We shall soon be arriving at Somewhere Very Dull

No, not Brexit. No chance. Bus announcements, and three observations based on recent travels.

1) Recorded audible announcements, while helpful to the minority, are an intrusion for the majority. Especially if the announcer sounds stroppy, officious, has a weird accent, or thinks that railway stations are called train stations. The technology may be available, but does not necessarily have to be used. If so, why can’t it be focused directly – narrowcasted - to those equipped with properly tuned gadgets? A broadcast to everyone isn’t generally necessary, unless something very unusual (a diversion) or potentially calamitous (an approaching Duke of Edinburgh) is about to occur.

2) If we must have announcements on buses, they should be useful and meaningful. Something like “next stop, town centre”, or “the High Street”, or “the market”. If you are in a rural area and are coming into a small and unfailingly delightful village, you want to hear “Groping Sideways” or “Farting Slightly”, or whatever its name. You don’t want to hear “Boggins Farm” or “Arthur Daley Mansions” or the name of some small thoroughfare of poxy little townhouses that went up last week, “Stoat Droppings View” or whatever, that nobody has ever heard of. Neither do you want to be told what the next stop is, just yet, if it’s four miles away. Nor, if you’re travelling for miles and miles along a very long road, say Watling Street, do you want to be told that “the next stop will be Watling Street”.

3) Again, if we must have these announcements, we don’t want too much of an anticipatory build-up. Not too much preamble and poetry. We don’t need to be teased that “we shall very shortly be arriving in the vicinity of Chlamydia Avenue. Alight here for the Dorothy Clutterice Academy”, or made to get all worked up because “in a moment or two we will be pulling into Salmonella Gardens. Unless it’s Wednesday you can get off here for the Smegma Research Institute”. Least of all do we need a breathless declaration that “we are now commencing our final approach to Horatio Bagwash Crescent”.

If you’re a regular, you’ll know already. If, like me, you’re an old geezer with a bus pass, you won’t be able to stand the excitement – especially as you know very well there’s absolutely no chance that “we are now stopping right outside A&E”.

An Appreciation of Paddy Apling

I was saddened to learn recently of the death of Edward Chatterton “Paddy” Apling on 4th October last year, at the age of 93. From various references on the web it appears that there was much about this man of which I was personally unaware, and so I can only write from my own experience. I never knew him as “Paddy”, only as “Mr Apling”, or by his initials, which I shall use here.

I first met ECA during Fresher’s Week at the University of Reading in October 1968. I had arrived to do a preliminary year prior to a 3 year course in Food Science, and I had been assigned ECA as my tutor, someone who would keep an eye on my progress, someone to whom I could turn if in need of support or advice. Along with another nervous new student I went along to see him, on the London Road “main site” of the university. We’d read all the bumpf about what was expected of us, and presented ourselves in academic gowns. I remember nothing of the meeting except that ECA was affable and pipe-smoking, seemed as nervous as I was, didn’t know what to say, bit his nails, and that as we were leaving he remarked “by the way, I never want to see you wearing those bloody ridiculous garments again”.

Clearly, he didn’t tolerate fools, and could be moody. Around the start of 1970 he began to grow a beard, which eventually settled down into a bright white, but was the subject of some disrespect for a while, as it was going through a badger-like phase of contrasting colours, his head hair being jet black. In one early Food Science lecture someone asked a question which revealed a profound lack of understanding of some particular point and resulted in ECA delivering the rest of the lecture at a painfully slow speed. Obviously he thought he was talking to a bunch of morons. On one occasion around this time he lectured with his flies undone, and on another, admitted that he had forgotten his notes, and talked to us instead about his childhood in Dagenham. On yet another occasion – a double lecture – he said that he “really couldn’t be buggered” and cancelled it. A man with his own agenda, who sensed what was really important, and what didn’t matter all that much.

Although he could and did lecture on most aspects of food science, ECA’s speciality was cereals, and the science and technology of baking and brewing (I think his father had worked as a drayman for Truman’s brewery in Whitechapel). Under his leadership we learned to bake some extremely tasty bread (which by the next day was as hard as concrete), and found out all about the Chorleywood breadmaking process, and the arcane specialisation known as dough rheology, featuring the much derided Brabender apparatus.

 In 1972

ECA, for all his irritability and dislike of pompous authority, was a kind man, and I recall being embarrassed when he made a fuss of me one day when I was going down with flu and feeling terrible, insisting that I went home and had a good sleep. I met him once, not long after graduation, at his home in Sonning Common, when he was in a bad mood because he was jet lagged after a trip to Canada. Thereafter we kept in touch, however, and he was helpful with references for job applications, and then after he retired to rural Norfolk we continued to exchange Christmas cards.

 
I assumed I wouldn’t see him again, and so it was with considerable astonishment that one day in 2008 I received a phone call from him, saying that he was touring the country, dropping in on old friends and colleagues, and that he would like to come and see me. Sure enough, the next day, he turned up in his large camper van, and we enjoyed a pleasant lunch and a natter. We had a good laugh about some of those fondly remembered old times – and people - in Reading. A complex, private, multi-talented man, who I was privileged to know and to count as a friend.

 

In 2008