being victimised, and they served to remind me that, while ridiculing the perpetrators may help me to cope at a personal level with the affront offered by their mere existence, it stops some way short of actually making them amusing. I confess I have found this episode quite upsetting, and I am fortunate enough to be pre-equipped with an understanding of how the scam works, how to recognise the calls, and sufficient technical savvy and specific case history to fill in some gaps.

For the moderate sum of £75 I have now ordered a new, replacement, 3-handset phone which will enable us to solve this problem once and for all – it has a sophisticated range of options allowing the user to block selected individual numbers (including the one that just phoned), all international calls and a whole raft of other helpful alternatives, including a facility to accept or reject individual calls, identified by the user’s settings. I will not have to change my phone number (which would have been a catastrophic thing to do, and – since we are ex-directory anyway – would only give us a short relief before we were back on the scammers’ lists; I understand that they buy their lists from staff working for real phone companies; money will always win over security - of which more later).

This new kit will arrive Wednesday; a little set-up effort and we should be well protected. I still feel very uneasy – there is a brooding malevolence out there, somehow. A few days ago, when we put down the phone on a scam call without answering, the caller rang back and left a voice message. He said, “I know you are there, sir – I am going to call you all day until you speak to me”. We played it back a few times – there he is – the enemy – he even thinks this is funny. Creepy. He is, in fact, a creep.

Not a huge deal – we know he’s there, we aren’t going to answer (and he did try another 5 times in quick succession); it is reasonable to assume he can’t spare enough of his premium, dollar-earning time to waste in chasing us, and it would cost a lot of international call-time for him to deprive us of our phone service by staying on the line. We can, in any case, manage without our landline phone for a little while. So what the blazes is he playing at? He knows that we are not going to do business with him, that, apart from accidentally, we are not even going to pick up his call – we can see who and where he is from the caller display. No chance. Is he now prepared to commit some time to just causing a nuisance, trying to intimidate us?

God knows. I sincerely hope that his god knows. It does not help a great deal to know that he and his pals will move on and attempt to cause loss and damage to other innocent souls, but at least by Wednesday night we will be off the hook until someone thinks up a new scam.

That’s what is bothering me most – that is the Theme at Three in the Morning. There is a comedic side – years ago, when we were students, my cousin and I used to tell each other stories (usually in the pub) about the Land of Bong, where things were usually ridiculous extrapolations of what we saw around us in the Land of England.

At one point (mugging must have been a growth industry at the time – or at least was getting a lot of publicity) we explored a situation where mugging became such a successful way of earning a living that everyone abandoned any other form of employment, and became a mugger. That’s right – for a while (at least until 10:30pm one evening in the Rose of Mossley) the entire population of the Land of Bong became muggers – they roamed the city streets, trying in vain to find other muggers who still had watches or cash, breaking each others’ heads and having a generally unrewarding time. [Parallels with a modern economy in which everyone is in a service industry, or is a scammer, and nobody makes, mines or grows anything are interesting, but a digression at this point.]

Imagine, then, if the phone scamming industry is so successful, and is such a colossal currency earner, that eventually no-one in Mumbai or Kolkata does anything else – in particular, the police and security forces have disappeared. They can only prey on outsiders – and they are restricted to outsiders who speak a language they can more or less cope with [if you answer your phone and speak French they will hang up, at present]. Preying on outsiders has some other advantages – it is easier to be contemptuous of people from another culture, easier to be untroubled about the morality of one’s actions. [The term “mug” was a boon to muggers, since it implied that there was something wrong or comically incompetent about the victim, and thus that in some way his fate was partly his own responsibility]. But this is a growth industry – what happens when everyone they can possibly phone is already working in the same industry? When Rajasthan – or the whole world – turns into the Land of Bong?

My cousin and I realised, all those years ago, that a criminal industry only works if there is still a residual non-criminal world to feed off. This isn’t philosophy, just economics. The anarchy implicit in criminal action must not completely wipe out the ordinary, structured world which contains people with watches and cash, or it will starve itself to death. So there is a balance (by some bizarre, unhinged definition) which would seem to limit, for example, scamming activities. The calls have to be rare enough to still find people who haven’t had one before, and who don’t know what you are up to. They must also stop short of the point at which no-one answers the phone any more, or at which the counter-activity of building scam-proof phones becomes so general that it is too labour-intensive to get through to anyone. The bad news is that there is plenty more money to be made and damage to be caused in the short term, but the faint good news is that eventually the scam must become impotent – must become something that isn’t worth carrying on with. The evil in the world will have moved on to something else.

