FAX AND WUNDERFAX

I have always been fascinated by fax machines. Too much watching Startrek, I suppose, where people go in one end and come out the other. I remember a splendid cartoon once showing someone in court with the judge looking grim and asking the prisoner at the bar whether he had anything to say before he passed sentence, whereupon the prisoner breathes into his wristwatch "Beam me up, Scottie. I'm in the s***t down here."

Oh well, yes, fax machines. But why stop at mere text is what I have always wondered. Will one day we be able to fax more than just text? I'm thinking specifically of food - or at least a Caesar Salad and croutons. You have a machine, plugged into a telephone line and linked up to a few simple containers of veggie protein, flavouring, starch, and so on - and then you would take a recipe and the machine would whirr and grind and synthesise for you an atomically perfect Caesar Salad - or Boeuf Bourginon if you'd dialled the wrong number.

You might ask why the machine could not simply concoct the Caesar Salad from resources in its own memory bank in the manner of a most marvellous coffee machine I worked with once in Spain which, when you gave it a peseta or two, ground and churned and hissed and produced a perfect cup of freshly ground coffee from starting ingredients of whole coffee beans and water?

Well, the telephone would be necessary so that the machine could check the atomic balance of its ingredients against some sort of master template - which might of course be your Mum. So you would phone up and say, 'Mum - how do I make Yorkshire Pudding?"

And Mum would say, "Put the Wunderfax on dear," and she would then scan one of her Yorkshire Puddings and send it down the phone line and in a few moments the machine in your kitchen would ping and you would open the door and there would be your beef and potato accompaniment and your husband would beam and say, "Those Yorkshires are every bit as good as your Mum's."

The invention would add to marital harmony and join the dishwasher and vacuum cleaner in the annals of domestic essentials.

So why have I put a bottle of whisky at the top of this post? Well there's a back story, which briefly is that running low on my favourite cold cure I went into our local store looking for Highland Park, my favourite malt, only to find that with the budget and VAT rise, prices had almost doubled overnight.

The price of malt whisky, incidentally, seems to fluctuate wildly for no reason at all. The bottle that is £33 today, sells for £19 tomorrow. I do not understand why. Nothing else does this. Nothing I like anyway.

Which brings me at last to the point. You see driven by these cost pressures I eschewed my normal 12 year old malt in favour of a souped-up ('with peaty, smokey malts,' the label said) version of 'Famous Grouse', called 'Black Grouse,' which was half the price.

Unfortunately, it was only half as good, at least to my taste. If you had blended raw spirit with battery acid and left it next to a bonfire you might get an idea of the taste. No doubt the makers have tried very hard but as they suggest drinking it with oranges and Coca-cola, it suggests that the flavour on its own may need disguising.

Now, when you make whisky you distill malt and then you stuff the brew away in barrels and leave it a long time to absorb the flavour and the colour of the wooden barrel. To make a good whisky you need to wait 12 years and a really good whisky, 20.

But why? When we are all constantly beseeched to improve our efficiency this must be the most inefficient industrial process going. Twelve years? It isn't even as if they move the stuff about, stir it, heat it up, mix it with platinum catalysts. No, they leave it in a warehouse.

Well, brother-in-law is an inventor and he has a theory that you can age any wine - or presumably whisky - by zapping it in a microwave oven. One zap per year. If you want to age it by twenty years you give it twenty zaps. I did try this with the Black Grouse and to be fair it did take the edge of the rawness. But you have to be careful that you don't end up with a hot drink instead of a cold one.

Surely in this modern age we could analyse what goes into a good whisky? What are those complex flavour and aromas but chemicals? So much of this, and so much of that. Couldn't we just mix the stuff?

Instead of waiting 12 years you could buy bottles of spirit distilled yesterday and then dial up on your Wunderfax - the same machine that made your Mum's Yorkshires - with a few extra ingredient compartments. There would be little sliders perhaps like those on fancy hi-fi sets - more smoke, less peat, more strawberry, less haddock, more colour, fruitier, richer - and there you would be.

