The Glidd of Glood Blog

Kids off school during lockdown - should you be worried?

So, we’re all confined, indefinitely, waiting for the virus situation to improve and the kids are off school. There has been a certain amount of wringing of hands about the education that children are missing out on. Will it be a lost year? Will their lives ever recover? Can they afford to miss these lessons?

I don’t have kids, so you can ignore anything I have to say on the subject, but equally, that makes me somewhat more objective. I thought I’d have a quick shufti at my own school education - 40 years or so on, what do I still remember of what I was taught and how useful has it been? I should say at this point that, without any false modesty, I was good at school. I was quite good at learning things, partly because I am innately curious and interested in (almost) everything, partly because, sadly, I didn’t really have anything better to do growing up. So, marvellous grades all round. Still, that’s as may be. Was it all really any use? Let’s have a look at secondary school in no particular order.

Maths

I liked maths, although my mother was always telling us that “we’re no good at maths.” Speak for yourself. I didn’t have the facility that people who are really good at maths have, but I found the homework to be quite fun in the same way that I like doing crosswords or sudoku puzzles. At least there was a beginning and an end. You knew when you’d solved the problem (or thought you had) and could move on to the next. Not like writing an essay which never had an end. So, I always started homework with maths. But 40 years on, I can’t say that I have had any use for quadratic equations or integration, nor can I really remember how to do them. What I am fairly sure about is that if I did need to know how to do them, half an hour’s revision would probably be enough to remember. Do I know how to do simultaneous linear equations? Probably not, but ditto. Still, the concept of equations can be quite handy from time to time and I have no problem with that.

There is quite a lot of simple arithmetic in marketing: fractions, percentages and whatnot. You need to know how to make graphs. I actually did statistics as part of my MBA, and they have been useful on occasion. I once wanted to know the height of the sequoia tree in my garden – idle curiosity. I could have worked that out with simple trigonometry with a trundle-wheel and one of those big wooden protractor things that you aim at the top of the tree and which give you the angle it subtends (is that the right word? Don’t remember.) Of course, I have neither of those things, so the height of tree remains a mystery. I can’t say it disturbs my sleep. I bet some app or other will tell the height straight off, but that rather takes the fun out of it. Are we supposed to think that so long as we know how to work an iPhone, we no longer need to know anything?

Verdict: maths was pretty useful, but considering the amount of hours spent learning it, you could say that the return on investment is reasonably poor.

English

You will learn all the English (if that’s your native tongue) you need by reading books and trying to write. I learnt to write mainly by having my best friend of my teenage years suddenly up-sticks to California with his family. I started to write letters to him instead of chatting to him face-to-face (no internet or cheap phone calls in those days) and unlike Christmas thank-you letters, I found I had plenty to say. Was my writing honed in English class? Possibly. Was my understanding of texts? No. They were just rendered tedious. I suppose I got an introduction to literary criticism with analysing Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd for O Level, and astonishingly, it didn’t ruin the book for me, so that I have gone on to read many of Hardy’s works for pleasure. But frankly, I was reading lots of books all through my school days and didn’t need English classes to encourage me. Knowing about subjects and predicates was utterly boring and not really very useful. So if your child is missing English classes, just give them some good books to read – maybe something a bit more challenging than Harry Potter. You could do a lot worse than Orwell’s 1984.

Languages

I wasn’t gifted at French, but I was motivated. Having already done about 4 years of it at primary school, starting from scratch again at secondary school meant that learning was always a breeze. I just had a lot less to learn than my fellow pupils, as I had already learnt most of what we were being taught. Language learning is a bore. It comes down to learning vocabulary artificially – very dull – and learning how to employ it, ie. grammar – equally dull. You try to make the sounds required, but there is really no one to try them out on, unless you have a foreign national teaching you, which we didn’t. Languages, like most other skills, require a lot of practice if you are ever going to be any good. Having gone on to study languages at university and deciding to make my life in a country where my daily existence is conducted in a language other than English, I can safely say that the languages I learnt at school have been extremely useful. Still, there is little correlation between the amount you learn and the quantity of very boring school lessons you attend. You’ll make far more progress in a couple of months of being dumped in the country concerned and it will be a lot more fun and interesting.

Already studying French and Spanish, I actually did a couple of years of Russian as a minority subject. I remember little, but I can decipher the Cyrillic alphabet and this was very useful when I spent a few days in Moscow for work. At least I can say “please”, “thank-you”, “hello”, “good-bye” and “Maxim is reading the newspaper”. Very handy.

You can tell that languages were going to be real education, when you came to exam time. There was almost nothing to revise. You had either assimilated the language you were taught, or you hadn’t. No need to spend hours with files, which suited me.

Once you’ve learnt a couple of foreign languages, it’s a lot easier to pick up others as the process is much the same. So, I guess that my school education in French and Spanish has been very useful for learning German, and I have had to do that, as it turns out.

Latin

How much Latin do I really remember? Very little. Not enough to instantly understand inscriptions on ancient buildings, or family mottos. On the other hand, I think I always got more out of Asterix books than those who hadn’t studied Latin. Latin, though, develops the mind. It is difficult, like an exercise in decryption. And the great thing about Latin is that it is considerably harder than Romance languages, meaning that after studying Latin grammar (which you can’t avoid) all other languages are a cinch, comparatively. Cases for nouns in German? Ha! Try doing them in Latin. And I did learn a lot about the Romans and Roman culture and the Romans were a very interesting lot. I’m quite tempted to relearn my Latin, just for fun, but it is, of course, a fairly unnecessary skill. I’d be better off trying to learn Italian.

Art

I did two years of art which were sufficient to teach me that I couldn’t draw or paint. I learnt absolutely nothing about trying to rectify that. I may have an eye for a photo, but don’t ask me to draw a house. So art lessons were a total waste of time as far as I was concerned. Could possibly have been down to the teaching. At the time, this seemed utterly unimportant. You didn’t need to draw or paint. But then in the 80s Apple invented the Mac and pretty much made it essential to have some form of artistic skills. Business = presentations (at least in marketing). Presentations = pictures and design. Dammit! And now we find that everyone is an artist, a filmmaker or film-editor, a graphic designer. How annoying is that? Being educated in the non-computer age, I was never going to acquire school-taught multimedia skills. No doubt kids pick them up all by themselves, or with their friends, rather than in a formal environment, but I could be wrong. Anyway, the art goalposts got moved as far as I was concerned.

Still, there was one positive outcome. We used to be bused up to London periodically to visit the National Gallery or the Tate. This was used as a ruse to visit London and hang around in Soho, but I actually used to spend at least some of the time in the relevant gallery. This must have rubbed off on me as I still like visiting galleries and can identify works from all sorts of famous painters even if I’ve never seen them before. So at least art sparked an interest in the work of people who actually can draw and paint.

Music

We also had compulsory music lessons for the first two years at school. About a third of the class was learning some instrument or other and had extra music lessons. Not me. I didn’t play anything up until the age of nearly 50 when I decided to try to learn to play the electric guitar. No, it wasn’t a “mid-life crisis”. I had always wanted to but hadn’t had the time or the environment to do it in, and when I was 50 I found that I had both. Suddenly, all those music classes came flooding back. I understood and remembered about chords, triads, scales – the basic building blocks of music. I even remembered many of the simple open chords of the guitar, as we had been made to learn them – C, G, D, E etc. For two years of simple music at school, I have really got my money’s worth – or would have if I’d had to pay for it.

And that wasn’t all. We were also played classical records and were introduced to Beethoven, Grieg, Mozart et al which has left me with a lasting appreciation, even if I don’t give the classics much of spin on a day-to-day basis. Still, without my 2 years of music lessons from the ages of 12 to 14, it is doubtful if I’d have any classical records at all.

Geography

A subject that really begs the question, what is geography and what is the point of learning it? It is a subject that is so vast, so incredibly enormous, that it defies learning more than a tiny bit of it. I had to learn about Canadian prairies, California, tourism in Europe south of Lyon (yes) and agriculture in West Africa. Why? I have no idea. I learnt rubbish about fruit-growing in the Sacramento valley, something about alfalfa in Manitoba and that there were countries in West Africa (don’t ask me which) where groundnuts (peanuts to you) and sorghum (whatever that is) were a big deal to the local economy. I was meant to remember about rainfall in Burkina Faso and Canadian grain tonnages in 1967 (probably the most recent figures available in 1973). Needless to say, I remember nothing and I don’t care. I might just as easily have learnt about the Norwegian fjords (I suspect I did in earlier years) or the Siberian tundra (I didn’t).

Maybe I am being unkind. I think we did “study” South America, at least enough to learn about the guano deposits in Peru and where the countries were. But we didn’t study Central America, or South-East Asia, for example. Or Japan. Hardly surprising. There is just too much stuff to know.

Of far greater interest and use was the study of physical geography and how to read a map. Knowing about glaciation, misfit streams and terminal moraines has been quite interesting here in Switzerland where there are plenty of all of them. But I don’t remember that much, not enough to pass an O Level in physical geography. Pity. But once again, I could just go on Amazon and buy a book for revision. It would all come back. Over the last couple of years, aware of my woeful ignorance, I have learnt all the countries of the world and can put them on a map. I have learnt all their flags too and most of their capitals. Is this useful? Not really, but it makes the Olympics more fun to watch. Without computer learning, this would have been really tedious had I had to do it at school. I know this as we were supposed to be able to identify all the countries in West Africa as part of our Agriculture in West Africa topic. I failed miserably, having no interest at all. How much about Conakry, Abidjan and Bobo-Dioulasso do I really need to know?

Education, it seems to me, is more about having the keys to understanding rather than odd bits and bobs of extraneous knowledge which you probably won’t ever need. So map-reading, yes. Millet in Sierra Leone, no.

History.

A bit like geography. Whose history? When? As it turned out, it was essentially British history, which made quite a lot of sense, or a lot more sense than only studying Spanish history, for example. But here again, the subject is just so enormous that we only got snippets of it.

