March-June 1974, my gap year part 6

This period was the longest part of our programme, and in a sense, the most boring: we worked every day with few external activities. As the primary idea behind the programme was to prepare for living on a kibbutz, it seemed only natural that we would live - as much as possible - as ordinary members of the kibbutz, and this meant working every day.

As far as I am concerned - certainly with the advantage of forty years' hindsight - one of the most important events of this period happened right at the beginning. It might have happened during the break which might have been between the Jerusalem and Haifa seminars, otherwise it happened when we returned to the kibbutz. One day after lunch, I was in the communal laundry picking up clothes, when I saw the adopted mother of one of my room mates (her husband was the hatchery manager). I have no idea what prompted me to say to her "We can't go on meeting like this", but I am eternally thankful. This lady was (and still is) only fifteen years older than me; at the time, it seemed like a huge gap, but the point is that she was somewhat younger than other "kibbutz mothers", or my own mother. As a result, we had many things in common, which we were to discover over the next five months or the next forty years.

I know that she is reading these lines so in a sense I have to be careful about what I write. Somehow, I recognised that she was a kindred spirit; not only that, she recognised the same in me. So slowly we became friends, talking about music and books. There were a few years in which our friendship (always platonic!!!) became intense and of course there were years when we were barely in contact. But at the moment I am writing about then: we didn't know what was to be, and of course we had to maintain a certain propriety; as a result, I used to go there for tea maybe once or twice a week (and probably not on the same days that my room mate went).

With the constant work days, I became proficient at work and hopefully made a contribution to the hatchery. I know that I helped train a few Israeli youngsters (they were actually older than me) who spent some of their army service on the kibbutz. What I got out of this period was the knowledge that I could work very well, given the chance and the right circumstances. Probably around this time I discovered that I couldn't work outside: I remember a few days spent on another kibbutz and feeling physically sick whenever I stepped into the sunshine but feeling fine when I was in the shade.

There used to be Israeli dancing sessions once a week; we had attended a few before the war started and in between, the wife of the kibbutz member responsible for the group would teach some of the dances to those interested (such as myself). Presumably, the sessions were suspended during the immediate war period but they must have started soon afterwards. At the beginning, the dining room used to be full of people (some would come from a neighbouring moshav), but in the post-war period, fewer people came. I remember one sparsely attended evening; in the middle arrived a (male) member who used to dance very well - in uniform. He took off his boots and joined in the dancing. Later on in the year, the attendance returned to its original level; those from my group who attended were now much more confident and even joined 'the inner circles'.

Towards the end of the year, we began planning the end of year show. As opposed to the show which we held at the end of November, I was much more involved this time. With Erica, I worked up a short 'set' of three songs: one of mine ("our affair"), one by Fleetwood Mac ("man of the world") and one by Kaveret ("the grocery store"). Erica did most of the singing, but I sang a fair amount as well. I did most of the 'twiddly bits" on guitar, but we swapped roles during the songs, so at one point I would be playing rhythm guitar, then playing a solo, whereas at times she would be fingerpicking under my solo then playing lead over my rhythm. I would like to think that we played well. At some stage in the near future, I will listen to the recordings that we made: some off-stage, playing around, and some in our final performance.

The opening number of the evening was "Welcome" from "Cabaret". We recorded the music and singing in advance; my co-musician from "America" played piano, Simon "sang" and I played bass guitar. Somehow I managed to work the tune "Wandering star" (we had recently seen the film with Lee Marvin crooning the song) into the arrangement.

With one of my room mates and another friend, I wrote the traditional Habonim calypso: this was usually satirical lyrics set to an existing tune and sung at the end of a camp, where the lyrics dealt with various incidents which had occurred over the duration of the camp. To be honest, I don't remember what the lyrics were about this year, but I do have a recording, should I wish to be reminded. What I do remember is that we were writing the lyrics (in Hebrew!) in the kibbutz dining room (we wouldn't be disturbed there and the lyrics would be a surprise); at some stage, we became aware that there were a lot of people around, carrying walkie-talkies and guns. It was the evening of the Ma'alot massacre, which was taking place less than 20km from where we were. This dates the evening to May 15, 1974. We were advised to go to our rooms as quickly as possible.

We had several discussions on the subject of the show's finale: I was all for singing the Kaveret song "Nichmad" (nice), whose lyrics seemed to be more than suitable (they were also in Hebrew and well known), but for some reason, the Fairport Convention "hit", "Si tu dois partir", was chosen. Theoretically I should have been for this (after all, I was a heavy Fairport fan), but I tried to argue that the lyrics are in bad French which no one would understand, and anyway they were hardly suitable for the occasion. Overruled,  we asked someone to write down the words (we couldn't understand the bad French and Sandy Denny's diction wasn't always too clear) and I decided to play concertina for this song. Fortunately the song only had a few chords which I could manage successfully on the concertina (echoing Richard Thompson's accordion in the original). Everyone sang (or mimed) and two others played guitar along with me. We took it turns to come to the front of the stage and bow; if one listens to the recording, one can hear a place when the guitars drop out and only the concertina can be heard. This is when the musicians were bowing.

We stayed for a few more days after the show, working on and off, and saying goodbye to all the friends we had met. At the time, I was treasurer of the group; I spent some time with the kibbutz accountants, trying to make a reckoning of how much we should be paid. I imagine that we would have been perfectly content to have spent the year there for nothing, with our work paying for our activities, but the kibbutz was actually prepared to give us money over and above. Every day I posted a figure - which seemed to increase every day - of how much each person would receive at the end of the year. People were leaving early and we weren't spending much, so we had more money to divide between fewer people.

December 1973-February 1974: my gap year, part 5

In mid-December 1973, cold and rainy, we moved to Jerusalem, to the seminar centre in the southern part of the city where I had spent some very happy days in the summer of 1972. Unfortunately, the tone of the 1973 days was far removed from that of the previous year.

I wrote in the first part of this series that the group was heterogenous: this became most apparent during the Jerusalem stage when vicious arguments broke out all the time. Don't ask me now what they were about - probably nothing. I know that I was discontented because of our living arrangements. 

As opposed to the ten rooms which we had on the kibbutz, I think that we had five or six larger rooms, with obviously more people sharing a room. There must have been some wheeling and dealing before we moved to Jerusalem, because when we got there, I discovered that the 'compatible people' had already filled their room and I was to sleep with the 'incompatibles' or 'unwanteds'. 

I don't remember whether we continued our Hebrew studies but we certainly learnt about Jewish and Israeli history, both ancient and modern. Of course, the war cast a certain shadow over the studies. We came into contact with other similar groups, and I learnt some very interesting Israeli songs.

Forty years later, I remember virtually nothing of this time. I don't know whether this is because I blanked the memories of what happened or whether this is due to the natural process of forgetting things, especially if they don't ever get remembered. I do remember that at some stage we moved to Haifa for a week, although I don't remember whether this was directly after Jerusalem or after spending a week or two on the kibbutz.

Haifa was more lectures, mainly about contemporary politics - Haifa was definitely the appropriate location for this. Again, living conditions are the only thing which I remember: the rooms were for two people each, and my two room-mates decided that they would prefer to be with each other than with me. As a result, I found myself sharing with a girl who also was without a partner. Normally I would have been very excited at this situation, but unfortunately my relationship with this girl at the time was very poor: in my eyes, she was guilty of the crime of selfishness (God knows what I was like then) and we were barely talking. We laid down some ground rules at the beginning of the week then spent the following days as strangers in the same room, barely acknowledging the existence of the other.

