intricate things

17Nov07

In my last year at high school (secondary school, we called in in Scotland), when I was 18, I still had no idea what I wanted to do, what work to do to support myself through this harsh and cruel world.

The nearest I came to thinking seriously about a trade or profession was on my visits to a friend who lived near us – Alex Howie – at this home – I loved the telescope the family had. I was allowed to take it to bits and reassemble it and did so time and time again. I used to love the clear lenses, the fine threads, the exactness of the whole thing and how it come together to be such a wondrous thing, letting you pull in details from the far scene – what the lasses were getting up to coming down the road – NO!! – I jest. It was a real fascination to me, every little bit of it but especially the tubes and threaded ends, and the lovely clear bits of glass. Many is the time I had that thing to bits, marvelled at it and put it back together again. Mrs Howie suggested I get involved in such stuff as a career. I wondered about that but had as little idea if that was what I wanted to do as I had at wooing girl-friends.

This is all a bit weird, as I have big hands – the size of some of the smaller States in the USA, I believe – Delaware (1,954 square miles) or Rhode Island (1,545 square miles) for example, although which would be the right hand and which the left beats me.

Here is my hand, handily (!) accompanied with a tape to give you an idea of the size.

So everyone would laugh these days at my story of the ’scope – and it is certainly true that I am (at least now) maladroit at fixin‘ stuff. But I avow and assert (and I’ll swear if you want me to) that this clumsiness is a result of impatience, not any falling off of nimble-fingeredness. Can’t be doing with all that fiddling now that I am a grumpy old man.

I still love fiddling with optical stiff – cameras especially, I have some old ones, the film kind, 20 years old and more where you fiddle with knobs and buttons and focus – focus! – back to the telescope, yay! – and everything is manual. The joy is in the process. My wife likes to ask me if the landscape has stopped moving yet (not the same as “did the earth move for you?”), as I compose the shot and look at aperture, speed etc.

So all that is a brief background to why I became a civil engineer. Ha ha. To be continued…..

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