A railway signalman spots a runaway truck hurtling down the line, about to crash into an elderly couple who are not paying much attention to anything other than taking photographs of flowers between the tracks (growing there because of lack of maintenance?).
The signalman could divert the runaway truck on to a different track by changing the points. However, there are people on the other track too, a group of five railway workers who (owing to privatisation policies?) have been badly trained and are eating their sandwiches and not keeping proper watch.
Should the signalman switch the points so that the truck will run over the railway workers, or do nothing and watch the elderly couple die?
Now, a different dilemma.
You are the dictator of a country in the grip of a lethal virus. You can minimise the number of deaths by making most people stay at home for months so that they don’t come into contact with each other. This, however, will cause long-term levels of unemployment, poverty, hunger, untreated illness and inequality not seen since the early nineteen thirties, as a result of which an unknown number of people will die.
Alternatively, you can impose fewer restrictions and avoid damaging the economy, but this will result in certain deaths from the virus, possibly including your family, friends and even yourself.
Which would you choose? A difficult decision would have to be made.
Monday 6 April 2020
Wednesday 1 April 2020
School Metalwork
(first posted 21st November 2017)
By the time Tinplate Thompson had finished describing the gruesome horrors of the metalwork shop, we were too scared to move. He went over and over all the ways to hurt or injure yourself: cutting your skin on sharp edges, scraping it on rough surfaces, hitting your fingers with a hammer, trapping them in pincers, burning your flesh with a soldering iron, melting it with molten metal, ripping off your scalp by catching your hair in a machine, or an arm by catching a sleeve, … the list went on and on. It was so terrifying that none of us made light of it when he ended with “... and remember, before you pick up any metal, spit on it to make sure it’s not hot.”
The first thing you noticed was the smell: sharp, bitter and pungent, a mixture of metal polish, machine oil, cutting fluid and soldering flux. It clung to your hair and clothes. You knew when Thompson had walked down a corridor before you because it hung in the air behind him in an invisible cloud. You could follow it like a bloodhound. Sometimes, you catch a reminder from plumbers who have been soldering pipes, or brass musicians. It brings it back: the heat, the acridity, the instruments of torture. It was like entering the bowels of hell.
There were lethal looking hand tools, powered lathes, drills, cutters, grinders, a blacksmith’s forge and anvil, and welding equipment with a Darth Vader face mask. We made feeble jokes about bastard files and horizontal borers, but most of us would rather have stayed with the lesser perils of woodwork, or, safer still, been allowed to do cooking or needlework. There would have been no shortage of feisty girls eager to swap.
“We can make anything in this workshop from a teaspoon to a motorcycle,” Thompson told us. Guess which we got to make.
We each cut the shape of a tea caddy spoon out of a brass plate, hammered out the bowl over a wooden form and smoothed the edges with a file. Mine was such a jagged and misshapen catastrophe I decided to ‘lose’ it in the acid bath where, hopefully, it dissolved away to nothingness. Yet it was magnificent compared to my sugar scoop. That was made out of soldered tinplate and supposed to look like a box with a slanted opening. Oh dear! A three-year old would have done better cutting it out with blunt scissors and sticking it up with paste. I might just as well have scraped on the solder with a builder’s trowel. It was ridged and lumpy, and didn’t hold together very well at all. Thompson wrinkled his nose in disgust as he marked it, as reflected in my school report.
Everyone else’s work looked neat, smooth and functional. But I did have one minor success. It was a hammer. It turned out right because the lathe did most of the work. All you had to do was squirt milky fluid on to the cutting tool while turning a handle. Even I could manage that. I was not even troubled by the springy coils of ‘swarf’ that flew off like shrapnel, threatening to slice your skin to shreds. My next report grade leapt from Very fair to Fair.
The hammer head consisted of a sawn-off rod cut with a couple of grooves and drilled with a hole to accommodate the handle. The handle was a longer, narrower rod with a non-slip grip pattern milled into one end, and cut thinner at the other end to fit through the head. I can no longer remember exactly how the head was fixed to the handle – it might have involved heat and expansion – but mine didn’t fall apart. I’ve still got it. You can see from the battered ends I still abuse it now and again.