Scratch the first 1000 years of the Common Era, as it now seems to be called. AD to me. We didn’t learn anything about that. I think I learnt about Harold, the Normans and the Bayeux Tapestry in primary school. That was also where I learnt about the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Greeks and the Meander Pattern, and heraldry. I remember having to do a couple of history projects in successive years at secondary school. We were in teams of two and drew lots for what project we were going to do. I ended up with medieval dress one year and the Jesuits (yes) another. All because of the Reformation, I suppose. So I learnt about priest holes in castles and stately homes and nothing about the politics of Henry VIII. All quite arbitrary. I also did not study, or learn, anything about the English Civil War, or the War of the Roses, or in fact pretty much anything before 1910. As a historical education, it leaves something to be desired.

But some of it was good. We did learn all about WWI and that is extremely useful if you want to understand why the world is as it is these days. Of course, it would have been even more useful to have studied WWII as well, but there just wasn’t time. Or at least, there wasn’t time if we were going to study the birth of the Labour Party which we did instead. Again, a sort of deep-dive of questionable use or interest. What would have been more interesting and useful, knowing about the birth of the Labour Party or knowing about the end of colonialism post WWII? I know what my money is on. But once again, you can read your own books on anything that interests you and I have, from the Vietnam War (I grew up with it, so that’s interesting) to Hitler and Stalin. On the other hand, I still haven’t got around to reading my two Pelican books on French history. I’ve only had them for about 30 years. One day, maybe.

Physics

If there was a subject I was keen to give up after O Level it was physics. I was delighted to do so, in fact. I liked physics when we were being told stories and explained stuff and hated it when we had to do pointless experiments. For example, watching a tin can being squashed under atmospheric pressure as the air was sucked out was great, but playing with the hopeless tickertape trolleys to prove Newton’s laws of motion was a waste of time as there was so much drag in the tickertape (unmeasurable in the experiment) that things were never going to work out satisfactorily. In any case, we’d learnt the laws, so there wasn’t a great deal of point in trying to prove Newton right or wrong (he was clearly right) by farting about with little wooden trolleys for hour after hour. And then, we’d have to write up the experiments, lying about our results (so that the equations worked), and sticking in any bits of tickertape that we could find that supported the spurious results into our exercise books.

I never understood electricity (still don’t, really) and atomic theory was so dumbed down that there really were models of the atom with a football-sized sphere representing the nucleus and a ping-pong ball representing the electron. It’s nothing like that at all and we should have been told. Needless to say, quantum mechanics at O level weren’t even mentioned. I don’t think we learned anything about astrophysics at all. We were far too busy playing with the tickertape trolleys.

So, it comes as something of a surprise to me to find that in my adult life I have bought over half a dozen books on particle physics and quantum mechanics, and various books on astrophysics. After all, who doesn’t want to understand about stuff, life, the creation of the universe and where we are all heading? Sadly, the answers to all these questions are very complicated and unless you’re brilliant at advanced mathematics, you aren’t going to get very close to understanding them. At least you can try and I do.

But I suppose that studying physics at least gave me the language to approach the books that I have bought. Had I not studied the subject, I wouldn’t perhaps have made it past the early, comprehensible chapters that deal with the Newtonian world, let alone moved on to Einstein’s theory of special relativity where time warps or doesn’t even exist, black holes suck in everything except when they don’t, and quarks spin and come in different “colours”.

 

Some manganese yesterday

 

Chemistry

Now, chemistry was a different kettle of fish entirely, as far as I was concerned. I liked chemistry and I liked doing the experiments. There is (or was at our level) a logic to chemistry that was expressed with satisfying equations that made sense. Our teacher said it was essentially just cooking and, in some respects, he was right. More accurately, I suspect that cooking is really chemistry, (but organic chemistry, which we didn’t really do, is a lot more complicated than inorganic). Still, getting to the root of why a gratin dauphinois comes out of the oven as it does would be beyond me.

40 years on, the Periodic Table of elements is still a wondrous thing. I have toyed with the idea of getting a Periodic Table t-shirt - it’s that good. I remember much of what we learnt, but probably not the fine detail of valency and thus I couldn’t just spit out the equations any more or know instinctively what is likely to occur if you heat manganese and iron together. I suspect I might have known that once. It doesn’t matter all that much as I never have any cause to heat manganese and iron, nor do I come into contact with a lot of sodium apart from when I salt my chips. But once again, learning chemistry gave you a language for understanding things and I’m very glad I “learnt” it, even if, nowadays, it is apparent that I haven’t really “learnt” all that much. Pity.

Biology

I know almost no biology for the simple reason that I gave it up after a year to learn Latin. I’ve always been squeamish and I had no desire to start cutting open eyeballs to see how they worked, interesting though it would have been. So I know little or nothing about cells, osmosis, enzymes or anatomy. Now, this is an interesting point. Does it mean that my life has been blighted by not knowing much biology and this proves that not having kids at school for a while is denting their valuable education, or does it mean that the valuable education can indeed be put on hold for a few months with no real ill-effects? It’s just not possible to study everything – there isn’t time. I’ve picked up quite a lot of biology from watching 50 years’ worth of BBC documentaries, from Horizon to Attenborough. The chemistry helps. Once again, learning doesn’t stop after school. If you’re interested, you can learn a whole lot more than they teach you in school by just reading a few books.

So that is something of a rundown of 5 years of my secondary school education and how useful it has been to me. It’s not worth talking about the two years of A levels, as they were just more advanced French and Spanish and Latin, with a bit of Maxim listening to music thrown in. But it is worth mentioning primary school. I had a particularly brilliant headmaster who was encyclopaedic in his knowledge or at least massively enthusiastic about imparting knowledge to kids. Apart from the Ancient Greeks, the Ancient Egyptians, the heraldry and whatnot, we learned basic astronomy, Belgian architecture and seabirds. We heard about Vasco da Gama and Magellan, the trees and plants that surrounded us and the wildlife. To this day, if I can identify Mizar or Betelgeuse, it’s thanks to my primary school headmaster. (As a matter of fact, I can’t identify Mizar or Betelgeuse, but I know what constellations to look in and I could spot a very likely candidate. It’s more than most people). Now, it strikes me that any parent could and should be telling their kids about Mizar and Betelgeuse and reading them the Greek myths and providing general knowledge. Why leave everything to state education? So if kids can’t go to school, it’s not really an excuse. As you take them for a walk, are you pointing out the different trees to them? Do you know what they are? Can you spot Jupiter in the night sky or know where to look for Venus? These things aren’t really on the school syllabus, but they are the most important things to know, it seems to me. In any event, they are a lot more interesting and useful than knowing about the economy of Libreville (that’s the capital of Gabon, in case you were wondering).

Make yourself a whisky sour. At once.

Over the past week I seem to have developed a certain weakness for the whisky sour.

The problem with a lot of cocktails is not that they are difficult to make but that you just won’t have the ingredients lying around. There is always a Crème de Menthe, Blue Curaçao, or a grenadine syrup or something of that nature that you just won’t find in the average home. You could say that the whisky sour is no exception, as it requires Angostura bitters, and who has a bottle of that lying around? Surprisingly, I do.

Angostura bitters is one of those things that crops up in a lot of cocktails and as such, it’s worth getting hold of a bottle. Once you have, it will probably last you a lifetime. You only ever need a few drops or a dash in any cocktail and as it’s about 45% alcohol, it’s not likely to go off. My bottle must be about 15 years old and it’s still about 95% full.

The whisky sour is so worth making. For a start, it’s absolutely delicious. It is also a cinch to make. This is how I have been making it:

Put your glass in the freezer. A cocktail glass if you have one, but a tall-stemmed glass if you haven’t. Or just any glass that isn’t completely rubbish. If you develop a taste for the things, you can just keep a cocktail glass in the freezer or icebox on a permanent basis. It’s the wisest course of action.

Get out your shaker. If you don’t have one, how are you going to make about 80% of cocktails?

Put some ice in it. Quite a lot, say about half full.

Squeeze about half a lemon, unless it’s a really dry one, in which case you may need the whole thing. Pour that into any kind of glass that you might reasonably expect to be able to judge the quantity in. I have quite a lot of glasses marked at 2cl and 4cl – thanks to a past in the alcohol industry… But you don’t really need a mark.

Add to the glass the same quantity of sugar syrup.

Sugar syrup? You cry. Who’s got sugar syrup in their house? Clearly, almost no one. Thankfully, it’s absurdly simple to make. Just get a cup and fill it with water. Tip that in a saucepan. Bring it to the boil. Then fill your cup with sugar and pour that in. Stir to dissolve and then cover the saucepan and simmer for about 15 mins. Leave to cool. Job done. Nothing is stopping you from making a double quantity - two cups of water, two cups of sugar. Once it is cool, put it in a bottle. A clean wine bottle will do so long as you can cork it. Best to put it in the fridge where it will keep for weeks. To make sure you can keep it for weeks, they say to add a splash of vodka to it, so I tipped a bit of Smirnoff into mine. This is the only downside to sugar syrup: you’ll have to make it a day, or at least a few hours, in advance. There is no point suddenly getting the desire for a whisky sour if you haven’t already got some sugar syrup in your fridge. So, make that now.

Right, where were we? You’ve added as much sugar syrup to your glass as you have lemon juice. Chuck the glass contents into your shaker over the ice. Next, put 3 times as much whisky into the glass as you had lemon juice, or if you prefer, the same quantity as the sugar syrup and lemon plus 50%. If your glass is big enough, you can add it on top of the other ingredients before tipping it all into your shaker.

Next, splash in a couple of shakes of your Angostura Bitters. (Buy a bottle online if you can’t find any locally.)

Finally, and this might be the magic ingredient, add an egg-white to your shaker. Most people have access to an egg. What do you do with the yolk? Not sure, but I am thinking that there is some very yellow scrambled egg in my near future. The recipe says you don’t have to add the egg-white, but I have only made it with, and it gives a froth and a lightness that is sublime, so unless you are vegan, go for the egg-white.

