And life is like a song….

I heard Etta James on the radio today and cringed while grinning like a reminiscing imbecile. No smells just a record and another party that could have gone better, or maybe couldn’t have.

There was a time when I could still be embarrassed, way before I became too cynical. I was in my early twenties and in a longish term thing with Jackie, past the annual milestone, which I always found to be the tipping point that took it to long-term. There wasn’t a cloud on our horizon until her mother also became a year older and threw but still managed to hold a party in a large garden on a balmy summer evening.

The celebrations had gone without so much as a spilt drink, none of the older couples had brought their acrimony or their children with them. It was a ‘proper’ party with strings of coloured lights, tasteful music and Jackie’s oldest and closest friends. The very closest of these was beautiful Sue, long titian hair and just about wearing a flimsy silky backless dress-thing. I remember we shared an interest in Dickens, Kafka and Fellini, which wasn’t as irritatingly sad as it sounds. Shamefully I don’t think we once mentioned our mutual friend.

We were standing talking, probably far too much, when that old Beatles song Something came mournfully wafting across the lawn. We were alone as the rest of the guests had migrated some distance away and out of sight, to where food was being served, She lightly touched my arm and said, “ I love this, shall we?“ It was slow enough, and nobody was around, so I wrongly said, “why not“. Before I realised there was a good reason why not, we were in an unexpectedly natural feeling clinch. I could feel the warmth of her body through her dress as we held each other close, so close that as we danced it was as if we were a single entity, instinctively knowing which way to move so as to not lose each other. She laid her head on my shoulder, and as it finished the retro DJ seamlessly started the Etta James classic At Last playing.

If we had stopped then it’s entirely possible I would not be typing this at all, but instead asking: ”I know she’s our daughter but do we have to invite her boyfriend to your party Jacks? I just think he’ll do something embarrassing”

But we didn’t stop.

Sue lifted her face close to mine with half-closed eyes, we didn‘t say anything. I was thinking of nothing other than her incredibly intoxicating beauty as we started to kiss, tentatively at first and then suddenly with a passionate urgency, in an irresistible way we were locked in an embrace that I felt could have endured for a lifetime, time had stopped. Like an even more engrossed but less well-dressed Paulo and Francesca, we were floating in an unreality where nothing at all existed but the soft curves and heat of her pressing insistent body and the taste of her tender seeking lips. The music faded away and we reluctantly drew apart slightly, staring questioningly into each other’s eyes, I saw we were both confused with the intensity and unreality of what had just happened. The reality soon dawned on me as I glanced up to a see a group of people, including Jackie’s mother, all pointedly not looking at us, the guests had all returned holding paper plates piled up with sausage-rolls and drumsticks. All I could think was….. Oh shit.

Fortunately, for the last ten minutes Jackie had been indoors, with a few other people, probably pushing a lot of candles into the top of a cake and had missed what I think could be called some performance. You may say if pressed, the swine, the unspeakable swine and I think you’d have a point but in my defence: Sue was her best friend, instigated the whole thing, was really completely stunning and I do have the resistance of a wet tea-bag. As a defence it probably lacks that water-tightness element I’d hoped for. The next day something else was missing, where was the guilt hiding? I know I should have been racked with it, but nothing, not even a tiny malnourished pang that hardly had the strength left to reach the surface and feebly call my name. Excellent, that meant it wasn’t that bad, I could always rely on my trusty barometer of contrition. So it was merely a moment of temptation and as long as nobody told Jackie, then we could continue on our path to a wonderfully happy future together. Naturally, she left me a few days later.

I never saw Sue again either, I didn’t even know her surname and besides, to have seen her again would have been pointless, nothing ever again between us could have surpassed those few minutes of blissful ecstasy found on a lawn in Essex, on a warm night in July.

Poles apart but so together.

It’s been an exhilarating few days since a few days ago. With the soft springy-fresh fabric conditioner weather here, the golf-boys, none of them could realistically be called boys but it suits them for here, have made a concerted effort to play this week. Yes, boys play games, that must be it. I’ve played quite well, if I say so myself, three times in four days, yeah I‘m on a roll, like uncannily pink-hued square-ham. As he told us, Golf-Larry met his son’s new wife for the first time a few weeks ago, she was the whirl in a whirlwind romance in Kraków. Making Larry’s son, a huge ego in his twenties, the wind that filled the sails of Larry and Bev’s boat-rocking moment. Tinsel-town people would have treated the whole thing in a light-hearted way starting with, ‘hey mom, you know how I was in Poland last week, guess what…‘, but Chelmsford isn’t now and never has been like LA, so the funny side of it went unseen by Larry and Bev.

