Erin, the electrician...

Out of curiosity, I looked into How To Build A Nuclear Submarine (BBC2, 27 June, 2010) and was not surprised at what I saw; men, young and older, engaged in a boys’ own strategy of bonding, machine-building, cutting and welding, and team-playing. What did take me by surprise was Erin, the young apprentice electrician at the Barrow-in-Furness based operation.
When Erin is finished her training, the voiceover said, she will be one of an elite corps of skilled technician. Not only that, Erin is young, blonde, pretty, a real role model for young women, everywhere. Forget the Wags, and make way for this new take on Rosie the Riveter. Forget the Beckhams, the Coles and the Rooneys. Manolo Blahniks have had their day and a Masters’ Certificate is the new cool.
And the beautiful end-point of the work? Each Astute submarine costs £1 billion build. Each is the length of a football field, can circumnavigate the globe without surfacing – it won’t have to refuel for 25 years – and is possessed of sonar so powerful that one in the English Channel can detect one leaving New York harbour.
Great, but I can’t imagine why anyone would want to – I mean, isn’t the Cold War over? And what about all those marines (submariners?) who will spend months underwater, in cramped conditions? Only the captain of the sub will have his own quarters, see.
It all smacks of the ‘sixties television series, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, underwater answer to the stellar Startrek. I relished the series, although I never knew exactly what that crew were up to, either. It was all great adventure stuff, as no doubt it will be for the Astute submariners. And in her hub of activity, productivity and sense of common purpose, how I envy Erin the electrician…

Beam me up, Scotty, please...

Of all the inventions that they promised us and that were never delivered, the one I miss most is teleportation. You have definitely heard of it, whereby a man that needs to get from A to B need not bother with train, plane or automobile, bike nor bus, but a “dematerialisation” chamber at point A that beams him to point B where the reverse process takes place. His journey is done, over.
No more being held in thrall to Icelandic volcanoes, French air traffic controllers or Irish low-budget airlines. No more missing luggage – it can travel with you, see! Goodbye to lousy food and dratted engineering works. Why are the scientists taking so long to invent it? Personally, I blame George Langelaan for writing his short story The Fly in 1957, in which scientist Andre Delambre suffers a shocking accident when he experiments with a disintegrator –integrator, the “dematerialisation” chamber I wrote of earlier. The following year Kurt Neumann gave us the first screen version of the story, followed by David Cronenberg’s The Fly in 1986.
If it wasn’t for Langelaan and his discouraging developments in technology, airports would be obsolete by now and the debate over the third runway would never have happened. Oh, yes, there is always the danger of fusing genes with a mouse or with Boris Johnson, but technology has always been hazardous – don’t forget BP. The benefits of teleportation to the environment would be so enormous that the odd, unlikely fusion would hardly matter. Indeed, one or two might be an advantage – how about merging David Cameron with Nick Clegg? They are two of a kind, anyway. Stripy horses already exist in nature; how about furry fish, feathered goats and horned kittens? Come on, scientists! Take a few risks, make travel less miserable and we’ll be one step closer to whizzing untrammelled about the universe...

Mystery of the Missing Shoulder

I grew up believing that the egalitarian, fashion-free, gender-equal utopia aboard the Starship Enterprise was a microcosm of the real world. Long before that vision was dashed, I received a rude awakening of the sartorial kind. When I was a little ‘un, our family went weekly to a local shopping precinct. One Saturday, we were strolling up and down, enjoying the day and gathering our purchases when a ripple of laughter running through the crowd caught our attention.
It was almost a medieval scene, the shoppers pausing in their business to stare at and lampoon a young man. Nothing remarkable about him except that the trousers he wore consisted of one navy-blue leg and one white leg. Young children, matrons, adult men, all tittered and wondered at this sight. The wonder of this story is, of course, our wonder, our sheer lack of sophistication. We really had never seen anything like it before. I remember thinking that maybe the tailor hadn’t enough of either navy or white fabric, and had cobbled together a garment made of left over pieces – in which case, the trousers were very innovative indeed. This is the same mindset with which my Mum regards those tops and dresses that have one shoulder cut away: it looks like they hadn’t enough cloth to finish the garment.
The Day of the Trousers pitched me into a lifetime of conservative dressing, a state from which I have never emerged. Over the years, I have bemusedly observed the procession of fads and fashions that contribute to the montage of life; the ripped and torn, the faded and distressed, the uneven hemlines and faux patches, without so much as a pang of longing - or a missing shoulder.