Shake the shaker vigorously for about 20 seconds, or until it is painfully cold to the touch (ie. your hand is in agony holding the shaker). Strain the contents (your shaker probably has a built-in strainer) into the ice-cold glass that you have retrieved from the freezer. Garnish your drink with a maraschino cherry (you won’t have one of these) or some lemon. I just cut up a bit of the lemon that I used to squeeze the lemon juice from. It might not be cocktail bar-class, but it’s cheap and simple.

Enjoy your drink.

What you will discover is that it is so delicious that it is hard to resist a second one. But is that reasonable? Having put 6 cls of Johnnie Walker Red Label in mine, I’m thinking it isn’t reasonable and am resisting the temptation. Do as the mood takes you. You will obviously be drinking it quite fast while it is still cold, so it’s not going to last long, rather like a martini. It is also irresistible, so that it’s hard to make it last. It contains a mix of flavours like nothing else – I defy anyone not to like it. Of course, you can experiment with other whiskies and I almost certainly will. Some recipes seem to imply that you need bourbon, but you don’t. Maybe Johnnie Walker Black Label will be even better. It should be, but the Red Label version is already so good…

You can do this. Make the effort and you will wow both yourself and anyone fortunate enough for you to make one for. Cheers.

Oh no! No internet!

Areas affected by Swisscom's internet outage February 11th-12th 2020

Something vaguely out of the ordinary happened last night at about 11pm.

I was idly looking at videos of guitar amps on YouTube when a video failed to load. I did the usual things like quitting Safari, the web browser, and starting it again. That didn’t improve anything, so I resorted to Firefox but that wouldn’t work either. So, I shut down the Mac and restarted it. Still no dice. I couldn’t get my Mail to refresh either. Rapid diagnosis? I had no internet connection (although the icons on the Mac appeared to show that I did). If I had no internet connection, then the TV wouldn’t work either because it is also internet based. So, I turned it on. Amazingly, it did work for about 10 seconds (how come?) but then informed me that I had no internet connection and that I needed to switch the internet box upstairs off and on again. These things can happen; nothing to get very excited about. I did the necessary.

The internet box can take a while to run through all its configurations and start-up procedures, so I thought I would continue my web browsing  by using my phone as a wi-fi hotspot, in other words, using the mobile network to stream the internet to my computer instead of the cable internet. But strangely, that didn’t work either. I should point out that I have the same supplier, Switzerland’s biggest, to supply my TV, landline, internet (all that is internet based) and mobile network. In this, I am like about 2/3 of the country. It now looked very much like a Swisscom problem, so I gave them a ring, notwithstanding the lateness of the hour. I just got a recorded message saying that all their operators were busy (not that usual, I’d have thought, at 11pm) and that I should phone later. I wasn’t even put on hold. This confirmed my suspicions that they had a problem.

However, with no TV to look at and no internet of any description, it was impossible to divine the extent of the problem. Was it a Swisscom problem (seemed unlikely that it was purely a local one), a national problem, a European one, or even a global one? How could I find out? It was then that I passed the door of the bedroom where my wife had fallen asleep listening to the radio, which was still quietly on. It was broadcasting some sort of announcement that emergency services numbers (there are separate ones here for fire, police, ambulance, avalanches etc.) were no longer working in most of the country.

Ah.

I was wary of ringing up friends at 11:30 pm (as it now was) to ask them what was going on, if they knew, but I sent a speculative SMS to one to ask him. No answer, although the phone said it had been delivered and I knew that the mobile network was up as I had got through to Swisscom. I sent another one to a friend in England and got back a reply that all was normal there. No need to panic, then. Not a European-wide or global catastrophe.

I went to bed and read my book. That was the sum total of my discomfort.

At about a quarter past midnight, normal service was restored and I went to sleep. In fact, I already was asleep when I was woken up by my first friend replying to my SMS saying that everything was working again.

It also transpired that the various emergency services had tweeted mobile numbers to replace their normal emergency numbers. This would have been bugger-all use to me, as with no internet there was no Twitter, so I would have been none the wiser. I would have been able to watch my house burn down or suffer a cardiac arrest without any means to call for help. At least the third of the country with Salt or Sunrise connections might have been able to log on to Twitter (as you would, with flames coming out of your house) to find out if, on the off-chance, the emergency services had replaced 117 etc with some odd mobile number. It’s just the sort of reflex you’d have.

It got me thinking. Everything works on the internet now, which means that if the internet doesn’t work, nor does anything else. I’m lucky not to have an internet radio, so there is still some means of finding out potentially when the shit hits the fan. But suppose the mobile network went down too, you’d have to resort to face-to-face communication or carrier pigeon. No TV, no phone, no internet. Had the situation gone on until today, there would be no real point going to work. Our phones are internet-based and wouldn’t work, so the 100-odd people who ring us every day wouldn’t. Those that came into the shop wouldn’t be able to buy much as they would need cash to pay for it because electronic payment methods wouldn’t work. They wouldn’t be able to withdraw any cash as the bank machines wouldn’t work. They’d probably want to reserve their little cash for food or transport. In fact, the entire contents of our shop, its computers, phones and iPads, would be just useless junk in the event of a prolonged internet failure and no one would want to buy them. The technical department wouldn’t be able to diagnose faulty machines either without internet tools. But it wouldn’t just be us. No one would be able to work, apart from farmers and woodcutters.

All a bit doomsday scenario, you might think, but I’m not so sure. Our entire lives are now predicated on the internet working but sooner or later, it probably won’t. Why would it? What have humans ever built that has worked forever? Any system has a vulnerability and all sorts of supposedly invulnerable things have been shown to have fatal weaknesses, from Goliath to Achilles to the Titanic. The internet is not invulnerable; it is contained in physical cables which can suffer damage, or in large banks of machines that might suffer damage. What was actually required to bring down 65% of Switzerland’s internet last night? Not much probably – pull out a few wires here or there, throw a few switches and hey presto.

The internet cables that physically link the world

I saw the Chernobyl mini-series which seemed to imply that a handful of people in a dysfunctional team almost managed to make a large and densely populated swathe of Europe uninhabitable.

I suspect that with the internet we have put all our eggs in one basket and that that basket isn’t anything like as well-woven and dependable as we’d like to believe.

The irony that you can only read this thanks to a working internet is not lost on me.

Rise of the Ransomes Part 3 – the homecoming

For this to make any sense, you will want to read parts one and two of this story of a mechanical Lazarus.

So, there was my restored Ransomes, all ready to cut grass once again but sadly, in the wrong country. It was sitting in Buckinghamshire in England whereas the grass I wanted to cut is in Switzerland. Thus, the next task was to work out how to get the thing sent over to me. You evidently can’t just post it.

John Gregory told me that in the past, they have used a company called Palletways to move lawnmowers around. This is a company that specialises in transporting pallets of pretty much anything. You get yourself a pallet, put whatever you want on it, give them a ring and they will come and pick it up and take it to where you want it. I had a look at their website and the prices seemed perfectly reasonable. There were just two small problems. The first was that they said they wouldn’t transport engines. I suspected that we’d be able to get over that problem as The Old Lawnmower Company had used them in the past, so they must be amenable to having their arms twisted. The second problem was potentially more of a deal-breaker: they don’t deliver to Switzerland.

There are a lot of companies that are happy to send you stuff anywhere in the EU that won’t deliver to Switzerland. I can only assume that this is because Switzerland is not in the EU, although it has bilateral treaties coming out of its ears. So there are probably bits of paperwork required and administrative hassle that means that although, perhaps, companies are happy to transport goods through Switzerland – to Italy, say – they aren’t prepared to drop goods off in Switzerland.  A few years ago, I wanted to buy some Timberland shoes on the Timberland Europe website. Ironically, although Timberland Europe is based in Zug, Switzerland (for tax reasons, obviously), they refused to send me any shoes as they won’t ship to Switzerland. You couldn’t make it up.

It was clear that I was going to have to do some creative thinking. It seemed to me that the best option was to get the lawnmower to within spitting distance of the Swiss border but still just in France. That way, Palletways would have no qualms about doing the job. The only question was, who could I have the Ransomes delivered to? I do know a couple of people who live on the other side of the border, but one is somewhere near Geneva – not really that handy, but workable – and the other has a holiday home even further away and they probably wouldn’t be in it when the lawnmower was going to show up. Not ideal. But then I had a cunning plan. Why couldn’t I have it delivered to a supermarket just over the border 30 minutes away where I go for a major shop several times a year (mainly for the cheap fish)? A supermarket is constantly receiving pallets of stuff and presumably has somewhere to put them. All I needed to do now was to convince the ATAC supermarket in Jougne, not far from the border at Vallorbe, to sign my pallet into its warehouse.

I did have one advantage in this quest. I have always found the staff in this smallish supermarket to be extremely helpful and polite. In fact, so pleasant are they to deal with that a few years ago I sent an email to the manager to congratulate him on his staff and to ask him to thank them on my behalf for providing such top-notch customer service. This is a place where the fresh fish counter will gut and clean your fish for you if you ask them, relieving you of the most unpleasant task associated with cooking fish. The staff are always smiling and cheerful and seem happy to see you – remarkable for a supermarket chain. So, in making my request, I did have a name, an email address and an email chain which might suggest that I wasn’t in fact a drugs smuggler who had hidden several kilos of cocaine in a lawnmower’s petrol tank.

To cut a long story shorter, it turned out that my email never made it to the manager, as he had moved on, and it remained unanswered. So, a week later (I didn’t want to hassle the guy), I rang up and was put through to the new manager, a Monsieur Tournissa. You couldn’t say he was brimming over with enthusiasm at the idea when I had explained what I wanted. But somewhat grudgingly, he said that yes, he would make an exception in this case and do a good customer this favour. I did some bowing and scraping over the phone – after all, this was well worth a bit of bowing and scraping – and hung up having solved my immediate problem.