At this stage, two new girls joined our group. Instead of spending the first few months on the kibbutz, they had gone directly to the seminar centre in an alternate programme. One girl was new to me (and I think to almost everybody) but the second was someone who I had known for a few years. We had played guitar and sung together so we became a musical duo. We may not have connected on a personal level, but the joint interest in music certainly made the sometimes hard days easier to bear. So hello, Erica and Abigail.

Late November/December 1973: my gap year, part 4

Before the programme started, we were told that the year would roughly be broken into three parts:

1. Introduction and learning Hebrew (3 months) - Bet Ha'emek
2. Seminars (2 months) - Jerusalem, Haifa
3. Work period (5 months) - Bet Ha'emek

By the end of November 1973, we were approaching the end of the first period. Despite the chilly national mood, we decided to put on a show for the kibbutz, to show our thanks for their hospitality over the past few months and possibly even to bring a smile to some faces.

I don't remember having very much to do with this show. Along with one other person, I worked up an arrangement of Simon and Garfunkel's song America; I had never heard the original and learnt the song from my co-performer. After the rest of the group heard our arrangement, it was decided that a few others would appear with us, bolstering the singing (I wasn't singing at all).

Presumably the evening went down well. The following night, I was having tea with the adopted family of one of my room mates; the conversation was mainly a post mortem about the show. After a while, my room mate left, but for some reason, I stayed. The father of this family was the manager of the hatchery, and presumably I wanted to take this opportunity to discover why I wasn't being allowed to work there.

The answer was that, unlike picking oranges or collecting eggs, working in the hatchery required a certain amount of training, and at the time, they didn't have the work power to allow this (the 'work boss' had been conscripted into the reserve army and wouldn't return for another few months). I asked how we could get around this, and it was suggested that I turn up for work every day: on the days when I had Hebrew studies, I would work for two hours before breakfast then continue to learn Hebrew. On my work days, I would work however long was needed, and not let off early because I was part of the group. I agreed to these terms.

That same evening, our work organiser was extremely surprised - and possibly happy for me - when he told me that I was working in the hatchery the next day. This arrangement lasted for about two weeks, which was the time left to us before we went to Jerusalem. In those two weeks, I learnt a certain amount about how the hatchery worked and about the life cycle of chicken embryos. I probably spent no small amount of time making cardboard boxes in which the newly hatched chicks would be placed, but I also got to take part in the other main activities.

The gestation period of a chicken is three weeks and the hatchery worked on a three day cycle: one day would be "incoming", one day would be "transferring" and one day would be "outgoing". So even after two weeks, I was able to go through a few cycles. The eggs would arrive on day one, they would be cleaned, placed on trays then stored in an incubator. After a certain number of days (I don't remember everything!), we would take those trays out of the incubator and invert the eggs.

On day 21, the chicks would begin hatching; we would take the trays out of the incubator and place them in front of selectors, who were able to determine the sex of newly hatched chicks. All the chicks were placed in front of the selectors; the males ended up on one side of the selectors with the females on the other side. Chicken runs growing chickens for meat would keep the chicks segregated, so it was important to determine the sex. 

Such hatching days would be very long; after all the chicks had been sorted, we had to clean the rooms thoroughly to ensure that there would be no chance of contamination between different batches of chicks. On hatching days, we would start work at 4am and finish whenever, whereas other days would start at 6am and normally finish at 3pm. Some times, the hatching day would include some of the following day's activities, meaning that there could be one long day followed by a short day. In 1975, there was a day when I worked 14 hours (I came back to my room and fell asleep fully clothed) but the following day, I worked only three hours.

I remember that one day in this period, we walked to the neighbouring Arab village of Abu Snan to meet with one of the village elders. As I had already been up and working for a few hours, I actually dozed off during this meeting.

In the second week of December 1973, we finished the first stage of our year and prepared to move to Jerusalem. At this stage, we said goodbye to one of our members: a girl a year older than me. For reasons which weren't stated clearly at the time - "incompatibility" was the general explanation, I think - she had decided (or maybe it had been decided for her) to return to Britain. I think that I was one of the few that missed her, as we had been quite friendly and often spent time together. I think that we had met for the first time in the summer of 1970, when I attended the 'wrong' summer camp; we met every now and then (I even spent a few days at her house at some stage) and then we spent three months together in 1973, as friends. Such is the way of the world - especially the Habonim world - that once someone left, they were never seen again. So forty years late, goodbye Lesley.

Late September/Early October, 1973 - My gap year, part 3

I don't remember a thing about the New Year celebrations on Kibbutz Bet Ha'emek, late September 1973. On the other hand, I do remember the celebrations held there two years later, and I will assume that, with minor corrections, the same things happened in 1973.

This would mean that the entire kibbutz had a celebratory dinner on the lawn outside the dining room, everyone sitting at long trestle tables. Before the meal, there would have been a short ceremony with a few songs played by kibbutz musicians, along with a few readings. As the New Year is the only festival celebrated in Israel over two nights, the whole thing would have been repeated the following night, although without the ceremony. 

[For those that don't know, outside of Israel, every festival is celebrated for two nights - this is because "in the old days", people in the Diaspora couldn't know when the actual celebrations were taking place in Israel, so this way they were making sure that there would be at least some overlap.]

For me, there were a few differences between 1973 and 1975: in 1975, I was one of those 'kibbutz musicians' playing the songs in the opening ceremony on the first night. For the second night, I fried seven hundred pieces of chicken shnitzel: it didn't bother me to work on a holiday, seeing that I was only on the kibbutz for a short time, and anyway, I still would have one day off.

A week and a half later, it was Yom Kippur. In 1973, this fell on a Friday night (many years later, I was to research the Hebrew calendar and discovered that Yom Kippur can only fall on certain days of the week; the length of the year has to be adjusted by inserting days to ensure this). It was October 6, the birthday of one of our group. After a few years of not fasting, I had decided that year to return to the habit of observing the fast, although this didn't preclude me from doing other things, like listening to music.

At around 2pm, I and a few others were in our clubhouse, listening to records played on the sole record player available to us. One of my room-mates shared my love of Van der Graaf Generator, so 'Pawn Hears' was on the turntable. As anyone who knows the record will be aware, the final sections of the second side are somewhat extreme - so extreme that we didn't realise for a moment that the noise we were hearing was not a combination of Hugh Banton and David Jackson, but rather air raid sirens. The Yom Kippur war had started.

Like almost everything else at the time,  we understood little of what was happening. Everyone gathered outside the dining room for the meal which concludes the fast, but already male kibbutz members were beginning to be a rare species.

We awoke the next morning to new circumstances: we would spend the next few weeks picking oranges in the rain, supervised by our contemporaries: the kibbutz youth who were in their final year of school. After a few weeks, we returned to our previous setup of learning Hebrew one day and working the next day, but of course, everything had changed.

I don't want to make light of one of the most important events of modern Israeli history, but although I was there, I wasn't really there. We didn't know - at least, not at the time - what was happening at either front. I assumed that if anything really bad would happen, we would be airlifted out, but that assumption was never put to the test. At that time, I had yet to form any connection with people who were drafted into the army, and later on, those who returned weren't exactly enthusiastic to tell about their experiences. The English language newspaper didn't contain very detailed information (presumably due to censorship) and we didn't understand the little that was printed. On the Saturday after the war started, we were woken at about 6am by the air raid siren so we stumbled off to the nearest shelter. Eventually we were told that a plane had been seen over the skies of Haifa but that we were not in any danger.

