A very British place
Totally congenial:
The country pub
Somewhere to relax
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It pays to be honest
A long time ago, a friend asked me to read a short story that he had written. He was hoping to submit it as an entry to a short story competition. I agreed to read it for him.
Fortunately, it was short enough for me to read it fairly quickly. Unfortunately, I did not feel that its quality was up to much.
When I saw my friend a few days later, he was eager to know what I had thought of his story. I was not sure what to say. I wondered whether I should be polite, and say that I quite liked it, and would wish him luck. Or, should I risk hurting his feelings by being frank about my opinion of his work? I made up my mind to do the latter. Trying to be as tactful as possible, I told him that I thought his story was not bad, but that there was not much chance of his story winning the competition.
My friend was surprisingly pleased by my opinion. He said:
“Thank you, Adam. Thank you very much. You are the first of my friends to say what you really think about my story. All of the others have tried to be polite and say they like it.”
I was relieved by his reaction to my honest but adverse comment. It paid to have been honest. It usually does!
Cycles and branches
There are plans to make a cycle super highway through west London. This might make cycling more attractive to people living in the areas it passes through as well as making it safer for cyclists by separating them from other road users. All very well, so far.
In order to creat this cycle thoroughfare, quite a number of well-established old trees will have to be cut down and removed. While cycling no doubt reduces the amount of toxic gases emitted by vehicles, removing the trees cannot be so beneficial to the climate of the future, about which so many people have become concerned.
The authorities have said that the felled trees will be replaced by new trees nearby. That is good, but many trees take a long time to reach the size and ecological efficiency of the trees that will get the chop. A large number of people have protested about the proposed sacrifice of trees for the cyclists, so we wait with baited breath to see whether the trees will survive or the new cycle route will come to fruition. Being Britain, there will probably be a compromise!
Picture by Natalia Goncharova in an exhibition at the Tate Modern, London
So near, but so far
I have been working on the manuscript of my latest book, about whose subject I will write sooner or later.
I have reached a stage at which I keep reading through the whole text, trying to put myself in the place of a potential reader, and from that position I make modifications, which I hope will improve the quality of the book. Each time I look at it, I make more changes, many corrections, some additions, and many more deletions to eliminate my natural tendency towards verbosity. So, my book is nearing completion, but has far to go before publishing it.
Soon, I will be ready to show my manuscript to some kind volunteers to get their candid (I hope) opinions, comments, and criticisms on what I have produced so far. If I do not do this, I will become self-satisfied and the book might begin to suffer. Also, I need to know whether what I have written is, in priciple, likely to be worth reading! Then, it will be back to the ‘drawing board’ to modify my work in the light of what my test readers tell me.
Finally, I will need to proof-read my book, format it properly, and add a few illustrations before publishing my ‘oeuvre’. From conceiving an idea to finishing a book based on it is a long process, frustrating at times but largely enjoyable.
Calm sea and Prosperous voyage
A few years before my mother died, I persuaded my parents to invest in a stereo hi-fi system. My mother would only have such a system if it looked nice. So, they settled on a Bang and Olufsen system. Unfortunately, the aesthetically pleasing speakers sounded awful and we replaced them with something less pleasing to look at but which sounded good. When CD’s (compact discs) became available, I added a CD player to the system. By then, my mother was dead and the appearance of the player no longer mattered.
After my mother died, I was living in Kent. I used to visit my father on Sundays. We used to have lunch together in various restaurants in Hampstead village in north-west London. Always, after we had eaten, we used to viit the Waterstones bookshop and the Our Price music shop nearby. Often, I would purchase a CD to add to my father’s small collection. On one occasion, I bought a CD with some orchestral music by Beethoven.
Some weeks later, I asked my father if he had enjoyed that CD. He said:
“There is something wrong with it. There is complete silence for the first few minutes.”
I said that I would look into this. When I reached his house, our family home, I turned on the hi-fi system and inserted the problematic CD. My father was right. For the first few minutes, there was nothing to be heard. Then, I looked at the volume adjustment slider which was marked at equally spaced intervals from 0 to 10. I discovered that my father had been using the system with the volume slider set between 0 and 1.
The first track on the CD was Beethoven’s Opus 12: Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage. The first few minutes of this piece are very quiet, which is why setting the volume so low made it sound silent. My father’s penchant for barely audible low volume background music was the reason for doubting the integrity of the CD, which I had given him.
You can listen to the music mentioned above by clicking: H E R E
A tingle down my spine
I enjoy exploring historical places. Well, I know that everywhere has a history, but what I mean is places which contain tangible remnants of their history like the Regency buildings designed by John Nash, built at the beginning of the 19th century around Regents Park in London. They were built when the future George IV was Regent.