They’re an old-fashioned couple that were probably hoping to see an English Rose endlessly morphing into their recently deceased poodle Bobby and back again, in their digital photo-frame. Well, that’s not going to happen now as shiny-new wife is called Anka, and as Larry was reeling off the list of her cultural differences I wondered if she realised what she’d done when she married the dote-smothered only child of fellow Europeans Larry and Bev. Is it word-association that leads Bev to dread that Anka will hold back her pride and joy’s clearly charted progress to a corporately stellar future? His actual rightful destiny I believe. Perhaps it’s the distrust of fractured language that confuses the nuances and insinuations that we like to read in every conversation and then woefully misinterpret, perhaps it’s most likely to be blind prejudice. But really, what do I know, I’m just a newly-reconstructed reconstituted ham-man.

In my next life I don’t want to be that. I want to be a fat-man in a shimmering England-shirt and sagging side-striped joggers. I want to strut wherever I go. All the time. I want to push trolleys of Heineken out of supermarkets shouting at my kids who are dressed just like me, to watch it. I want to puff a bit when I put the cans in my clean-me-daubed dusty Vectra and shout at my kids to get in. I want to hear them argue who gets to sit in the front only stopping when I shout. I want to light a cigarette as I drive away. I want not to care that diminished sevenths make Moonlight Sonata sound sad if it does. I really want to run my hand over my cropped-head in frustration and shout when it goes wide. I want to make fists of rage and light a cigarette. I want only to ever speak to people I like and only ever about what I like. I only want to see things I want to see. I want a short selective memory. I want to call women in shops and everywhere else love. I want to not have a past to miss but find now complete enough. I want to be well chuffed when I‘m not shouting. But above all things I most want to not want to want to light up a cigarette every day when I’ve given up smoking for thirteen months.
 

 

My sister-in-law occasionally lights up, more than just the world with her smile, and when we’re together I’m very passive about her smoking, I enjoy it in a way, so it really doesn’t come between us and even if I could, I wouldn’t change a thing, even in another life. Like Larry and Bev she lives in Chelmsford which means I was wrong earlier, it is actually the wannabe-city of at least one angel.

A penitent adrift in a sea of nostalgia-junkies.

Last summer during a brief lull in the vitally important IT work I joined a well known site designed to bring old friends back from their comfortable obscurity and confront them with, well myself I suppose. So many people who seemed exotic and exciting had spent so many years in a tax-office or an insurance company, and so many marriages had run aground. If, like me you are a slave to mental imagery, Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, may also have been your first- choice visualisation. Like a lot of shy people on that site I didn’t provide a profile or a picture, that would be too much like wildly semaphoring with my oldest pants above my head and shouting, “over here, I’m right here look.” And then inviting constructive criticism from my peers.

“Are these the actual pants Mr Stimp?”
“That’s right guys, these are the actual pants that appear in the blog.”
“Awesome.”
“Gwyneth said ‘no way darling‘, but I insisted on keeping them in, they’re integral to that whole entry, I told her if the pants go, I walk. As you can see guys, in the final cut they stayed.”
“Awesome.”

Presumably, plenty of people would have correctly pictured me on that raft, probably as the idiot who has somehow conspired to lose his underwear in the shipwreck. The actual occupants of the raft that the painting was based on only managed to endure four days before succumbing to cannibalism, that doesn’t seem very long. I think I would have plumped for a couple more days of belt-tightening.

Aren’t we all like asteroids? Constantly circling on more or less the same orbit, now and again nudging into another asteroid, sometimes staying next to it, sometimes veering off to take up another place, but still in the same relative orbit. I don’t know what I thought had happened to people I’d lost contact with years ago, maybe they’d just disappeared or been Orwellian-esque unpersoned. I don’t remember thinking about them, and if I did they would have been locked in our mutual-time, never growing older, until that is, signing up to Friends-realistically for the morbidly sticky-beaked.

