Fat of the Lamb

There are no children in The City. It’s a bit weird, like the scourge of some terrific nursery rhyme kidnapper. There are lots of majestic people though, well groomed, well heeled and well busy. Too busy even for each other, if the dating agency adverts on the tube are to be believed, majesty is clearly a lonely state. It’s nice to be here for a bit though, standing in a pool of cold sunshine surrounded by vainglorious architecture, macs flapping, heels tapping, stockings swishing by.

All around me money, including my inheritance, is flowing out of taps, swirling down plugholes and gurgling off into reservoirs to be picked up and pumped around, like it’s been for hundreds of years. Markets have been operating on this ground for a very long time and this is one of the capitals of capital where money leaves its mark, like a million hands burnishing a banister. The stones sweat it and it collects in sanctuary like piles of dead leaves in windless corners.

There’s a lot of it about but it’s not for everyone, as we’ve touched on before, money begets money in ways that make the small piles we set aside for a rainy day look a bit silly. But it’s not there for the taking unless you make it your life’s work, your sole occupation.

The City is majestic but also quite sinister and I decide to walk to New Court, where the Rothschild dynasty has built the first new building on this site for a hundred years. I did a condition survey here, the one with the glass box on top of it. God only knows what goals and outcomes are set up there in that shark tank (see photo). I bet they have dinner parties with naked servants pouring Château Lynch-Bages in rivulets down bare buffed thighs. Liver-tongued money men lapping at their feet in an orgy of self abasement – I’ve been bad, I’ve been so very bad, oh thank you (slurp), thank you.

I have to shake myself out of this dark and unsubstantiated reverie, even though it’s really hard not to imagine that whatever they’re up to up there, it ain’t for the benefit of you and me. Financial services are supposed to deliver huge benefits to our economy but these are not charitable institutions, let’s face it, and it sits awkwardly with me to have any stock market investments at all. Before I started out on this road, before I inherited a little money, I knew nothing about the machinations of the markets and it’s been an education just getting involved. That's my excuse for it, but once you're involved it can be hard to get out.

One of the weirdest things has been watching the government basically ruining things for me, in a direct and laughably cack-handed way. First of all the green energy company I invested in, which relied on the Warm Front programme, saw this initiative cancelled to save money. Bear in mind the government were and still are intending to cut CO2 emissions, rhetorically anyway, so quite how shelving insulation upgrades to existing housing stock underpinned the green agenda was anybody’s guess. The company's share price halved overnight.

Next came the extra-ordinary tax on British oil producers. I went to fossil fuels after seeing the commitment to the green agenda first hand, only to see the share price of my small UK-based oil company slide gracefully downwards.

The property company I invested in happened to own a number of government contracts which were slashed. I can hardly blame them for trying to economise on this one but I did begin to wonder if they were ever going to do anything for me.

Then, and you couldn’t make this up, Snacktime, my little ringer, the vending machine company that my next door neighbour worked for, who convinced me they were loved by the city and currently undervalued, well, what did the buffoons have in store for these guys?

“We’ve got to save more money, Dave,” say George Osbourne and Danny Alexander, one afternoon after a long lunch at No. 10.

“Okay, I know!” says David Cameron, “why don’t we make money cheaper?”

“Oh God...how does that help us?” burps Danny, frowning at the lamb fat on his breath.

“Well, what are coins made of – copper? zinc?”

“Er, nickel, actually.” snorts George.

“That’s my point, nickels are expensive, that’s why my iPhone cost so much (snigger), as if I had to pay for it. So, why don’t we make money out of, say, pots and pans, like they did in the war?

“They didn’t," says George. "They made planes out of pots and pans, allegedly, but point taken.” He settles his Cognac on the mantelpiece. “Steel’s having a rough ride at the moment, over-production for China, who are throttling back, has resulted in a surplus...”

“Well then, it’s settled, there’s enough duff money floating about anyway, let’s start making it out of steel and sell our nickels to Apple, or Orange, or some other friendly fruits. Now I’ve got to get cracking, the Rothschilds are having a do tonight and it’s the hottest ticket in town...”