I agreed with John the date for the Ransomes to be picked up on its pallet, and booked the pallet with Palletways. This process was simple except for the fact that I couldn’t see anywhere on their site where I could specify the collection date. Once the order had gone through, I was breezily told that the pallet would be collected the next day. Disaster! It wouldn’t be ready! There then ensued various emails and phone calls to get the date changed to the date I wanted, for which I was charged the sum of £20. It seemed a bit rich that I should have to pay extra because their website is badly designed, but it was no time to argue. In the scheme of this project, twenty quid is really neither here nor there.

A week later I was just beginning to wonder if someone hadn’t snaffled my lawnmower en route or if the supermarket was going to deny all knowledge of ever having received it – in which case, there wouldn’t be a whole lot I could do about it – when I received an email from the assistant manager telling me that the Ransomes had arrived. I agreed to pick it up a week later when my friend Yves and his Subaru estate would be available. I wasn’t sure it would fit in the back of my Alfa which, although an estate, is only on nodding terms with practicality.

So, a couple of weeks ago, Yves and I drove over the border to Jougne. We had gone by way of a local chocolate shop as I wanted to get some handmade chocolates to thank the people in the supermarket. After all, there was nothing much in the deal for them and there was a lot in it for me so it seemed only reasonable to make some gesture of appreciation. Then the plan was to do some (fish) shopping. There are a couple of local borders near me. The main one is at Vallorbe and this is the one that sees most freight and is by far the busiest. Whilst the French quite often don’t bother to man their side, or if they do, may be eating garlic sausage in their hut for all you see of them, the Swiss are almost always in evidence and do a lot of checking of cars in addition to their systematic lorry checks. Thus the chances that they were going to ask me about the Ransomes when we came back over the border with it were high. And there wasn’t much I could tell them about it apart from the truth, and then they might say, where is the proof of what you say? Did you not just buy this? Or alternatively, VAT needs to be paid on the restoration job, even if you did inherit the mower. Put it this way, there are no conversations with customs officials that you can have that beat no conversation. Your best result is no additional costs, paperwork or fines. A far better idea, it seemed to me, would be to avoid the customs officials altogether and come back over the border at L’Auberson, a tiny village on a backroad where there is almost never anyone to be seen at the customs post. It’s a longer trip home, but it’s very scenic and neither Yves nor I are bothered about making longer trips.

So, we rocked up to ATAC, armed with chocolates, and went to customer service and asked to speak to the assistant manager who, to my amazement, was at work on a Saturday. Some telephoning ensued and we hung around. Then, instead of the assistant manager, a guy showed up with a pallet truck with my lawnmower on it, snuggled up in bubble-wrap and cardboard. We took it out to the Subaru and loaded it in. I proffered the choccies. As I was getting a trolley for the (fish) shop, a smallish, dark-haired man in his 40s appeared, evidently looking for us and clutching the chocolate bag. This turned out to be M. Tournissa himself who was determined to thank me personally for the chocolates. “Fallait pas!” he said. I assured him that it was the least I could do. Having stocked up with fish and wine and butter (surprisingly, better than in Switzerland; not surprisingly, cheaper) we headed off to L’Auberson, winding down through the fir forest on an immaculately surfaced road that is just perfect for biking, or at least it was until they put speed traps on it.

The customs post, such as it is, is on a less-travelled road a mile from the village, round a bend as you emerge from the forest. And there, would you believe it, was a customs official. What?? That must be one of the first times I have ever seen anyone there in years of crossing the border – not through trafficking goods, you understand, but because that road is such a good ride. The good news, though, was that the official in question was busy asking questions of another hapless motorist and he waved us through. Phew! We could now settle down secure in the knowledge that no one was going to start asking us weird lawnmower-based questions and demanding bits of paper that we didn’t have.

We drove peacefully though L’Auberson and were just heading on up to St.-Croix, the barely-a-town at the top of the pass before the col drops down into the valley where I live, when… we were waved over to a layby. What?? This was La Volante, or Douane Volante – the flying customs officers. These are extra customs officers who leap upon smugglers when they least expect it, a mile or two over the border. This was more customs activity than I have ever seen on that road, ever. Did they know we were coming?

What, they wanted to know, were we transporting? I told them about the lawnmower which was apparently of no interest. But we had been shopping, had we not? Oh yes, I said, but I frequently did and I knew all about the quotas and had no more than 2 kg of meat and twelve bottles of wine. And what about the butter, they wanted to know. Did I have more than 2 kg of butter?

Butter? Is butter rationed? Apparently, yes. Before I could answer, the cheery young customs guy said “I’m not going to hassle you for a pat of butter. Off you go.” And that was that. I had exactly 2 kg of butter in any case…

The rest of the journey was uneventful and the Ransomes arrived safely home. We unloaded it and bolted its handle back together. It had been dismantled for shipping. I then went to print out the detailed instructions that John had sent me for starting and running it, as well as the period instruction manual. It’s amazing; even instruction manuals have dated considerably since it was first printed. Something to do with the typeface, the drawings and the fact that it is only in English and not Japanese and Swedish. It doesn’t look as if the Ransomes was greatly exported. We also found, just bolting the handle together, that the bolts are all imperial and not metric. Who in Switzerland has got an imperial socket set or spanners? The whole thing feels completely… Brexit.

Ransomes Marquis operating instructions

We added the petrol as instructed, bled the fuel system, fettled the choke and pulled energetically on the starter cord and the Ransomes roared into life.

You can instantly see that it is a machine from a bygone, non-health-and-safety age as its spinning blades are beautifully exposed and threaten to maim you if you go near the grassbox. Of course, by throttling down as you should, the motor will still run and the blades stop whirring when you bend to uncouple the grassbox for emptying. But you can just tell that these days there would have to be some failsafe switch or safety mechanism that prevented you from unhitching the grassbox if the blades were still turning. They didn’t worry about that sort of thing in the 70s. I never used to give it a moment’s thought back in the day when I used this very machine, or the Atco, its predecessor. I mowed a few strips of grass tentatively, but memories soon came flooding back – the way you need to be nifty with the clutch and how you spin the machine around on the back roller at the end of the strip. What also became apparent was that even on its highest setting, this is a machine for a decent lawn and it cuts very closely for early spring when you need to just take off the top inch or so of grass. Later on, in a few weeks, it will be ideal but at the moment, the grass just isn’t ready for the close attention of the Ransomes.

And so there we have it – a project has come to fruition. The Ransomes sits purposefully in my garage next to the Chinese, constructed-from-cheese, little petrol mower that I have been using for nadgery bits, and the chunky ride-on that deals with most of my grass. When spring gets properly underway I shall be employing it and thinking of my old man as I do so. I know that he, as a man who never threw anything away, would approve of my giving it a second lease of life.

Restoring the Ransomes Lawnmower – Part 2

Well, what can I say? If you’re looking at the photo above, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was taken from a Ransomes lawnmower catalogue some time in the 70s. But no. It was taken just a few weeks ago and is a photo of my restored lawnmower. If you haven’t read Part 1 of this little saga, it would probably be a good idea to do that before reading any further. Just click on this link.

We left my father’s old lawnmower in the more than capable, elven hands of John Gregory of The Old Lawnmower Company who promised that he would restore it to its former glory. This seemed like something of a tall order. Although the Ransomes had not spent a few months at the bottom of a canal, it looked as if it might have done. Where would you dare to begin on all the rust that covered the thing like a fungus? The motor was going to be the least of John’s worries – if it had any oil in it, it probably wasn’t rusted. Being a motorcycle enthusiast myself, old motors are not as frightening as they might be, but cosmetic stuff? That’s a nightmare.

I’d told John that I wasn’t in a hurry to have the mower back. Some time in the spring would do, as I’m not about to start cutting my grass in the snow. My garden is on hold over the winter months. I don’t spend much time in it although no doubt there are all sorts of pruning jobs I could be doing, or, indeed, looking after my tools, sharpening and oiling them.

But I did ask him to take some photos as he went along so that I could understand the rebuild and share it with anyone interested, which is what I am doing now. So what follows are his photos and explanations of what they all mean. I don't know that I necessarily have the exact order that John did the work in, but these are all the things that needed to be done to restore the mower.

The first thing to do is take it all to bits and create your own Ransomes lawnmower puzzle. You'll end up with something that looks like this:

Anything that was to be painted needed to be stripped down to the bare metal and in some cases filled to remove the dents that had accumulated over many years of banging into things as my father was mowing. It pains me to think that I will undoubtedly be putting the dents back in over the years to come.

Then everything needs to be primed prior to painting and in some cases the elements are treated with Kurust Rust Inhibitor:

Then you can finally paint some things:

The cutting assembly requires a lot of attention. After all, it's sort of the whole point of a mower, isn't it? If it's not going to cut the grass properly, there really isn't much point in restoring a mower, except as a sort of museum piece and I'm not too keen on them. First off, you've got to get the thing apart. Out with the blowtorch and the impact driver:

Once you've got it to pieces, you can start repainting it, putting it back together and sharpening it. The cutting cylinder and new bottom blade are sharpened together, using backlapping paste, with a strip of paper used (like a guillotine) to check its effectiveness.

 

 

One of the secrets to the amazing results you get on your lawn from using a proper cylinder mower is the heavy rollers that it contains hidden at the back. These iron out the bumps that accumulate in a lawn over time, due to the soil shifting, wheelbarrows and in my case at least, moles or other creatures burrowing about underneath it. In order to have some manoeuvrability, the rollers come in two sections with a differential allowing them to be driven independently of each other. Very cunning. You want to keep this properly greased because otherwise it can seize up making the mower extremely difficult to operate. Here the differential is lubricated and the bearings refitted. The bearings secure the rear-roller assembly to the mower chassis.

