Et tu Brute?

This post might seem like a "poor me" or parts of it even like boasting. Think that if you want, but I am trying to make a point.

If you know me or you've followed my blog you'll know that I excelled in my school A-levels. My parents told me to do my best, so I did. Although I grant that, in my O-levels, I failed History and only just passed English Literature even though I could (and still can) quote from memory Et tu Brute? and Let me have men about me who are fat... yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look... such men are dangerous. My English teacher had said quotes were like the plums in the pudding.

I excelled at college too, leaving with a First Class Honours degree. And did pretty well in my first job working in the prestigious BBC Research Department during which I was granted MIET and CEng which title I have retained (by paying an annual subscription) until recently.

After a few years doing odd jobbing building work while playing at radical church, I started my own electronics design business and completed a number of projects for various customers. To facilitate this work I have a home office cum workshop and have taught myself how to hand solder down to 0.4mm pitch, how to program embedded devices in assembler or 'C' and some PC programming as well.

And then, all of a sudden I retired and electronics work dried up. True, I continue to provide occasional technical support for that one active project, but otherwise my office and its equipment and stock of components has become largely redundant.

I had wondered about teaching - trying to pass on the skills I have learned, for the benefit of the next generation. But so far no one appears to be interested. The parents of young children in the community here have decided to quit the assisted home schooling we have assumed to be the norm for oh so many years, so it looks like there will be no need for my usual maths and physics teaching here. So instead I am helping my son doing some building renovation work here, and stoke the wood-burning boiler, weed the drive and mend things around the place that others have broken. Come the summer (if we haven't already missed it) I may take a day or two to go exploring now that I have a Senior Citizen free travel pass. But otherwise it is a strange feeling, this being retired is. I have always considered myself as being highly motivated and never, dare I even utter the word, bored. No, I'm not bored, really I'm not, but sometimes I'm not sure that I am fully motivated and I wonder what life is all about. We come and go like a ripple on a stream.

My first wireless set and stodge

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.