The immediate result of the war was that our entire programme changed overnight. People often weren't available to carry out activities which had been planned, resources country wide were reduced, areas of the country were out of bounds (our trip to the Sinai peninsula was greatly affected) and our youthful exuberance was at odds with the general demeanour of the country. For example, in November, we wanted to hold a fireworks party; when we finally managed to find someone who sold fireworks, he refused to sell us any, saying that the country wasn't ready for such a party.

So we had a completely different experience to the group that preceded us. I don't know which year 'had it better': they probably had an easier time, but we saw things that they didn't.

A new member joined our group: one of the "Birmingham Simons" had stayed on at school for a third year in the sixth form, presumably to study for the Oxbridge entrance exams, but once the war had started, he left his (optional) studies behind and came to join us. This was not the Simon with which I had spent some of the summer of 1971, but rather "the other Simon". As it happens, we were to spend the next few years together (I certainly do not imply any gay relationship) and became good friends on certain levels (but not on personal matters). When I wrote a few months ago about academic failures, I wrote that there were a few reasons why I didn't repeat my final year at school. If moving from Bristol to Cardiff were one very good reason, this war was an even better reason.

After bringing the orange harvest, I don't remember anything until the end of November. I don't remember where I worked: I think that I put in a few pointless days in the kibbutz maintenance stores but apart from that, nothing springs to mind. I didn't work in the hatcheries nor in the chicken runs, which means that I must have been employed in some form of agriculture - but I don't remember (obviously, the work made a deep impression on me). Things, though, were to change....

Welcome to the Beehive - My gap year, part 2

As this evening we will be celebrating the Jewish New Year, it seems only fitting to wish all my readers a happy and healthy New Year!!

Going back 40 years: we lived in two rows of huts, where each row had five rooms. Boys were two or three to a room, girls two. Conditions were what might be termed spartan, but somehow it didn't seem to bother us too much. The communal showers unfortunately weren't close to our huts, which would be problematic later on in the winter.

One day in the 'early' period,  I was walking between the two rows when an effervescent guitar riff (as I was later to term it) caught my ear. When I asked what I was hearing, I was given a cassette copy of the 'Poogy Tales' album by the Israeli group Kaveret ('Beehive' in English). I was very impressed by the sound, even though the whole cassette seemed to be one continuous song. Later on, of course, the songs separated into individual units and it became clear which songs were excellent and which were merely very good.

This music was to accompany me for the entire year: at the end of year party, I was to perform one of the songs in front of the entire kibbutz.

The record started with a short introduction which basically was the words 'one can learn from Poogy Tales'. What exactly one could learn was never specified; presumably everyone would learn their own lesson. What I learnt from those songs was the Hebrew language; obviously it took a lot of work, but like a long lost mosaic, bits and pieces of those lyrics were slowly deciphered, assimilated and understood. As it happens, I was listening to this record again the other day and was explaining one of the puns to my wife.

But - initially, at least - the words were not the attraction for me. Even today, whilst I appreciate lyrics to songs, I'm really listening and reacting to the music. There was something very special about the first Kaveret album, something which had yet to be heard in Israeli music. Their sound was built on contrasts or pairs: there was a pair of lead vocalists (one high, one low), there were two lead guitarists (both very good), and there was a keyboardist who could take things in his own direction away from the others. The arrangements were exciting and at times, unexpected, combining disparate elements to forge a unique sound.

Almost all the songs (words and music) for the first album were written by one person, guitarist Danny Sanderson. Their second album also was mainly written by Sanderson, not surprising as it was based on leftovers from the first album. But their third - and final - album featured a wide spread of writing credits and musical styles. This was the beginning of the end: there was a vast explosion of talent which the group structure could not contain and so the best Israeli group ever called it day after only three or four years of activity.

Every ten years or so, they would get together for a reunion, which would mean a few open air concerts and possibly a live album - but always the same songs (this sounds remarkably like Fairport Convention in the 80s). This year (2013), they reunited for what they call the final time; there were five concerts, each attended by 20-30,000 people. Commentators performed cost analyses and reckoned that each member of the group (and they are seven) walked away with anything between one to two million shekels. Not bad for a few weeks' work. This probably was final compensation for the early years.

Unsurprisingly, a box collection has just been released. My initial thought that the box would contain the original albums and one or two reunion concerts, but it transpires that this box set has been two years in the making and almost all of it is unheard material. There are six cds and two dvds; bar one dvd, all the material is from 1971-6. As one might infer, I am listening to one of the discs now.

The first disc contains three rock operas, recorded before the group had only five members; the second disc contains their comedy skits (of which there were a lot). The third and fourth discs document a live performance held in Jerusalem some time in 1974 (I can't find the actual date), which means that this would be very similar to the performance which I saw in May 1974. The fifth is a live in the studio run though the songs on their third album and the sixth is a collection of alternate versions and oddities, like English language versions of a few well known songs, and a few English-only songs which were written at the end of their career and trying to get a recording contract in America.

The first dvd is a television concert performance from 1975 (black and white!) whereas the second is from their first reunion in 1981. The box set is packaged very well and is completed by a one hundred page booklet which contains a large amount of information as well as the texts to some of the skits.

This monster package has a price list of 329 NIS (about $90): expensive, but value for money. I was prepared to pay this amount, but as it happens .... I received as a New Year present, the third book by Dan Arieli which has just been published in its Hebrew translation. As I purchased the book - in its Kindle edition - a year ago, I was able to return the book to the shop from which it was purchased and obtain a credit towards the box set. In the shop, I was told that normally one couldn't credit a returned book towards a cd, but that they would make an exception in this case (maybe because it was a box set? maybe as a gesture towards the New Year?). So strike 96 NIS from the price. The sales girl told me that I would have to pay 153 NIS. As I signed the credit card slip, something about the arithmetic gnawed at me: it turns out that there was an extra 80 NIS credit which they had given, presumably to reduce the expensive 329 NIS price tag down to a more reasonable 249 NIS.

In the past few days, I had been intending to write about New Year in Israel, 1973, but I seem to have been somewhat sidetracked. I'll continue this subject tomorrow.

It was 40 years ago today - My gap year, part 1

4 September 1973 marked the beginning of the most important year of my life. It was the year in which I changed from a youth into a man and the year in which I learnt the meaning of the word 'responsibility'. These days, such a year would be called a gap year, but this term had yet to be invented in 1973.

-- some historical background

Until a few years beforehand, the Zionist youth movement 'Habonim' maintained a farm in Sussex which served as a training establishment for young men and women before they emigrated from Britain to Israel. This farm was supposed to give them experience before they settled in the primarily agricultural kibbutzim of the 1960s. I was too young to know much about this farm, but I did spend a week there in the winter of 1966 (aged 10). The farm was probably closed down at the end of the 60s because of financial reasons, but there were other changes happening. The number of senior Habonim members who were students had increased - so there were far fewer older members who could go and work on a farm - and air fares from Britain to Israel had become affordable, meaning that one could go to Israel and experience 'the real thing'.

A programme was started in 1970 called 'Shnat Hachshara' (a year of preparation), in which school leavers could spend a year on kibbutz, preparing for eventual emigration. Although most of the year was dedicated to working, time was also spent learning the Hebrew language and learning about Israel.