 

The engine also inevitably needs some work after all these years. The good news is that it was built in a time when you could still understand your engine. It reminds me somewhat of taking motorcycle engines apart in university bedrooms. Not great for the carpet, but there wasn't really anywhere else you could do it. I am surprised, though, by the amount of gunk and crap that was coking up the cylinder head. After all, lawnmowers aren't run that much in the scheme of things, if you compare them to a bike or a car. Perhaps it had been running rich? Talking of which, I am going to have to ask John what sort of petrol to put in it now, as it dates from the time of leaded petrol. Do you just put in some unleaded, or does it need magic additives to keep it running sweetly? Here is John working on the carbon deposits in the head:

There's none of your new-fangled electronic ignition with a motor like this. It's all about points and probably setting them with a cigarette paper. Isn't that how it used to be done? Not so convenient now in the non-smoking age. First you clean them:

Then you set them:

The Ransomes is also treated to a new condenser and coil for the ignition:

Not forgetting to deal with the starter mechanism, the part of the mower that can potentially instil more rage in the owner than any other. You'll want to make sure that this is perfectly restored if it's going to start reliably. The recoil start assembly gets its spring lubricated...

... a nice new piece of string...

... and is lovingly put back together:

And now we move into the final stage of the restoration in which all the restored assemblies are bolted back together again to recreate the mower of my dreams. 

First off, the reassembled engine showing the flywheel and centrifugal clutch.  The flywheel holds the centrifugal clutch shoes, which are spring-loaded.  The centrifugal clutch automatically engages when the revs of the engine are raised, which revolves the cutting cylinder. Look at that paint !

The fuel tank, engine cowling and carburettor are fitted:

The rear roller and cutting cylinder assemblies are then fitted to the deck:

The cylinder's sprocket is secured with a left-hand thread (ie. it does up anti-clockwise).  The sprocket is done up using a stilson spanner gripping an old chain, which protects the sprocket's teeth:

Fitting the engine to the deck -  the engine is aligned with the mower's drive-shaft and positioned on the deck (the cardboard protects the deck's paint, during this procedure).

Then it's securing the rear roller sprocket.  The sprocket is again on a left-hand thread and is tightened, in this case, using a fabricated bar with two lugs protruding- these lugs slot into two holes drilled into the sprocket:

And you thought a lawnmower was a simple device?

The rear-roller clutch is the next to go on. The clutch plate is shown being fitted to the backplate:

The positioning of the rear-roller clutch determines the tension of the two drive chains, so it is tightened with them both fitted to the sprockets using a pin spanner.

Grease those chains!

Now the handlebars can go back on. The handle bars are in four tubular sections which slot together and are held in a central clamp. If you look back at Part 1 of this story, you will see the lamentable condition of this clamp which now looks like new. Maybe it is new, although it doesn't appear in my new parts list so I assume it has just been restored to look like new. Astonishing.

And here is the mower is fully assembled and running (the cutting cylinder is revolving, hence, its blurry effect).

All that is required now is the grassbox which has not been forgotten. Go back to the first instalment to see its initial sorry state, covered in dings. We did talk initially about just junking it and replacing it with another one and this is what John has done. A second hand replacement has cost all of 40 quid. All that is required for the finishing touch is for the original decal to be recreated, which John is having done by a local firm.

So there will be another instalment of this in which you'll be able to see the final mower with the decal and the grassbox fitted, and I'll tell you about how I got the thing to Switzerland. At the moment, I have no idea how I am going to do this cost effectively. John's bill has come in at well under £1'000 which is astonishing value for money, and even more so when you consider than almost half of this amount is for new parts and materials. I don't know how he does it. So it would seem ridiculous to pay some company now a similar amount just to get the mower to me. I'll have to do some research. I can't think that Brexit is going to make things any easier.

A huge thank you to John for what looks to be an incredible job. I can't recommend him enough to anyone who is serious about lawnmowers. Why would you want some Chinese junk when you can have something that has been through his hands? You can find out all about The Old Lawnmower Company here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Podcast advertising : blurring the line with journalism

I’ve been listening to quite a lot of podcasts over the last few months. As I’m gardening, going to the gym or even driving, I quite like to listen to something intellectually stimulating rather than just music, although I am coming around to the idea that music at the gym is probably a better option. I tune in to the radio, but so often the programme that is on is deeply dull, or, even worse, The Archers. With a podcast you are essentially listening to the radio but on your own terms, in other words, only to the programmes that interest you and you can listen to half a dozen on the trot if you like.

I seem to have developed something of a fascination for true-crime podcasts and even more so for cold-case investigations. These latter shows rake up some old unresolved mystery and attempt to solve it by going over the case and interviewing anyone connected with it. Sometimes the sheer amount of buzz created gets people talking again and if people talk enough, someone might get fingered for the crime or even confess. So some of these podcasts actually achieve something over and above simple entertainment. And they are undoubtedly entertaining. I’ve been enjoying David Ridgen’s Someone Knows Something, Payne Lindsey’s Up And Vanished and Sarah Koenig’s Serial, among others. And I’ve binge-listened to several series of each.

The podcasts are supported financially by advertising, which is only reasonable. You can’t expect all these people to work for free. And by and large, the advertising isn’t overly obtrusive. But strangely, the podcast host sometimes presents the advert, in the middle of his or her show, as a sort of personal testimonial. This seems to me to be completely bizarre. You are listening to an investigative journalist probing a case and doing their best to maintain objectivity, whatever they may feel about some of the testimony they are presented with, and then suddenly they break off to vaunt the merits of Hello Fresh and tell you that they particularly like the Asian chicken meals. You can just about believe this, but it becomes a lot less credible when they also tell you about their supposed personal experiences with on-line stock-trading, sofa-buying, cookie-eating and stamp usage. Of course, they are being paid to tell you this, but then their voice is just being sold to the highest bidder. What sort of journalistic credibility does that leave you with? I just can’t imagine Nick Robinson or Evan Davis endlessly telling me invented stories about consumer products. They would just look like idiots.

To be fair, David Ridgen does not do this on his podcast. The advertising is handled by someone else. Ditto Sarah Koenig on Serial. But Payne Lindsey seems to be becoming some sort of personality whose personal endorsement is a valued item. He started off in Season One of Up and Vanished quite discretely, but as the show grew in popularity, his persona gained more prominence. He became quite emotional and annoyed with the girlfriend of one of the supposed perps of Tara Grinstead’s murder. In a question and answer phone-in a couple of callers queried this way of conducting the interview. Did he not feel that he had overstepped the mark? No, they were told. He had values and was going to voice those values and stomp on anyone who didn’t subscribe to them. This seemed an odd way to go about journalism, but he told us that although emotion wasn’t part of traditional journalism, he felt that it should be. There just wasn’t enough emotion in journalism. Well, well. There have even been Up And Vanished roadshows where Payne Lindsey appears on stage to the rapturous shrieks of adoring women like some sort of guru. I don’t know the demographics of listeners to true-crime podcasts, but from the people phoning in, I’d say that they are overwhelmingly female and probably Millennial or younger.

Today I made the mistake of suggesting, on the Up And Vanished Facebook page (a rare and unwise foray into social media) that perhaps it would be better if the editorial voices and the commercial voices of the show were separate and that Payne didn’t voice the ads as personal experiences. This created a shit-storm of outraged comment. Despite my protestations to the contrary (I shouldn’t have bothered), I was accused of expecting podcasts to be advertising-free. I was told that ALL podcasts had their hosts voice ads as personal testimonials. I was told that I ought to try making a podcast to see how difficult it was. The time spent in editing! In fact, I was summarily flamed for suggesting that just maybe, there were improvements that could be made and that if traditional media separated the editorial side from the advertising side, then perhaps there were good reasons for this. A couple of posters attempted to defend my point of view but they were shouted down and then, finally, after a sort of cavalry charge of people mounted on high horses, the administrator, who had wilfully avoided trying to understand the meaning and intention behind my comment, shut the whole conversation down and deleted it.

I found this experience to be fascinating. I was clearly intruding upon a foreign territory that I didn’t understand. Not only are the show’s listeners to be found overwhelmingly in the US, but I suspect that the posters are young people, and mainly women. Which makes me, a middle-aged male European, a complete alien. I was pointed to this article which explains that personal host testimonials are a common and highly effective form of podcast advertising. This seems on the face of it incredible, but then the internet, digital generation seems to have a real problem separating fact from fiction. And it has an even bigger problem with critical analysis. This has been shown in universities where unwelcome opinion is not listened to and confronted with debate, but just shut down. This is “no-platforming” which has now got its own word, such is its prevalence.

The fact that the young generation likes to get its news from Facebook rather than respected publications and live in its own echo chamber is also a manifestation of the same thing. The Up And Vanished discussion group is an example of an echo chamber. It’s not about to invite criticism, constructive or otherwise. Of itself, this is of course not important. But I did find it a microcosm of what is going on in the world, of people essentially covering their ears and shouting “La la la la la!” very loudly when confronted with any opinion they might not like. It’s the attitude that leads to increasing right-wing extremism throughout the world, or of spray-tan, moronic celebrities becoming presidents.

And like the 30-year-old Payne Lindsey’s assertion that there isn’t enough emotion in journalism, his generation essentially doesn’t believe that there is enough emotion in anything. Hence the invention of the emoticon, and the constant stream of LOLs and OMG!!!s that seem to accompany any online utterance. If you’re not upfront about your emotions and sticking them in the face of whoever you have any communication with, in whatever form, you just don’t belong in the 21^stcentury. *Smiley Face*.

Resurrecting the Ransomes

Back in the 80s, the Thatcher government was accused of “selling the family silver” in order to make the budget look good. What this entailed was the selling-off (privatisation) of some actual money-making public companies such as British gas and British Telecom. Whatever. The purpose of this post is not to revisit the machinations and figure-massages of the Thatcher government but rather to look at the phrase “selling the family silver”.

