the exacerbation of the machines

When I was small, much of the maintenance required on the various bicycles I had the use of as I became less small could be performed with the aid of a single adjustable spanner and whatever I found in the tin of random nuts and bolts which fitted whatever needed to be nutted or bolted back into place. Very occasionally the little chain bit which fed into Sturmey-Archer hub gears had to be tightened or loosened but a single adjustable spanner could do most things, up to and including opening up a wheel hub to regrease it and replace the bearings. I don't think I ever had to replace a gear cable on anything (whereas brake cables give up much more easily) but it fortunately turns out to still be reasonably simple, even when dealing with indexed gears. Lots of things have become much less simply mechanical since I was small, increasing the gap between the principles learnt in physics lessons and how-things-work. Almost no fatherly explanations of how something did what it did when I was small involved mention of programming or software, whereas when the wingpiglet learns to speak and gets to the asking-questions phase there'll be much less simple physics, except where it concerns the behaviours of semiconductors.