Never mind Inspector Gadget we’ve all got gadgets at home

Have you ever opened a kitchen drawer, or cupboard, and wondered what some of the items in there actually do?

We know about the ice-cream scoop and, possibly, the melon baller, you might even recognise an old-fashioned potato peeler.

What about that odd thing with cog wheels and what looks like the winding key for an old clockwork toy train?

Once upon a time people peeled potatoes with a kitchen knife; if you had ice-cream it was probably in a brick-shaped block wrapped in cardboard which would then be sliced up into individual pieces.

As for melon, well you’d be lucky to see one from one year’s end to the next unless you went out for dinner at a posh restaurant.

We’ve all got these kitchen gadgets tucked away, an old breadmaker which was shoved in the cupboard because the baker in the house had decided proper bread needed to be handmade or, more common, the baker could no longer be bothered.

I’m sure my parents had some gadgets, in fact I might have some of them in my possession, possibly handed down without instructions, but the first one I remember is something which cost me just 6d (that’s 2.5p in modern coinage).

My friend Roger and I had travelled down to London to go the the International boat show. We were about 16 at the time and, coming from a seaside town and both interested in messing about in boats, were interested in looking over boats of all sizes, with or without engines, and all the accessories that go with them.

There were stands throughout the exhibition with men and women demonstrating everything from outboard engines to galley equipment.

One man was demonstrating a gadget which could be used to squeeze an orange and extract all the juice and pour it into a cup.

Despite being a sophisticated young North Walian (that’s right, from North Wales, not a Northerner which implies English) I was drawn to this little plastic gizmo which could make extracting juice from an orange so simply.

They were on sale for just 6d as opposed to a shop price of 1/-, which was still quite a lot (actually 5p in modern money).

Surprisingly out of all the gadgets I can remember that orange, plastic juice extractor is the only one that I would still appreciate and lose.

I still like gadgets and even admit to having an electric breadmaker tucked away under the stairs. I prefer to mix my dough by hand.

A few days ago I did treat myself to a new gadget – a milk frother, battery powered. Mid-morning I enjoy a good frothy coffee while my wife enjoys a mug of hot chocolate.

The trouble is even a balloon whisk does not froth the hot milk enough whereas this little battery-operated frother does the job as well as any modern variety.

It cost me a fiver and if you compared it to that juicer I bought all those years ago for 5p then nowadays that £5 should have been £50, or possibly more.

From innocence to sexual predators in one fell swoop

It is amazingly simple to make a giant leap from a fairly mundane chat about songs from the 60s and 70s to suddenly find yourself in a discussion about paedophiles.

I’m not suggesting this was a chat over a pint in a pub. I’m not even sure that people discuss pop songs and paedophilia in pubs these pubs.

The chat in question was on an internet group reminiscing about growing up in the 60s, and the sort of music people enjoyed.

A quite anodyne chat about songs of the 1960s suddenly turned into a trawl amongst the lyrics with a suggestion that many of them would fail to get any airtime in these “enlightened ” days.

There were the usual suspects of course, Gary Glitter and Rolf Harris for example, but these were actually based on the men themselves.

Admittedly there were songs which nowadays would be blacklisted.

I was just surprised that anyone could think “Young Girl” by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, or “Does Your Mothr Know” by ABBA could be considered subjects of a ban based on lyrics.

In both cases the songs are based on a man telling a young girl that he believes her to be under the age required to have sex.

He recognises that he has strong feelings for her but knows he cannot start a relationship.

There are far worse songs these days that even seem to imply violence, rape or even murder against women.

Don’t destroy our memories of a time when musicians knew how to make music and singers could sing in tune.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Published by Penguin Classics

We all know the horror story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, well a lot of us know the story of the kind and gentle doctor and the evil counterpart.

You can see it now, a man takes a drink of a potion which bubbles and glows then falls behind the settee before standing up as Edward Hyde, a stooped over, ugly figure who disappears into the night intent on murder and mayhem.

Except that is not how RLS wrote it.

I know many people are positive they have read or seen the mild-mannered man turn into a monster, as described above. Except that is a better fit with the films, or TV series, or “sequels” that have proliferated since the story was first published in 1886.

The description above could have been taken from any of the films of the book and even from spoofs such as Carry on Screaming with Kenneth Williams as a mad scientist (more Dr Frankenstein than the pleasant doctor of Stevenson’s novella).

In fact the description could have been a scene from the Carry On film except the person drinking the potion was an upright Victorian policeman, played by Harry H Corbett (the H there so that he could be distinguished from Harry Corbett of Sooty fame).