I was in the fourth group to participate in this programme. As this was still fairly new, there were all kinds of people around who were free to participate, not necessarily only those who had just left school. So my course was very heterogenous, whereas in following years, the groups were much more homogenous. In my group, there were three barely seventeen year olds (myself and two Scottish youths - in those days, Scottish youth finished school a year earlier than their English brethren), there were eighteen year olds who had finished school, and there were several older youths who had left school much earlier and had been working at various jobs, marking time. This heterogenity would be a problem throughout the year.

I wrote earlier this summer about finishing school with underwhelming results. Had I been anyone else, it would have been a good idea to stay another year at school (or a sixth form college), but I was dead set on participating in this programme and nothing could change my mind.

We were supposed to travel on 3 September - a historical date in itself - but there were problems with the aircraft, and after a few delays, we spent the night in an airport hotel (at the airline's cost) and eventually left 24 hours later than intended.

My group - as the three previous groups - would spend the year in Kibbutz Bet Ha'emek, near Nahariyya, in the north western part of Israel, a very tranquil area. This kibbutz had been founded by a group of British Habonim members in 1948/9 although over the years it had taken in members from many countries. Thus while Hebrew was the official language, most people there could speak English as well as other languages (French and Dutch spring to mind). The original settlers had children about the same age as my group, which aided our integration.

In those days, the ability to work well was considered to be the most important facet of a kibbutz member, so I had devoted some time to thinking about where I would like to work. I had some discussions on the subject with a good friend of mine who had been in the third group: working in the fields didn't sound appealing, and milking cows certainly didn't attract me. He told me about one branch which seemed very intriguing: a hatchery for chickens. I decided that I would try and work there.

The first few days after arrival were very confusing, as one might imagine. We elected a member of the group to be our work organiser - he would meet every evening with the kibbutz work organiser, learn how many people were needed in each branch of the kibbutz then assign group members to those branches. I imagine that we all aspired to working permanently in a branch, but first we had to become acquainted with the branches, and secondly we were dependent on the needs of the kibbutz.

I was told that there was no vacancy in the hatchery, but that I would work in one of the chicken runs. So on my first day of work (probably our third day on the kibbutz), I was woken at around 5:40 in the morning and staggered off to where the chicken runs were (someone might well have taken me because I had yet to visit that area). I remember that we (someone else from our group was assigned here as well) sat around in a stone building for about fifteen minutes, drinking tea and being told in broken English what we were expected to do. Then we were launched into our careers - or thrown in at the deep end, depending on which metaphor one prefers.

As opposed to most chicken runs, where the chickens are grown for meat, these runs were for breeding chickens: the eggs were fertile and would be collected to that they could be transferred to the hatchery. Our job was simply to walk up and down the runs, collecting the eggs. Just to put things in perspective, these chicken runs were upto 100 metres in length and maybe ten metres wide, so doing a complete collection took a few hours. There were several runs in the complex.

Down the center of each run were wooden structures into which the hens would enter so that they could lay their eggs. We had to walk down the run, poking our hands into these structures (like pigeon holes), feel around for eggs (the holes were filled with sawdust so it was never clear whether one would find an egg) then extract them and put them in the trays which we were carrying (30 eggs per layer). Sounds simple. Unfortunately, it would happen that a chicken sitting in a pigeon hole would peck the tentative hand reaching into the structure, causing the recipient to jump in shock. Also, the floors of the runs were covered with chickens (naturally), and the cockerels didn't take well to young, well brought up British youths wandering about. So these cockerels used to charge at these youths - run at them and flutter their not inconsiderable wings. 

I found this very difficult to take; I was told to walk as confidently as possible so that the chickens would automatically get out of the way, but I couldn't handle this easily and so lasted there for only a few days. I did work one or two days during this period in the chicken hatchery, but I didn't really understand what I was expected to do and so probably didn't make much of an impression. 

September was the time of the cotton harvest and I remember spending a few days on my own in a large container. Every now and then, a tractor would come along and dump a load of freshly picked cotton into the container. It was my job to jump up and down on the cotton, thus compressing it and allowing more cotton to be added. Of course, these days there is a machine which does this work.

We would work one day then learn Hebrew the next; I think that this was a better arrangement that the previous year, when they would learn Hebrew for a few hours then work for a few hours. Being good at languages - and having learnt Latin - I didn't have much of a problem learning simple Hebrew, whereas my companions had problems with tenses and declensions. Of course, we were also learning Hebrew at work - the first words which I learnt were "Bo le'echol"  (come and eat) - which I was told at regular intervals.

We were assigned 'kibbutz parents': we became adopted by a family and would go there for tea most days. These meetings allowed us to ask about the kibbutz and all the strange things that were happening to us. Later on, we used to visit other people for tea, thus getting to know more and more kibbutz members. For some reason, the family which was supposed to adopt me couldn't, so after a few weeks of being an orphan, another family adopted me.

The first few weeks between our arrival and Rosh HaShana (the Jewish New Year, which that year would have fallen around 28 September) were thus spent getting to know our new environment. Little did we know what was about to happen.....

Frederik Pohl, 26/11/1919-02/09/2013

I was saddened to read this morning about the death of Frederik Pohl, who was one of the leading science fiction writers. According to his website, Fred went to the hospital in respiratory distress yesterday morning and died yesterday afternoon.

I first became aware of Fred Pohl in the summer of 1973 when I found one of his stories in an SF anthology. I didn't particularly care for the story, and neither did I care for the famous collaboration, "The Space Merchants", when I read it sometime in the 70s. Pohl had a chapter in the book "Hell's cartographers", which was composed of six autobiographical essays of science fiction writers (I bought it for the Robert Silverberg chapter). Again, I wasn't over impressed by what I read, but the very fact that Pohl was included in the book meant that he was a force to be reckoned with.

At the end of the 80s, I picked up a second hand copy of his book "Heechee Rendezvous" in a street market in Jerusalem, not knowing that this was the third part of a continuing series. At first, I had great difficulty understanding the plot of the book, but after I bought the initial books of the 'Gateway' series (and the final installment), I not only understood the third book, but also developed a deep appreciation for the 'Gateway' series and Mr Pohl himself.

Presumably in the early 90s I found a copy of Pohl's autobiography, "The way the future was", which was certainly interesting, although a great deal of it was about times long past (the twenties to the forties) and not particularly relevant to its date of publication.

I have read several other Pohl books, including "Jem", "The coming of the quantum cats" and "Man plus", but none of them seem as gripping nor as funny as the Gateway series. Maybe the fault lies with me.

Anyway, Pohl had a generous innings, falling shortly before his 94th birthday.

The Magic of Belle Isle

I saw this film the other night on television and thoroughly enjoyed it. I doubt that anyone would claim that it is a major piece of art, but it gave me a good feeling. True, some parts of it were perfunctory and could have been expanded, but I'm not complaining.

I found a very interesting interview with director Rob Reiner, which explains all kinds of things about the film. The budget for the entire film was five million dollars (Julia Roberts gets/got 20 million per film!) and it was shot over only 25 days.

Nothing more

A few weeks ago, I was listening to my take on the traditional Irish tune, "Killarney Boys of Pleasure", during my evening perambulations. As this song followed my versions of some Sandy Denny songs on my mp3 playlist, I was still thinking about which additional Sandy songs I could sequence. It struck me that I could use the basis of "Killarney" for "Nothing more", the song which opens the eponymous Fotheringay album.

