Finicky detail and the harder choice

I think it was one of the great yacht designers – my memory has it as being the late Olin Stephens (of S&S) who quipped that ‘a boat is just a mess of details’…..and I do think he used the term mess of details rather than the more obvious mass of details. Quite often it has seemed to me that it’s the details that make or break a design : I for one don’t like the kind of designs coming out of one notable modern European yard where the boats are stripped down to a minimalist style where often there isn’t even anything to hold on to when at sea in a blow : boats just designed to live in marinas I feel. Right now, i’m trying to finish a small and simple working style boat and I have a list of detail jobs to be done all written up on the inside of my shed door.

One of the great problems with getting the detail right is that the smaller the job the longer it seems to take, this morning for example i’m on day 3 of what I allocated half a day of work for and that’s for just one small part of the electrical system – in this case building a switch panel box and finding a dry place to attach it to the boat and getting the wiring runs to and from it. This morning it’s taken me 5 goes at climbing in and out of the boat to drill a single hole to bring the wiring through the soleboards….and iv’e still failed because now my battery has died and the spare hasn’t charged. Another great problem for me now is that my brain has difficulty in communicating with the fingers of my left hand when I am trying to do fine detail work : just getting cable ends into crimp connectors and keeping the join steady while I crimp them has taken most of my planned job time so far.

About 20 years ago and rewiring my Frances 26

This post is as much a reflection about my stroke recovery as it is about what I am doing with the Pathfinder jobs right now. Today, as usual i’m struggling a bit with typing because my ‘phat fingers’ problem often has me hitting the wrong key or the right one twice : unless I read and edit as I go along it makes for some entertaining reading.

In hospital, immediately after my stroke, I was seen by several health professionals – in my language both the mafia (physiotherapists) and their counterparts the rafia (occupational therapists). The young and rather self important physiotherapist evinced surprise that the old guy, her patient, knew which bits of affected brain caused what problem – in my case mostly fine balance and control. Their job was mostly to check me out on the hospital stairs but even then they were nothing like the steep pitch of our stairs at home – a some 160 year old miners cottage and even they are quite easy compared to the ones I grew up with in the 1960’s and by all accounts bounced down a few times.

The rafia (occupational therapists) had a wider interest and bigger remit than I remembered from my training days : my first assessed task was to make a hot drink in their play kitchen and from what the OT told me a lot of what they were looking out for was to do with my memory…as if an ex nurse wouldn’t know where to find the mugs, the coffee and the nurse’s stash of biscuits in what used to be the nurse’s staffroom !

My OT assessment became a lot more interesting when she spent about an hour giving me a thorough workout for my memory, cognition and basic maths – she was good enough to admit that she’d failed the maths test so…..

We spent quite a bit of time discussing what I thought my problems might be and I mentioned the fact that I had a workshop and spent some time climbing into and out of a boat – as it happens that has been a real balance problem and has been the cause of most of my scars and grazes. One thing that she said in response is that they have some kind of community team that can visit and help with that kind of problem : I did ask, jokingly, whether they would like to come and deal with the continuous trip problem that my workshop floor represents…..there being at least 5 different levels of concrete and original uneven granite blocks. Really though that’s a builders problem for another day but only after iv’e given the workshop a new roof – most likely my main autumn project.

Iv’e spent most of the last 8 weeks in my workshop or climbing in and out of the boat and in doing so learning which moves aren’t great with my dodgy balance. At this end of the project, doing mainly fine detail jobs my new problems come with fine work – even pouring small amounts of epoxy resin or threading a small cable tie are difficult because I just don’t have the fine muscle control. As with most of my post-stroke problems i’m taking the contrarian approach of not avoiding problems but giving myself detail tasks that test me, and I think train me, nearly every day.

When it comes to my current work on the electrics for this boat I think back to having to learn about 12 electrics after the Frances had been mostly underwater and needed both a new engine and a new wiring loom and switch panel. Even then a marine electrician was one of the costliest technicians to hire so I bought a book and taught myself how to do the job ; the result of which was that the marine surveyor who was often looking over my shoulder commented that my wiring around the switch panel resembled nothing so much as a well detailed model – as it happens I came up through model making so one of my new fine detail practice problems is picking up on those skills. Right now I aim to take a day off the project once a week and instead mess around with my model-making project which mostly uses workshop scrap.

The anti-lesson.

If there’s a lesson here it is the anti-lesson I take from the end of my late parents lives : at about the age I am now they moved from a modern house to as modern a bungalow because it was easier and more convenient. At the same time they lived in a dull and extremely flat city where there was no daily physical challenge aside from the easy walk over a fairly low railway bridge – a huge comparison to living in a small and hilly village in lumpy rural Cornwall.

While physically easy and boringly convenient it all struck me as an end of the road kind of place – the place you might just call the geriatric quarter of a city going nowhere – in many ways just a dormitory town for nearby Londinium. The lack of daily physical challenge, I still think, ultimately made them physically weak and bizarrely may have contributed to my late mother’s first fall which resulted in a hip fracture and took a long time to heal. The fact about falls is usually said to be that many old people that fall will be dead within 2 years. I happen to think that living in a more challenging environment with physical problems to overcome on a daily basis keep people (at least the ones that walk) much fitter and contributes to higher bone density which generally works against bone fractures.

Maybe, taking the harder choice is the better one…..who knows.

Here endeth the lesson for today.