Now for something completely different – in praise of the one-string guitar
…for children, that is. It has the great advantage that you don’t have to tune it. Or rather, an adult doesn’t have to tune it, even if they could. The kid, in my case a six year old grandson, quite a long time ago now, can play a simple tune on the one string. Most important of all, they can play-act with the thing.
which is what it is all about, really.
What you need is some sort of reasonably resonant wooden box – I can’t remember what had come in the particular box that gave me the idea all those years ago. It didn’t have a back, but that didn’t seem to matter, although it would have been a simple matter to cut a piece of thin ply to fit and glue it on. Cutting the sound hole must have been more difficult. I suppose I marked the centre and scribed a circle with a pair of compasses and then cut it out with the old fret saw I used to make jigsaws with for his mother and her sister a generation earlier, not to mention for the school fete. Then smooth off with sandpaper of course. Then make the neck out of a two lengths of thinnish batten, glued on with PVA, one to the surface of the box, and the other glued to it and butting up to the body.
The winding mechanism was a bit trickier, because it has to be stiff enough to stop it just unwinding all the time. I solved that by making the diameter that the string wound round a bit smaller than the diameter that went through the blocks on each side, so that the string exerted less twist on the peg. I remember being pleased when that worked.
I haven’t mentioned that he helped me with all this, as he had helped me with a simple sailing boat and a space ship on previous visits. I know lots of other grandpas who have had a wonderful time doing this sort of thing.
And there we had it, the one-string guitar.
A grain or two of truth
W.S.Gilbert put a lot of himself into Jack Point, the tragic jester in The Yeomen of the Guard – the nearest thing to serious opera he and Sir Arthur Sullivan wrote in their long partnership.
I was lucky enough to play Jack Point myself, one of a number of roles I had over the years with Alton Operatic & Dramatic Society our small town’s own company – AODS for short.
Naturally, people see Gilbert first and foremost as a jester – his wit and brilliance with rhyme and meter have rarely if ever been equalled.
But I remember being aware as I played Jack Point that there was another side to Gilbert, that he also wanted to say serious things about human nature, about society, about scandals in high places. Which is exactly what he is saying as he describes the power of the jester’s role in “I’ve jibe and joke…” the great song that I – a recently retired doctor in the town, no less – had the joy of singing:
‘Winnow all my folly, folly, folly and you’ll find
a grain or two of truth among the chaff‘
A grain or two of truth. Gilbert’s librettos were full of truths, surely one of the reasons why so many amateur companies did little but ‘G&S’ – and in some cases nothing but G&S – for generations.
Read more…Grandmother’s clock
The old hall clock struck four at twenty minutes to six this morning. And then five at six. It’s almost like a code – but, as my wife points out, without that element of consistency which codes require to make them really useful.I mention this because, endearingly, the old thing behaved itself perfectly all through this Christmas. I had finally given up on it a couple of years ago (when it struck something like twenty five at something like seventeen minutes past three) and since then it had stood, a beloved but silent sentinel, in the hall of our home. But this year, when I was putting the seasonal holly and tinsel in its hair, I suddenly had a whim to give it another try.
I hauled the weight up on its chain and circled the ancient hands to set the time, and as I did so I noticed with surprise that the correct number rang out as they passed each hour. So I gave the pendulum its little push and tiptoed away, pleased that I had restored, if only for a short time, the house’s ticking heart. But, as I’ve just said, it then surprised us by keeping time and striking the hours correctly right through the new year, asking only to be wound each night on my way upstairs to bed.
The way this happened was really quite weird, because now the festive season is over and we have hit 2017, it immediately reverted to being just as erratic as ever.
Generally Speaking 