True, the chord sequences are slightly different: "Killarney" is Em/Bm whereas "Nothing more" is Em/C, but that wouldn't be a problem. The real problem of "Nothing more" is that its harmonic palette is so limited - it's composed of six verses, three of which are Em/C and three are C/Em, as well as another two instrumental verses of Em/C. At the end of each verse, there are two repeats of D/Em. So it was clear that any arrangement would have to rely on stylistic and intensity variations as opposed to harmonic variations.

I did "cheat" by changing the chords in the instrumental sections to Bm/A but that doesn't seem to make that much difference.

Anyway, I started of with a very quiet verse, with acoustic bass and a mixed pad, then slowly built up the sound with cor anglais, soprano saxophone, clarinet, cello and arrpegiated harp. I really like the clarinet lines. When I had finished the arrangement - and listened to it for a week, tweaking here and there - it was time to record the vocal.

As far as I remember, this went fairly quickly: there were several false starts, as usual, and I had to repeat the final verse, but otherwise there were no problems. It took me several hours to find a vocal sound with which I was happy (equalisation and reverb). After a few more days of listening, I decided to make a copy of the vocal for a few verses, then with the help of my vocal tuner program, I was able to create a simple harmony vocal track. This was mixed in stereo, and placed 'behind' the main vocal.

I very much liked the result, so I decided to place it on the Internet and share it with the Sandy Denny mailing list. True, I have received only two responses, but they were both very favourable:

• I like the composition, the instrumentation, and your voice, too. Will be in my iTunes library.
• Thanks for the cover. It's beautiful.

You can make up your own mind by listening to the song.

Appendum: after writing the above, I went for my evening walk. Nick Drake was first up on the mp3 player and I thrilled to the sound of his guitar and the restrained arrangements of the late Robert Kirby. When I came home, I found an excellent midi arrangement of Drake's "Day is done" on the Internet. I liberated a few bars of the guitar part, switched the notes around slightly, then added them to my arrangement of "Nothing more" in place of the pad. The resulting track has more space between the instruments and is slightly less mechanical (one of the advantages of playing a 'pointillist' part through the NN-19 sampler is that the stereo position of each note can be random). I'll have to listen to this version several times before I decide which will become the "official" version. I'll also have a deeper look at "Day is done", especially at the strings.

Children of the revolution

The end of August means that there is a new Inspector Banks novel available, written by Peter Robinson. This novel, in keeping with the partial tradition with Robinson has established, is named after a song, in this case one by T. Rex. The song itself was not particularly good; it is not referenced in the novel (can one imagine Banks listening to T. Rex? Maybe to their predecessor, Tyrannosaurus Rex, but not the teenybopper music that Marc Bolan made from 1971 onwards).

This year, I bought the Kindle version of the book: I clicked on the payment form on Amazon, connected the Kindle to my wifi, and a few minutes later the book was available for reading. Amazing!

The novel itself is not so amazing. Whilst I had difficulty in putting it down (I read it over the course of a weekend), I wouldn't class this book amongst his best. I've been trying to think of reasons why ...

1. A body is found after heavy rain, thus there are no forensics.
2. There doesn't seem to be any real motive for the death - it isn't even clear whether the death was caused by murder, manslaughter, accident or suicide.
3. Banks' team investigates only one death, thus there's none of the two pronged attack (Banks on one side, Annie Cabot on the other) which make some of the later books so good.
4. Annie's characterisation is making her more bitter and less attractive as the years go by. Sergeant Winsome Jackson - who could have been a star - is given more inner dialogue than in previous books and turns out to be a prude. It's very hard to identify with her.
5. Hints are tossed out at the beginning of the story that Banks is due for retirement (he is approaching 60) but may be promoted instead. I expected that the story would end with some reference to this, but no.
6. Similarly, it seems that Banks may have found a new romantic relationship, but there's no development.

So, due to the lack of forensics, the team (only four people) work on the meagre leads that they have. Banks is warned off one lead as this involves a friend of the Chief Constable - of course, by the end of the book, one sees that this was the correct path. The whole investigation seems to be arbitrary, and it's only by chance that a solution is found. I doubt that this would happen in real life.

I'll give the novel another read but I doubt that I'll be more impressed. At least I didn't notice any mistakes - Robinson thanks several people for copy editing.

At the end of the novel, there was an advert for 'other books that you may enjoy', including a new Ian Rankin novel. It seems that Rebus has rejoined the police after the retirement age has been increased, and he investigates something along with DI Fox. That book will be published in another few months. So it seems that Rankin hasn't started writing books with Siobhan Clarke as his main protagonist. 

Throwing in hints about Banks retiring is taking a page out of the Rebus universe. I can understand why the police might be raising the retirement age - people's life expectancy is growing and there isn't enough money in the retirement funds to keep people for twenty years.

Chaining functionality

I see that I've hardly written any blog posts this month; it's not because I've been sunning myself in the Bahamas without access to the Internet, but rather because I've been too busy at work with all sorts of activities which aren't of much interest here.

As it happens, there was a nice coincidence of events the other day: the same procedural issue reared itself both at work and also with the Occupational Psychologist, so I feel that I can write about it here.

At work, there was someone who wanted that orders be marked after she had printed labels for that order. I asked her how she printed the labels and here was the explanation (my words):

1. I run program A which extracts data from the order and places them in a temporary table
2. I run program B which prints labels from that temporary table
3. I run program C which deletes all my entries from that temporary table.

The OP had something similar:

1. Change status in a docket
2. Add default meetings to that docket
3. Print the checklist of exams for that docket (based to a certain extent on the meetings for that docket)

In both cases, I was able to suggest a change in their work-habits which reduced the amount of overhead: I suggested that they chain their activities. Of course, such chaining is dependent of the programmer and not the user. In the first case, I added to the beginning of program A the command to delete entries from the temporary table, and at the end of the program, I added the command to print the entries in that table. I also suggested to the user that she run the program from within the order screen itself, which saves having to input the order number to the program. All she has to do now is press a button and the labels print automatically.

In the OP's case, changing the docket's status to a certain status will now cause the default meetings to be added to that docket, and adding the default meetings will cause the checklist to be printed (or more accurately, displayed in Word, prior to printing).

In both situations, the original programmer concentrated on atomic activities: this is correct, but can be improved. In the work situation, there are many programs which have to print labels and it is advised always to clear the temporary table before adding new values. So these activities are written once and called many times. But chaining these activities together didn't require me to "reinvent the wheel": printing the labels is accomplished by adding a print stage to the original program, and cleaning the user table is a one line SQL command.

I have noticed that users tend to have a very data-centric or atomic view of their activities whereas I tend to have a more process-centric view which works at a higher level. Hopefully, adding these two higher level programs will open the eyes of the users to the fact that with a little glue, one can work at a higher level, achieve more in less time, and minimise the overhead.

Research questionnaire

Over several instances of taking the dog for a walk, I've been thinking about the questionnaire which I will be using for my doctoral research. In the background, there is also the work which I am currently doing for the Occupational Psychologist regarding our aptitude exam - calculating standard deviations and item analysis. 

It became clear to me the other day that the questionnaire can be divided into two logical sections: the first section gets data regarding the various dimensions that I wish to check (ie person's age, experience with ERP, level of formal education, department) and the second level gets data regarding the user's work habits. At the end, I intend to run correlation analyses on the work habits to see which dimensions cause an affect in the work habits. I realised a few days ago that I need to formalise the work habits section by giving a score which would reflect the level of 'end user computing' (EUC). I haven't checked the questions which I have developed so far, but I think that they don't give me a quantitative value but rather qualitative data.