Now, Old Pete tells me that, metallurgically, steel isn’t quite as heavy as the current money mix so the new coins will have to be fatter to carry the same weight, so that bags of them can still be weighed accurately in banks and so forth. But what does this mean for vending machine operators...well, try an immediate 10 percent off the share price of Snacktime. Brilliant, thanks Dave & Co., can you please stop meddling, you're like a bunch of bloody school kids.

Jane says our glorious leader has only ever had one job in the real world, out of politics, and his girlfriend’s dad got him that one, so he and his Tory mates are, in effect, really like a bunch of schoolkids. I begin to understand and have real sympathy with entrepreneurs and captains of industry. If they get tripped up as often as I've been it's no wonder the put so much effort into lobbying. You just can't leave these guys to their own devices.

Bosh, Arctic Circle, Thank You Very Much

One problem with voicing an opinion is realising that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Before you set out your stall you have to be reasonably confident that your opinion isn’t going to show you up, like a child might, out of the blue and in full public view. Unfortunately this happens to me quite a lot, with both children and ideas.

Two of my ideas/proposals have shown me up recently, I should have taken them down to the lake in a sack, and lobbed them in with a couple of bricks but no matter. However hard I promise myself not to get stuff wrong, it still happens. If only I could screw my eyes up and concentrate really hard to make things right, but it doesn’t work that way, goddamit.

The only thing worse than being wrong about something is not being able to have an opinion at all, for fear of being wrong. And, heck, with many things right and wrong is only a matter of perspective. Unfortunate for me that the things I was wrong about are not subject to interpretation. Bugger. Anyhow, you have to ‘fess up and get on, it doesn’t do to be too defensive or egotistical about being wrong, that way you’ll never learn a thing.

What was I wrong about, then? Fuck off, I’m not telling.

I do have some interesting news though, about the Black Bullet. A year ago I was determined to take her up to the Arctic Circle – it was a crazy idea, ill thought out and expensive to execute. I fancied taking the old girl up to Frazerburgh in NE Scotland and imagined talking our way onto a trawler headed for Iceland. I can see it now, waves crashing on deck, swirling around the bike, I know, idiotic is the word. The best part of the plan was that it looked like a quick scoot up the east coast of Iceland from that Sneezlefjordur place to the northernmost tip and then bosh, Arctic Circle, thank you very much.

What I didn’t realise at the time...er, among all the important things I didn’t appreciate at the time was that there was a stand-off going on between the Icelanders and the Scots over quotas and fishing rights. There was even a mini blockade at one point so you can see how ridiculous anyone asking for a lift, quayside, would have been.

I guess it would have made a good story, though, they probably all needed a laugh up there. Lucky for me the Biking Viking stepped in and popped my bubble. “There are no blacktop roads to the Arctic Circle,” he said. Basically, bring a trail bike or get ready to fall off in a faraway place where you’ll find neither parts nor sympathetic rescue.

So, there are things to be wrong about, like how to fix a car, or mixing up two different Hitchins’, and there is freezing to death on a rain blasted rock in the middle of the North Atlantic because you went ill-prepared for the conditions. Oh bugger, now you know.


Pingates

The Horse's Mouth

Water leaks into the passenger side footwell of my VW Passat. The boys up at my local garage, Tune Rite, discovered this when I asked them to diagnose why the alarm kept going off. Apparently the alarm gubbins sits in the footwell, nestled in an inch of acoustic wadding which had become wet although the carpet was dry to the touch. This is a common problem with Passats, judging from the online forums, and I think I may have hit on a reason why. Christ it’s so simple I wanted to shout about it on every forum I’d visited but form filling soon diluted my enthusiasm. ‘Just read my fucking blog’ I growled at the second registration form.