I will not give you details of the actual book because if you go to it with an open mind you should find the original far superior to any other version.

The book tells the story of friends and relations, the good doctor, his long-term friend, a lawyer, as well as a loyal manservant.

It is also about the id, the ego and the super ego , the three aspects of personality as viewed by Sigmund Freud.

Do not be put off by what some see as psychobabble. Stevenson has presented the whole thing in a manner that can be read at any level and still remains a cracking read.

I urge you to give it a go.

What goes around comes around – especially spectacles

There are certain things in our lives that are important, yet we only think about them if someone else comments on them.

A classic example is glasses, or spectacles if you prefer.

When you first get them you notice how they press on the bridge of your nose, or how they lie along your ears.

It only takes a couple of days to get used to them and within a week you won’t even think once about them.

You are more likely to find your wallet at home, if it isn’t in your pocket, than you are to find your glasses, having only put them down a minute before.

You only really notice them if someone sees you wearing them for the first time, and comments on them.

I started wearing glasses when I was about 17 and studying at Kelsterton College in North Wales. I started one term at the back of the class, when all your classmates are teenage girls you don’t choose to sit at the front. By the end of the term I had moved gradually to the front, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to see the blackboard.

The crunch came when I was at the Flint railway station heading for home.

It was a two-track railway line and I was standing opposite the station sign, a large purple sign with large letters spelling out the station name: FLINT.

To me it was a blurred purple with some fuzzy white blotches.

When I got home local businesses were closed but I asked my mother to make an appointment at the optician’ for the following Saturday morning.

When I did get the spectacles back the first thing I noticed was that everything was clear again.

The second thing I noticed was that the glasses were the same as those worn by Michael Caine in the Harry Palmer spy movies.

Since that time I have had plain black frames, wire frames, contact lenses, prescription sunglasses, varifocals, the plain glasses that go dark in sunlight, and so many more in the last 56 years.

Guess what my latest glasses are – a very chic pair of black-framed spectacles.

“My name is Michael Caine – not a lot of people know that.”

Ding dong the Bells had the literary world in a muddle

In 1847 three books were published by authors with the surname Bell. There was Currer Bell, Acton Bell and Ellis Bell.

Literary stalwarts, reviewers and those in the publishing world immediately smelled a rat, but they were on the wrong track. They suspected the books were all written by one person – a man.

What had probably missed their attention was that the previous year a book of poetry had been published- the works of three brothers: Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell.

The reason no connection was made, between the poetical brothers and the novels of Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell, could well be because the volume of poetry only had a two-volume print run.

Nowadays we know the Bell brothers were actually the Brontë sisters: Charlotte, Emily and Anne, daughters of a country parson of Irish extraction, Patrick Brontë.

The novels of the “Bell brothers” were well received and many reviewers considered it brave of the authors to indicate support for female characters who showed strength in their actions, and a degree of learning, often shown through them becoming governesses or even teaching young men of a somewhat “lower class” to read and write.

If Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey had been published under the writers’ real names it is highly likely they could have fallen foul of male prejudices and sunk into oblivion.

That would have been a literary tragedy and could well have put back the feminist cause back for decades.

The strangest thing is that literary connoisseurs of the early 19th century not only thought the three works were written by a man, they also thought they were written by the same person.

Yet if you read the books you could not see them as the works of one person.

Admittedly there are authors who have produced novels using different characters in the lead. Murder mysteries are a classic example.

Agatha Christie had Hercule Poirot as her main detective, but Jane Marple also played her part, yet the characters could not be more different.

Hercule is a prissy little Belgian, a refugee in the First World War who had been a police detective.

Jane Marple was one of those little old ladies you see everywhere but never really notice, yet she uses everyday situations to solve crimes.

The point is you can always recognise that Agatha Christie style.

If you were to read Jane Eyre and follow on with Wuthering Heights you would need to be very narrow-minded to even contemplate that the authors were the same person.

Even the man on a Clapham omnibus could understand these basic instructions

You never know what you’ll find on an instruction sheet when you buy a gadget.

Once upon a time it would identify the component parts and explain what each part did.

If it was made in the UK it would have assembly instructions (if it needed assembling) and operating instructions. These would be written in English and possibly in French, German and Spanish.

When we joined the EU the information required grew and the number of languages had to cover every single one.

From the days when a small slip of paper was enough as an information leaflet a lot of items we buy these days have what amounts to a slim paperback.

My son works for a company which has to ensure the information in these tomes is accurate. A lot of this work is now done online.

He started off in this line working as what amounted to a quality controller and also involved quality testing an item to make sure it is safe.