When my grandmother died I was offered a few bits of the family silver to remember her by. I ended up with a silver ladle, which is pleasingly large and almost useless for my purposes as I don’t have a tureen to go with it (a very long story – I should have had) and in any case, I rarely, if ever, make soup for about a dozen people. If you don’t have a massive amount of soup, it’s a pretty large ladle. I also got a pickle spoon, which is useful for fishing pickled onions out of very tall jars, i.e. almost never. The pickle spoon I actually wanted had a little lever-operated device that snapped the spoon over the onion. It wasn’t really any more useful, but the mechanism fascinated me when I was small. A cousin got that. I also got a silver teapot with matching sugar bowl (I don’t add sugar to my tea) and milk jug. I don’t remember my grandmother using any of this, if indeed she did. And I don’t have many bourgeois tea ceremony-like occasions where I’d be tempted to use it. The various items sit, as probably in many homes, behind the glass doors of a pine dresser (also a family “heirloom”), where they tarnish. Now and again, perhaps annually, they are cleaned and shined and put back.

Following the recent demise of my father, my mother tells me that I must choose some more pieces of family silver. I can’t say that I am in any hurry to do this, as the process will simply be duplicated. I will end up with more stuff that I won’t use and that I can’t put in the dishwasher if I did. I don’t associate my father with any bits of silver per se. I find it interesting that a family’s sense of itself is, or probably more likely was, bound up in a few metal objects that today must have almost no value at all, unless it is sentimental. People are increasingly less interested in stuff and more interested in experiences. The stuff they do buy (plenty of it) is used fleetingly and then chucked out or taken to the charity shop. People have less and less space to accumulate unnecessary stuff. I know how they feel. I have a house and I still don’t really have any room for superfluous pieces of silver.

That’s not to say that I don’t want any objects to remember my old man by. I’m quite keen on his war-time stapler which is surely of very limited use. And I associate him strongly with a very small chopping board that he used to trim stamps, or postmarks or for some arcane philatelic purpose. I can’t think I’d have any use for these either, but at least they won’t take up much room. But one day, I woke up knowing precisely what I wanted – his lawnmower. Or more precisely, one of his lawnmowers.

He appeared to have a few lawnmowers at any given time and as I seem to recall, they often didn’t work. There was the unpowered pull-along or push-along mower for the postage stamp of lawn that we had in the early 60s when we lived in Roehampton. It was sky blue with orange hubcaps and I think it’s still around. Hmmm. I could have a project for that. He had a Flymo at some stage for dealing with scrubby bits of grass in hard to get to places, and he ended up with a few other machines. But the one he used the most in the 70s was a large Atco with a cylinder blade of the sort that rolls the lawn flat and produces the classic stripes that any self-respecting lawn should boast. I think these have gone right out of fashion. Maybe lawns are going out of fashion; they have probably been paved over so that you can park three cars on where they used to be.

The Atco was one of those petrol mowers that was a bastard to start and then, when it was going, had a mind of its own, careering off at the slightest opportunity into the flowerbeds. You had to keep the thing on a tight rein, with much use of the clutch. But it did make a great job of the croquet lawn. My father had always wanted a croquet lawn, and after about half-a-dozen years of flattening a very undulating piece of ground, he finally had one. I thought that the Atco had a kickstart, but I’m probably wrong. But one day, it appeared that my father got bored of its unreliability or capriciousness and bought a Ransomes Marquis, which was a similar sort of affair. It is also a large, heavy, petrol-driven cylinder mower, but it was seemingly more docile, or reliable or more trustworthy. And of course, it was green, as all the best lawnmowers are.

I wasn’t around the house that much when my father was using it, as by the 80s (and he must have acquired it in the mid to late 70s), I’d pretty much left home. But I think that the cylinder lawnmower in some way encapsulates my father. He was a great gardener. I don’t know that I’d say a “keen gardener”, as the hackneyed phrase has it, because I’m not sure how much he really liked gardening. What he wanted was a garden, not to garden for its own sake. If you want a garden, you have to get into gardening, so he did. But he was probably happy enough doing it. And I doubt he liked cutting the grass, but he did a lot of it.

And now, there was the Ransomes, sitting rusting in the garage, unwanted and unloved. My father hadn’t used it for years. In his 90s, he wasn’t going to, but in truth, he’d sort of given up on it in his later years and was no longer really very interested in having a croquet lawn. Perhaps it was because with his kids having left home, there was no one to have a game of croquet with. So he used lighter lawnmowers that don’t roll anything flat and don’t produce stripes and he got a ride-on mower, a completely useless machine that constantly clogs up with cuttings.

Thus I woke up that day with the idea to resurrect the Ransomes. I would have it restored to its former shiny glory, have it shipped over to Switzerland where I would use it on my own lawns, or rather the patches of grass that might become lawns once they got the regular Ransomes’ stripy, rolling treatment. I consulted the internet and found The Old Lawnmower Company, a firm that was seemingly invented for people with wishes like mine. They specialise in resurrecting the classic lawnmowers of the 60s and 70s, and they’ll sell you one for a very reasonable price if you haven’t got your own rusting hulk in a garage or shed.

They operate out of premises hidden up a lane to a field behind a huge farm gate, somewhere near Aylesbury. Your satnav will come in very handy if you try to meet them. If you do, you will find John and his father Ivor to be charming people and passionate about lawnmowers. These are the skilled artisans of grass-cutting machinery who will make your mower rise Lazarus-like from the rusting flakes of its once vibrant green paint.

I have now delivered the Ransomes into their tender care and over the winter they are going to turn this potential scrapyard item into the envy of all my neighbours. The latter already harbour thoughts about me spending more time than is reasonable on my grass, but then “c’est un anglais, n’est-ce pas?”. But when the stripes appear, some time next spring, well, they’ll just have to bow to my superior English lawn knowhow and commitment. The Old Lawnmower company tells me that although the mower is about 40 years old, after their refurbishment of it, it will happily chug along for another 30 or more. I hate to say that this is because it was built to last by an English workshop, rather than being made of cheese in some factory in the muddy and smoky heart of China, but well… there’s got to be some element of truth in that. It was made in a period where people who bought lawnmowers were not “lawnmower consumers” but “lawnmower owners”.

I will doubtless take more pictures and add smug remarks to them when I finally get my hands on the Ransomes again, some time next year.

 

What's on the pedalboard and why? Choosing guitar pedals

So, what’s on the pedalboard and how did I end up with those particular pedals? Well, they all have a story of sorts.

 

The first pedal I got was the Boss Tuner TU-2. I got this when I bought my first guitar, an Epiphone Casino semi-acoustic, and amp, a Fender Blues Junior. All of this arrived by post to Switzerland from London. I had asked my guitar-playing friend Nick Morgan for advice and when he gave it to me, it seemed contrary and stupid not to take it. I knew next to nothing about guitars and equipment. I didn’t even know that there were clip-on tuners or other tuning gadgets you could get. What I did know was that I would be incapable of tuning a guitar by ear and of course, I still am. You can’t fault the Boss. It gives you a clear visual indication of whether you are in tune and that has to be the most important thing. You could have any number of wonderful pedals, but if you’re playing out of tune…

 

 

The next one I got was the Marshall Bluesbreaker II overdrive pedal, again on Dr. Morgan’s advice. The Fender Blues Junior doesn’t have an overdrive channel which is often referred to in various teachers’ YouTube videos and so it doesn’t naturally make that “electric guitar sound” that non-players commonly associate with the electric guitar. If you’re not careful, you just sound like a loud acoustic and there aren’t that many top tracks where the guitar sounds like that. Somewhere along the line you need to add some grit and the Bluesbreaker serves that function. There is no point going into the specifics of overdrive here as there are countless people explaining it on the Tube. The pedal has a “boost” mode and a “blues” mode. Essentially, if you want to use the pedal to provide a fatter signal for other pedals, you leave it on “boost”. If you want a more distorted sound, you go for “blues”. To be honest, I’ve found the pedal a little underwhelming, but I suspect that is because I haven’t played around with it enough. As will all these pedals, there are plenty of knobs to tweak and you’ve got knobs on your amp and guitar too, so the combinations are literally astronomical. It takes quite a lot of time to find something that suits you.

 

 

Dr. Morgan then advised me to get a Big Muff fuzz pedal, so I did. What convinced me was that David Gilmour uses one on occasion and David Gilmour is the tone god. If it’s good enough for him… I think mine came from Macaris in the Charing Cross Road, London. Once you have one, you can understand how Gilmour gets that monstrous guitar sound from the opening of Sorrow. The Big Muff is a pedal which doesn’t do subtle very well. It’s pretty full-on and in-your-face and you need to be playing at a certain volume, it seems to me, for it to shine. That might be a volume which could easily annoy anyone in the vicinity, so I am thinking that I haven’t really been exploiting the Big Muff as much as I could. It also has the disadvantage of being a big pedal that takes up a lot of room on your pedalboard and the construction is very tinny compared to the Boss pedals for example. But there you go – it’s a classic and a relatively inexpensive classic at that and I don’t regret for an instant acquiring it.

