Mechanical eptitude

Recent comments on Guthlac's misadventures with vintage engines have set me thinking about the critical part that "being practical" played in the lives of my father's and grandfather's generations, and how a mechanically able man still commands blokish respect. No man wishes to sound, for instance, clueless in front of his garage mechanic (partly lest they slap a 200% clueless twerp surcharge on your bill for 'adjusting the sparkplugs on your diesel' or similar, but partly out of desire not to lose face).

The male half of humanity, it seems, is divided into tattooed Morlocks who can tune an engine and linen-jacketed Willas who write supposedly hilarious and heartwarming columns in the broadsheet press advertising their cluelessness in terms which still produce a torrent of Black-Country eloquence from my father's aged lips.

The former is represented by my biker mate and sometime commenter on this blog Mr Wessex, a motorcycling gentleman of intimidating bulk who is capable not merely of stripping down and rebuilding vintage motorbikes, but of lifting them with one hand and eating them; or by my friend Hubert, an engineering graduate whose idea of helping to fix a car is (deliberately and expertly) to replace the gearbox back-to-front so that the car has one very slow forward gear and five reverse ones. The latter is - surprisingly - the realm of No Good Boyo, a man whose unfamiliarity with his own car led to him being unable to close the sunroof during a snowstorm.

And then there is me (and, I suspect, several million others) squatting nervously in the no-man's land of this particular cultural divide. I am not the man to turn to when you have broken down, taking painfully long periods to complete even relatively simple mechanical procedures and needing to "pop out to Halfords" twice in the middle to buy new tools that I need but don't have, only to return and find that I did have one after all lurking in the depths of the toolbox and now have two, which is twice as many as I will need for the one time in my life I shall be called upon to use them.

And yet I cannot raised myself to the lofty Mandarin magnificence of the resolutely unmechanical. I can change a wheel, do an oil change, rewind fuses and change tap washers. Most of the shelves I have put up are still in place. I can even explain what most of the bits under the bonnet of my car do, albeit with a large sprinkling of metasyntactic variables: "Yeah, that's the oil filler cap. And that's the cylinder head thingy. And then that doodad goes round and round so that the whatsit wobbles up and down on the oojamaflip..."

I put my state of partial confusion down to a traumatic experience in my teens. One Saturday morning when I was 14, my father sought me out in my foetid lair. "Son" he said in a kindly way, "You are now approaching manhood, and there are things you should know - " I prepared a teenage sneer and was just about to roll my eyes at his naivety "such as how to remove, strip down and replace the gearbox on a Ford Escort. Follow me." Gobsmacked, I complied.

His method of instruction took an unusual form. He donned a boilersuit and eye protection and then sat himself on a stool with the Haynes Manual open upon his knee while I grubbed around underneath the car, struggling to understand his instructions. The conversation was full of exchanges such as:

"Now pick up the radial torque wrench and fit the 3/4" Hackett ratchet sprocket."
"What's that look like?"
"It's the one we had to have surgically removed from Uncle Frank after the incident at Lutterworth."
"Ah. I'll just put rubber gloves on..."
"Now unlatch the self-tapping grommet plunkets."
"Where are those, Dad?"
"There boy - just behind the 4 1/2" pillion bush!"

And so it went on. The result of this form of mechanical education is that I ended up knowing with a fair degree of certainty what things were and how they worked, but not what they were called.

Furthermore, in my mind's eye all cars are now Ford Escorts. If I open the bonnet and see things that look like the equivalent on the Escort I have a fighting chance. Any other layout or form of engine and I'm sunk. Front-wheel drive is still an impenetrable mystery. But even that's better than everything being an impenetrable mystery.

Now if you will excuse me, Mr Wessex and I are just popping out to replace the sparkplugs on Boyo's diesel. And we're only charging him 50 quid...

Futurism - it's so last century...

As I may have noted in passing before, our two-year old offpsrog Guthlac is a pushover for anything mechanical and - preferably - noisy. The other night he was heard talking in his sleep, muttering in an agitated but intelligible voice "Mummy, no, Guthlac flyyyyy de plaaaaane..."

When Djangolina and her visiting friends from Germany opted for a trip into Birmingham, it quickly became apparent that the one place I knew Guthlac would adore was not on their agenda. So we agreed to split - the girls would go to the Sea-Life Centre to coo over cute turtles and seahorses, while Guthlac and I would head for the science museum at Millennium Point to coo over steam engines, old cars and Spitfires.

I was right - he did adore it. I let him have a run around first, richocheting from wonder to wonder in a state of chronic indecision as to which admire the most - the traction engine? The steam locomotive? The vintage cars? The vintage motorbikes? The Spitfire and Hurricane suspended tantalisingly out of reach from the ceiling? We then had a spot of lunch, after which I plonked him in the buggy for a more leisurely tour. This time, we headed for the other end of the hall, where the assorted industrial steam engines are kept.

