Fiction

Needed a day away from non-fiction, so I reread a very good Thomas Perry novel, Vanishing Act, which I'd picked up at a library sale. A good read. Decent fiction is a complete transport for me, so is non-fiction, for that matter, but when I'm rereading non-fiction I get up and walk around more, thinking about things. Perry is a good writer and I read the book straight through, setting out a tray of grazing bits at the island, cheese, sausage, several pickles, crackers and different olives. The whole experience, starting with coffee, moving on to juice mixed with tonic water, then to whiskey, when the sun was finally over the yardarm, was very pleasant, calming. I'm pretty calm, as a rule. I'd rather not argue, though it is true that my father and I argued all the time. Not in an ugly way, or loud, just disagreement (usually) about small points: the best way to tie a knot in monofilament, the best spice mixture to rub a brisket, that the greatest play in baseball was Mays throw-out, at home plate, from deep center-field. He threw the ball, from over 300 feet, and nailed the runner. Later, we argued politics, and it always bothered my mother, who thought we might come to blows. I made use of this, in debate, which is what led to theater. Debate is like dressage, it has no point. Dressage is a ballet of moves that might once have been important in battle; and debate is an offensive weapon. I love these miniature barrel drinking mugs, stoups, and they're made with straight staves so they're (relatively) easy to make. I made one today, no great shakes, but a wooden container that would hold water, I secured the bottom and staves in place with a muffler clamp. Muffler clamps are great for this, because you can loosen, to let in the head. Sobriety was not one of the coopers virtues. Repairing casks was a endless task and Guiness, who might have several hundred thousand casks in rotation, required a shop of thirty coopers just for repair. A barrel might last for fifty years, but by the end of that time neither a hoop nor a stave might be original. It would still be the same barrel, we could argue, because the head pieces, the ends, which took no wear, were branded with the name of the brewery and a number. Usually the stave with the bung hole was the first to fail, end-grain being a conduit for decay, and eventually they used screw-in brass or bronze inserts. Still, wood fails; and even iron fails because the great thing about barrels was you could roll them, single wheeled vehicles. I have tons of questions, the herring industry, for instance, at Bristol. How did they stack those barrels? I can't tell, exactly, but 35 to 55 gallon barrels packed full of fish and brine, and they're stacked four or five high, waiting to be shipped to the mainland. I spend a fair amount of time trying to do the math on this. I can't find the specific gravity of pickled herring. A hole in my data base, so I make a guess. For reasons I don't remember I assigned pickled herring a number, 1.5, which I'm sure is giving them the benefit of the doubt, so a 55 gallon barrel, a gallon would weigh six pounds, so a 55 gallon unit would weigh 330 pounds. And why do those pyramids of barrels hold that shape? Outward force and downward force. I always think of it as dead weight. Tomorrow might be August 10th, it could be August 9th or elventeth, jesus, is that even a word. Four stout Irish guys could swing a barrel down to four other Irish guys that could load it onto a cutter and you could smuggle that across. Early on wooden wheels developed, then small iron wheels that didn't work very well, then metal hoops on wooden wheels that lasted a long time. A spoke is like a stave.