June 10, 2017

Yesterday. 12.15 am:

3.08 am:

4.00 am: There was in inexorable drift towards a muddle. I went to bed.

8.30 am: Radio on. As I’d anticipated. But the end is not yet. The negotiations will rumble on (rather violently) for some time. These are unprecedented times. Times of change. And change for good, at least in principle. Good to see young people voting in numbers. Good to see that mature people can get it wrong. (Always a salutary lesson.) We may not all wish to be party-political, but we’re all political — all members of the polis (the community) and responsible for its affairs.

9.30 am: Off to School to clarify postgraduate admin. 10.00 am: I can’t turn off the news. My laptop will be tuned into BBC News Live all day, I suspect. To work …

I began by installing dehuming junction boxes between the two turntables and the mixer. Problems resolved. On, then, to the Stylophone in order to insert the new potentiometer and begin putting the device back together again:

Today. 9.45 am: On with the Stylophone assembly:

Tricky. The plastic grill on the device is soft and, as such, unable to support switches and other controls on its surface securely. A large metal washer and a file were required:

This was going to be a slow, problematic, and irritating process, without guarantee of success, requiring brute force and, sometimes, crude but effective solutions.  I acquired skills and dispositions like these from my father. He neither instructed me in nor demonstrated any practice. Rather, he allowed me to watch his hands as they turned the tools and manipulated the materials, and work out how it was done for myself. Thus I learned from him and taught myself simultaneously. This is my ideal for education. (Today, I used some of his tools to do the job.) My school was his workshop (‘the shed’). It was, literally, filled to the rafters with lengths of wood and board; containers of paint, varnish, solvents, and lubricants; brushes, bottles, and seed trays; saws, files, hammers, and electric drills; coils of wire and off-cuts of string and tine; Sun Valley Finest Quality Light Tobacco tins full of assorted nails and screws; broken things that would never get fixed, and nondescript bits and bobs. This was a wondrous place:

6.20 pm: Time out! 7.30 pm: An evening with my family.

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