There is something hypnotic about the workings of an old engine, and one very good thing the Birmingham musem does is keep as many of the machines turning over as possible. In addition, there is a series of enlightening hand-cranked exhibits showing how piston movement is tranferred into rotary motion, how a governor works, and the motion of planetary gears. Personally, I prefer that to Damien Hirst's sliced dead things any day - but then, I grew up in the Black Country where such things are considered the summit of our culture.

Much as I hate to agree on any level with tedious proto-fascist madman Dick Marinetti (purists may argue that his name was Filippo, but personally I've always thought of him as a Dick), there is beauty in the workings of machines. And particularly, the kind of machines that were around at the end of the 19th century.

It's not just the pleasing steam-punk elegance of turned brass handles and white-backed, glass-fronted dials; it's also the fact that so many modern machines are impenetrable 'black boxes' which do clever things but cannot be seen to be doing anything at all. And that had me wondering sincerely about when exactly the point was when futurism became retro. Was it when valves replaced cogs? Or when transistors replaced valves?

At this point, I became aware of a subtle change in the sound of the machine in front of me, and upon looking down realised that the noise was being caused by Guthlac's hat, which in an experimental turn of mind he had fed into a gear mechanism.

Condensing the entire experience, I have learnt two important things:
1) Form guided by function can be as aesthetically beautiful as pure art, possibly because the challenge of achieving a funtionally working form gives vital grist to the designer's mill, and
2) A two-year old in a museum requires absolute 100% attention at all times.

Are you really a urologist, or are you just taking the...

Different people have different ways of dealing with pain. Some grit their teeth and take it stoically. Some scream and thrash about. I usually lie there wondering how I can turn the experience into an inappropriate anecdote I can use to put other people off their food during a meal.

This morning's procedure was no exception. Friends and relatives who have gone through "stent removal" (the stent in question being a small flexible silicone tube put into the ureter from kidney to bladder to protect it while it heals from the damage done by a kidney stone ripping along it, and not a particular retired BBC journalist of such irritating mien that on three separate occasions he came within a gnat's wing of being picked up by the shirt collar by an enraged Gypsy and shaken until his fillings rattled) have cheerily told tales of doctors putting a foot against the patient's stomach and pulling with both hands. The consultant merrily told me that the doctor in question "will just brace his back against the door and yank it out with both hands".

While in the waiting area outside the alarmingly sound-proofed treatment room, I was buoyed up by the fact that several other people arrived prepared to go in after me, who would be a perfect captive audience for my well-embroidered narrative when I came out.

As it turns out, the procedure of getting the endoscope into the bladder in the first place is a lot more teeth-gritting than that of pulling the stent out - even then it's more stinging and discomfort than actual pain. When the doctor pulled the thing out with a flourish he held it up, writhing and twisting like a decapitated snake. Within minutes I walked out again with my stent in a jar to embark on the enjoyable process of winding up the waiting patients.

There was a nice-looking chap sitting there in his hospital gown with his wife next to him, looking very nervous. I put the stent jar down on the table, without announcement but clearly visible to all. The man flinched slightly.

"Oh god - is that what it looks like?" he said to nobody in particular.
"That's the stent, yes. Are you here to have yours out?"
"Yes" he says, looking somewhat pained. "What's it like?"
"Well" I went on jauntily "Once they've got the pliers in position and lined up the hospital's tug-o-war team..."

He blenched, and crossed his legs. His wife, however - clearly one whom, like most experienced wives, it is hard to fool with mere blokishness - took a more rational view.

"Well, he's standing up and smiling" she noted of me dryly, sending detectable waves of "I've had a baby, you pathetic worm" vibes in my direction, "So it can't be all that bad."
"You'll be fine, mate" I said, changing tack rapidly, and moved off towards the changing cubicle in an exagerratedly and utterly unnecessary bow-legged manner calculated to convey both extreme discomfort and immense, stiff-upper-lipped bravery.

Had I remembered to keep it up when I emerged shortly afterwards having clearly had no difficulty dressing or tying my shoe-laces, it might even have looked convincing.

Spotted on Indonesia's roads...

It is now something of a cliche that the humble motor-scooter is used as a cargo vehicle on Southeast Asia's roads; nonetheless the following are all pictures I've taken from the car in the last few days rather than being borrowed from existing websites.

Among the things we've seen have been a mobile restaurant:

A year's supply of snacks:


A delivery round's-worth of electrical appliances:


And an entire village's fuel supply:

Misfortunes - the complete set of three...

Just when everyone had either assumed my demise or lost interest, here I am again after what seems to be turning into Last Django's customary spring break!

As I dolefully predicted in January, my much-loved mother-in-law steadily declined and messages urging us to go and see her "as soon as possible" piled up from the family. Mrs Byard duly went out ahead of us leaving me to trail in behind her (and stay on afterwards, to cover more possibilities). This meant I had all the fun of keeping the two-year old Guthlac happy during a 20-hour flight. Lucky me.

As it turned out we were too late - she passed away two days before my wife arrived, although at least Mrs Byard could attend the funeral (something she'd happily have passed up for five minutes with her mother, of course). Anyway, we duly trailed in and had to visit graves and carry out the ceremonies demanded by Chinese tradition, the highlight of which was Guthlac picking up a packet of cigarettes that had been acquired for offering on his grandfather's grave to be told forcefully "Just take one!"