It turns out they hadn’t disappeared at all, they were still in the belt, still circling. One kind soul wrote very briefly and almost poetically in their concision: “ Do I remember you ?” I remembered him very well and consequently had to reply, “No, I'm afraid you don’t.”

I did write to a few and a few others wrote to me, because that’s what it’s all about and it was mostly kind of pointless, like swapping c.v.s to get non-existent jobs. When you haven’t seen someone for years, after the quantity and quality of children has been duly itemised, and the list of career-shifts or otherwise has been detailed, it comes down to the car that you’re driving. Every time I look at my present car, I forgive it for depreciating at a Zimbabwean-rate and it’s drink problem and it’s expensive shoes because it’s beautiful, so very, very beautiful.

These were people who I don’t know, and who don’t know me and were they ever close anyway? Were they there for me, for instance, when I felt so utterly alone, crying out helplessly in the darkness of my own soul, brought to my knees on the cold, hard floor of despair. Unable to escape the torment of my mind’s imprisonment, futilely praying to a God I’d never known, my heart wrung with a muted, but very real, fear that the rest of my life could be this and only this and no more? Of course they weren’t, but to be fair, nobody else was there either. That sticking lock on the bathroom door took some manly-jiggling that day, I thought it was all over. I have since left a screwdriver propped discreetly in one of the holes in the toothbrush holder. That might count as a useful tip, another one could be when the house is empty don’t lock the bathroom door. I can’t imagine it would be easy to write a wordy farewell note on a roll of Andrex Sublimely Soft with a blunt frosty-pink lippie.

More sadly introspective still.

I was naïvely surprised to find the page of my first serious girlfriend, just looking at her name written there, I admit hurt in a way that after so many years I didn’t think could happen. Life is full of surprises when you are as soft inside as a Tortilla wrap.
She was someone from way-back who was so significant at the time that it brought back a whole lot of memories, it actually brought back a whole lot of guilty memories, if ever there was a person who deserved so much better from me it was her. It was a first awkwardly-honest relationship that was so intense that it seemed, in hindsight, destined inevitably to burn-out completely. Maybe it was always going to finish, but I think I hastened the conclusion. For nearly two years we were, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating, two people trapped in a Greek tragedy of our own making. It kind of set the trend.

But it was important, those were formative years, I would have liked to have met her a few years later. There was a brief exchange of a few emails, which impressed her so much I think she decided I was a melancholic half-wit, I’m really not, I’m very cheerful, almost ebullient when I’m not typing; people prefix their questions to me with, “As a cheerful, almost ebullient half-wit Stimp, do you think that…”

Then she unfortunately just figuratively vanished again, I can’t blame her, could you imagine that a self-assured and successful woman would do otherwise? No, probably not. For two people who meant a lot to each other we never properly said goodbye the first time, and now we haven’t done again as strangers.

And not sadly, but still introspective of course.

After all this intrusive imposition on innocents, I thought it might be sensible to avoid one or two other ex-girlfriends on there, when the last thing I remember one saying to me was ’screw you Stimp’ (classy and to the point ), I can’t think we’re about to be reliving a whole lot of cherished moments in the near future. These are the sort of recollections I can happily deal with. Overlooking disbelief, I would make a tremendous Catholic, every day impatient priests would drag me out of the confessional, kicking and repenting, by the hairy collar of my industrial-strength high-visibility hair-shirt.

On a more uplifting note, and there has to be one always, there was some good to come from joining the site that reunites, I met up with someone for coffee in the metropolis that is Colchester and we had a few hours of memory-searching nostalgia. She had been just a good friend at school so it was a lot easier, she had hardly changed and she insisted I was still the same, which really wasn‘t very complimentary. I was taken right back to the sixth form common-room, which reminds me, I must go now to agonise about my hair, chew on some Polos and where’s that bottle of Blue Stratos.

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.

I really wanted raisins again but instead got Aegean seaweed.

There are people who insist they ‘think’ in smells but still feel compelled to describe them to themselves and, I’ve noticed, others who have to work with them.