Nowadays he concentrates on ensuring all the information needed (including warnings on whether or not it is suitable for different age ranges) is provided.

Over the years he has explained to me the necessity for certain things provided in these leaflets.

It is not down to bureaucracy, much of it is to ensure the safety of the purchaser and any user of the item.

As a journalist I was always told that a news story had to be understood by an average reader, known in the early 20th century as “the man on a Clapham ombibus”.

Although the term is archaic it is still a good guide these days and applies to any purveyor of information.

Mind you this tenet now looks as though instructions are being brought to an extremely basic statement.

I have just bought a kitchen gadget for which information instructions have come down to the most basic I have ever seen.

HOW TO USE:

Press button: machine works.

Release button: machine stops working.

I think even Donald Trump could understand that.

From home phones to mystery emails – grifters keep trying

Why do scam artists (actually that’s an insult to real artists, sorry Vincent, Renè, Michelangelo, Pablo, Salvador et al) think that anyone over 70 is as dumb as Trump, and you’d need to get close to the bottom of the IQ ladder before you’d find a candidate, and an easy mark for a grifter.

Five years ago it was mainly our landlines that had the trolls jiggling in excitement when they called on behalf of: “your bank”; “your computer security company”; “your Sky account”; or whatever company they claimed to be.

My initial reaction was to accuse them of lying and put the phone down.

The trouble is that did not deter them. They continued to use a range of different numbers in the hope that I would not notice the same person was calling from so many accounts.

I did go to the well-tried move of engaging them in conversation:

“Ah yes, didn’t you call yesterday? Good to hear from you again. Sorry I cut the call short but I was concerned about my mother who is 92 and bedridden. How is your mother by the way?”

This would put some of them off, but there were the persistent ones who would change tack and start telling you that with an elderly person in the house you needed to ensure your cyber safety, as if you were scammed you might end up unable to provide care for them.

Anyone who tries that just gets cut off.

The problem is that some of the scammers just can’t stop. This used to put me on the “shaming” tack.

“Does your mother know what you do for a living? Does she know that you try and con elderly people to pay over all their savings just so that you can live the high life?”

Surprisingly this does turn some of them away. I have had an occasional one even say sorry but most of them get narked and tell me to do things to myself that I have not been able to do in 20 years before cutting the call.

Eventually they appeared to have realised they were not going to con me out of my hard-earned savings and the phone calls slowed to a trickle and then just stopped.

Then they tried a new tack. An email, which was allegedly from my Internet provider; or my bank; or my McAfee security.

Over the past couple of years these emails have increased from one every now again to two or three a week; then to every day; and now three or four a day.

The thing is all you have to do is to put your marker on the word details and will reveal who sent the email. Normally it will have a name and what is also a company name.

These are not necessarily cyber thieves, they just want you to open the email which takes you to their email site and gives them a click on their site.

It might make it difficult for you to leave the site unless you shut down completely.

The scammer only succeeds if the recipient opens the email.

Do not open the email.

Blame those responsible not the NHS front line workers

We all know the National Health Service is under tremendous strain.

Staff shortages; not enough time for GPs to spend with patients; hospitals having to leave new patients on trollies because there are not enough beds on the wards.

Who is to blame for all this?

In fact that should be who is responsible for the current state of affairs because we know the blame gets laid on the shoulders of those in the front line.

The GP receptionists take the brunt when they have to tell patients there are no face-to-face appointments with a doctor within two weeks.

The doctors themselves are accused of not giving enough time to their patients, or do not pay enough attention to those they do see.

Higher up the chain doctors or consultants are accused of spending too much time dealing with private patients.

What we must remember is that the receptionist can only offer appointments when they are available; GPs have to allot a specific period of time to an appointment, if they go over even a minute it builds up to six minutes in an hour and over a day could take up an hour which means six patients lose out.

Although I do not condone private practice if hospital doctors and consultants are not allowed time out for such moneymaking activities then they are more likely to drop NHS work and go completely private.

The real problem lies with the politicians, politicians of all colours, who believe that by gradually putting more and more effort into slicing off sections of the NHS and giving them to the private sector.

Of course the politicians are not the only ones to blame. There is a large chunk of pencil pushers at the heart of NHS management.

Forms must be filled in and then need to go to another department to be verified, after which they get passed to another division for a signature and finally to the department which files the forms.

Details of appointments also take a circuitous route. From being written (when a date goes on it) a letter might not even go out for delivery for a few days.

How else could a letter dated 6 January only get delivered on 11 January?

Yet this is a problem which crops up time after time after time.