Colour me unconcerned

During the 1980s a whole rash of businesses arose, based on assisting members of the populace to find their ‘true colours’. I believe it worked something like this. You went to an office where a consultant with undisclosed qualifications looked at you underneath different lights, asked a number of questions about your likes and dislikes and then, after due consideration, drew forth a palette of colours that she (usually) decided were for you.
Only in these colours, went the claim, would you look and feel your brightest and best to the point where those who got their colour scheme ‘wrong’ were likely to crash cars and fail exams. Most curious of all were those consultants who grouped their clients into one of the four seasons. The town was alive with springs talking to summers, and autumns arguing with winters. Now, it’s all rather passé.
In these days of throwaway clothes, there is much less angst expended over the tint of a shirt than when we (gasp!) saved up and bought a garment that might hang in our wardrobes for (double gasp!) years. I never bought into this colour thing simply because I couldn’t bear the thought of a total stranger telling me – who has very definite colour likes and dislikes – that my choice of clothing was all wrong.
Instead, I contented myself with filling in those pop psychology quizzes in magazines, indicating favoured colours in various circumstances, then reading the analyses afterwards.
I have long forgotten what sort of animal I am supposed to be, but the colours of that decade still resonate: midnight blue, fuchsia pink, pillar-box red, canary yellow and black, black, black – and I have never moved on from wearing combos of these glorious shades. Fashion aside, there are definite psychological responses to colour in certain situations, and often with beneficial results – but that is another column.

The Importance of being Spotted

Spots and dots, what do they do? Leap, walk, march and polka over yards and yards of fabric, breaking up po-faced planes of plain colour into exuberant labyrinths that evoke fun, innocence and happiness. Their expounders range in type and temperament from Damien Hirst to Cath Kidston, to Pudsey Bear. The more brightly-coloured the spots are, the better, bringing to mind Smarties, those mouth-watering candies of childhood.
Coloured spots evoke long, sunny, salad-filled days; flowers, rainbows, babies, nursery walls and cuddly toys. No wonder there is a dessert called Spotted Dick. And how can you not love a critter that is covered in spots? Just look at the adorable Dalmatian. Spots denote nobility too, witness the invincible cheetah. Any successful actor/singer/writer will tell you how they went from nowt to acclaim the day they were spotted – har!

Why I love ducks!

The duck has been getting a bad press lately, especially when the media uncovered a number of them living in Westminster-subsidised housing. Indeed, our ire has been such that we are in danger of throwing away the meat with the left-over sauce. After all, the duck has contributed to so many arenas of life, from the arts to the dinner table, that it deserves a sound-out now and again.
Throughout the ages, the duck has inspired creativity, from those wonderful dog-and-duck public house signboards, to the flocks of flying ornaments that grace the walls of household halls up and down the country, to the Marx Brothers movie of 1933, Duck Soup. The duck has contributed to the English language with words like ‘duckboard’ and ‘duckweed’. The duck has provided a word that means a female bird, a way of avoiding things, a type of cloth, and an indispensable bathroom-furniture cleaning thingummy.
So let’s not begrudge our feathered friend his subsidised home. After all, the taxpayer provides housing for humans. Instead, on this fine spring day, let’s sound for this web-footed wonder, one great, resounding quack….

When men wore tights...

Some time ago, I pronounced on the extraordinary cult of the female leg and how, in order to get anywhere in this world, a girl has to have hers eternally on display. It wasn’t always thus. In the Middle Ages, it was the male leg that endowed a man with status, while drawing orgasmic gasps from many a young maid. Just look at all those medieval images of men in tights. No wonder Robin and his merry men led such a successful Sherwood Forest campaign.

A few centuries down the line and Renaissance ladies swooned at the sight of illustrious alpha males such as Henry VIII prancing about in court dances devised especially to show off their pins – no wonder the Monarch drew six wives! The cult of the male leg continued until the eighteenth century although by now the appeal, like the leg, had been halved. Knee breeches covered the top half of the shank while the calf and foot were resplendent in silk stocking and buckled shoe.

By the nineteenth century, the cult of the male leg was on the wane, what with the advent of long trousers. However, there is in existence a painting of the young Queen Victoria in company with her beloved Albert, (name of the artist escapes me). The bright, red boots that encase his legs signal dangerously his most (to Queen Vic) erogenous zone. The curtain rises on the twentieth century and along with it, the hem of the female skirt. The male leg is dead forever. Methinks, what irony? Just as woman is freed from her whalebone corset, she is handed another zone to maintain. Ah me, if I could go back in time, it would be to when knights were bold and maidens young and old could conceal their less than perfect pins under full-length skirts. I’ll bet it was much warmer, too.