“Whenever I think of the number ‘nine’ I think I smell bacon.”
“What do you think of when you smell bacon?” I asked him.
“Bacon.”
He replied and gave a ‘what else did you think’ sort of disparaging shrug and slight shake of his head. The answer I was actually looking for was, “I’m sorry, I appear to have been something of a twat again and now I’ll quietly get on with some vitally important IT work”

He was an irritating, always being different to be more interesting sort of bloke who left three weeks ago, to be replaced by an interestingly different sort of woman named Karen, who is not at all irritating, quite the opposite.

When Karen leant over my left shoulder two hours ago to peer, I presume, at my monitor and to ask a vitally important IT question I couldn’t help notice her luxuriant auburn hair actually smelt of a beach in a very distinctive way. While she was dangling her locks in my face I found myself thinking less about the catch rules for method declarations and more about a couple of Croydon’s shiny-pink seals hauled up on a stretch of Turkish sand. I didn’t want to be on that beach, or any other beach actually, and to compound my discomfort the Croydon-two had latched on like a pair of hungry babies, from hotel to Lycian harbour, back to hotel and to beach. If they could have slept on the floor in our room then we wouldn’t have been forced to lose even more precious hours of togetherness in their company.

If I was on that beach tonight and I told the Croydons that this place smells exactly, no really exactly, like my colleague’s hair they might have suddenly found they wanted some just-us time. But I don’t think I’ve ever found it in reverse, for instance some cakes smell of old people but I’ve surprisingly never thought of Cream Horns while queuing in the village shop where there’s a permanent elderly presence. Hence all the queuing, it seems to take them longer to buy two carrots than to peel them, cook them and bitterly regret that they don‘t taste like carrots used to taste. So if we do only associate scents in one direction because our brains are wired that way it seems illogical, unless we’re trying subconsciously to put something tangible where only an abstraction of a smell exists.

Scent is of course a powerful sensory memory trigger, and hair is so odorously evocative after the chemical-plant leak has blown over, a day or so after washing, and probably unique to that person. I don’t know why or how Kaz managed to get close enough for all this hair association, she is by her own admission very tactile, so I suppose that’s why, and the how was just a matter of leaning over too far. I can remember various girlfriend’s hair smelling of apples, hot wet jumpers and airing cupboards, which can be perilously close to essence of old people, but my favourite was dried fruit.

Relational memory perceived from the olfactory system must serve a purpose that we no longer depend on perhaps and it seems more accurate than sight or hearing for painting a detailed picture, even one that’s better forgotten. So we must all be carrying around hundreds of thousands of possible images and long-winded memories along with a few thousand recognizable smells just waiting for the bridge made in a millisecond; by someone who’s irrationally keen interest in JavaScript is only eclipsed by her complete disregard for appropriate personal proximity. It’s the Croydons all over again, well maybe not, they weren’t extremely attractive and their hair, surely, must have smelt of this office.

Several unlikely predictions and some clichéd northernisms.

When we have another Cretaceous-finale Chicxulub size impact, in the aftermath two things would survive to see the new world order, cockroaches and wooden rebate planes. Everyone has some of these skewed planes, I have some I never see, but they’re there, lurking sullenly waiting for their big day, always there. If I can find these harbingers of our eventual disastrous Hollywood moment, I will take a photo, but they’re just blocks of wood with a blade.

However, there are some more interesting alternatively-square metal planes, amongst them, the Record 712, 713 and 714 and the Stanley 140. I can’t say much about something if I haven’t actually got one so I’ll ignore the 714 as if it never existed. It will be like the older brother to the other two Record boys who somewhere along the way went wrong and now the rest of the family won’t even mention his number.

Mentioning things going unmentioned, nothing more has been said about my sister-in-law and Pete-mate parting. Though superficially this seems relatively inconsequential for everyone other than them, I have a premonition that it could be the catalyst to a dramatic soapy-moment that changes everything dramatically. I expect the whole story will come gushing out when I do some overdue mother-in-law sealing, that’s not a euphemism, she really does need something carefully smeared round the rim of her 60mm waste-outlet.

Living in the south of England where, as every northerner knows, by law there must be scatter cushions in every bus-shelter, we can easily overlook how tough and monochrome it is up there.

“Mr Hampton sir, I’ve designed this new plane with t’skewed blade, I was thinking about some improvements like a proper enclosed rear handle?”