Thinking back to that one year of metalwork, it is surprising that, so far as I know, no one was ever seriously injured. There were a few minor cuts and scrapes, but the nastiest accident was to Tinplate Thompson himself. Ignoring his own advice, he picked up a piece of hot metal without spitting on it first and burnt his hand. You should have heard him swear!
The photograph of the forge is from pixabay.com and is in the public domain
 |
| The heat, the acridity, the instruments of torture - it was like entering the bowels of hell |
By the time Tinplate Thompson had finished describing the gruesome horrors of the metalwork shop, we were too scared to move. He went over and over all the ways to hurt or injure yourself: cutting your skin on sharp edges, scraping it on rough surfaces, hitting your fingers with a hammer, trapping them in pincers, burning your flesh with a soldering iron, melting it with molten metal, ripping off your scalp by catching your hair in a machine, or an arm by catching a sleeve, … the list went on and on. It was so terrifying that none of us made light of it when he ended with “... and remember, before you pick up any metal, spit on it to make sure it’s not hot.”
The first thing you noticed was the smell: sharp, bitter and pungent, a mixture of metal polish, machine oil, cutting fluid and soldering flux. It clung to your hair and clothes. You knew when Thompson had walked down a corridor before you because it hung in the air behind him in an invisible cloud. You could follow it like a bloodhound. Sometimes, you catch a reminder from plumbers who have been soldering pipes, or brass musicians. It brings it back: the heat, the acridity, the instruments of torture. It was like entering the bowels of hell.
There were lethal looking hand tools, powered lathes, drills, cutters, grinders, a blacksmith’s forge and anvil, and welding equipment with a Darth Vader face mask. We made feeble jokes about bastard files and horizontal borers, but most of us would rather have stayed with the lesser perils of woodwork, or, safer still, been allowed to do cooking or needlework. There would have been no shortage of feisty girls eager to swap.
“We can make anything in this workshop from a teaspoon to a motorcycle,” Thompson told us. Guess which we got to make.
We each cut the shape of a tea caddy spoon out of a brass plate, hammered out the bowl over a wooden form and smoothed the edges with a file. Mine was such a jagged and misshapen catastrophe I decided to ‘lose’ it in the acid bath where, hopefully, it dissolved away to nothingness. Yet it was magnificent compared to my sugar scoop. That was made out of soldered tinplate and supposed to look like a box with a slanted opening. Oh dear! A three-year old would have done better cutting it out with blunt scissors and sticking it up with paste. I might just as well have scraped on the solder with a builder’s trowel. It was ridged and lumpy, and didn’t hold together very well at all. Thompson wrinkled his nose in disgust as he marked it, as reflected in my school report.
Everyone else’s work looked neat, smooth and functional. But I did have one minor success. It was a hammer. It turned out right because the lathe did most of the work. All you had to do was squirt milky fluid on to the cutting tool while turning a handle. Even I could manage that. I was not even troubled by the springy coils of ‘swarf’ that flew off like shrapnel, threatening to slice your skin to shreds. My next report grade leapt from Very fair to Fair.
The hammer head consisted of a sawn-off rod cut with a couple of grooves and drilled with a hole to accommodate the handle. The handle was a longer, narrower rod with a non-slip grip pattern milled into one end, and cut thinner at the other end to fit through the head. I can no longer remember exactly how the head was fixed to the handle – it might have involved heat and expansion – but mine didn’t fall apart. I’ve still got it. You can see from the battered ends I still abuse it now and again.
Thinking back to that one year of metalwork, it is surprising that, so far as I know, no one was ever seriously injured. There were a few minor cuts and scrapes, but the nastiest accident was to Tinplate Thompson himself. Ignoring his own advice, he picked up a piece of hot metal without spitting on it first and burnt his hand. You should have heard him swear!
The photograph of the forge is from pixabay.com and is in the public domain
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