A gathering of thoughts and spanners.

Here is a Record 043 plough plane and some relatives, all small, all good, none of them made for many years but still almost readily available. If my sensible waterproof apparel was zipped right to the top, I could point out the blue and russet Record 040 above has holes supplied to fix a wooden sub-fence and a flat side to the fence arm, whereas, to it’s eternal shame the red-faced Marples M40 has neither. I’m also starting to hear a faint chanting, “two arms good, one arm bad” coming from the tool cupboard again.

In moments of lucidity, I sometimes envisage a dystopia where the morbidly obese Saturday boys who had been left in charge of the cake shop for years are suddenly blamed by the untrained, imprudent and since-sacked supervisor for eating too much and putting the whole country in line for of a prolonged diabetic coma. All extremely unlikely I know, governments are there to govern, and they always have at least an inkling of what is happening and it’s possible consequences, that’s why they exist.

Friedrich ’Mr aphorism himself’ Nietzsche said something along the lines that extremes will always be countered with opposing extremes before a moderate situation emerges, it’s been a long wait for the moderate so far. He grew the most ridiculously over-sized moustache of any nineteenth century big-thinker, and wrote about how a thought, once it could be eventually recognised as a thought, arrives unbidden of it’s own volition and without precedent. It seems unlikely that a concept of any sort could arrive without any prior experience or knowledge of at least some element of it’s basis, if not a great deal more. I’ve probably now misrepresented the hairy one.

Every thought I’ve ever had, and there hasn‘t been that many, has been a combination of previous thoughts recycled to feel different, this could be because we are manacled by semantics as we mostly think in words, even when visualising known situations not only abstractions. How can it be possible to not think in terms of vocabulary, it can’t be, as you then have a feeling or an emotion, and with a limited bank of words to draw on, would it follow that thoughts are also more limited in expression and in some areas non-existent completely? Can a person lack the ability to conceive of an idea because they haven’t got the right language-tools?
 
How radical would it be if taught maths was reduced in the curriculum and replaced in part by a more philological-based logic that could be more accessible when needed. Having algebraic formulation and Euclidian irrationals pushed in your face and then rotated back and forth like a custard-pi by a lantern-jawed maths teacher doesn’t necessarily equip you with the confidence to rationalise anything beyond the logic of numbers and coded functions. It seems there must be a more effective way to instil a judged, balanced and most importantly, expressible and readily coherent way of coming to terms with even the most mundane everyday bafflement. I don’t constantly worry about these things, but I didn’t like maths.

However, everyone likes the Record 044, it’s just the way it is, well deserved universal popularity with just eight cutters, the one pictured above came with some extra continental sizes. I believe it was one of only a handful of Record’s own-designed planes and through this blog I have discovered, wait for it… that the long rods on the 1967 example above are shorter by about ½” than the long rods on an older version I have. Yes I know, wow indeed. I can’t completely rule out some tampering in their past, I haven‘t known them for very long, but if it is true and the long-rod length did change then that fact alone is worthy of some serious anorakism.

I’ve known for a long time that I’m an anachronism, so many people I know have parted company with their spouse and lived to tell me the tale, they make it sound easier than changing electricity supplier, I‘m still shocked though whenever I hear about it, frequency doesn’t seem to have lowered my raised eye-brows. But really, how on earth can the off-peak unit-cost be so reasonable? Talking of which, is it unreasonable to occasionally let your artistic bent straighten up and stretch, the boundaries of what is domestically ‘permissible‘? I don’t think it is.

Not a quiz, but nevertheless some questions. Do you have:

A shed full of old tools, some replicated several times over?
A piano, for too long tortured by a six-year old nephew?
An aversion to yet another murder in the hamlet of Midsomer Moistfart?
A foreseeably wet bank holiday weekend?
A spacious sitting room?
A conviction that Britain must have talent, somewhere?

If it’s at least two yeses then you’re through, so why not create your own homage to Brandon Truscott's "orchestrate entropy", a sculpture full of interest and excellent orderly simplicity, an assemblage of the discarded and discordant, given another bash at being.

When it becomes obvious what you’re doing, you may get a mild rebuke about the carpet, the piano or some other trivia, easily countered with, “no, no, no, never mind that, this is my actual tribute to a painstaking craftsmanship that was once common, it’s mostly lost now, don’t you see? By deconstructing it, I’ve re-borne a semblance of identity and a soaring optimistic template for us all, here in this installation, it goes beyond pliers, yes?”

And then, all that's left to do is nod encouragingly, perform the distracting mime of the shaking cup in front of your beguiling smile and just hope for the best, or at the very least, possibly a nice cup of tea.