Tinkering
Page 6
That’s the thing about the two-airline policy. It’s got to be revised all the time in case it works.
Plumbing
Gidday. Now, of course, it costs a great number of ducats to get an actual professional plumber around to do your plumbing, so amateur plumbing has been thrust on the bulk of the populace and the sooner you come to grips with it the better. Obviously the only people making enough money to get professional help in are plumbers, so the people who really need to develop a reasonably impressive array of plumbing skills are those among us who are non-plumbers and I might say that, in non-plumbing circles, I am accorded the status of grand master.
Let’s just take a simple everyday run of the mill plumbing problem and work our way through it until we’ve solved it, and I’m using the word ‘solved’ here for the metre. Let’s say you have a dripping tap. Let’s say it’s dripping in the same way that, say, Niagara drips. The first thing to do is to turn the water off outside at the mains. For this you’ll need a machete, about four day’s rations and a good map. Next, you should unscrew the dripping tap. You’ll find it’s on fairly tightly and you’ll have to belt it a few times with a big hammer. This’ll strip the thread nicely and break the pipe off inside the wall.
I should have told you to let the surplus water run out of the taps once you’d turned the water off, but seeing you’re wet now anyway you can really get stuck into it. Shove a few socks and newspapers down the pipe while you try to separate the tap from the bit of pipe that came off with it.
About now the build-up of water pressure will blow the shower nozzle off and provide you with a rather nice little soap recess about five metres up the dining-room wall, and you should find there’s a fairly impressive geyser in the middle of the street. This clears most of the deposit out of the pipes and the only way to obviate the possibility of a series of ginger feature walls is to position yourself between the pipes and the walls in question. Once the surplus water has run out, you can chip the wall away and bend the broken pipe around so that it points outside.
Now you can turn the water on again and swim around making notes on what you’d like the plumber to do when he arrives. You’ve done most of the groundwork, you might as well get a professional in to provide the finishing touches. Anyway, you’ll need someone to help you clear up before having the place relined.
Sitting on the Beach
Gidday. For this you’ll need a beach, which is a long sandy arrangement somewhere near the sea, and you’ll need something to sit on.
First of all, you should mention to everyone that you’re going to just get away from things and let the wind blow away the cobwebs. Then go and find a beach with about a million people on it. If you’re going to get away from it all you’ll need to keep an eye on it all so you can keep your distance. Find yourself a piece of beach and get out your towel.
In front of all these people, and some of them were queuing on Thursday night for this, you’ve got to get out of your clothes and into your beach clobber.
Wrap the towel around yourself and slowly fumble away underneath trying to remove things as they come to hand, pulling each item out from under the towel and hiding it under some previous marginally less embarrassing item. And keep an eye on those people behind in case they rush you.
After a while things should be getting a bit sparse underneath, and about now you should break into a kind of carefree lunatic whistle to carry you over the last stages. When you’ve got down to the stage between phase one and Bob’s your uncle, reach over and get your swimming gear, being careful not to move too rapidly or clap your hands above your head. You pull on your natty little summer sartorials and, with as much nonchalance as you can muster, you whip the towel away to reveal yourself, resplendent in beachwear, with the outfit on back to front and both legs down one leg hole. Don’t let this worry you, just sit down fairly smartly and survey the scene.
While you were whistling, a gross of wet canines have come over and with any luck they’ll shake about 400 litres of ocean all over you. This will cool you down nicely and you’ll be ready for a bit of sunbathing.
Lie on your stomach and open a book. The book isn’t for reading and it’ll get sand all through it so take a book you don’t want but one with a good title. If Tolkien had knocked out something on Wagner it would’ve been just the job. The sun will play about your person and the glare from the book will make sure your face gets plenty of good hot blinding rays and it’ll reflect off that cream on your nose and you’ll get some impression of what it must have been like to lose to Joe Louis after drinking Harvey Wallbangers for a fortnight.