 

 

I think the next pedal I got was the Boss DD-7 digital delay. It’s one of my very favourite pedals. The great thing about delays is that they play when you aren’t playing. Hit a note and you get several back as it repeats. This thickens up the sound hugely and if you’re playing by yourself, you can sound like several guitars at once. The pedal adds “kerpow!” to whatever you’re doing. You can have short “slapback” delays, or create whole soundscapes with longer delay settings and those soundscapes are even more marvellous when you put the thing in the “Modulate” setting where it starts making chorusy noises. I love it and that is where I mostly leave it. The sad thing is that my enthusiasm was not shared by my bandmates who found the sound overly psychedelic. They wanted some more straight-up rock and roll. Musical differences, eh? Stick the modulation effect on after an overdrive or distortion pedal and it just sounds massive and marvellous. You can imagine making that sound at Glastonbury…

 

 

Then surely I purchased my Colorsound Wah pedal. Well, you need a wah, obviously, as otherwise you won’t be able to do 1970s blaxploitation funk strumming, or shriek off some of the more famous solos by some artists. But you know what? It’s not that essential. It’s because there is little call for funk wah strumming unless, indeed, you are in a band that is always trying to sound like the theme music from Shaft. Ours wasn’t. As for the shrieking solos, you pretty much need to have them nailed before adding in your wah pedal and that takes a certain amount of practice and ability…

Then there is the pedal itself. Why did I end up with this one? The answer is that I had had a particularly superb lunch at Terroirs near Trafalgar Square and so I was pretty drunk when I walked up to Macaris again to investigate wah pedals. Essentially, the bloke in the shop sold it to me as it is made by Macaris. The Colorsound has its devotees, but not that many famous guitarists use one. In fact, I can’t think of any. It also has disadvantages. It is quite large for a start and is thus taking up more space than it should, seeing as I’m not using it that much. I am thinking that I may replace it with a Dunlop mini Cry Baby which will take up a lot less space. The next most annoying thing is that it only works on batteries, so you can’t plug it in to the power supply. Now, the thing with pedals is that even when they aren’t switched on, if you put an input and an output jack into them, then they sort of are switched on as far as the battery is concerned and if you leave them like that, the battery will drain. This means that the Colorsound has to be disconnected entirely whenever I am not using the board. It’s just a hassle. The whole point of the board is that you plug it into the mains and you’re good to go instead of farting about plugging pedals together. This is what I most dislike about the Colorsound. I also don’t like the way it sort of saps volume when it’s actually working. I bet I can get a smaller wah which will work on the mains and sound just as good for my purposes and I suspect that I am going to get one of those quite soon and pension the Colorsound off to eBay where someone will be happy to acquire it. Moral of the story – don’t make purchases when you are drunk. Many years ago, I bought a Pierre Cardin suit shortly after a lengthy pub visit. It was about two sizes too big for me.

 

 

Favouring as they did the heavier end of the rock and roll spectrum, my bandmates told me that they didn’t think my guitar was sounding metal enough for their tastes, so after a fair old bit of YouTube research and surfing I ended up buying a Proco RAT distortion pedal. The brilliant thing about the RAT is that you can set it from mild overdrive to something which is almost fuzz. I reckon that if you only had one distortion-style pedal, this is the one you’d want to have. It is a superb acquisition and once again a classic and reasonably inexpensive pedal, and also, once again, favoured by Mr. Gilmour, along with god knows how many other artists. It also looks as if it is built like a tank and is somewhat weighty. After many reviews, I decided to get a “White Face Reissue” version as this is the one which appears to have the best tone. I sounds great, but it has one drawback and that is that it doesn’t have a little light to tell you when it’s on. All my other pedals do, with the exception of the wah. Now, it quickly becomes apparent when you’re playing that it is either on or off, but you can still be momentarily surprised and it’s just vaguely annoying not to know before you start playing.

Still, this is but a trifling annoyance compared to the problems I have had with the on/off switch. It failed after about less than a year but as the pedal came from the States – as the reissue version wasn’t readily available in Europe – the guarantee was only valid there. Postage and customs ruled out sending it back so I had it repaired at my expense in Switzerland. That would have been just one of those things, but bugger me if the switch didn’t break again at the beginning of this year. I took it back to where it had been previously repaired but apparently  the bloke who had done it (perhaps not very well…) was no longer available to do it. Some bizarre switch apparently – although it looks pretty standard – and impossible to find. So now I’ve found some people in the UK to repair it, Pedalmods, but I am waiting to visit the UK to send it as the cost of postage (and customs…) will make it onerous to mail off. I had a lengthy email exchange with the manufacturers in the States but the upshot was that they don’t make the White Face Reissue anymore and don’t have the bits to repair it so even if I sent it to them, they’d just replace it with a RAT II. Hardly satisfactory. But I can’t play for months without a RAT, so I just went and bought a RAT II myself to use until I can get my White Face working again and that is what is on the board. Does it sound different? Hard to say without A/B’ing them but at least the RAT II has an LED that lights up when it’s on…

 

 

I had wanted a Boss Chorus pedal for some time and asked for one for Christmas. You need a chorus pedal because there are many songs which use one, such as Nirvana’s Come As You Are, for one, or a lot of the Cure stuff for others. In fact, chorus pedals are used the whole time. However, when my wife went to get one for me, the guy in the shop sold her a multi-effects pedal instead. Why, he said, would I want a chorus pedal when for only a bit more I could have an “everything” pedal? As she knows nothing about pedals, she fell for this argument. Any guitarist who has a load of pedals like I do knows that the reason you have them is because they aren’t copies of the real thing – they are the real thing. And those are the pedals that have made the music we all know and love. Pedals are simply cool and a multi-effects pedal, whilst perhaps producing a great sound, is just something different. I am indeed very happy with my Zoom G3 multi-effects pedal but I see it as an alternative to the pedalboard, not an add-in. Let’s be honest here, though. If you could only afford one pedal, you’d get the Zoom and have done with it. It is even a tuner and a looper too. Sadly though, the thing is a bit like a spaceship: there are just so many controls and settings that understanding it takes an age. The Boss does the job although you need to tweak the settings a fair bit to get that very liquid chorus sound, otherwise it is just too subtle.

 You’ll have noticed that Boss are my fallback for pedals and this is because they have a great reputation, are widely used, very well built, easy to find, competitively priced and not very big. Their only real disadvantage is that they don’t have silly names, wacky logos and are the sort of bog-standard purchase. Maybe I should be wilder in my pedal choice.

 

 

Next up, the MXR Phase 90 phaser pedal which produces that swirling, swooshing sound that is not uncommon in rock music. The Phase 90 is the classic one to have and once again has been used by David Gilmour. Some of the things I like most about it is its weightiness, bright orange colour and ludicrous ease of operation. It’s only got an on/off switch and a knob for more or less phase. In practice, I find that you only need it slightly on to get quite enough of that sound. This was also a Christmas present but this time I made it quite clear that this was the pedal I wanted; this and nothing else. MXR have done other interpretations of this pedal, but there is no reason to have anything other than this one, the original.

 

 

When I finally decamped from the now almost non-existent band, I decided to take the Boss Compression Sustainer with me. Our rehearsal room had a variety of small cupboards and in those cupboards could be found some odd pedals of a certain age. They didn’t appear to belong to anyone. No one used them. Now, this is strange as we the band, the four of us, were responsible for everything in that room which had been let to us completely empty. Consequently, as the old pedals didn’t belong to me, they must have been accumulated by the other 3 band members and yet no one would admit to owning them, let alone wanting them. We’d been renting the rehearsal room for about 4 years or so, plenty of time for someone to use the pedals if they had been of interest. I had read about compressor pedals and how they increase sustain for solos and even out volumes. I probably wouldn’t have bought one, but it seemed stupid to pass up the opportunity to get a free one, so I liberated this one and took it home and put it on my board. I’m not sure it’s something you must definitely have, but it is quite useful, I find, and once again is a pedal that has been used by many artists including the Pink Floyd guitar supremo although I am not sure he favoured a Boss for his compression.

 

 

Which only leaves the Tone City Golden Plexi. This is a newish pedal which came to my attention through watching YouTube videos. It is absolutely tiny and inexpensive. The idea of it is that it is an overdrive pedal that produces a sound like a classic Marshall Plexi amplifier being turned up to 11. I don’t have a Marshall amp and even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to turn it up loud enough for it to produce all its famous Marshallness, so this pedal looked like a good investment and it is. I now play with it on a lot of the time, but the gain knob is very sensitive and I find it is best only to have it on a smidgeon or it gets a bit out of hand. It’s also quite a “noisy” pedal, prone to hum, but for that kind of money, can you complain? I can certainly get my Strat to sound more like John Frusciante’s by using the Golden Plexi, which isn’t overly surprising as Frusciante favours Marshall amps.

So that is pretty much the pedalboard. It’s a versatile thing and you can get a lot of classic tones out of it. It also provides endless scope for fiddling. I can’t think it will change a great deal in the foreseeable future although I am suspecting that a change of wah is imminent as mentioned.

 

Putting together my pedalboard

It was when I visited our rehearsal room after a few months of not playing with the band that I decided I needed a pedalboard. I hadn’t been playing with the band because essentially, our lead guitarist had sacked us. He had decided that he no longer wanted to play with a bassist, drummer and rhythm guitarist who weren’t as accomplished as he was and thought it was about time he played with better musicians. It was understandable, if disappointing. After all, we did have a lot of weekly fun playing together and we didn’t have any ambitions, as far as I know, to do anything other than have a good time. We weren’t that awful. Some of our jams sounded pretty good – at least to us. And we had been playing together for several years.

So now I became the de facto band leader and there were big shoes to fill. I didn’t think I could really fill them adequately. Our drummer was quite likely not to show up in any case, seemingly preferring amateur dramatics. There was only so much fun to be had playing along with a bass guitar, so we tended not to bother.

But we still all forked out a monthly sum for the rehearsal room. Our guitar player was now using it for his own band and a new drum kit appeared in it and our rent was reduced accordingly. However, on a couple of occasions the remaining three members of what had been Needless Jam did try and play together and it was then that I discovered that I was no longer chez moi. My guitar pedals were disconnected and strewn around. Some of the cables that I had bought personally were to be found in a box of miscellaneous cables. It took me half an hour to put everything back to how I like it and reconnect everything to the amp. My Vox AC30 is not so easy to sling around; it’s pretty weighty. But it was at this point that I started to think that I should perhaps no longer leave my guitar pedals in the rehearsal room but should take them home where my guitars have always lived. It is something of a drag, though, to set out and cable up your pedals every time you want to play, so I began to investigate pedalboards. I figured that I could then transport the pedals en bloc to the rehearsal room and quickly become operational whenever I actually wanted to play there. There is also something undeniably cool about pedalboards per se. They look professional, although they are a comparatively recent invention. If you look at early Pink Floyd videos, even Live in Pompeii, David Gilmour doesn’t have a pedalboard; his pedals are just lying on the ground much as mine were. There probably weren’t any pedalboards at the time that he could have bought.