What really troubles me at 3am is a growing suspicion that our growing reliance on technology – especially the internet (of which I am an enormous fan, by the way) – provides such a rich field for the corrupt and the greedy that it may be doomed. One of the odd jobs I was given toward the end of my working career was as head of Technology Security at an insurance company, so I have thought a great deal about this stuff before. The technology itself has moved on since my day, of course, as has our complete reliance on secure internet banking and so on, but human frailty is constant.

Security is very largely an illusion. If you haven’t thought of that before then write it down, and hang it on the freezer. If the rewards for dishonesty are sufficient, you can buy anybody’s integrity. There is a basic principle of auditing which involves division of responsibility – a risky or high-value procedure must be carried out by a number of individuals or departments, independent of each other and with separate reporting and audit lines. Bunkum. It only works up to a point. If the pay-off is high enough, you can place as many of your own (corrupt) people as you want in all the separate positions – it is just a matter of cash. Anyone, whatever you might think, can be bought or overruled if there is enough of a reward.

At 3 o’clock this morning, my estimate was that there is about a 30% chance of a secure, trusted internet still being in use by 2025. I haven’t made any estimates yet for expected use of telephones. That sneering bastard on the answering machine is still out there.

Foot Guards - More is Better

Coldstreams

3rd Foot Guards

I recently obtained via eBay some interim-period Minature Figurines British infantry (poses BN26 & 27) which were a good match - including painting style - for my two battalions of Foot Guards, so I set about taking the opportunity to increase the size of these battalions by some 50% - something I have had a fancy for since not long after I painted up the original units (circa 1973?). I had some adventures with varnish incompatibility, and neither the castings nor the paint job will win any prizes, but this is what my Old School units look like, and it's nice to achieve a low-priority objective.

Martin P asked me for some pics of the enlarged units, and I needed to take some for my in-house catalogue system anyway, so here they are - veterans of my wargames going back a great many years, they have been handled and deployed by a good few friends who are no longer with us, and who would probably have been delighted to have the extra 2 bases available for each battalion from time to time. The command figures are - some of them, anyway - later imports from other manufacturers. I don't know where the guys in the last two rows have been this last 40-odd years, but they fit right in.

I am tired this morning, like a great many Brits, having sat up late watching the General Election coverage on TV. I have nothing at all to say about the results, but, having lived through the build-up over the last few weeks, wondering what on earth ever happened to old fashioned concepts like truth and humility, I am reminded that recently I came upon a favourite old quotation (I was, of course, looking for something else at the time...), and somehow it strikes a chord:

"We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us... but what if we are a mere after-glow of them?"

- J.G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur

Housekeeping – a World of Glue

Sticky problem - and this is just some of them...

Yesterday I was having a brief look at what would be involved in doing some conversion work on some more Spaniards, and as part of this I needed to dig out my store of fusewire, to see what gauges I have and see what would suit the job.

Couldn’t find the stupid fusewire. It normally lives near the left hand end of the clutter that is my painting desk, but it wasn’t there. Hmmm. Well, of course it might be next to the fusebox in the electric meter cupboard, in the porch, which is where it really ought to be – but no, not there either, so thank goodness we haven’t blown any fuses lately.

Thank you, Goodness.

Then followed a brief period of muttering and raking about (the muttering was encouraged by the discovery that spare Stanley knife blades are packaged on a card that looks just like the card that holds the fusewire – sometimes it is the little remnants of false hope which hurt the most), and eventually it became clear that it would be a good idea to conduct a proper search of the painting desk – which is actually an old writing bureau with all sorts of little hidey-holes and drawers. This sort of search is not something to be undertaken lightly; what I should do, of course, is keep the bureau tidy all the time, but it doesn’t work out like that. Especially at times when figure painting is sporadic, stuff lies out on the desk top and the water pots dry out and dust falls on the mixing plate and entropy gradually claims its own. Then suddenly there are visitors coming, or else I have had another confrontation with my son about his untidiness, and guilt drives me to get things sorted out, and the desk is cleared, very largely by stashing things in the drawers, lest people might see how I live normally.

Thus the contents of the drawers are always a bit of an unknown – I find things that I haven’t seen for ages – sometimes I don’t even remember I ever had them. Of course, the drawers contain a lot of Official Items, such as paint and tools, but yesterday’s effort had a few additional themes:

(1) Kitchen roll – since I am always worried about waste, any piece of leftover kitchen tissue which is even approximately clean tends to get stored away for the next time I’m painting. Next time, of course, I always kick off by washing out the water pots and refilling them, cleaning off the magic glass mixing plate and getting a clean wad of fresh kitchen roll. Thus I have a drawer containing a ridiculous amount of kitchen tissue – you never know, it might come in handy one day (in truth, what bothers me about this is that my dad used to do exactly the same sort of thing…).

