All hands to the pump, I think we're sinking to new depths.

Using a plough plane is undoubtedly one the most fulfilling, satisfying and largely unseen things anyone can ever do in the realm of woodwork. You are working along the grain so there’s none of the concomitant fear and excitement associated with dados, none of the elaborate setting-up either, you can just relax and be yourself. You can’t of course if you’re not alone or if your inhibitions haven’t been well squashed by whatever it takes. When someone excuses his or her oafish rudeness with the belligerently dishonest conceit: ‘What you see is what you get’. I don’t think so, what I am going to see is someone who is so conscious of what they aren’t, that they defensively announce it up-front, which perversely shows a degree of consideration.

I felt very considerate when I took Mrs Stimp to a wonderful barbecue, she had torn a leg-ligament, and though she couldn’t drive she desperately wanted to join with her friend Sylvia to celebrate Sylv’s Decree Absolute, well who wouldn’t ? I could, and should, have dropped her off and left but sometimes those unknown blackened things aren’t too bad once they’ve been thoroughly dipped, so starving, I stayed.

Despite the multitude of females, a chap wearing an innocently friendly demeanour like a burqa, cornered me on the patio between a white plastic table and a large hydrangea. Our conversation chugged along the preordained course, a few shrugs and the odd titter, comfortably at tick-over for five minutes until he slammed his foot down on the surreal pedal. From nowhere, launching effusively into a long monologue about a ‘friend of his’ who was working on, or maybe had invented, maybe in his garden shed, a stainless steel and neoprene motorised suction pumping device to help overcome erectile dysfunction. Green cardigan, pink tie, tan sandals, bald man, standing far too close and in a conspiratorially hushed voice using the words ‘erection’ and ’inability’ and ’maintain’ over and over, sort of brought it home how little control I have over anything that happens in my life.

There may well be a big need for this nether-Hoover but surely no need to explain to a complete stranger the finer details of its construction and worse still its modus operandi. He did though, at some length (sorry). I of course stood there and listened like the interested-faced and nodding fool that I am and at some point, though I don’t remember doing it, I must have said, ‘please go on, you’ll find me too conscious of social mores to stop you, fill my ears with the horrors resulting from foolhardy over-use’. I can picture Torquemada, his shoulders jerking spasmodically with suppressed evil-giggling, turning one over in his hands, “well Izzy, if this little beauty doesn’t get us some answers, I’m gonna be one surprised friar.”

It wasn’t until I’d extricated myself from all this man-sex medical madness and  Mr ‘problem penises’ that I realised, as he had been talking, I’d been Freudianly eating chipolatas one after the other, if I ate them all he‘d go away, is that how it works? Following my escape, I was warned in passing by the limping but still ever-observant Mrs Stimp that it wasn’t a good idea to eat so many sausages, sound health-conscious advice no doubt.
“But I had to do it, don’t you see I had to, he wouldn’t stop saying things about…well, about things.”
"Pull yourself together, you're a man, where's your fortitude?"
"I'm sorry, my upper-lip seems to have lost it's....honestly, this hasn't happened before, no really it hasn't, I'm under a lot of stress at work and....well okay maybe once before, but my doctor said if it continues there is a device that you put on your er.... upper-lip and it well....sort of, you know....helps sort of."

Was I just being squeamish? Really all that happened was that I shared in a uniquely inappropriate outpatient conversation for twenty minutes while nibbling on some bonfire-food. No, it was described with such clarity I knew at the time that it was going straight to the write-protected part of my cerebral cortex, the sod.

Mary Wollstonecraft naturally felt quite strongly about this as far back as 1792 and wrote,“…I particularly object to the lover-like phrases of pumped-up passion.” I couldn’t object more myself Mary.

Ploughing on, there are some excellent planes available for making a groove when you need one, and it’s worth going out of your way to ensure you feel that need. The average quite nice piece of furniture is riddled with grooves. They may be out of sight for the most part but they do still have to be parallel with the edge, square in themselves and not in the least fluffy. In other words, just the same as my grimacing uncle Norman.

Some wooden plough planes are works of art with ivory, exotic wood and one, a huge hit on ‘Pimp my plow dude’, even had silver embellishments. However in the more prosaic form, used in the world of grooving, they are a little cumbersome and adjusting a fence where both arms are held in place with wedges is, and I hate to say it, out-dated. The screw-stemmed is quite okay for the modern time-conscious woodworker.

Last Saturday Stimp jnr and I couldn’t wait to get to Mother-in-law’s bungalow for some light-weight plumbing, after which, she unrolled at arms length a scroll entitled ‘other little jobs‘, that read like a royal proclamation being announced to a pair of slightly surly but still basically acquiescent peasants. Younger Stimp and I worked our way through the list with a little mutinous muttering from him. I felt it necessary to remind him: “It’s granny, you can’t not do it, it’s one of those things that you just have to accept in life. Look on the bright side at least she hasn‘t made a carrot cake, now back up the chimney with you, or we‘ll be here all day.”

The burden was considerably lightened by her tutting depreciation, particularly when drilling holes with my most macho SDS drill, to put up a new curtain-track, “oh that is noisy, oh look at all the dust, that noise, can’t you do something, have you nearly finished, oh that is noisy.”
Made worse probably, because like everyone else, I have a predilection to drill some thin-air before approaching every hole-to-be, Uzi pointing upwards and just a couple of short bursts, checking bit straightness and direction of rotation which might have changed without warning. Mother-in-law is widowed, obviously sensitive to noise but very talkative, however not about her youngest daughter this time. We have got on very well since we first met, over a cup of tea with the future Mrs Stimp sitting on one side of her and my future sister-in-law sitting the other side, and me opposite them. Facing the inevitable judgemental ravaging from over a coffee table, just like so many times before.

Sitting in the same chair as I sat in then, it’s so tempting and futile to think what if I’d just put the cup down and said, “well this is all lovely, but in twelve years from now future Mrs Stimp, we’ll barely be talking, I won’t really know who you are anymore and you’ll have found other men you like better. As for you, future sister-in-law, Peter, who you will meet soon, won’t change, even if you move to the other side of the world, so how about dinner sometime?”

If I had, and she’d said yes, I might still have been there on Saturday drilling precisely the same holes, and drinking the exact same cup of tea, but I wouldn’t know a thing about what could have been called the 'Invigorator XL250’ I hope.