It’s not like that now though and I did a lot of research on the web and YouTube in particular into pedalboards. One of the surprising things that this threw up was that you really need a power supply to power your pedals, which was not good to hear. Not good to hear for a couple of reasons. For a start, it’s more expense and spending a significant amount on a power supply is not a sexy way of spending money. Where’s the fun? The second problem is that the power supply is going to take up valuable space on the pedalboard and you were already wondering how you were going to cram all the pedals on it in the first place. I opted for a T-Rex Fuel Tank power supply and its creators have gone to some lengths to make it more fun by producing it in blue and packaging it nicely. It also comes with loads of handy cables for powering the pedals. More research indicated that the clever thing to do was to mount it under the board where it wouldn’t take up room on top that I might need for pedals, so I bought some brackets for this purpose. I had to drill the board to take them, but that is apparently standard procedure. This had all become a bit DIY. As things turned out, I had to raise the power supply a little off the board so that the sockets for the cables were available, otherwise they are entirely hidden. I used a thick piece of rubber that was supplied with the bracket, although I don’t think that that is really what it was there for.

You then need to attach the Velcro that comes with the board to both pedalboard and pedals. That is what is going to keep them all in place. Not such a tricky job. And then you have to arrange the pedals – trickier than it looks.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves here as before you even buy a pedalboard, you need to decide which one you are going to buy. There is inevitably, as with just about anything these days, plenty of choice. Pedal Train is probably the brand leader and it’s not hard to see why. Quite apart from their boards looking snazzy and being made from black-coated aluminium, they have invented a superb marketing tool. This takes the form of a website where you can have fun building your virtual pedalboard. You can select the different models of Pedal Train and virtually install your pedals on it. You will thus be able to simulate what the finished board will look like and which model you are going to require. It is pure genius, great fun and very useful. And once you had gone to the bother of doing this, why would you opt for a different make of pedalboard with all its unknowns? Here is the picture of what the Pedal Train software threw up for the board I was going to make. Although the amount of pedals in the software is comprehensive, there isn’t every single pedal available so I had to duplicate the Boss Super Overdrive to replicate the missing Golden Plexi by Tone City.

I had ended up with a Pedal Train Classic 2 pedalboard and the simulation was pretty accurate. It was undoubtedly the right size of board to accommodate my pedals. But the layout wasn’t quite so simple. When you just have the pedals on the floor, you cable them up in the logical order; in my case it has always been right to left. What is the logical order? Well, there are also umpteen videos on this and no rules cast in stone. You can do whatever you like, but it appears that some things work better than others.

You’re probably best off starting with the tuner pedal, so that it gets an unconfused signal from the guitar. Then overdrive pedals, then distortions. You want the distortion pedals to be beefed up by an overdriven signal, should you decide to stack them (have them both, or all, on at once). In my case, I have elected to cable from less distorted to more distorted, so it goes Marshall Bluesbreaker to Golden Plexi to RAT to Big Muff, the latter being a fuzz pedal. No doubt I could do it all entirely differently but it works for me. After that, you want the modulation pedals – chorus, phaser and the like, and then the delay. I have reverb and tremolo on the amp so don’t use separate pedals for them. There is a limit to my pedal madness although like many guitarists I could easily become something of a pedal whore as they are essentially non-comestible, brightly-coloured sweets for guys (in the main). Pedals are small, not overly-complicated, fun gadgets. So, do you want a phased (swooshy) chorus sound, or a chorused swooshy sound? The former, in my case, but you could argue for the later. So it’s Boss Chorus before MXR Phase 90. The delay repeats or echoes your final sound, so best at the end once you have finished farting around with the signal, although I suppose that the amp is then adding the reverb on top. Not to worry. Sounds fine.

However, unlike the floor, you might not wish to arrange the pedals on the board in this order, no matter how you secretly cable them together. What became apparent is that some pedals are taller than others, such as the RAT, and if you have it next to the Golden Plexi which is very small, you are going to have a hard time getting your size 9s or 10s to operate the switch on the smaller pedal as it will be impeded by the RAT. Similarly, the Phase 90 is quite low – best to have it next to the Golden Plexi even if it is a few pedals down the road in the signal chain. It is very unlikely that you will suddenly have to tune-up deftly in the twinkling of an eye, so you might just as well have the tuner pedal in a less convenient place. What you should end up with is an ergonomic board layout that has nothing to do with the order in which you are really going to cable the pedals.

So with any luck I already had all the cables to power the pedals, as they were supplied with the T-Rex. What I now needed was all the patch cables between the pedals for the unimpeded guitar signal. I already have quite a few patch cables, but inevitably, I needed some longer lengths as some pedals were now quite a long way away from each other and my cables weren’t long enough. Enter the totally superb D’Addario patch cable kit. This allows you to make your own patch cables – 5 of them – to any length you want. You get the connectors, a long length of cable, a tool to cut it to the right length and a little screwdriver. I was stunned by this product. It was laughably simple to use and I had my 5 cables put together in minutes. It is just a sheer joy to be able to accomplish your DIY task with so little hassle. I can’t recommend it enough, even if the Planet Waves kit looks pretty similar.

I had finally finished and it was time to see if it all worked. And the answer? No, it didn’t.

Not a sausage. When I plugged the power supply in, its little light didn’t come on. Crisis! Don’t tell me that the unit was defective! What may amaze you was that this was the first time I had plugged it in. I had waited until I had buried it under the pedal board and screwed it in before checking to see if it worked. Doh! Well, in my defence, it’s not that interesting just plugging in a power supply. I assumed that of course it would work. I did some instruction book consultation. This seemed to suggest that if one of my pedals was reverse polarity, it would prevent the power supply coming on as it would save itself from some potentially catastrophic electrical malfunction. Was one of my pedals reverse polarity? Search me. All I want to do is play a little guitar, not become an electronic engineer (even if, ironically, my father was one). Two of the pedals, the RAT and the Big Muff have a different jack which is male and not female. I already had one converter for this, but I found a cable with the T-Rex which also ended in a male connector and had used this. And then, when I disconnected the Big Muff, everything lit up like a Christmas tree. Ah-hah! So, there was the problem. The Big Muff is true bypass, so it doesn’t matter if it is on or not; it can still be cabled in the chain and the signal will still get through. I proved it was the T-Rex cable (which, I presume, must inverse polarity) by swapping the cables around between the Big Muff and the RAT. So to finish the board all I needed was another female to male converter which didn’t inverse the polarity.

However, once I had solved this problem, I found that there was still quite a lot of hum and buzz from the pedals when everything was switched on. The manual implied that you can probably get rid of this by using the supplied daisy chain to link several pedals together. It sounds counter-intuitive. Why would you want to do this when you have 8 separate DC outs to power 8 pedals? I really don’t know and you needn’t tell me. What is worth bearing in mind is that the 8 outs are not isolated from each other, which you’d probably expect them to be as they are on some power supplies. No doubt this is all extremely important. In my case, the eagle-eyed may have noticed that I have 10 pedals, so how, in any case, could I power them with 8 sockets? Good question. The answer to this is that the Colorsound Wah can only work on a battery (which, in itself, is quite annoying); you can’t power it via the mains. But that still left another pedal to share an outlet. I had used the supplied daisy chain for this and left the other 3 nodes just sort of trailing around on the floor under the pedalboard. I suspected that this was not good. So, I decided to experiment. I recabled the pedals to the power supply using all the nodes on the daisy chain (five pedals) and powered the other 4 directly from the bloc. Hey presto, no more noise. Now my pedalboard sounds as good as it looks and I am very happy indeed with it.

In part 2 to this, I’ll give you a little gen on my pedal choice and how I have ended up with the ones I have.

 

 

 

Out with the seed trays

So, what do you do on a cold, wet, blustery Sunday at the beginning of March? You wash up your seed trays, get out the potting compost and all the different packets of seeds and start planting. And I have, in the warmth of the kitchen.

Foxgloves, delphiniums, snapdragons, lupines, dill, parsley, coriander, basil, sweetcorn, aubergines, tomatoes, squashes. We’ll see what comes up. Some of the packets were a bit close to, or a couple of months after, their sell-by date, but what the hell. If nothing shows in a couple of weeks or so, I’ll just buy some fresh seeds, I imagine. That’s the advantage of starting early. Plenty of time.

The tricky bit begins when you are drowning in new plants and they all need potting on and you don’t have a greenhouse. But I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. In the meantime, there is plenty of fun and excitement in store and all I had to buy was a bag of seed compost. Cheap thrills.

I still can’t quite get over seeds. They are at best very small, at worst totally insignificant. While you can pretty much understand that something as substantial as a pumpkin seed could grow into something useful, foxglove seeds are just russet-coloured dust, looking like the sort of thing you might find your car covered in were you to park it in the Australian outback. Sowing the foxglove seeds is something of a challenge. You just sprinkle as little as possible in your growing cell, poke the growing medium about a bit in the hope that some of them are covered and trust in luck. It must work, as I have a few foxgloves in the garden that started this way.

Coriander seeds and lupine seeds are tiny cannonballs, quite easy to manipulate. Tomato seeds are like miniscule bivalve shellfish. Delphinium seeds, on the other hand, are wee little granules that don’t look like seeds at all. How could they possibly turn into beautiful blue flowers? Maybe they won’t.

Seeds for most of us are utterly banal. They are probably sitting on the top of your hamburger as sesame seeds, or on your bap as poppy seeds. It seems a waste, somehow. All that potential never realised. And how many countless millions of the things are in a combined harvester destined to become your breakfast? It’s only when you start to deal with them in ones and twos and spend time carefully poking them into the soil that their true awesomeness hits home.