Developing this thread; I thought that it would be a good idea to try and incorporate within the research questionnaires a competency exam for Excel. Instead of having questions like 'Do you use the IF function in your spreadsheets (yes/no)?', I could have a question like

When you enter data into a cell and press the Enter key on the keyboard, the cursor will move to ...

1. The cell below the cell where you entered the data
2. The cell to the right of the cell where you entered the data
3. It will not move
4. The formula bar so that you can check your data
5. Not sure

Having such questions in the questionnaire will allow me to assign a value to the user's competency in Excel, and then I can see whether there is any correlation between this value and the user's personal data.

Yesterday evening, after walking the dog, I started googling 'excel competency test' and found several interesting sites. I continued looking until I found a multiple choice questionnaire which was exactly what I was looking for (the above question comes from this questionnaire).

I'm not sure whether I took the test purposely giving wrong answers (so that the feedback to the exam would give me the correct answers) or whether I tried to answer the exam honestly. Anyway, I achieved a score of 10 out of 17, which is possibly higher than I had expected, although maybe I was confusing this test with another which I tried, in which I didn't get a single question correct. This second questionnaire wouldn't be very useful for my purposes, as I need a spread of values, but the first questionnaire seems at first sight to be good.

I will translate the questions into Hebrew, put them into a program and then test them out on people at work. This way I can fine tune the competency part of my research questionnaire.

The above question reminds me of another piece of the puzzle that is called a thesis: at some stage, I want to include some historical data regarding spreadsheets. 'Everybody' knows that the first computer spreadsheet program was called 'VisiCalc' which was written around 1978 (or was it 1976?) for the Apple 2 computer (in fact, it was the 'killer app' for this computer and caused millions to buy the computer). The developers weren't able to port VisiCalc successfully to the IBM PC; the original spreadsheet leader was Lotus 1-2-3. Excel's birth and success are linked to that of Windows which didn't really take off until 1986-9. I remembered that on the PDP-11, we had some kind of spreadsheet program in about 1984 which was called 'Saturn-Calc'. I went looking for clues about this program the other day and actually managed to locate its author, with whom I have exchanged a few emails. Anyway, I came across the author in a mail which he sent to the development team of Open Office, detailing an option in Saturn-Calc which allowed the user to choose to which cell the cursor would go after pressing 'Enter'; the developers thought that this would confuse users so decided to go with Excel's behaviour, which is to go to the cell below the cell where the data had been entered. 

So the answer to the above question is 1.

My first visit to America

Whilst looking for my old diaries, I came across old passports and so discovered that I first visited America on August 23, 1978. When I blogged earlier about this visit, I wrote that I couldn't remember anything about the days before flying, but now the memories have returned.

As I wrote before, I was living in Cardiff over that summer. On Friday, 21 August, I took the train to London and as I had nothing better to do, I went to the cinema to see the film 'House Calls'  (with Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson) which had just been released. The next day I was with a group of friends and we decided to go to the cinema; by default we ended up watching 'House Calls'! The film on the plane to Newark was ... 'House Calls'!! The film itself was quite good but not worthy of watching three times in three days.

My hosts in San Francisco were my best friend's sister and the sister's husband. I had met them a few months earlier when they had come to London; as a gesture to my best friend, I took them around a few sights in the city then had dinner with them in the sort of restaurant which I would never visit (touristy and very expensive). I remember arriving at SF airport at midnight (which for me was 8am - I had been traveling for 24 hours) then phoning my hosts, expecting them to collect me and not realising how far the airport was from the city. They told me to take a bus to the bus terminal which I did; they collected me from there.

They lived in an apartment on Seventh Avenue, near Golden Gate Park. On my first day, after clearing the cobwebs in my head, I set out for the park and rambled. For me, this was the first of several historic sites: the first 'Be-In' was held here in January 1967; only eleven years previously but it seemed like a lifetime. From the park I walked down to the Haight, bought a book and a record which I was looking for, then retired to eat lunch under a tree in the park (in those days, I still ate in MacDonalds).

After having eaten my burger, I took stock of the situation and quickly realised that I didn't have enough money for my three week trip if I continued spending at the same rate as I had started. This simple fact cast a pall over the entire trip and prevented me from enjoying it more.

I don't remember now all the things that I did in San Francisco and certainly not in which order they occurred so I'll simply list what I do remember. After a week, my hosts 'cast me out' and I had to move to a cheap boarding house for another week. I misled the owner about exchange rates sterling to dollar which he wasn't too pleased about. Places I visited in the city were the Golden Gate Bridge (of course), North Beach, Sausalito, Chinatown, the Pacific shore line (I walked what seemed like a hundred blocks in order to get there!), Fisherman's Wharf and the Embarcadero (there was a jazz group playing on the grass) and Berkeley University, across the bay. One day I took a combined boat and bus trip to various places in Marin County, simply to see something new.

I remember attending a service at a synagogue on a Saturday and hanging around outside hoping that someone would notice me and invite me to dinner. I was too shy to approach anyone directly, and as a result no one invited me.

On my final day, I wasted some precious dollars by traveling to Candlestick Park to watch a baseball game; director and actor Ron Howard threw the first ball. I very much enjoyed the day and bought a 'SF' baseball cap which I wore for the rest of my trip. It seemed that San Francisco was divided into two parts: the side where I stayed which was sunny whereas 'the other side' (including Candlestick Park)  seemed to be in perpetual cloud.

My primary influences had been 'On the road' by Jack Kerouac and 'The electric kool-aid acid test' by Tom Wolfe.

After two weeks in San Francisco, I took the Greyhound bus to New York: my plane ticket was to San Francisco but my return was from New York. I had planned this in advance so that I could see both cities. The bus left at midnight and went via Sacramento on its way to Reno, Nevada (cue song). I awoke here after a muddled sleep and thought that there was a half hour stop, so I got off the bus to stretch my legs. The bus drove off almost immediately after I disembarked, so I was stuck in Reno for twelve hours with no money and only my copy of John Le Carre's "Honourable Schoolboy" (which I had bought in Heathrow on my way to America) to keep me company. As the Americans say, bummer.

Once back on the bus, I tried to make the best of my situation. The bus would stop every few hours so that people could eat and/or visit toilets. The Americans always serve big portions but charge accordingly, which I couldn't really afford. At least once, someone paid for me to have a meal at a diner. One morning, in some mid-West town, I looked for a grocery store where I bought a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and a carton of chocolate milk: I ate peanut buffer sandwiches for the rest of the journey. I was hoping that my rucksack would have got lost (it was traveling on the first bus) so that I could claim compensation, but the rucksack was waiting for me in the Port Authority building.

Once in New York, I thought that I would be able to stay with members of Habonim. After all, in London, we frequently hosted people who were passing through. Unfortunately (yet again), my expectations didn't match reality; every night I had to find new lodgings which weren't always conducive (I had no money for a hotel). For the last few nights of my visit, I stayed with a family in a comfortable house - but this was in Long Island, so I had to spend money on trains into and out of the city. 

Due to me wearing the SF baseball hat, more than once people thought that I was from San Francisco rather than from Britain, although one woman in Central Park who drew my portrait without me asking to do so complained about 'hoity toity Brits' after I declined to purchase the portrait (no money).