“Nay lad, that lump sticking up is just t’ticket“

“A nice fence with t’two arms ?”

“Nay lad, think of t‘cost”

“A screw type adjuster for t’blade Mr Hampton sir?”

“Nay lad, needless luxury lad”

“What about a spur for planing across t’grain?”

“Nay lad, are you from t‘south by t’way?”

“Can we call it t’759 ?”

“Nay lad, far too much, call it….. t’712”

And so, somewhere in the backstreets of North, in a blaze of indifference it was born, the plane that could have been a contender, if only…..

To be fair, perhaps Record saw that the American 289 only had another 15 years in production and so it wasn’t worth copying or maybe they, like Churchill, foresaw the coming conflict and thought, no point in making something fancy because we’ll have to stop half way through the war anyway and make bullets. Whatever, it doesn’t seem to have been produced for long, consequently there aren’t that many around. I bought mine really to just have a look at them. My middle name is decadent, I have all my cravats made by Lithuanian monks from material woven entirely from the fur combed secretly at night from rabbits that are kept as pets in just one particular street in Hemel Hempstead.

They seem too big for a plane to make fine joint adjustments and too small for removing a lot of wood; but being skewed they do work very well across the face of a large tenon, which is good as it has cured me of indulging in the frankly unnatural practice of using a shoulder plane for this. For small tenons there is the Stanley 140, a skew-bladed block plane with a prosthetic side, once this is removed it will plane right up to an edge. If all the hours of searching through shavings to find the weird-thread screws that hold this side on had been used constructively over the last hundred years we might now be travelling to work in hovercrafts and eating artificial cod. A future that we were once promised.

Nicola cast me aside for a teacher called Nigel and I couldn’t believe it at the time, I thought it was all going so well between us, we’d been dating for about six months, maybe more, I’d shaken hands with her father, he’d even gripped my elbow when we did, we’d bonded. She said, that though she had grown very fond of me, like a re-homed dog I suppose, she couldn’t picture us together in the future in any positive way; just that, nothing else, she was probably sparing my feelings and it was really something much worse. However, I happened to meet Nigel a few weeks later and was relieved to discover that he was a great bloke, funny, gregarious, generous, tall, square-jawed and most importantly not a dribbling hunchbacked blogger. She looked so right clinging like long-lashed moss to his chequered sleeve, laughing too readily and really hardly sneering at all at the girl I was with. I would have left me for him as well if I wasn’t me. Nicola was exceptionally brunette and lovable, but she’d seen our future and it wasn’t to be.

 
The Stanley 140 can also, of course, be used as an ordinary block plane and the slicing action works very well on end-grain, the one I bought, probably unwisely, has the early and very inferior adjustment lever, I expect that's what Nicola saw coming and just couldn‘t face the stigma.

Surely not at Easter.

I’m afraid so.


That blacksmiths traditionally never worked on the Thursday before Good Friday has always resonated with me, to feel the shame of your predecessors for supposedly making three long nails centuries earlier seems so appropriate to the Christian ethos of mankind‘s everlasting sin. Carpenters may have felt that their professional affinity let them off any such misguided, but nonetheless deeply felt, opprobrium for knocking together a couple of large pieces of Cedar. It being Easter has also made me wonder, if Christianity is so full of forgiveness, why then is Judas’s marzipan representation still banned from the top of a simnal cake. For no particular reason, other than maybe symmetry, I’d like to see it back with the rest of the apostolic balls.

Recently the General Synod chose again to ignore the marzipan issue completely and instead decided, with only two dissenting voices, that science and the Biblical tenet were compatible. Another milestone in Church of England capitulation to be acceptably open-minded, which can’t further confidence in the completely confused perception of the church, and in what it currently believes.

The bishop of Southwark, commenting on a leading physicist’s view that the universe was filled with unseen matter driven by an as yet unknown force, said: “If believing that isn't faith, I don't know what is. I don't think we need be defensive about ours.“ Within perhaps even the next twenty years, far more will be known about the universe, but religions, by their nature have to basically remain defensively static at their core; how many more pages of their book can they just simply disregard on the grounds of new-think, I think they may be facing quite a lot of defending actually. On a brighter and far more relevant note, next year marks the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible.