My advice at about this stage is to go for a walk. Remember this is not just any old walk, this is a beach walk so you’ll have to do your special unselfconscious body beautiful casual stroll. Fix your eyes on the horizon and command your body into position A. If the beach is fairly long you can relax every now and then and have a bit of a slouch but if it’s relatively short and heavily peopled you’ll need to hold yourself in the same position for the entire performance, so get comfortable and if anyone looks at you, just flex a couple of ripples and look as sensitive as you can without actually laughing.
By the time all this is over you’ll need a lie down and you can have a bit of a look at other people walking up and down. Then it’ll be your turn again. After each completed stroll, as you return to your towel, the judges will hold up the score cards, the lowest score is dropped and the average of the remainder is flashed up on a big electronic board behind the car park. If you want to save your big effort for the nationals, my advice is to whip away home as soon as you’ve notched up a personal best.
Character Analysis
Gidday. Now today’s little lecture will concern itself with the analysis of the human character.
I remember some years ago when I was in London, taking the waters and some of the whiskies, I had my palm read by a charming woman who wore a red curtain and spoke with a series of very thick accents.
She told me I’d been on a long journey across many thousands of miles, and that I was in a new place, and had left my old place many thousands of miles behind me, and that I didn’t have many of my immediate family with me, and that they were all away across the seas and the clouds and past many rivers, and were in a distant place a great many thousands of miles away, and that one day I would return whence I had come in the first instance, and it would be a journey of major proportions involving the traversing of many lands and kingdoms, to a distant place situated many thousands of miles away, and nowhere at all adjacent to where we were at the time, which happened to be just near the main entrance of the Highgate Cemetery. As you can see this is a fairly penetrating piece of divining and it affected me very deeply to the tune of £1 sterling.
Of course there are many other ways of ascertaining the nature of someone’s character, and handwriting’s one of the better ones.
If you write off about a ten-yard run-up, and you do huge swirling loops that knock the phone off the desk, and you can fit about three words of your neatest RSVP writing on to a sheet of foolscap, then you’ll tend to be a relatively confident person; and you’re quite possibly the sort of person who inspires either fear or laughter. If your writing is very small and extremely faint, and you write only because you’re too shy to say anything, then you’re probably a shy person and your handwriting will tend to be on the small side.
Now all this might strike you as being perceptive to a quite remarkable degree, but it’s all there in the handwriting. I just read it; I’m only saying what I see.
You can also feel people’s heads, although you will find that in a lot of cases people will want to feel yours back, and at about that stage it’s a good idea to go on a long journey to a distant place many thousands of miles away.
A Nice Drive
Gidday. What you’ll need here is a car, preferably one with a few major mechanical defects, windows that don’t open properly without a hammer and ideally, of course, the car shoul
d be just a tiny bit too small for the number of people you’ve got to put in it.
For the sake of getting to the main business of the drive itself I’ll ignore the many potentially charming aspects of the planning stages, the preparation of food and clothing for the journey and a fair amount of reasonably heated discussion as to exactly where you’re going to go.
Around about five hours after you planned to return, you should be leaving. The day should be overcast, cloud down to about forty-five centimetres, visibility zero and falling. The temperature should be about 1000º Celsius on the Richter scale and the atmosphere would probably weigh in at around ninety-five percent water. You should have three in the front seat, or, if the car seats three in the front seat, you should have four in the front seat and in the back there should be a landscape of fairly small faces with perhaps a smattering of aunties, grandparents or some other mentally unhinged person with a bit of a death wish.
The boot should be burgeoning with beetroot sandwiches and spare jerseys and there should be tea in thermoses and at least an oodle of cold sausages and bacon and egg pie, so if the drive gets a little tedious you could conceivably have a crack at the north face of the Eiger.
You are now prepared and, as you leave home wondering about whether you turned the stove off and hoping the cat doesn’t get accidental behind the fridge, you begin to feel free and hopeful. You look out the window and everyone says, ‘Isn’t this fun’ and ‘shouldn’t we do it more often’. My advice to you is to enjoy this bit of the trip, savour it and let it linger on the palate. It’s the last bit of enjoyment you’ll have for a fair while.