Think of the savings! Think of all that whisky stored for 12 years that would no longer be needed. Think of the sherry casks and all those oak and hickory trees that would now no longer need to be cut down.

And if your father in law was in some far off land enjoying a most excellent aperitif, he could dribble a little of it over his mobile phone and it would pass down the telephone line and into your kitchen Wunderfax and out would come the same thing, same flavours, colours and all.

Of course, you'd be stuck in a power-cut.

POINT OF DEPARTURE

You know what they say - don't shoot the pianist he's only doing his best.  Mind you I don't know who 'they' are in this case.  Anyone know from where the saying comes?  Or so I have just enquired of the Purple Coo website - of which I am a longstanding member. The site has just been rebuilt and in another place causing much ruffling of feathers in the dovecote. I guess we’re getting old and change is too difficult.

My own life I keep feeling is in a rut. There’s this horrid feeling that comes sweeping over me and tells me that there is an inescapable sameness about day to day events and that I ought to sell up and head off into the setting sun on a camel - or take the Queen’s shilling, or become a foreign correspondent or whatever the modern day equivalent is for someone of my advanced age. Maybe it is to join MSF as a volunteer, or some other benevolent organisation, and be shot at for your pains.

I did try to join VSO once - when I had fallen on hard times and I thought they might welcome a pair of hands while I gathered my wits about me, but they didn’t and wouldn’t let me. Bah! Ah well, it was before the Big Society.

Still running off to sea or whatever would I tell myself be grossly irresponsible seeing as one has responsibilities in the here and now, friends, and particularly relations, who would be not one wit pleased by some poetic abandonment. Besides, I have to say I would miss them dearly as I am fortunate to enjoy tolerably good relations with my relations, if you see what I mean and I would be bereft were I not to see my little grandson who is coming to lunch tomorrow with his parents in tow. Which means I shall have to scrub the kitchen floor ready for him to deposit and smear a new quantity of comestibles over both it and the kitchen furniture.

Babies and toddlers should really be fed on dried food until the age of ten.

Well, where were we? I am afraid this may turn out to be a somewhat meandering post. So let us return to the pianist issue with which I began this ramble. Last evening I put on the radio and heard, quite by chance Beethoven's 4th piano concerto. On Classic FM. I love that piece and can recommend a listen to anyone fancying a quiet fifty minutes, curled up on the sofa with some light and not too distracting reading matter. It was the first piano concerto (and maybe even the last) to open with the piano itself. A soft chord. Beethoven played it first time round, apparently.

I think it is safe to say that he didn’t play it on a Yamaha either, which has always made me wonder why you don't you ever see a Bosendorfer motorcycle? Or a Norton organ, I suppose? I mean it is hard to think of two machines with such different purposes as a piano (or an organ) and a motorcycle with a particularly plangent and revolting whine. You don’t think they make them in the same place, do you? I suppose both machines have to be tuned. But not, I guess by the same people.

I'm going to a film preview tonight. A French film. The story of (I've forgotten - it's about some woman writer who lived 100 years ago).  All top hats and petticoats.  But somehow Egypt comes into it too for the blurb describes it as Indiana Jones meets Amélie.  The fearless writer doing the equivalent of volunteering for MSF in 1911. A year incidentally when very little happened. Or so says James Cameron - the famous foreign correspondent responsible for preaching the then heretical doctrine that the people who lived in Vietnam at the time it was being bombed to pieces were actually human beings and cared just as deeply about their nearest and dearest as the rest of us. James Cameron was born in 1911, or so he tells us in his autobiography, and grew up in France.

One day he had rather a shock when his school teacher in a fit of heightened emotion removed his own arm and waved it above his head. It was a false arm, of course; the previous one having had an argument with an explosive projectile around 1916, but the young James Cameron hadn’t realised this. It rather put him off wars and fighting for life.

Anyway, his biography, which came out around 1967, is a very good read. It is called Point of Departure and was once available in Penguin. Not one letter of this beautifully crafted book is out of date though for all I know they all may be out of print. He was a pianist and most definitely not one to be shot at. Though of course he was. Literally and metaphorically, too.