(2) Wire spears/flagpoles – I keep running out of these, so keep ordering more, then I stick the new ones in a drawer, and can’t find them the next time I need one, so I go through this cycle regularly. You will be pleased to hear that it seems I have enough wire spears (mostly the good ones from North Star) to last several lifetimes.

(3) Wow. Glue. Whenever I’m in model shops or hardware stores I get interested in various exotic types of glue, and often buy a tube or two. Next time I have to tidy up in a hurry, these get put away, I forget I bought them (in many cases I find I have forgotten I ever knew about them, never mind bought them), and so the process rolls on – like wire spears but worse. I find that I have a marvellous collection of glues – I am going to work out what I’ve got, what they are good for, all that, and get them properly organised. Recently a friend told me about a fantastic new glue he has been using, and recommended it – I duly wrote its name on my whiteboard in the office, so I would remember to get some if I saw it. Well, I’ve seen it now. I had a tube of the stuff in the bureau drawers all the time, and it must have been there for at least a year. I could open a glue shop – especially of different types of superglue. Awesome.

Alas, I did not find the fusewire, so I’ll have to buy some – I think I’ll buy a few packs, and I’ll make a point of putting one in the meter cupboard, next to the fusebox. And I’ll try to keep things tidier in the painting desk department – don’t rush to place a bet just yet.

Hooptedoodle #172 - Uncle Harold

Lanchester 10 - Harold's was dark green

Another inconsequential tale of long-dead friends and relations. Unlike my so-called Uncle Arthur, who was featured in a previous Hooptedoodle, my Uncle Harold was a real uncle – in fact he was my dad’s eldest brother, a position he took very seriously. When I was a youngster he was very much the head of the family (or considered himself to be so), and he would take it upon himself to try to mend any feuds which had broken out between his siblings (and there were many such) and to impose his Solomon-like decisions on family matters, often with disastrous or hilarious results.

Problem was, Harold was a likeable fellow, and meant well, but he was not the brightest bulb in the candelabra, to be honest. His most celebrated attribute was the amount of bad luck he had, though much of this was undoubtedly due to clumsiness and poor judgement.

Some tales of Harold, then.

His motoring exploits were the stuff of legend. He learned to drive, like many of his generation, long before there was a competence test. Thus he held a driving licence for many years before he could actually afford to own a car, and those years had done little for his skill, or for the relevance of what he had learned to contemporary traffic laws and conditions. His driving reflected this - he was once in an accident – fortunately without injuring anyone – caused by his travelling around a roundabout the wrong way. He was charged by the police, but for some reason the matter was dropped – the law clearly had better things to do than oppress pillars of society.

Preselector "Quadrant" on a Lanchester - to the right of the steering wheel

He had a series of misfortunes in the first car he owned – a Lanchester 10 – a design which was noted for its weight and strength (Lanchester were eventually swallowed by Daimler, and were also manufacturers of armoured cars and light tanks, which anyone who had ridden in Uncle Harold’s car would understand) and for the fact that it had a preselector gearbox. For those who are unfamiliar with preselector boxes, they were regarded as very exciting in their day from a technical point of view – ERA and Connaught racing cars used them, for example (though they were rather heavy) – a forerunner of fully automatic transmission. The system required that the driver would move a sequential lever to indicate the next gear he would require (preselect it, in fact) and then – when he required that gear – he would depress the pedal which took the place of the usual clutch and – zoom – a very quick and smooth change would take place, enhanced by a special fluid drive and all sorts of neat features.

One potential downside, of course, was that the position of the lever did not necessarily correspond to the gear that the car was in at that moment. This was particularly serious in the hands of Uncle Harold. He would reverse into the parking space in front of his house, next to the kerb, switch off the engine and then move the lever from Reverse into Neutral. If you have been following my rather feeble technical description, you will realise that the gearbox would not actually be in neutral until next time he pressed the pedal. He was caught out a number of times by this, starting the engine when the gearbox was actually still in reverse, and leaping backwards.