Before I get to the solution, the problem represents a good example of right-on solving for the ordinary man, with all its associated ups and downs. It’s worth charting the course from start to finish to demonstrate the true value of determination and an uncluttered mind, I’m sorry the story is a bit dull but stick with it. The more I think about it the more I see, it's really quite exhilarating.

One winter’s night about two years ago a neighbour came round and mentioned the alarm sounding, intermittently, through the night. I tried to disable it that night using the dog-in-car button and the next day I freed up the tailgate switch which appeared to have jammed open. This made no difference and so I checked the fusebox to see if I could just disable it before someone took a golf club to the windshield in a bout of midnight frustration.

Of course, no alarm worth its salt is easily disabled and eventually I was forced to take it over to the boys at Tune Rite who diagnosed the fault and said the water leak was probably from the cabin air box, which is fixed to the engine bulkhead over the footwell. Others on the internet supported this view and as it seemed a reasonably straightforward investigation I decided to do it myself. In the meantime the lads disconnected the alarm.

The summer came and went and the job slipped down the list, the following winter the car would flash its lights every so often after it rained and a new warning light flicked erroneously on the dash, saying that the airbags had packed up. I really must get in there when the weather’s nice again, I told myself but there never seemed to be the time. It wasn’t until this winter when the carpet started to grow mushrooms that I resolved to investigate, or pay a professional to fix it.

It pains me to see one of my assets degrading but cars have also cost me a lot of money, too much given that I choose ones with cheap-to-run reputations, and the temptation was strong to just drill a hole at a low-point in the footwell and turn it into a draining system. I could live with a few flashing lights, if that’s as bad as it gets. I did wonder if the problem would drain the battery over time but I’d replaced it a couple of years back and it still seemed to pack plenty of punch.

So, this weekend, with baby Liza snuggled up asleep in her car seat and Jane and Poz off to the pool, I popped the bonnet to investigate. I’d taken a bit of time to swot up again on the internet on Friday and I was as ready as I could ever be. There were a lot of leaves in the nooks and crannies of the engine bay and I scooped these out as best I could, then I pulled off the bulkhead-to-bonnet acoustic seal and lifted the plastic battery/airbox cover.

Some horses went by and I lowered the bonnet, apparently racehorses think car bonnets are open metal mouths waiting to eat them, or some crazy shit. Then Liza started to stir and I realised I wasn’t going to get the un-interrupted time I needed to fully dismantle the airbox and make a proper job of it. I stood in the resident’s car park watching the horses amble up the road and felt defeated. Reluctantly, I replaced the cabin air filter and slotted the plastic cover back in place.

Now, you have to imagine a weathering detail, like roof tiles, or the overlapping boards making up the wall of a shed. The runoff from the windscreen in this design is channelled into the engine compartment over three lapped pieces of plastic to eventually drain away under the car. The final lapped piece is this cover which I had slipped neatly between the two other pieces beneath the windscreen, thinking this was how it was properly fitted. The boys at Tune Rite had done the same, replicating the arrangement they’d found when they opened her up. But if each successive tile isn’t lapped under the one above, water will get in, just picture that.

Somebody had taken this cover out and replaced it incorrectly, before it went to Tune Rite, sometime in the winter of two years ago, when the alarm started sounding for no good reason. Which bastard could have done an idiotic thing like that? It was then that I remembered having to replace the battery, after the first big freeze of that winter. I did it. I did it in bad light in the freezing cold and god only knows how many of the Passat owners out there have done precisely the same thing. Those poor bastards. Replacing a battery is a standard thing for a bloke to do, it wouldn’t surprise me if many of them had spent hours taking things to bits, unblocking drain holes, spewing silicone around under the bonnet and probably all for nothing.

The garage charged me £100 to tell me the electronic gubbins in footwell was damp. The airbag light probably stems from the same fault. Mouldy carpets and warning lights and the recent failure of the rear n/s electric window, which may turn out to be related, will all impact on the resale value of the car. The cumulative depreciation resulting from this basic error hardly bears thinking about. In this sense it would have been cheaper to have a battery man do the battery, even with a call out fee (as I couldn’t drive the car). But even my trusty local garage didn’t put the cover back correctly so there are no guarantees that a professional wouldn’t have made the same basic error. The thing is the cover actually fits better when fitted the wrong way.

