28. Rubik's Cube

I'm waiting to read of the youngster who has been put into care for smashing his parents home to pieces with a sledgehammer and attempting to murder the cat by putting it into the spindryer.

          

His parents will be reported as saying that they have no idea what came over him, as up to date he had been a good boy of high intelligence and a happy disposition, and so far as they knew had no vices. Not even the odd bit of glue sniffing which some of his mates were known to indulge in behind the school bog.

They will be honestly mystified as to their son's lapse from civilised behavior, although will recall, at the court inquiry, that he had recently had a few nightmares from which he had awoke screaming "Left, Right, Left"

I haven't actually read of such a case but, like the riots that have recently plagued Liverpool, Brixton and other British areas, it is inevitable that it will occur when you study the contributary factors which spark such events. This case will have nothing to do with ethnic minority suppression, three million unemployed, lead poisoning or the envy of folk who could only afford a registry office wedding and a honeymoon at Southend after having a recent more expensive do shoved down their gullets until they got sick of it. This case will be due to parental indulgence and pride.

As the average Mum and Dad quite naturally thinks that their pride and joy is the only one that's been cast from the mould and should have no less than any other kid, and is far more capable of succeeding with it than the rest, they got him one.

You must know what I'm on about by now.

Rubik's Cube of course.

This bloke Rubik has a lot to answer for and it's quite possible that his diabolical invention will be the final straw that breaks the finely balanced mind of Homo Sapiens and we shall all do a lemming type Hari-Kari and leave the dolphins to take over planet Earth. 

And the epitaph of Man will not be the mushroom shape of nuclear explosion, but the six sided figure of Rubik's Cube. 

This puzzle can be done, of course, and they sell a book of instructions telling you how. What they don't tell you is how to understand it. They naturally assume you have the qualifications to be able to do so. Like a degree in in higher maths or chess movements of the world masters. The trouble with this puzzle is that it is compulsive, like eating peanuts.

You just can't stop once you've started. 

After a while of twisting and turning the sections and getting nowhere, you put it aside, take some aspirins and turn on the telly. Then as you get up to go for a pee you pick it up and have another go in there. Half a dozen more tries and a couple of dozen aspirins later you sling it aside promising yourself that you'll really settle down and solve it later when you've got time. Anyway, there's no point in wasting time doing something that don't achieve anything, is there ?

Better let sonny have a go. After all you bought it for him and it'll improve his mind and his concentration, which is a good thing ain't it? 

You know that you could do it if you really tried. Just that you ain't got the time right now.

So - sonny cops it. Poor little sod.

And sooner or later the result imagined at the top of the page will almost certainly happen, cos little pride and joy hasn't got Dad's ability to  convince himself that he can do something which his inner self knows he bloody well can't. Not in a month of Sundays.

I suppose Rubik can't be wholly blamed for lumbering the world with such a diabolical toy. Kids toys are so advanced these days that there isn't much joy in any of them, and he just jumped on the bandwagon.

Parents are slightly bewildered when Junior mopes around looking bored and saying he don't know what to do. 

Course he's bored. He's surrounded by masses of electronic equipment designed to make him think and to instruct him. No fun at all. 

He don't have to take off his socks when he wants to count over ten. He just presses buttons on his calculator.

He wants toys he can play with, not instructional manuals designed to make him a genius, which is what most of todays toys aim to do. 

We had none of this problem when I was a kid.

We weren't expected to be adult minded, at least not until we could earn some money by doing a paper round when we had to be knowledgeable enough to realise that any income thus come by was to help out with the family income and not to be frittered away on toys But I don't think that the kids of yesteryear were any the worse for that.

We kept ourselves busy with games that were primitive compared with todays and reading material that was designed to be enjoyed, not to instruct.

Most homes could boast a pack of cards which were in continual use in games of Old Maid, Beat your Neighbour, Chase the Ace, Sliding Donkey, Cheat, Rummy, Banker and Pairs. To name just a few.

If you wanted to gamble it was Pontoon or Brag for buttons.

Games that were easy to understand, but what's more important, games that did not leave you with an inferiority complex or uncontrollable frustrations.

If your brother or your mate beat you at Ludo or Draughts you could always punch him on the nose (if he was smaller than you), or accuse him of cheating (again if he was smaller). If he wasn't then you kept your mouth shut and tried to cheat him, but whatever the outcome of any game, kids weren't left with homicidal thoughts towards other peoples property or the first O.A.P. who happened to cross their path.

The trouble is that you just can't cheat most modern toys. Some of them have even got printed circuits which tell you, through an amplifier, when you've boobed at spelling or doing a sum or whatever, and if all a nipper gets when he wants to enjoy playing with his toy is – “ You are wrong. Do it again. " he's quickly going to learn the satisfaction of saying the first word of Colonel Bogey and jumping on his birthday present.

He don't want to be a genius when he's playing or reading, and he'll mature intro a responsible citizen if he reads The Beano in bed instead of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

I suggest that Rubik be entombed in a pyramid of his blasted cubes and be left to figure his way out of that one.

figure his way out of that one. Without aspirins.

You may have gathered that I've been having a go at it and you'd be right.

It nearly sent me round the twist and that's why I'm worried about the effect it may have on nippers. Well I was until the other day,but now I'm not so sure.

My little grandson, aged eight*, came up to me and handed me a cube with all the colours on their correct sides and said " Mess it up Grandad. Get all the colours mixed up"

I thought he'd done the old trick of taking the squares out and putting them back in correct order instead of turning complete sections as you're supposed to do.

So I twisted and turned the sections  until it was completely jumbled and said "Here you are then. Now lets see you do it", getting ready to calm him with sweets when he went berserk with trying.