Well, there is nothing surprising about these beautiful buildings. That is what I thought until my wife spotted the street lamp posts next to some of the buildings. Each of their bases has a symbol for King George IV. Seeing such mundane objects that must have been in daily use since so long ago sent a tingle down my spine.
The same thing happened to me once when I was driving along a ring road around Munich and I passed a direction sign pointing to Dachau.
Would you trust them with your money?
Back in the early 1970s, I had dinner at a cheap and cheerful Chinese restaurant (Lido, which still exists in Gerrard Street) with about 7 friends. 5 of them were studying to be chartered accountants, I was completing my PhD thesis, and ‘J’ had only the most basic of educational qualifications.
The bill arrived. It was £24 for all that we had eaten. That seemed about right. The bill, consisting of three pages stapled together, was examined by all of us.
When J looked at it, she said it was twice what it should have been. This was because the waiter had added the sub totals at the bottom of each page to the individual prices which added together were equal to the sub totals.
We ended up sharing a corrected bill of £12.
What concerned me was that 5 people who were about to become chartered accountants missed the error in the bill which they had perused. Would you have trusted them with your money?
Incidentally, J went on to become a very successful business woman, probably more prosperous than anyone else sitting around that table in Lido.
A few words
For the past few months I have been working on the manuscript of my latest book. I am not telling you what is going to be about. You will have to wait to find out!
I was reasonably happy about the way it was going, but a little worried that I was including too much about matters distant to the topic on which I was planning to focus. Some of the less relevant material might easily have been considered controversial and possibly hurt the sentiments of some of my potential readers. This worried me somewhat.
A couple of days ago, an old friend, whom we had not seen for a few months, came to dinner at our home. During the meal, I told him what I was writing about. Immediately, he reacted that what I feared was controversial might easily get me into trouble if my text was read by a certain type of person.
For a couple of hours, I was downcast. I thought that maybe I should just abandon the project, which has taken up so much of my spare time during the last few months.
Next morning, I woke early, feeling inspired. I turned on the computer and removed the ptentially ofensive material from my draft text. Then, I read through what was left of it, and realised that by trimming it down, my text was far better than it had been before. It had become tighter and more focussed on the subject I want to portray.
I am always amazed how important a very few words of advice can be.
Travelling on a budget
Suitcases that become trollies.
Trollies that run over the feet of others.
Wheelies that fit overhead lockers.
Hand baggage that is too big for a hand.
Waiting in long queues.
Cases filled to the brim to avoid paying for baggage in the hold.
Seats that cannot be reclined
Baggage for flights that often run late
To airports far from where you actually want to go.
Suitcases to avoid waiting at the baggage claim.
The joys of ‘budget’ airlines.
No outside food
The Coffee Cup café in London’s Hampstead has been in business since 1953, and has been very popular since I first remembered it in the early 1960s. I have visited it several times, but never before noticed the sign at its entrance, which reads: “Please do not bring food or drinks from outside into these premises.” This instruction is not seen frequently in restaurants and cafés in the UK. Seeing this sign reminded me of what is very common in eateries in India, namely, signs reading: “Outside food not allowed.” Customers are forbidden to bring into the estblishment food or drink they have obtained elsewhere. That is fair enough, I suppose.
Cinemas in India, like in many other countries, try to sell food and drink to their customers, often at outrageously high prices. Apparently, watching a film is for many people more enjoyable if you are stuffing popcorn into your mouth at the same time as spilling it on the floor in the dark.
Back in 2001, my family, my in-laws, and my wife’s brothers family went to watch the recently released Bollywood blockbuster Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham at a large cinema in Bangalore (India). After purchasing the tickets, we had to wait in a queue before all of our baggage, shopping baskets, handbags etc., were searched by uniformed security personnel. I wondered what these officials were looking for. Was it guns or explosives, I asked my sister-in-law after we had reached the auditorium. No, it was not that, she replied. They were looking for food and drinks brought from outside the cinema. She told me that outside food was not allowed into the cinema, and then showed me inside her shopping basket, All I could see was a shawl (some cinemas are too cool because of air-conditioning). She moved the shawl aside to reveal that her bag was filled with sufficient drinks and snacks to easily satisfy all eight of us during the three and a half hour film. So much for the security check! Had we been carrying anything more dangerous than ‘outside food’, this would have also been missed by the not so vigilant security people.
It is odd how a chance sighting of something like the sign in the Coffee Cup can bring back distant memories.
yamey 