The picture shows a most respectable looking James Cameron in India and comes via the BBC and the Guardian, whose assistance is acknowledged with thanks.

WE WILL ROCK YOU

When I mentioned to a good friend that I was intending to see the ‘Queen’ musical ‘We Will Rock You,’ he told me that I never ceased to amaze him. I don’t know why. Though he and his wife have a more conventional taste in concerts - Mozart, perhaps, or a spot of Bruckner, there’s no reason why one shouldn’t be able to enjoy both pop and classics. I feel sure that Mozart, for instance, would have revelled in Queen’s fantastic creations and wanted to join in. What Bruckner’s attitude would have been I’m not so sure.

Anyway, whatever, we booked for the Wales Millennium Centre and we went despite the show having been panned by the critics for the past ten years. Had dear Freddie Mercury been buried rather than cremated the gyrations of his corpse in the grave might have rendered the search for further sources of renewable energy quite unnecessary. As long as people like me went along to see 'We Will Rock You,' that is.

We went. A big treat. A looked-forward-to occasion at the end of a big week. And I can’t begin to describe how ghastly it was. Well, I suppose I can begin for I have already begun and the proof of the pudding should be in the eating rather than the cliché. But it really was awful.

To anyone tempted by the hype I say spend the ticket money on a bottle of good wine. Buy yourself some Green and Black’s maximum strength organic chocolate and play all your Queen CD’s several times letting your imagination run wild and the tears of joy roll down your cheeks. And donate the surplus you will have saved from the tickets to AIDS research or some other socially useful charity.

So what is wrong with the show? In a word everything that you can possibly think of: the music was wrong, the volume was wrong, the set designs were wrong, the whole approach to the audience was wrong, the story was worse than wrong, the actors were wrong.

But then when you’ve stopped tearing your hair out and thinking that yes, even I, given a freehand, Queen’s music and the back of a fag-packet, could have created a better show than that, comes the awful thought, the perilous, tragic, worrisome thought that maybe, just possibly, it is I (and the critics) that are wrong - or, even worse, just old. And square and the sort of people who shouldn’t be allowed access to Queen’s music at all because it might excite them too much before their bedtime cocoa.

But banish this dreadful thought. No! No, young people! And no, Ben Elton, and the stagers of last night’s performance who I won’t embarrass by naming: no, no, no! How can you possibly so traduce the fine art of putting on a show? How can the world of popular musical theatre have possibly descended (despite its already long decline) from the wit and elegance and cadences and extravagance and charm and acting and sheer vocal skill to this: sheer brute force and cacophony and a story line that would disgrace the Beano, with absolutely no relation to the music whatsoever.

Cacophony - brute noise and ignorance - that is what it was. Never have I been so deafened. Six bars into the opening number and I was tearing the corner off an envelope to put into my mouth and chew to a maché with which to make a species of ear-plug. My other ear I plugged with my finger, taking it out when people appeared to be talking. Even with these barriers the sound was deafening. It echoed out in physical waves way beyond those levels which, in a factory, would have the Health and Safety inspectors reaching for their prosecution pads.

When the posters said ‘We Will Rock You,’ we didn’t think they meant it literally. The heavy bass grabbed the theatre and worried it like dog with a rag doll. The place will collapse if they run many more shows like that. The Cardiff earthquake of 1990 shook us less.

Apart from posing a serious long term risk to one’s hearing ability, sound at that level isn’t true. You can’t hear music at that super-volume however sophisticated the amplification. The brain shuts down. All you can hear is super-noise, with the singers screeching distorted against it.

If we ask ourselves why Queen were so great, why Freddie Mercury was such a great artist and why their live performances were so loved - the answer would surely have been because they reached out, they touched, they involved the audience, they drew you in. Last night we might have been watching a film. Protected by this wall of sound the cast stamped and shouted and screeched their way through their lines, all subtlety gone, all humour gone, all wit gone and the only possible scintilla of substance remaining, some fair to middling dancing.

We left at the interval.

The picture at the top courtesy of Wikipedia is of Queen performing on stage in 1984.