He did it in just under five minutes right in front of me, and I'll take anyone who don't believe me round to him and let him do it. 

Well, it's understandable really. He don't stuff his bonce with all this electronic facts and figures rubbish and has inherited some of his Grandad's brains by reading the Beano in bed.

I only ever read about Billy Bunter when I was a kid.


Notes:
* Which helpfully dates this piece to 1981.

Special thanks to Paul Rose for the slight cheat on the photo of said grandson.

If games, retro or otherwise, are your thing, check out Paul's work here Digitiser 2000 You Tube and here https://www.digitiser2000.com/

27. The Greenhouse

I beg to report that my greenhouse is still standing and has successfully withstood all the buffetting of the torrential rains with which we have been blessed since March.

Even the automatic opening window in the roof has decided to live up to makers advert and open up when the inside temperature reaches the degree to which it has been set. 

For a while it was obstinate and refused to open at all, but after some persuasion with a hammer and a few choice four letter adjectives, felt that it might as well cooperate and started to open at 40F which would have given any plants therein a touch of frostbite of the stalk. However a few more whacks of the old persuader stopped it being bloody minded and it has since behaved as per guarantee.

While on the subject of things not going right first time of asking, do you suffer likewise? I feel that I can't be peculiar in this respect. It seems that there must be an inbuilt perversity in the scheme of things which states that no ways in anybody going to get a smooth ride by having things go right first time out.

Everybody must suffer from it. Or is it only me?

All you want is a quiet life. Just do the job, get it over with as quick as possible, get your plates up in front of the box and take it easy with a fag and a pint.

How come there's always this hassle with fate even with the simplest of jobs such as bunging a nail in a lump of wood? It never goes in like it should do straight away. Either bends over or splits the wood, which means getting it out again, straightening it and glueing the split before attempting to whack it in again.

Point is, it always goes right the second time of asking, so why no the first time?

I remember once having to replace a faulty rote arm on the motor. Now what can be easier than that? Just remove the distributor head, take off the old arm and put on the replacement. 

Simple. 

So I did just that, but when putting on the new one, dropped it.

You know what? I never did find that bloody rote arm. It wasn't under the car and I searched every nook and cranny I could find on the car. Nowhere. I figure it must have sprouted legs and run like hell on hitting the deck or disguised itself as a nut and dropped off after I got another one on and got the car going.

Now why couldn't it go right first time? No bother. After all can't be me all the time, can it?

Anyway, about this greenhouse I got. 

Apart one one flesh wound and a stiff neck got through working in a cold wind, everything was all systems go, and I thought that at last I'd done something right first time. It was windproof, watertight and as cosy as Uncle Tom's cabin.

Great!

Well, apart from one little item which caused a slight doubt in my mind. It wasn't the knowledge that I'm no gardener, I'm well aware that what I know about gardening could be put in a thimble and still leave plenty of room for my thumb.

Also the title of Little Green Fingers don't apply either, Doctor Death could have picked up a tip or two from my hands when it comes to plant life, I've seen poison ivy struggle to get into next doors garden after starting in to mine when I've come along.

No problems there as my wife was appointed O.I.C. Greenhouse with full vested authority to direct and supervise any labouring that would be required to be done by me. So why the misgiving when everything was covered with a fully comprehensive insurance?

Well. I gather that the main function of a greenhouse is to raise plants, from seeds preferably, in order to save the expense of buying them from a retailer who will charge 45p for each little plant when you can expect to raise perhaps fifty from each packet of seed you've bought for 30p.

Right? OK.

We got all our seed boxes, soil, packets of seed etc and sowed according to instructions, carefully spraying with sun-warmed water at nights. Visions of unlimited supplies of tomatoes, cucumbers, marrows and flowers kept my wife and I nursing those boxes of earth like they were triplets, and we were all set for the good life.

This is where the doubt came in. About me doing something right first time.

After some time we felt the gestation period should now be over and little plants should be thrusting their little bonces through the surface, anxious to grow big and bear fruits, as is their destiny. And what have we got?

Several miniature deserts of earth looking as fruitful as an octogenarian spinster. 

So we decided to do a bit of investigation. Maybe we'd put the seeds in too deeply or upside down. We started with the tomatoes. 

Result of investigation - nowt. Not a seed to be found.

The marrows?  - likewise

We moved to the cucumbers - ditto.

Flowers? No hope. Either vanished completely or as dormant as they were in the packets. 

So we started again. With fresh seed but this time with carefree abandon. Each seed box was blessed with the benediction of the true gardener -

"Right, you got two chances, you sods, live or die and see if we care"

And with the true perversity of nature they all did - live. Each seed booming upwards, elbowing their mates aside in an effort to get more growing space. 

Now why couldn't they have done that in the first time of asking? Beats me.

Anyway, time has progressed, as have the seedlings. They've grown in to plants and have been potted out, hardened off and bedded out to permanent sites, and we felt that at last we'd done a good job with the greenhouse and its functions.

Well, maybe. There's still some doubt, cos this thing about nothing going right first time is continuous, and while we got the greenhouse to perform its function after successful erection, we forgot that there's many phases between the first bite of the fruit from the sowing of the seed. All prone to the rule of the first time failure.

This year, which is known as the Year of the Disabled*, is a misnomer.

All this rain we've had has raised an army and it should now be called the Year of the Slug. 

We've been invaded by millions of the ugly back slimy abortions and are now involved in a battle of extermination armed with salt and pellets to try and save a few of our cherished plants which they're gobbling up like a plague of locusts. 

I've got a feeling I should have a bought a shed.

* which helps us date this piece to 1981.