De-bearded

First published in Column 8, Sept 1993.  

Fooled into thinking I was good-looking - even handsome - by photographs more than a quarter of a century old, my wife and family had long nagged me to shave off my beard. I resisted the conspiracy to tame this full-blooded feature of masculinity.

However, while my wife was away overseas, I decided (quite unaffected by outside pressures), to see if she would know me at the airport if I met her beardless.

The weekend before she came home, I took scissors, along with a borrowed razor, (fully intending to return to my hairy state within a week), and shaving cream. Breathing deep into my diaphragm, I proceeded to dispense with the facial hair.

Excitement welled up as I embarked on a voyage of rediscovery. I hacked away with the scissors: a reasonable-looking character emerged. Hmm, not too bad.

Then I completed the job. And all those movies where someone's face changes before your eyes - usually for the worse - came back to haunt me.

The youth of the 25 year-old photos was gone. Double-chinned, a bejowelled, bothered and bewildered stranger appeared, like Rip Van Winkle after his lengthy slumber.

I could never confront the world like this. The beard must resume its groundcover as soon as I'd faced my wife.

Sunday morning at church. Every reaction possible. People recognizing me instantly - and laughing! Complementary people: my smile now seen in its fullest glory. Uncomplementary people - like myself - who couldn't wait for my face to go into hiding again. People who knew me but thought I'd changed my hairstyle. And those who didn't know me at all...!

"Mr Crowl," one bearded friend said, "I feel betrayed."

Subsequent meetings with friends and acquaintances convince me that people recognize other people in very individual ways. What else would account for such varied reactions?

On Monday, a shopkeeper and a librarian, people who know me only as a walking beard, recognized me without difficulty. Others recognized the glasses and squeezed-up eyes, but didn't register the loss of the lower part of my face. I feel like someone in those children's books where the top halves of the faces can be matched up with all manner of lower halves.

People say I look twenty years younger. This is odd, since they used to say before that I never looked my age. I must have plummeted back into adolescence. (Some say I look older. Good grief!)

As soon as I move away from my normal context, many people totally fail to recognize me. Anonymous, I melt into the crowd. I'm the victim of beardist remarks, from both men and women, as people's deep anti-beard emotions come out of the closet. All this on top of skin irritations, nicks, rashes, and the sting of aftershave.

Tuesday, my wife returned to Dunedin. At the airport, she screamed, laughed and cried - but avoided hysteria. I've been bearded for 22 years; longer than we've been married.

"I hate it!" she said, which was a relief - so do I. But that was her first reaction. Later she began to enjoy the smoothness of the face - and the smell of the aftershave. It was like having a new husband - at least in part.

I told her I've got plenty of smooth bits on my body that don't need to be razored - the palms of my hands, for instance, or the backs of my ears. If necessary, I can always douse these with aftershave.

The photo above is, at present, a remembrance of things past. Don't despair, fellow bearded ones: negotiations currently underway are hopeful of my naked face returning to its former glory.

Inventive

First published in Column 8, date unknown, but sometime in the 1990s. 

Though only thirty years old, the discussions in this column seem like they come from a different century. Ah, wait! - they do.

Getting irritable with things that don’t do quite what’s expected of them has its advantages. We humans delight in setting to and improving the aforesaid irritable things, or else inventing something altogether new.

I know it sounds chauvinistic to say it, but usually it’s the men who do the improving or inventing. Perhaps this is because they have more of a tendency to tinker.

I’m not trying to be sexist here. I once began writing an article on women inventors but found very little information. There was one American book on the subject, but nothing on New Zealand women inventors. (If anyone can help, I’d still be interested.)

Back to Invention. I’m sure irritation has its place, but I suspect many inventors started out as children who took things apart to see how they were made and couldn’t put them together again.

I’m not an inventor – I can barely take something apart in the first place – but I do have ideas for improvements on things.

For instance, I’ve long wondered why Telecom doesn’t have some way of letting you know that Call Minder has recorded a call. As it works now you have to remember to pick up the phone after you’ve been using it in order to see whether you’ve had another call while you were chatting. Since this takes discipline, calls can sometimes be minded for quite a while.

This obviously irritated some other inventive mind and a company in the US has produced a little piece of equipment called VisuAlert* which notifies you that a call has been recorded, by lighting up its ‘smile.’ (The machine is little more than a white pad with a painted red smile connected to your phone.)