Mrs Byard and Guthlac then trailed off back to blighty, leaving me and Djangolina to go round and do some things that can't really be done with toddlers in tow. The first day of this odyssey I had a few abdominal pains and took an immodium figuring it was just the normal travel bug-type thing. The next night the pain was getting worse and I took some painkillers. By noon the third day I couldn't stand up and could no longer urinate properly. At this point I was rushed to hospital, where an ultrasound scan revealed that my urethra was blocked by a kidney stone the size of a Glaswegian's liver and that my right kidney was swollen to double its proper size. After a day of extreme pain and discomfort, an x-ray revealed the bloody thing was stuck and refusing to come the normal way, so and endoscope was inserted, and the offending mass removed. (Lest anyone think this is a play for sympathy, let me assure you that a) I know my readers better than that, and b) kidney stones are eye-wateringly painful without being a serious health threat - they are the stuff of black comedy rather than tragedy).

This was followed by 72 hours on a hospital bed attached to assorted drips and catheters, at which point I found out misfortune number three - thanks to the Icelanders being as careless with their volcanoes as they were with their banks, I couldn't return home on time and was facing a further fortnight of enforced holiday in Indonesia. Frankly though, were I to choose any country to get stuck in through no fault of my own, it would be this one - so this stands as the tail-end sweetener to a catalogue of visits by the cock-up fairy. Onward and upward, eh?

Oriental women - widely admired, widely misunderstood...

All things Chinese have been much on the mind recently, what with the dawning of a new Year of the Tiger and what-have-you. I brightly greeted Mrs Byard on Sunday morning with "Kong hee fat choi!", to which she responded by furrowing her brow and replying "Did you just call me fat?"

Djangolina - or Liem Kwee Lee as she is now styled in connection with all things Chinese - is quite fired up by this being the Year of the Tiger, which is her birth year. Having established my credentials as one cohabiting with 1.5 (ethnic) Chinese women, let me share a few intriguing observations for those watching from further afield.

The popular stereotype of a delicate, tottering, parasol-twirling "Lotus Blossom" character is utterly, utterly wrong. Chinese women are very, very tough in all kinds of unexpected ways.

I have already had cause to mention Mrs Byard's capacity for eating palate-scorchingly hot food and shaming "hard lads" in the process. Last year, we were served a platter of seafood at a restaurant in Indonesia which included whole crab. After a while, the following dialogue took place:
Her: "Aren't you going to eat your crab?"
Me: "Um, I've got nothing to open it with."
Her: "What are you on about?"
Me: "Well, in Europe you'd get crackers and a pick to open the shell up with so you can get the meat out."
Her: "Oh give it here, for goodness' sake..." (Picks up crab claw and cracks it open with teeth)

We have had similar conversations back at home - steered elegantly toward the conclusion that I am a useless wimp - over my pathetic attempts to find oven gloves rather than just pick up a roasting tray fresh from a prolonged stint in a hot oven with my bare hands.

I have encountered little old ladies - albeit in Indonesia, but I'm credibly informed by a Sinologist friend that China has an extensive supply too - capable of carrying loads on their backs you wouldn't believe. I once felt very proud of myself having scaled a relatively modest volcano in Java, to find at the top an entire drinks stall which had been carried to the peak, in its entirety, in a scarf wrapped around a 70-something lady shod in flip-flops.

I paid her an exhorbitant sum for a luke-warm bottle of jasmine tea (the legendary Tehbotol - Indonesia's finest soft drink....) and slunk back down the mountain feeling duly humbled. Which is no bad thing, after all...

New programme ideas for 2010

In the effort once more to catch the attention of the major channels, I shall offer up again some programme ideas that would be at least better than half the appalling drivel that graces my screen.

Britain's Got Talons - A show in which birds of prey from all over the UK compete in a series of falconry and singing challenges, the winner of each (species-based) round being decided by a combination of phone-vote and Simon Cowell's toupee being carried off by a Golden Eagle.

What's in that Rock? - Palaeontology quiz hosted by geomorphologists' crumpet Hermione Cockburn in which professionals (e.g. Shubin, Conway-Morris, Fortey) would be teamed with celebrity fossil enthusiasts (e.g. David Attenborough, Alex James, Mark Gattiss etc) to identify fossil-bearing rocks on camera. I'd watch it...

Police, Camera, Action-Man! - Teams of policemen compete to make stop-motion animated films featuring action men.

Cashews in the Attic - A camera follows Mrs Byard and myself for a fortnight as we struggle through our overcrowded loft to try to find a bag of nuts we were sure we'd left up there.

Hannah Monsanto - Miley Cyrus gets genetically modified.

The Top 100 Polkas - Three-hour countdown show mixing old footage intercut with amusing reminiscences and witless fan-speak from radio DJs and stand-up comics.

Serious offers from channel heads only, please.