Why not email the appointments on the day they are made? Or send them by telephonic messaging services?

It doesn’t take a genius to cut the waste.

Pick a puzzle to keep a sound mind in a not-so-sound body

There’s nothing like a good puzzle to keep your mind active – over the years I’ve tried them all: crosswords; wordsearch; Sudoko; even a GCHQ quiz book and that modern phenomenon Wordle.

The best of them all, however, is the puzzle to end all puzzles – the jigsaw.

I remember as a little child having one of those wooden jigsaws (24 pieces) with a picture of ducklings, or piglets or something just as cute.

When I became a man I put away childish things, well not really but you get the idea.

I made a return to them when I was out in Australia. Working on a daily paper meant leisure time during the day. With the children at school and Marion at work I started doing jigsaw puzzles again.

The point is in Oz I couldn’t find many “normal” puzzles: country cottages; steam trains; harbour views etc.

What I did find were puzzles based on: a multitude of gaily-coloured parrots; a wide variety of different types of bread; pantry shelves stacked with cans of food.

I think you get the idea.

They went to the local charity shop in Townsville when we decided to return to Britain.

Over the next few years the jigsaw puzzles went on the back burner until my brother happened to visit a London art gallery and sent me a postcard-sized puzzle of The Last Supper.

After that I received an occasional birthday/Father’s Day/Christmas Day present of a jigsaw puzzle not all of which I got around to doing, especially in 2024 which seems to have been a generally barren year when it comes to hobbies and pursuits.

What did happen, however, is that my daughter Sarah bought me an “Advent Calendar” puzzle.

This was a normal jigsaw puzzle box inside which were 24 numbered boxes, one for each of the 24 days of Advent.

The idea was to do one day at a time leading to the completion of the puzzle on Christmas Eve.

This was the first time I had come across a jigsaw puzzle which had pieces identified by numbers on the back. Not each single piece, of course, but all of the first box would be 1 and the second 2 and so on.

It did make it simpler as you were literally doing 24 42-piece jigsaws.

I actually ended up doing two, three or four in a day.

Although I have a couple of jigsaws I had not got round to doing I did put puzzles on my Christmas list but rather than having random ones I suggested well known paintings by artists as Van Gogh, Michelangelo, Matisse, Botticelli etc. and no more than 2000 pieces.

I thought initially a 1000 piece or even 1500 piece jigsaw might turn up.

As it happened my daughter bought me a 2000 piece puzzle of Botticelli’s Venus.

Now I have to decide whether to: do a 1000 piece puzzle of the Sgt Pepper album cover; go straight on to the Venus; or work the two together.

Whatever I decide to do it should certainly keep my mind active.

Don’t judge a book by its cover, or a TV show by a snippet

Once upon a time the only real way to discover when new programmes were being broadcast was either by buying the weekly Radio Times (which included BBC TV programmes as well as ITV programmes); or buy a daily newspaper which had all TV listings.

If a new programme was being introduced you had to rely on the information printed in the newspaper or the somewhat more detailed TV magazine.

You had to decide whether to watch the new programme or an old favourite on the other channel.

Nowadays you can get all the information you need and if the new programme appears interesting you can record it to watch later.

The point is how do you decide whether or not to watch a new programme?

At one time we would check the subject matter and the cast and make a decision based on that.

Months later you hear of a second series which everyone is raving about and you think: “I didn’t see the first series so I won’t know what’s going on.”

With modern technology you can look up the original series and watch it before watching the new series.

Of course, after watching a couple of episodes, you might consider it is not your cup of tea at all.

Nowadays we always watch a couple of episodes before deciding whether or not to continue.

This is because a new programme might take a couple of episodes to really get going.

Here is where the fact that we can call up programmes from years previously proves to be a boon.

This year a lot of people watched the Gavin and Stacey Finale and wondered why they had not bothered to watch the original series.

It is this series that first made us decide to give series at least two episodes before making up our minds as to whether or not to watch it all.

As it happens having seen The Finale we thought we would watch the series from the beginning.

We are now on series 2 and are finding it is as hilarious as it was the first time round.

It is amazing how many things you miss when you first watch a programme and don’t even catch some of them only after watching an episode three or four times.

One thing that puzzled me about the Gavin and Stacey Finale was the reaction some people had about.

Many comments have been made about the programme and most of them were favourable.

Some people reckoned The Finale was not as good as the previous programmes.

The ones that puzzled me, however, were those who attacked the whole show and taking pride in saying: “I have never watched a single episode because it’s rubbish.”

How do they know if they have never watched it.