I will start with a small confession.

I am engineeringly challenged. To put a hammer, a saw or a power tool in my hands is not a good idea.

If someone put a box containing a gas barbecue in front of me and said “If you can assemble this perfectly within 6 hours you will win a million dollars,” I would push the box back rather than incur the inevitable frustration.

Having said all of that, and then some, I think I now have a bona fide explanation or my problem- it is genetic. I am of British descent.

I am staying at Erasmus House residence at Queen’s College, Cambridge. The rooms were just redone and I am thrilled to be the very first guest to stay in this “new” room.

A British tradition is having a heated towel rack in the bathroom. They have been used here for centuries to heat towels in the otherwise cold residences. As originally designed, water flows through the pipes to provide heat. Today they are also electric. Here it is.m

But now comes my challenge.

How do I get this darn thing turned on??? There is no switch or button on the device, or anywhere nearby. There is no switch in the bathroom other than the room light…hmmm.

But then I think I have it figured out! Look at this…

“What an odd place to put the control,” I say to myself.

Wrong! Nothing on this misplaced panel to get this thing working.

A weird very British place to locate the control. Or so I thought.

HELP!

Enter KERRI, who is our porter and had helped me yesterday with a dodgy room key that needed to be replaced.

Kerri told me she would take of it for me. On my return I found this:

Duh?

Of course the switch is in the other room! How did I miss that?

You wake up and you can turn it on to warm up without having to get out of bed. Brilliant engineering or or just typical British thinking…?i

Anyway, time for a tune. The MEKONS formed in Leeds 🇬🇧 in the late 70’s.

They were a brilliant outfit. Lead guy JON LANGFORD was a fanatical song writer.

He formed an additional outfit with JOHN HYATT and P. “JOHN” BRENNAN- hence the obvious band name.

They were active from ‘81-‘90 and ‘12-17.” They recorded a handful of great LPs.

As, MEKONS drifted into alt- county music, I preferred the THREE JOHNS from that point on.

Here is a live rendition of them performing an appropriate song to celebrate my ineptitude with “English White Boy- Engineer” from the mis 80s.

SPOTIFY-

https://open.spotify.com/track/4ExsGJ1TbBPzs5HUq54BNH?si=uiFxOMc9S9K0hCvs27bx3Q

(SONG 1151)

Play Loud Or Perish

July 15, 2025