When you’re out in the unknown and the heat’s appalling and you’re up a side road that someone said was quicker but you can tell it isn’t going to be, you should find your left back tyre’s doing pancake impressions and it’s a good thing you’ve got to pull over anyway because the temperature light’s on, the oil light’s flickering, the petrol gauge only works downhill and if the smell’s anything to go by, part of the fuselage is on fire.
This is the highlight of the outing in several respects. You’ve got to get the food out to get to the spare and you can have a go at the prandials while you work out why the spare’s only got one metric puff of air in it and who you lent the jack to. By now the weather’s getting its eye in and the sandwiches have melted, the kids have collapsed and the top’s blown off the radiator.
When someone eventually comes to the aid of the party and you limp home on one cylinder, you may not feel you’ve had the greatest time of your life. You might not even want to see anyone else ever again. But there’s no denying you’ve given Sunday a run for its money.
Dentistry
Gidday. If you’ve ever walked into a room and had everyone in it try to get out through a very small air vent, you probably know what it feels like to be a dentist. You have to be a fairly resilient sort of character because you have to spend all day seeing people who don’t want to see you.
Let’s just take a typical dentistorial episode and give it the once over. You, the dentist, enter your surgery with considerable foreboding and seated in the waiting room is your first patient, Mr Jones, hiding behind a big stack of Illustrated London News, with only his feet sticking out. You put on your white backwards-coat, and you go out and tell Mr Jones that he can come in now. Then you prepare your little glass tray full of instruments and you go out and tell Mr Jones that he can come in now. You should have a record card for every patient so you go and get Mr Jones’s card, you have a look at it and you tell him that he can come in now. Then you go over to your nurse/receptionist and inform her that she can tell Mr Jones that he can come in now.
The patient will now look around the waiting room just in case there are some other Mr Joneses before him who’ve slipped down behind the heater and, having ascertained that he’s the only major contender, he will eventually shuffle into your surgery and sit down. You can try to make conversation with him if you like. My own personal advice is to leave him alone and just sing to yourself while you look at his X-rays and mutter about his upper left five and the watch on his dorsal cusps. When you peep into his throat you’ll feel the tension in his nervous system and you’ll notice the perspiration roaring out of his forehead and running down into his ears, so get your repair work done as rapidly as possible or he’ll short everything and blow your surgery into a less desirable area.
Once you’ve laid your cement you will have to leave him there until it dries, with his mouth open and the little bilge pump on overdrive. If you hide around the corner during this period you’ll notice that he does things like trying to line his feet up with the new car park building, and inspecting your ceiling as if he’s thinking of putting one in exactly the same at his place, or moving his head up and down so that the aeroplanes fly along in between the slats on the venetian blinds. The fellow’s obviously a lunatic and you should get him out of your surgery as soon as possible.
That’s the main trouble with dentistry: you meet a very strange class of person. Actually, I recommend you stay away from dentistry altogether. See you in six months.
Tennis
Gidday. Now today I want to waylay you with another suggestion about how to show the weekend who’s boss. This method is safe, completely dependable and fulfils most of the requirements of a leisure activity as laid down in the Geneva Convention. It is time-consuming to a point where you can actually think you’re busy, it’s tiring, it involves special clothing and equipment and in general terms it’s a 100 percent bona fide waste of time within the meaning of the act. I refer, of course, to the ancient and revered art of tennis.
First of all, you’ll need a tennis court and, if you play your cards right, you can spend till about Sunday lunchtime waiting for one to be vacated by three or four big Brunhildes who’ve been whacking around on it since April, rallying for service. By the time you get a court it’ll be raining and there’ll be a Force 9 blowing leaves and silt in from Asia.
This will carry the ball over the net, the wire fence and a fifteen-hectare subdivision at the back. The net will have wound itself into a thin line of black string, so you can’t tell whether your shots are going under it or over it, and you only find out where it is when you hurl yourself forward to smash a lob and it bends you over in the trousers and drops you on your back between the tramlines.
