Just as it was my fault for suggesting a flying lesson for Kate's 18'th, so this electronics thing was my father's fault for taking me, at an early age, to Woolworths (the UK sort, not Oz) and buying me a battery, wire and some flash-light bulbs. The rest was history in each case.
At that tender age I had contemplated being a train driver, a plumber, a joiner, an electrician (figuring that electronics was much too complicated). My train driving has been restricted to model railways, otherwise I have done all these.
I have happy childhood memories of powering a flash-light on one side of our wood shed from a battery on the other side via a length of house cable buried under the dirt floor. The concept that energy and information could be carried across that distance fascinated me.
I graduated into electronics when folk started to offload on me ancient and no-longer-working wireless sets, sometimes even TVs. I was smitten by the fancy colours on resistors. And I figured being an electrician was too dangerous anyway, with all those high voltages. I used to disassemble these sets into component level. I wondered greatly at how a volume control could work, as when I connected it in series with a battery and bulb nothing happened.
On one occasion I decided to build my own wireless set. I suppose I might have been 10 years old. I made a sort of box out of Meccano and inside it connected various components from my cache, somewhat randomly. I had a pair of headphones for the output, and doubtless a volume control, an aerial, and two convenient wires which I duly attached to a battery and wonderingly donned the headphones. Sadly I heard nothing. Apparently my random approach to design wasn't the ticket. However, the experience has coloured my view on Darwinian evolution.
The subject of school stodge is related only in so far as I happened, whilst this post was in draft stage, to watch my daughter-in-law L squashing the middle of each of several muffins whilst still in the baking tin with an inverted egg-cup (prior to filling the voids with apple). Which brought back memories.
School dinners were legendary. This was before the time of cafeteria-style-students-have-a-choice days. The choice was simply take it or leave it. Occasionally we would see deliveries of fresh produce and we would wonder how the kitchen could convert all this to what we found on our plates. Having said that some meals were OK - butterscotch tart being one such exception,
although the school variety was served in a rectangular aluminium tray and the colour was not as golden as the photo.
A more common dessert (or pudding) was what we called stodge. Stodge came in various flavours and was served with custard which came in various colours (pink, yellow or brown). Stodge was basically a steamed sponge though "sponge" is a bit of a euphemism. We developed a test for stodge. Having put some in a bowl you would use the convex side of your spoon to compress it. If it collapsed and liquid visibly flowed out then it was stodge. Since school days I have eaten many substances that call themselves "sponge" and none has yielded to this test, yet all school stodge did. It wasn't that it was inedible - it was just... wet.
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