The only things that I remember (at the moment) of this visit were Central Park,'Guernica' at the Museum of Metropolitan Art (where I saw the first non-comedic Woody Allen film, 'Interiors'), and pinching a book* from the New York public library, a book which I had been unable to find in the myriad second hand bookshops which line Manhattan. Obviously, my lack of money ruined my stay and prevented me from remembering much. On the final day, I mosied around the city, trying to delay the inevitable, but eventually I came to the Port Authority and took the shuttle bus to JFK where I spent the night (I had done this a few times in Israel as well, after arriving there late at night). 

In Heathrow, my parents met me and took me back to Cardiff where I spent a week or so before making the final trip to London prior to emigration.

* The book was called "The boy who could make himself disappear" by Kin Platt; I had become aware of the book as I had seen the film 'Baxter' (based on the book) a few weeks previously and had been deeply impressed. To quote a review of the book, "I first read this book thirty years ago and literally thousands of books later I still vividly remember the impact it made on me. I think I started crying about page fifty and didn't stop until the end. The subject matter, child abuse and willful neglect, is ugly, but the telling is done with such subtlety and delicacy that to this day this book still sits on my shelf. I've recommended it to quite a few young teens who I knew were strong enough to take it and virtually all of them loved the book. Even the fact that the ending is hopeful rather than happy doesn't put them off. Kids are realists more than we think and I believe they appreciate the author not taking the nicer and therefore easier way out with this work. They can get all the cute and sweet stuff they want from Disney, Kin Platt wrote about the real world where happily ever after doesn't always happen. Sometimes it's good to remember that." 

I couldn't put it better myself.

Puzzle

Once upon a time, Jews in Israel (and everywhere else) had strong, Biblical names. Boys were named Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Adam, David or Jonathan, whereas girls where named Sarah, Leah, Rachel, Miriam, Rebecca or Hannah. Why, even my grandparents were called David, Rebecca, Joseph and Sarah; my mother was called Hannah. But such days are long past, and nowadays children get all kinds of names; the best names are qualities (No'am = pleasantness) or abstract nouns (Shai = gift, Raz = secret, Vered = rose), whereas some are compound words (Or-Li = light to me) and others are just sounds (Kai).

Whereas at one time a name indicated its owner's gender, these days names tend to be unisex. I know both males and females called No'am, males and females called Shai, and males and females called Raz. In this spirit of unisex names, I present the following puzzle.

Gal, Yuval and Amit* are all in the same family (no incestual relationships). One of the three is the father of Gal; one is the only daughter of Yuval, and one is the sibling of Amit. Amit's sibling is neither the father of Gal nor the daughter of Yuval.

Who is the odd one out in terms of gender?

*These three names are indeed unisex and unfortunately are used by both genders.

Synchronicity

One of the satellite tv stations in Israel has been showing reruns of 'The West Wing' for the past few months. I've seen the first three series and the last two, but had never seen series four and five before, so I was very pleased when these were broadcast. Season four was very good, season five less so.

The schedule has now got up to the beginning of series 6, which begins with a two parter about peace talks held between Israelis and Palestinians at Camp David. It is with some pleasure that I note that in real life, peace talks are (once again) being held between Israelis and Palestinians at Camp David.

One can take one's choice of expression: either plus ca change, plus ca meme chose, or life imitates art. I imagine that in real life, the results of such talks will be much less clear cut than those of the television series.

Transferring more cassettes

I spent a few evenings last week transferring to computer then editing a 60 minute cassette recording of songs which I made with my friend Robert in Feb/March 1973. At first, I had planned to write a detailed review of the material but then I realised that no one is ever going to hear these songs. Even so....

It seems as if I had the same criticisms of my first cassette forty years ago as I did now, as the second cassette answers so many issues that I raised. Gone is the dreadful percussion,  the strongly strummed acoustic guitar and the samey-ness of the songs. Instead I'm playing piano on a few songs, opening the sound out, Robert's guitar playing and time keeping have improved, and the songs themselves vary from the ambitious and fully developed to the quick, forgettable, one-offs. There's even a 12-bar rock'n'roll song presumably entitled 'The Captain Murdo blues', which contains the immortal lines

Hello pretty woman, I'm out at sea
I'm as perky as sailors can be
Playing darts halfway up the mast
I can drink grog till I can see in the fog
I've got my cap on my head
And my head's in bed
I've got the Captain Murdo blues

Unfortunately, we weren't able to execute the more ambitious (some might call it pretentious) material very well so it sounds somewhat lame now. I'm hoping that I'll be able to salvage upto half an hour of reasonably performed songs and forget about the rest.

A neat hack: right clicking a grid's title bar

In Priority, our ERP program, there is a neat function in which enables one to right click the title of a numeric column;  the total of that column is then displayed. I was reminded of this the other day when I sat with the Occupational Psychologist, looking at a list of dockets which had yet to be paid.

After looking into the matter, it turns out that one has to use the grid's OnMouseDown event and not the OnTitleClick event, as one might naively assume. A dbGrid has the useful function MouseCoord which returns on which line the mouse was when it was clicked, and in which column; the title bar of the mouse is row 0. The first line in the code below checks to see that it was the right button which was clicked on the mouse and that the click was on the title bar. Once this has been checked, we can get on with calculating the total of one of the columns. In the form where I used this procedure, columns 4, 5 and 6 - as they appear on the screen - have numerical data. As far as the underlying dataset (qDockets, a clientdataset) is concerned, these are actually fields 3, 4 and 5; the extra screen column (0) would appear to be the row indicator column. Originally I was going to use two case statements, one for choosing which field had to be summed and one for the message at the end, but I realised that I could access the dataset's fields array and save an expensive case statement.

For those that understand these things, I think that the code below is fairly self-explanatory. The "format ('%1.0m')" is a way of getting a number like 1234 to display as 1,234, as well as adding the currency symbol. As the defined width of the string is 1, there will be no extra white space between the number and the equals sign.

procedure TDoDocketsA.grDocketsMouseDown(Sender: TObject;
  Button: TMouseButton; Shift: TShiftState; X, Y: Integer);
var
 total, old: longint;
 col: integer;

begin
 if (button= mbRight) and (grDockets.MouseCoord(X,Y).Y = 0) then
  begin
   total:= 0;
   col:= grDockets.MouseCoord(X,Y).x;
   if col in [4,5,6] then
    begin
     old:= qDocketsID.asinteger;
     with qDockets do
      try
       disablecontrols;
       first;
       while not eof do
        begin
         inc (total, qDockets.fields[col-1].asinteger);
         next
        end;
      finally
       locate ('id', old, []);   // go back to where we were
       enablecontrols
      end;
     hebcontdlg (qDockets.fields[col-1].displaylabel + ' = ' +
                 format ('%1.0m', [total + 0.0]));
    end
  end
end;

It would be nice to make the above routine as general as possible but that involves knowing which fields are numerical which means traversing the fields array at the beginning of the procedure and checking each field's type. At the moment, I don't know whether I am going to use this routine in other forms so I am not going to generalise it.

Transferring cassettes

The latest gadget which I have bought from DX is a cassette player with a USB interface: this allows cassettes to be played without batteries and imported into a sound editing program on the computer.

I initially tried to connect the player to my desktop computer but the latter wouldn't recognise the device, so I connected it to my mobile computer. The device comes with the Audacity program, which has the means to decipher data being sent on a USB line as music.

Naturally, the first cassette to be transferred was the first cassette I ever recorded. My friend Robert received a cassette player as a gift at the end of 1972, probably for Christmas, and it didn't take long for me to press the player into use as a recording device. I was teaching Robert how to play the guitar at the time, but he was only at the first stages. We recorded nearly sixty minutes of music in January 1973, me playing crappy acoustic guitar and singing, whereas Robert played bits of guitar and hit found percussion. I doubt whether I have heard these recordings much since they were made, and certainly not in the past 30 years.