Simple enough, but why doesn’t Telecom just use the red light on telephones for the same purpose? Why buy a VisuAlert when there’s one virtually installed?

Another thing that puzzles me, and which I’m sure I’d do something about if I had the first clue where to start, is this. We hear a lot about water becoming a precious resource – we’re using it to such an extent that we may find it rationed in the next century.

Taking the salt out of the ocean is the obvious solution (desalinisation), but the problem with this idea is the expense. Yet one fishing town in north-west Mexico, Puerto Lobos,** has its own solar still. This produces 3000 litres of fresh water in the summer, and 1000 in the winter. Hardly big time, but a start all the same.

Now here’s a great invention, albeit at this point almost as costly as desalinisation ($899 in the US). A VCR that not only keeps track of the programmes you’ve recorded, their date, channel number and length, but also tells you which tape you’ve recorded them on. That beats flicking through endless tapes to find the one important bit.

I’m not convinced of the value of this next invention, however – a shower valve that ‘remembers’ the temperature you set for your last shower.

Now I know Jeeves always used to run Bertie Wooster’s bath at just the right temperature, and I think I’m right in saying that Bunter did the same for Lord Peter Wimsey, but do we really need the extravagance of a mechanical butler that can drip the water to the right degree?

Dandelion Bones
courtesy Sharon Mollerus

Perhaps more useful on the watering scene is the MoistureSmart Watering Gauge. It tells you exactly how much watering your garden needs. It knows how much water the plants are absorbing, the amount of rainfall and irrigation, and the amount of moisture stored in the soil.   Wow!

Buy one of these and the only other invention we’d need would be the Detect Smart Weed Gauge. This would run round the garden removing weeds from under rose bushes, pulling docks out by the roots, and separating wheat from the chaff. 

Sorry, I haven’t invented it yet.**

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* VisualAlert now appears on the Net as a system invented in Australia, making much use of modern technology. 

**Since this was written the desalinisation process appears to be a much bigger system. 

***But since I wrote this, the idea seems to have taken off in a number of ways! Maybe I'm more of a genius than I thought. Check out Google for variations on the idea; this one, for example.

 

Goodbye to my little best mate

 Our lovely, warm-hearted little dog of immense personality was put to sleep today. At nearly fifteen 
years old he’d had a good innings (105 in dog years), but his back legs had gone phut to the degree that he couldn’t push up on them, making it almost impossible for him to get through the dog door. He’d surprise us sometimes by going out through it without difficulty, but then couldn’t get back in; there was a step on the other side making it a bigger jump. And he’d started to baulk at coming up the three back steps; I’d have to go out and rescue him. Or not. Sometimes he’d just do it, somehow. Even as recently as yesterday.

He was sleeping a lot more, and we’d had to start feeding him on kitten kibble because he’d lost some front teeth. I don’t know when this happened, but it must have been in the last few months. He was losing weight – I could feel bones in his back that I hadn’t noticed before, and even his fur didn’t seem to be growing as fast as usual. On top of all this, there was some constriction in his throat which meant he’d hoick like an old man, and not always get rid of what was there.

But it was still extremely hard to have him put down. Both my wife and I have struggled to make the decision over the last weeks and we’ve put it off more than once. Today was very emotional all round. He’s the first dog we’ve owned – we’d always had a cat or two when the kids were growing up.

He’s been my companion on endless walks, and until recently would walk as long as I was walking. Up till last year people we met still thought he was a puppy. Lately however, a breathlessness would creep in and even walking round the block was an issue. For a while I’d take him out in a pram to make sure he got some fresh air.

So, will we see him again? As Christians we believe we’ll see a lot of people we’ve known in Heaven* - but will we see our pets?

Peter Kreeft in his book, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven: But Never Dreamed of Asking has a brief section answering the question: Are there animals in Heaven? He writes:

The simplest answer is: Why not? How irrational is the prejudice that would allow plants (green fields and flowers) but not animals into Heaven! Much more reasonable is C. S. Lewis’ speculation that we will be “between the angels who are our elder brothers and the beasts who are our jesters, servants, and playfellows”. Scripture seems to confirm this: “thy judgments are like the great deep; man and beast thou savest, O Lord.” Animals belong in the “new earth” as much as trees.