So maybe the fault lies with the designers. Certain parts should not be fit-able in more than one way. I don’t know yet but if I have fixed it, I’ll be over the moon, quite literally skipping down the road. I am man, I can protect and provide. I’ll know by the end of the winter.

As a footnote, I also noticed that on frosty mornings the car doors wouldn't open. The locks weren't frozen or anything like that, the door seals had become welded to the chassis by ice. I surmised from looking at the seals that this was ice forming from the inside. The extra humidity in the cabin which often resulted in condensation and frost on the inner face of the windscreen had had the same effect around the door openings. This was a real bind on mornings whan I was in a rush and I must have come close to damaging the seals trying to get into the car. One small mistake, heaps of knock-on problems which were hard to relate back to the original error.

Nobody Loves a Smartarse, Right?

This morning John and I had to dispose of a dozen shed panels, by cutting them up and loading them into a skip. It was a two man job, intended to become a one man job, once the panels had been reduced in size. We started by piling the panels on top of one another, with the preferred cutting side upwards in each case. We laid a couple of fence posts on the ground first so that the disc saw wouldn’t grind on the concrete when the last panel was cut. Once the pile was set, one man would be able to cut each panel and manhandle the two halves to one side, freeing the second to attend to other business.

It was a good plan and we even cleared the area around the pile to improve the conditions of work and promote safety. There were nails in the wood, so we wore gloves and safety glasses also briefly looked each panel over to identify any other potential hazards.

Once again, it’s a benign and somewhat dull story but it serves a point. Each of the actions described was raised in advance, discussed and modified as required to limit risk of injury and play according to the principles of No Journey Wasted, in minimising the effort required to complete the job. Also, once the task at hand had been planned out any misadventure could more accurately be called an accident. Without this thought, discussion and planning there was huge potential for stupid injuries which could not rightly be called accidents.

At times during the planning stage I wondered if we were making a bit of a meal out of it, but I can think of many misadventure and of people believing themselves to be the victims of circumstance where those involved pretty much asked for it. When you lay down all the pieces and figure out what happened, in any situation, there are layer upon layer of short and long range causes and effects. Only a supercomputer could reasonably plot the entire lattice of relationships, in even a mundane task, if a person tried they would probably only tie themselves in knots and never get anything but thinking about doing things done. But sifting through and identifying the salient factors is a peculiarly human ability and a most useful one at that.

Many times I’ve felt a bit pointless next to men of action, or women who jump in and get things done. Sometimes it’s a reasonable comparison, particularly when faced with someone of experience who can cut to the quick while you’re still assessing the task at hand. These guys know from experience where the wrinkles are and it’s good to have people like that around and to follow their lead, provided the results remain favourable. Sometimes the lead is taken by a dominant personality of limited experience and this must be resisted, unless a group action requires this kind of cajoling. I think it’s best to look and listen and develop your own ideas from this, drawing on whatever experience is available.

This story hasn’t developed into anything more exciting, has it? It was supposed to be inspirational but it reads like a Safe Work, Safe Home, Target Zero, One Accident is Too Many site induction. The point is that the right frame of mind will untie the knots of any problem and that most problems on a human scale are actually weak or skewed thinking made manifest. I’m not talking about Force Majeure here, there’s not much that a calm and inquisitive mind can do about an earthquake but if you can keep your head you’ve got a good chance of sorting most things on a personal scale out.

It seems to me that I’m always wandering off the track, chronically veering toward the hard way of doing things, like trying to fix stuff myself even when I'm out of my depth. Some of this is due to financial constraints but it’s also a bumbling attempt to gain some of Pirsig’s mechanic’s feel. Experience breeds understanding, understanding promotes confidence, confidence encourages positivism, in a general 'can do' kind of way. Trying leads, inevitably, to some degree of failing, failing opens up compassion and humility which I suppose, as I write, keeps confidence in check. Nobody loves a smartarse, right?