I have to separate the listening experience into four: the songs themselves (mainly written by me), the playing, the singing and the recording. Some of the songs have remained in the repertoire until this day and have been sequenced for MIDI; some of those in the pre-Reason days and some in the Reason era. In other words, some of the songs I consider to be good by any standard. Other songs are not so good, and generally display a lack of development. Already my harmonic palette had been formed; there are no 'three chord wonders' and few full cadences (ie V -> I). All the songs are in 4/4.

My rhythm guitar playing is enthusiastic but not particularly subtle. Certainly, I'm not banging out four strums to a bar, but the strumming pattern seems to be almost the same on every song. Most songs display no dynamic variation whatsoever, and obviously I had yet to hear about finger picking. Robert's contributions are enthusiastic but unfortunately only rarely add something to the performance; most serve to distract. There's one instrumental which sounds like he was playing the chords (probably DMaj7 and Em7) whereas I'm playing lead guitar. Unfortunately, it sounds like Robert was playing a 6/8 rhythm whereas I was playing a 4/4 line and we weren't sophisticated enough (we weren't sophisticated at all) to make this sound good. It sounds as if we are out of time with each other and makes it extremely hard to listen to this mess. Now I know why our mothers complained.

The singing is surprisingly good. My voice is higher and thinner than it is now, but I'm belting out the songs with confidence and enthusiasm. It sounds like the higher notes are lacking in accuracy, but in those days we didn't have autotune and so were less used to perfect vocals.

The tape recorder had a built-in microphone so obviously this picked up a certain amount of hum. I suppose if I wanted to be a really good engineer, I would isolate the frequency of this hum and then equalise it out, using a very narrow band. The recorder also had a slide volume control which we used to fade recordings in and out; sometimes these fades worked well and sometimes not. Although we had the 'luxury' of recording second and third takes, these were done by recording over a previous recording, so there are multiple clicks before and after songs. After I transferred the recordings to the computer, I was able to edit these out; I also fixed the fades, sometimes by editing out material at the beginning and end of songs.

I'm pleased that I manage to salvage these recordings - I'll transfer them to disc shortly - but I very much doubt that I'll ever listen to them again. We were at the bottom of a learning curve, and hopefully things can only get better from here. Next to be transferred is a cassette from a few months later: I remember that I played piano on several songs and hopefully Robert improved as a guitarist, so presumably the songs will sound better. On the other hand, I'm not too sure about the songs.

A radical change in our ERP program

Priority, our ERP program, prides itself on having a very strong MRP module. This is a program which scans all the open customer orders then issues work orders according to when the goods' delivery dates; it can combine work orders if the same part is needed for several orders and can also issue purchase recommendations. In a sense, it is the basis of any manufacturing ERP system and ours is very good.

In the chair division, there is a clear separation between parts which can be produced in bulk and parts which can be produced individually. If there is an order for 100 chairs with a metal frame, 10 chairs per colour, then the metalworkers can produce 100 frames at one go, but the upholsterers have to produce ten sets of different upholstery. Thus it makes sense for the metalworkers to produce items in bulk and store them in inventory, whereas the upholsterers and the final assemblers work only on ordered items. For a bulk part, we define a minimum quantity and a bulk quantity: when the quantity of the part falls beneath the minimum amount, the MRP program is clever enough to issue one work order for the bulk quantity (if not more). Obviously such work orders are issued maybe once a week. In order to do so, the MRP program has to check inventory and outstanding purchase orders, which takes time.

But in the furniture division where everything seems to be bespoke, there is no concept of producing bulk items for inventory. When a customer order comes in, work orders have to be issued for every single part which has to be manufactured. So here one doesn't need a very clever MRP program.

Unfortunately, for reasons which I have never understood completely, the man who runs the production facility in the furniture division (let's call him Vladimir - ruler of the world in Russian - but not his real name) was running MRP maybe ten times a day. This requires a large amount of computer processing, but more importantly prevents anyone else from running MRP at the same time. There is a third division which uses the same database as the furniture division; until recently, they have been "ERP free", but finally they seem to be moving into the computer age. These multiple runs of MRP are causing them havoc.

At the moment, the furniture and chair divisions work on separate databases but there are moves afoot to combine them into one humongous database. When this was first mooted two years ago, I did a feasibility study and saw that there was only one real problem which could prevent the integration - MRP.

Talking this over with my consultant, he suggested writing a work order generator which would function outside of MRP; it would issue work orders but not check inventory levels or anything clever. Several times I have tried to get this suggestion adopted but have never succeeded. I felt that the major reason for my failure was that the word 'change' does not exist in Vladimir's vocabulary. He seems to be content to run things 'the way that they have always been run', whether or not that is correct. Systems and goals change, but Vladimir keeps on in his groove. God forbid we should change how work orders are created - we might not output the correct work orders! [I should note that I suspect that some parts are produced without work orders, so this apparently strict adherence to the need for work orders seems strange at times. There are also plenty of furniture parts which don't have a bill of materials and so don't have work orders at all.]

I had written a simple work order generator for the third division which was sufficient for their needs but not enough for the furniture division.

The company's CEO heard rumours of problems running MRP and so called a meeting; Vladimir and his manager tried to cancel it. I don't know whether this was done innocently, believing that there was no problem, or deliberately in order to maintain the status quo. Whatever, the CEO ruled that the meeting be held and held it was. First, Vladimir explained how he works at the moment, after which I said, "Yes, this is how they work. It doesn't mean that they work correctly". I explained how the proposed work order generator would function, and the representative of the third division said that his simple generator works well.

I must have been persuasive enough for the CEO to decide that we would try to work with the work order generator! To be fair, Vladimir and his manager took the decision well and didn't try any stalling tactics which might be understood to imply that they had ulterior motives - or in other words, maybe the word 'change' does exist in Vladimir's vocabulary after all.

After the meeting I looked at the simple generator which I had already written and saw that I would have to extend it to handle multiple orders. This took a few hours of false starts and problems but this morning I had a program which I could test. I tried it out on a few simple examples, finding a few problems and fixing them. Then I tried it out on a more complex example and the generator passed with flying colours. At this stage, I passed it on to Vladimir for further testing. He found some problems, most of which were due to bad data (parts which had some wrong definitions); I fixed each problem and returned the generator for further scrutiny.

During the test process, I saw how I could simplify matters in the future; this requires a new field in one of the tables, so tonight I'll add the field (I can't do this when people are working) and tomorrow I'll update the generator to use this new field.

During the day, the CEO mailed us asking Vladimir when he would put the generator into production use (the CEO has little patience at times, but he also might have thought that the generator was ready for use instead of being debugged). About an hour ago, Vladimir wrote in reply: after a number of tests in our test database, I have begun to use the generator in our production database. If I find any strange behaviour [ie bugs - NN], I will pass them on to No'am for checking and correction. Generally speaking, it works very well indeed and I haven't come across any serious problems.

Who would have thought it? Vladimir actually going on record about a change (and a fairly radical one at that) working very well and almost instantly embracing it! Maybe I misread the person after all. But it all goes to show that change will be embraced when the user realises that the change is designed to make his job easier as well as everyone else's.

As far as I am concerned, this is one of the most radical changes which I have ever made in the way that we use Priority, and I'm pleased that the political side was so easy. Of course, it does help that Priority is so flexible....