C. S. Lewis supposes that animals are saved “in” their masters, as part of their extended family. Only tamed animals would be saved in this way. It would seem more likely that wild animals are in Heaven too, since wildness, otherness, not-mine-ness, is a proper pleasure for us. The very fact that the seagull takes no notice of me when it utters its remote, lonely call is part of its glory.

Would the same animals be in Heaven as on earth? “Is my dead cat in Heaven?” Again, why not? God can raise up the very grass; why not cats? Though the blessed have better things to do than play with pets, the better does not exclude the lesser. We were meant from the beginning to have stewardship over the animals; we have not fulfilled that divine plan yet on earth; therefore it seems likely that the right relationship with animals will be part of Heaven: proper “pet-ship”. And what better place to begin than with already petted pets?

From chapter 2 of Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Heaven: But Never Dreamed of Asking, by Peter Kreeft . Ignatius Press, 1990

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*When I write ‘Heaven’ here, and Kreeft is the same, it’s necessary to keep in mind that we’re remembering that those who receive everlasting life through belief in Jesus will one day live in a New Earth, a place often known as Heaven, but in fact a wonderfully heightened version of earth as we know it now, a place utterly fit for human beings to dwell in.

Hard Truths

 My wife wanted to go and see Hard Truths at the movies yesterday. We'd seen the trailer, and it looked interesting, and it stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste who was the wonderfully serious daughter in Secrets and Lies way back in 1996. Both of us had enjoyed that film all those years ago and it had remained in our minds partly because of Brenda Blethyn’s constant, ‘Sweet-art’ (with a great slide down on the ‘art’ syllable, and because it was an enjoyable movie.

Hard Truths – another Mike Leigh film – is anything but enjoyable. Initially the endless anger that Jean-Baptiste’s character, Pansy, directs at everyone, familiar or stranger, is somewhat amusing and all seems to be leading up to some catharsis. But no, the movie drags on through scene after scene of the miserably-depressed Pansy undermining everything good and finally taking it out completely on her long-suffering husband, who’s long since given up trying to argue with anything Pansy says, as has his 22-year-old son, who retreats from her as soon as he can when he’s at home. The last scene is of Pansy finding out from her husband’s workmate that he’s sitting downstairs barely able to move because he’s put his back out at work. Pansy gets up, but then just sits there, incapable of dredging up even an ounce of sympathy, it appears, for the man. He sits in the kitchen, a tear running down his cheek, knowing that even this crisis won’t change her heart.

You realise about halfway through that Pansy isn’t going to change easily – it’s going take an earthquake to shift her. The earthquake never comes. Three-quarters of the way through she finally consents to go and visit her mother’s grave with her sister, a hairdresser who has her own business, an outlook on life that aims for the positive, and who is successful at what she does. Plus she has two lovely daughters in their early twenties bouncing with life and energy. 

At the graveside, it’s revealed that Pansy had to look after her sister when their mother was forced to go out to work, because her husband had left her. This has somehow contributed to destroying Pansy’s life, and underneath she still hates her mother. In fact she hates all humanity, pretty-much. Her sister, Chantelle, manages finally to get her to come home with her for a dinner with her daughters and Pansy’s husband and son. The son, supposedly never capable of doing anything for himself, has left flowers at home for his mother because it’s Mother’s Day. The dinner party turns to mush because Pansy won’t give an inch. (Did I mention she’s also afraid of insects, the outside world, dirt, other people’s ‘DNA’ on a sofa and so on.) And when she and her family are home again she accuses her husband of not saying anything about his awful mother (which is all we hear about the mother) and then proceeding to throw all his clothes out of their bedroom – surprisingly, they still sleep in the same bed up to that point.

The film has garnered awards from every side. Jean-Baptiste is brilliantly awful – in fact you wonder what it cost her personally to be so awful day after day working on the movie, and, during all the time when the characters were being built up bit by bit in the usual Mike Leigh way. 

