12 November 2015
Neat and Nimble
By Chin Chin
When Flanders and Swan wrote their famous song about the gasman, they based the lyrics on those of a Victorian ditty in which the singer falls in love with a young woman who, while “dashing away with the smoothing iron,” steals his heart away. In fact she does more than this, because on the morning of each day of the week she undertakes a new task and manages to carry it out while looking “so neat and nimble O” that the heart-stealing becomes more or less inevitable. It is inspiring stuff and hers is plainly an example to be emulated. The trouble is that emulating it is a bit more difficult than you might think.
On Wednesdays her task was starching, and although the reader will be relieved to hear that she carried it out with her accustomed neatness and nimbleness, it is hard to copy her because (stiff collars being a thing of the past) starching is something I never do. Never mind, perhaps I can try to perform some other task to her high standard. Writing this article, for example. Perhaps a little neatness and nimbleness will help reduce the time usually spent in correcting errors.
To start with I shall sit straight in front of the computer. No slouching is permitted and no manky cup of coffee leaving a ring on the desk. Mayor Rudy Giuliani turned round the City of New York by ensuring that the broken windows were repaired, I will take an equally strict approach to my writing desk. Actually, there are no broken windows there but there is an in-tray full of unanswered letters. They can go straight into the rubbish bin. After all, this is a brave new world and I would not want it to be polluted with correspondence from its predecessor. Then all those nasty plastic figures which I bought back from various holidays. They can go too. Also that calendar given me by my mates on my birthday – no, on second thoughts, that one can go in the top drawer. Before long the surface of the desk is every bit as clean as Mayor Giuliani could wish. Now to impose neatness and nimbleness on the screen.
I start typing with great precision and discipline, and to begin with it seems to go extremely well. Many fewer errors than usual and the prose not broken up with the red and blue lines with which computers sneer at errors of spelling or syntax. It’s then that I remember a tip I once heard. A really good typist – the neatest and nimblest sort – doesn’t need to look at the machine. They do it by feel, and if I am to achieve the highest standards I must do it by feel too. I look firmly out of the window as I type.
I’m not quite sure where it went wrong but when I look down I can see that it certainly has. Instead of the words running in lines across the page, the whole thing has been rotated by 90° so that they run from the top to the bottom. Obviously I have inadvertently touched one of those mysterious keys at the top of the keyboard which control the machine. Yes, but how to undo it? I was brought up to believe that “two wrongs don’t make a right” but the keys across the top of the keyboard are a well-known exception to that rule. Often, if you press the key twice, you will end up back where you started – a bit like going the whole way round a roundabout. The trick is to work out which key you pressed in the first place. I have no idea so I begin to strike keys at random.
Whatever you say about that approach, it is certainly not ineffectual. The words get bigger, then smaller, then appear in a series of colours and after a bit some of them disappear off the bottom of the screen and have to be hauled back on by titanic exertions. Then they are translated into Arabic. After a vicious struggle I manage to translate them back, which is as well actually as otherwise GCHQ might mistake them for Islamic propaganda. I fight as Hercules fought against the Hydra and score some famous victories. Still, try as I might and however many buttons I press, I cannot undo the 90° rotation and get the lines back to the horizontal.
Normally in these sort of circumstances I begin to show signs of irritation, a slightly less stiff upper lip and a tendency to damn computers and all involved in their production, a special level of torment being reserved for Microsoft and Bill Gates. Still, that would hardly meet with my new “neat and nimble” approach so I decide to think laterally and to see if that produces a solution. In fact it produces two ideas which at first blush seem rather good… The first is to rest my head horizontally on the desk and to peer at the screen from that position. That brings the lines to the right place and makes them easier to read. Unfortunately, however, it is a difficult position from which to type and constant switching from the horizontal to vertical soon results in an unpleasant form of seasickness. Never mind though, I have the second lateral solution up my sleeve. That is to keep my head in its normal position but to stand the computer on its end so that the lines of print are brought into the horizontal. Again, that is fine for reading but I am using a laptop with the screen attached and it is quite difficult to type when the keyboard is standing on its end.
Then a new idea strikes me. I borrow a couple of mirrors from the dressing table and try to set up a viewfinder. It brings the lines back to the horizontal all right but now the text has become reversed. Perhaps if I looked at it in another mirror… It is at this point that a dreadful thought strikes me. What will happen when I have finished the article and send a PDF to the publisher? Will they mind that the reader would have to rotate it to read it? That will certainly be unusual and will need some sort of explanation. Well, we know that Arabic is read from the right to the left. Are there any religions where they read straight down the page, to which I could say I had been converted? All in all it is a relief when I hear the creak of a door and in walks a teenager. In seconds the screen is back to its normal state and, before long, the article is completed.
It was reflecting on this that made me realise how politically incorrect God is. It is quite outrageous that he has given neat and nimble fingers to women and to men of Asian descent but not, generally speaking, to northern males. That is sexism and racism combined. Arguably he has gone even further and, by allowing the computer to be invented, has disadvantaged those afflicted with clumsy fingers. He certainly would not be invited to give a lecture at one of our more Stalinist universities. More seriously though he has not given me a fair crack at that neatness and nimbleness which the song tells us is the essence of the lovable human being. But does the song really say that, or is its message rather narrower? Let’s have another look. Yes, it is true that the neatness and nimbleness help the young lady to steal the singer’s heart, but then maybe his tastes are not universal and some are attracted by untidiness and scruffiness.
Back out of the rubbish comes the in-tray and the old coffee cups, the tasteless plastic animals I bought on holiday. Up goes the calendar, placed so that it cannot be seen through the window. It looks much more homely now, homely and, dare I say it, rather attractive. Here comes my wife. Let’s see if she agrees.