Eventually, of course, he leaped backwards into the neighbour’s car. Mrs Preston had a nice VW beetle – a lovely red one – and it was no match at all in such an impact for the Lanchester. Mrs Preston’s car was taken away to have the front end rebuilt and a complete respray, and after some weeks it was returned by the works, on a Saturday morning, I recall. Within an hour of the VW’s shiny return, Harold reversed into it again, once more doing extensive damage to the front end. At this point Harold’s insurers became more than a little stroppy about the matter, and when he did the exact same trick yet again six months later (this time with my grandmother sitting in the back seat of his car), they put their corporate foot down and said that they would settle the claim this last time, but would not insure him any more in any car with a preselector box.

Riley 1.5 - Harold's was just like this one

The Lanchester was duly replaced by a new car. Harold bought a Riley 1.5, which was the twin carb version of BMC’s Wolseley 1500 – for its time, this was quite a sporty saloon, and Harold was surprised that he had to replace the rear tyres quite frequently – he kept finding they were worn smooth. The idea of anyone quite as incompetent as Uncle H driving a sporty saloon on the public roads is unattractive, and it has to be said that if the insurance company unintentionally encouraged this situation by banning the trusty Lanchester then they should be ashamed of themselves. At least the Lanchester, for all its majestic weight, had a top speed of about 55. Inevitably, there followed further misfortunes – at higher speed. The most memorable event happened on an autostrada in Northern Italy (tremble, o reader, at the prospect of Harold’s driving circus on tour), when he passed a serious accident in which he was not involved, and which was in fact on the other side of a dual carriageway. Travelling at some fairly high velocity, he passed through a cloud of glass splinters, each of which pierced the paintwork of his car and slid some millimetres in the direction of travel, underneath the paint, as a result of which Harold’s car had to be completely stripped and repainted, at very considerable cost.

He was outraged when his insurer refused to have any further dealings with him, declaring him officially to be “accident prone”, though this final accident was no fault of his at all. One can only sympathise, though it is, admittedly, easier from a safe distance of 50 years or so.

Harold had a misunderstanding with a local builder which I recall with some fondness. He had bought some lovely little Spanish wrought-iron window frames when on holiday one year, and the next Summer he took the opportunity to get the builder to work on a small extension to his living room while the family were going to be away. He talked through the drawings with the builder – in one side of this extension would be one of the Spanish windows – glazed. Since the other side faced directly into his neighbour’s garden (not Mrs Preston – the other side), Harold’s plan was that a dummy window should be sunk into the wall on that side, featuring the matching frame but “glazed” with a mirror. The builder had great difficulty with this – he even came back for a second look at the task, and went away shaking his head. When Harold came back from his holiday, he found his extension complete, but the dummy window was not there – there was just a plain wall. The builder, it seems, had been so confused by Harold’s instructions that he had assumed it was a joke, so had just ignored that bit of the spec. Harold didn’t seem too bothered, in fact, but I remember that the extra window frame lay in the garden shed for years afterwards, like a sad, sacred relic.

Late edit: I checked this strange story with my mother, and she tells me my version of it is not quite correct - the builder did think the design was bizarre, but while Harold was away on vacation the "dummy" second window was, in fact, installed, complete with mirror, in the wall opposite the genuine window, but it was countersunk into the outside of the extension wall, where it was only visible from the next door neighbour's garden. The extra window frame in the shed was, it seems, a spare one. I think accuracy is important in these things...

There are a number of treasured family tales concerning the poor organisation of outings and picnics – including a group visit to Birkenhead docks to watch the firework display for the Festival of Britain which, by oversight, did not include provision for transport home afterwards – and there is a shadowy legend of how he once fired a shotgun out of the bedroom window (at a rabbit) at 5am, while his wife was asleep in the same room.

Birkenhead bus of appropriate vintage - note the rail on the platform

However, my last Harold story comes from his long saga of ill-fated DIY projects. He converted some bedroom cupboards into wardrobes, and one Saturday he went into Birkenhead to get some suitable clothes-rails – and he bought a seven-foot length of chromium-plated brass tube of the appropriate section, which would cut up nicely to provide an excellent set of rails. Pleased with his purchase, Harold got on the bus with it, but the conductor would not allow it inside the bus, and Harold had to stand on the open platform at the rear. You may imagine him, like Horatius, standing with his pole. Sadly, in the busy Saturday traffic, a passenger missed the bus at a stop, and ran after it to jump aboard, taking hold of Uncle Harold’s prize pole in the mistaken belief that it was a part of the vehicle. In his surprise, Harold let go of it, and the bus drove off, with the newcomer left standing in the street, holding the pole, the pair of them staring at each other in bewilderment as they faded into the distance. He never saw it again, of course, and had to go and buy another.