And that Mike Leigh way, is I think the problem with this film. It has no real structure. Yes, there are some sequences, as opposed to scenes, but a lot of it consists of Pansy berating someone or other just for being there, basically. The fact that she does could have been told in a few short episodes; instead too many of these scenes just go on and on. They lead us to think that something worthwhile will come out of all this bile, that someone will finally speak the hard truths of the title. But they don’t. In real life that’s probably not unusual. People suffer from someone like this for years because there doesn’t seem any way to convey the truth that they’re unwell mentally and that their sheer aggressiveness to all and sundry is ultimately harming themselves even more than others. 

But this is a film, a story. It isn’t real life and there needs to be some breakthrough, even if, at worst, everybody decides to abandon her to herself.

My wife got completely fed up with it in the end; partly because the last section drags even more than other earlier scenes, partly because there just isn’t any outcome. I’d mostly enjoyed it, though I found the character very frustrating after a while, but even I was gobsmacked when it just ended. As a work of art it was unfinished. In fact it was also unfinished in the sense that it made the audience sit through scene after scene that should have been edited down to the essentials. It’s indulgent on Leigh’s part; he seems to think his audience will just tolerate long scenes of unpleasantness without anyone stepping in and dealing with it – including the main character. You don’t expect a sudden complete turnaround, but a hint of the possibility would have made the rest of the long trip worthwhile.

 

Ickle-Uckle

 Ickle-Uckle

First published in Column 8, date unknown, but some time in the 1990s

There are days when I wish I'd been an etymologist - that is, a person who chases after the meanings and derivations of words. (As opposed to an entomologist, a person who likes pulling legs off spiders and wings off flies.)

I'm always intrigued by the peculiarities of English, the way it interconnects with other languages, and the curious gaps we have in it.

A particular gappage problem struck me the other day when I realised how few words ending in -ck went on to become -ckle words. We have plenty of words of the lack, lick, lock, luck variety, (although very few in the leck area), but nowhere near as many in the lackle, lickle, lockle, luckle department. (-ng words that have no -ngle are another cause of concern.)

And even when we do have them, they have no logical link with each other. I mean, what do buck and buckle have in common? Nothing at all, and it appears that they're not even relatives. One comes from the Old English for a he-goat, bucca - so how did he get to be Billy? - and the other from Latin, buccula, a little cheek (of the facial type), which then became a cheek strap. Now you find these cheeky straps all over the place.

Tack and tackle are a slight improvement, both of them having some connection with sailing, but tick and tickle? Tick began life meaning to touch, but fled away from its teasing little friend, tickle, and turned corners into a sound, or a mark, or even motivation, as in "what makes her tick?" - it isn't a touch...!

Pick and pickle are not related at all. Pick comes from piken, meaning what it still does, but pickle comes from pekel. So when Peter Piper picked his peck of pickled peppers, he was making no-cousins into next-of-kin.

This is all very well, however. There seems to me to be a gold mine of words that we haven't even begun to use, let alone explore their possible meanings. Why do we make up new words when we have all these old ones available?

Where are duckle, luckle (winning $2 on Instant Kiwi?), puckle, and ruckle (a handy word for footballers)? And anyway, where's knuck if there's a knuckle?

What about backle, hackle, (heckling incompetent politicians), lackle, knackle, (a skill?), packle, quackle, (what ducklings do), rackle, sackle, and whackle (a gentle clip round the ear)?

Where are beckle, deckle, feckle, (and if it comes to that, where's feck, the opposite of feckless), neckle, peckle, and wreckle (just avoiding a dint in your car)?

What happened to dickle, hickle, lickle (a 50c icecream), mickle, nickle, (not nickel), quickle (a short trip out for morning tea), rickle, and wickle (after the candle's burnt out)?

Or dockle, hockle (junior hockey player), jockle (a junior jock), lockle, mockle, knockle (a hesitant tap on the door), pockle (a zit, or acne), rockle, sockle (what's left after the other one's lost in the wash), and tockle (the rest between tickles)?

Going in reverse is just as bad. When did we lose the ank in ankle, or the wrink in wrinkle, the dang in dangle, or the ming in mingle? Why do we lack the jing in jingle, and the wrang in wrangle?

We need to use these words!

When we slip on the stairs and give our foot a twinge, that's an ank. When wrinkles haven't quite made it they're only wrinks. Something that's about to dangle is only in the state of dang, and if we're the sort of person who doesn't like crowds, we'd probably prefer to ming.