You should really wear whites and have a good racquet but, if you couldn’t raise a mortgage in time, you can generally get away with an honest attempt. A pair of white shorts you once washed with some red curtains and now have a blotchy pink aspect to them and a painting rag with armholes is often quite acceptable, if you’ve got shoes the same colour and a good hat. A good hat is crucial and, if you can’t get one of those visor arrangements from an old New York newspaper editor you might get by with a sweatband, which is like a sock you wear round your bonce to keep your brains from sliding out your ears. Always remember that the best sports gear has two stripes down it, so whatever you’ve got, get a good thick biro and plant a couple of stripes on it so you look like a pre-war postman and you’ll be OK in the sartorial department.
The next thing is the game and, although it’s the least important aspect of the whole exercise, it’s as well to know a couple of the basic rules in case the Rosewalls on the next court ask you whether their last serve was a let or an inwards one-and-a-half with a degree of difficulty of 2.4.
The way to score is relatively simple and once you’ve played a few games, you’ll pick it up, no trouble. The first person serves, which is called a double-fault, and so it goes on until you get to the point where all the balls are in the blackberries up behind the car park. Then the person to the left of the dealer says ‘juice’ and you all go and do that. From memory it’s fun from there on.
Accounting
Gidday. If you want to become part of the modern world I recommend you become an accountant more or less immediately. First of all, let’s just see if you’re aptitudinally suited to this lofty
calling. I’d like you to be so good as to answer the following questions.
Can you count to three? (You may use a calculator during the final stages of your working, although it’s probably better to lease one than to buy one, because the leasing of business machinery can be deductible at full rate, whereas purchase price, although deductible through charges against the current account and again advantageous through depreciation, is ultimately going to show up as an item of capital expenditure, and the opportunity cost of such utilisation of funds is obviously going to be the possible write-back to standard value of any cattle purchased before balance date and held subject to fertiliser provided by the vendor with monies other than those already earmarked for consideration as possible year one and year two input figures for a forestry development programme with milling at year one plus twenty-three.)
Secondly, can you lean back in a chair, look out the window and demonstrate what’s meant by the term ‘a sharp intake of breath’? This is to be done whenever a non-accountant attempts to count to three so it’s got to be mastered fairly early on. Of course, if you want to be a cost accountant or an auditor you’ll also have to be able to put your hands together as if you’re praying and tap your incisors with the nails on your two forefingers. But that’s really fairly advanced and should probably be left till later.
Finally, and this is the real nub of the matter, can you draw a line down from the top of a piece of paper to somewhere near the bottom and can you count to three on both sides of the line? This is the very lifeblood of accountancy and if you can do that you’re not only halfway there, you’re halfway back as well.
The Diplomatic Service
Gidday. I’d like to have a bit of a nutter with you concerning the possibility that you could under certain circumstances consider the proposition that you might like to become a diplomat. Of course, I’m not suggesting that you’re not perfectly happy doing what you’re doing at the moment, and I certainly don’t want to suggest that you’re not very good at it. I’m sure you are; I’m sure you’re excellent at it. In fact I’m told more or less constantly that without your steadying hand the whole place would fall apart. Neither do I mean to indicate that what you’re doing is intrinsically inferior in any way to diplomacy. Very far from it. I know how valuable your work is and I hate to think what would happen if it wasn’t done. The whole idea is absolutely unthinkable. And if anyone ever did anything to lessen the effectiveness of your work, I personally would release a decidedly cool statement, to be taken in the context of a joint communique which you and I would issue together, probably from a hotel foyer somewhere or with one of us at a lectern, confirming our mutual respect and reaffirming that our relationship can be expected to continue to produce ongoing dialogue of interest to all those with an interest in regional issues and in charting a viable course through the sensitive sargasso in which the Western power bloc finds itself at this difficult time in our history. Then we can hop out the back and I’ll beat your face off.