Jane and Poz on the Isle of Skye (2011)

Pfff, Whatevs...

The Black Bullet has disappeared under a pile of rags and boxes, hiding out in latent shame of a Statutory Off Road Notice. But it’s Pint Club night tonight and I’m going to try and nail a date with Old Pete for the use of his workshop and the benefit of his experience.

I’ve read Hitchcocks’ technical note on decoking and I’m feeling a bit shameful myself after I gasconaded at the outset of all this, boasting that I would travel on and in the bike to learn more about the past. “Pfff, whatevs...” Jane would likely say but I’m committed now and even though the procedure fills two A4 sides with technical description - all thriller, no filler - I/we are going to attempt the procedure.

One of the things that worries me is what Pirsig would call mechanics’ feel, or lack of it. How many of us have set off with a spring in the step, spanners jingling, workshop manual under the arm, only to trudge back after an hour or two moaning to an unsympathetic partner? “It says undo the bolts and take the bit off, well I’ve done that and the bloody thing is stuck fast. How am I supposed to fix it if the manual doesn’t tell you anything useful? Stupid book.”

It’s a chicken and egg situation, however, and I tell myself you’ll never gain an iota of mechanics’ feel unless you have a go. One thing about trying, which tends to be glossed over, is how frustrating, humiliating and painful it can be and I have to remind myself why this is important at all. Why not just pay the man who enjoys this sort of thing, and is qualified, to do a proper job of it? Why not indeed? It’s tempting but there was a reason why I wanted to get cold, dirty and annoyed...now, what was it again?

Two-dog Night

We mark the New Year with reflection, the tilt in cosmology with taxonomical navel gazing. What did you think a year ago? Were you right and did the course of the annual wobble bring feast or famine to your quarter?

We are feasting our eyes on a new addition to the family and hoping the extra people we have made will not pile unnecessary pressure on the pool of available resources. Sustainability is what we are aiming for, isn’t it? Or is that term so ubiquitous and loaded that it’s become unsustainable, the victim of its own popularity?

Entropy; is it the Law of Entropy which dictates that all states of matter are gradually diluted, leaking energy, slipping off the cosmic couch and onto the floor? If entropists are right, might it be that sustainability is simply a mirage, a construct of the hopeful, jargon for town planners?

It would be a lie to say my brow was furrowed by this while sitting in the coffee concession at Oxford’s Debenhams, as I’ve just thought of it, but there I was with my wretched brow glowering into the middle distance, with Poz upside down in his seat crashing his plastic pterodactyls together. It’s not that I hate shopping exactly, I'm just a little nervous about consumer culture, not sure it's really there for the benefit of ordinary people.

Then I had a bit of an epiphany. Little Liza was on my knee, watching it all go by, and people began breaking out in spontaneous smiles as they passed. I kept my gaze fixed on the aisle where Jane was last seen but my peripheral vision caught it all and softened my brow. We’re all the same at heart, getting on as best we can. Most of these people weren’t smiling until they saw the baby and then something inside them gave way.

It was as if the anxieties of consumerism were momentarily lifted by the memory of innocence, the possibilities of a new life. At worst, the unbridled and un-selfconscious wriggle of the proto-consumer, with the future of retail at her feet. I loved having her there on my knee. She helped me belong, which is a more comfortable place for an old man than a life of cantankerous disapproval.

As we walked up to the car I remembered being on that same spot a few weeks ago, on my way back from a networking evening with a bunch of builders. It was cold and as I turned up the collar of my new Debenhams overcoat I saw a small banquet underway behind the leaded lights of one of the Oxford colleges. Completing this Dickensian scene, a beggar drew his dog close on the pavement outside. I dropped a coin into his palm and said, “reckon it’s a two-dog night tonight mate.” He grinned in agreement.