Jing happens when one of the sleigh-bells has lost its dang, as in Jing Jing Bells, Jing Jing Bells, Jing Jing all the way. The husband in the TV ad who's about to throw the chair at his family and decides not to, is at the point of wrang.

We need to put the value back into feck. For example, he was a man full of feck - a much more straight-to-the-eyeball word than self-esteem.

And let knuck take its place as the word for knuckles when they're lying down flat.

Well, how else do you describe them?

Guess which one of these words is fictitious,
even though it appeared in an encyclopedia 

Large birds mangled with a weapon?

 Large birds mangled with a weapon?

First published in Column 8, date unknown at present, but some time in the 90s. Since this was written a few decades ago, some of these crosswords may have disappeared. The Otago Daily Times, my home town of Dunedin's daily paper, now has a cryptic that alternates between a stinker and one that might be solved. Both are more difficult than the cryptic they used to publish daily. 

 
As I've mentioned before, we have a tradition on holiday of doing the cryptic crossword in the Otago Daily Times. This year my wife, son and I gathered round the grid each day, bantering and arguing and tearing our hair until we'd finished it. The satisfaction was tantamount to putting a man on the moon.

Usually we have too little time to cope with it the rest of the year round, but we've become more adept at solving the clues, so we've carried on solving it this year, sneaking in answers between other daily tasks. Even the Aged Parent, who falsely claims no skill at doing cryptics, joins in.

She's good at the sudden illumination. My wife uses a set of Scrabble tiles to sift around the anagrams. I'm the analytical one, and like to know why the answer is right. Between us, and with the help of a dictionary and thesaurus (one has to have the right tools for the job) we usually manage to finish, even if it is last thing at night.

I don't know why crosswords are so tantalizing - perhaps it's part of human nature to delight in puzzles, and the completing of them. After all, so many legends and fairy stories are full of the equivalent of crosswords: strange riddles that only explain themselves when you solve them.

Crosswords began life as uncomplicated beasts - on the 21st December 1913 to be exact. They were called, then, Word-crosses. They'd had plenty of ancestors, of course. Acrostics (which are as old as the Bible), have always been around, often in utterly convoluted forms, such as double and triple. (The first letters of the poem might reveal a word opposite in meaning to the last letters, for instance.)

The Word Square goes back to the Romans, if not further, and later turned into the Magic Square - or triangle, in some cases. As a puzzle it was very popular with the Victorians before the arrival of the crossword. The most famous crossword of them all, the Times cryptic crossword, was a late starter. And amazingly enough it was first compiled by someone who'd never produced, or even solved a crossword, in his life. Adrian Bell had ten days to learn the job, then went on to produce crosswords for forty years.

The speed with which people have completed the crosswords in competitions held by the Times over the years is phenomenal. One contestant, John Sykes, was clocked in at an average of eight and a half minutes over four puzzles, in 1972. He claimed to have done one at home in three and a half minutes, but the official record for this is held by Roy Dean, who in December, 1970, completed one in just under that time. (On the other hand, in the year of Our Lord, 1966, one lady from Fiji finished a puzzle set in April 1932.)

If The Times' crossword is the most famous, The Observer's is reckoned to be the toughest - although some think The Listener's are worse. (The English Listener, that is.)  The Listener crosswords have appeared in the shape of a heart; as a chessboard, (with clues according to the chess pieces' positions); in a hexa-pentagonal shape; with clues in the form of mathematical equations; without any black squares at all.

There are many other variations on the theme, such as the Alphabet crossword, in which every letter of the alphabet is used only once. Then there is the crossword with no numbering, so that you have to figure out the place to put the answers.

There are puzzles with numbers instead of words; or puzzles with two identical grids, but no indication as to which set of answers fits which grid. There have even been puzzles in which the black squares, (or the marks between words in some cases) produced a picture - as in one by "Afrit", where two letter Qs are printed to form his eyes.

And there was the puzzle sent to The Times by Sir Max Beerbohm in 1940, which was full of red herrings. Only six clues out of nearly 50 actually had any answers at all!

If you want a good book to help you work out the difficulties of cryptic crosswords try Rewording the 
Brain by David Astle. It's a book not only about solving cryptics, but also the way the brain worksand dementia. Published Allen & Unwin, 2018. Available in paperback and ebook - though the latter isn't as satisfying a format as the paper version.