There are always new ways to be astounded by the Christian perspective, one of blinkered optimism, and devious selectivity following hard on the dictatorial heels of a historically pernicious and shaming past. Which is sidelined as old-fashioned muddled thinking, because now we know better, and we should faithfully peer further back still to a story that can’t be verified in any way to really see the roots of what we are faced with today. Man invented gods for explaining the inexplicable and control, lots of control, and there are deities with some serious domination problems stemming from the insecurity of being one over many, and there are always so many. Mau, Stalin, Pot, Amin, Minh, Doc and Tito all knew the sweaty fear of the sweaty masses, (not the dwarfs from hell just the bullies with short names, there were and are plenty of others). None of them had any need for repressive guilt-saturated religion; they had more down to earth and in your face methods of conversion.

A well-meaning and reasonable chap, in say 150 BC, without the overbearing religious rule-book, could have enjoyed a peaceful and harmonious lifestyle, not fornicating outside of his rude hovel, not nicking stuff, nor killing, or even coveting. Would the later prescriptive edicts really stop someone who was seriously considering doing any of these, it never did and doesn’t still, it can’t be true that because of this bossiness there has been less killing, adultery, thievery and coveting in the last two thousand years. I expect the Christian response might be that the reason there is still a great deal of most of the above is because people have turned their backs on religion. And now, coveting is out of control, as it was when 150 BC man, chewing thoughtfully on a turnip, looked at Mrs Jones from the next hovel and thought, ’she’s well fit, if I rub out Jones I could pillage her and his ox. Plus, I’d get the big self-esteem bonus of not having to keep up with them anymore, it’s a no-brainer let’s do it’.

However he probably didn’t, if he had, as an average sort of man then so would they all and the human race would have been run. There is no evolutionary advantage in killing Jones and reducing the gene pool in a predominantly monogamous society, and really, yes the ox was a nice set of legs, but Blodwyn Jones? I mean, well seriously, you just wouldn’t would you.

The rest of the advisory notes chiselled into stone are a little less concerned with nuisance neighbours and more centred on the actual don’t make graven images, don’t look at another god, and don’t take my name in vain. There are people who have discovered, after presumably some research of some sort, that God was a woman. Why not, it shouldn’t make much difference, and in a way it sort of makes sense. If we now translate graven images as the photo taken by you from behind her, when the one to worship was bending to pick up her print of Michelangelo‘s God creating Adam from where it had fallen, and then being forced to delete it at the point of a steel nail-file, then yes, I can see how they might think that.

Don’t even think about looking at another, “keep your gaze right on me then you can be sure you won’t get into any trouble, and when you’re driving, just the road, always the road, keep thinking of the road. As a passenger, I am not only watching the road, as I must, but also you. Don’t take my name and twist it to something you think is cute to get round me, I saw you looking at her, just checking for hazards were you? Oh I see, were you worried that her enormous boobs were going to crash into us from the pavement?”

The rest were fillers, don’t go to Tesco on a Sunday, that is quite a good one actually, I find the Sabbath shopper a bit more smug than the Saturday one, as in, "this is the only time I have to spare in a week filled with important big stuff, and I’m going to treat it as a casual recreational jaunt, not proper shopping. So yes, I am going to be slow, real slow and in your way as much as I can be. Look, I’m wearing canvas beach shoes and light blue shorts, that‘s how seriously I‘m taking it, okay?"

Finally, be nice to your parents and don’t bear false witness, you can try as hard as you like, as I once did, but to have your mother and father deported as illegal Albanians is a big ask. Even when you’re prepared to swear on a bible in court that they’ve stolen your real parent’s identity with a low-fat sex-butter email-scam, and that you’ve never seen them before in your life. We’re all okay about it now, we just hardly ever talk about what is looked back on now as a watershed moment in our parent/off-white sheep relationship.

The predominant colour where we live is green, out of every window it’s all a hundred shades of green and rural tranquillity, occasionally interrupted by the Jehovah’s Witness named John and his nameless taciturn friend of the moment. With a grandiose sweep of his neatly charcoal-grey suited arm, John proclaims all the greenness is solely the work of God; I know if we could have the same conversation in a piss-soaked needle-strewn alleyway he would rightly tell me it was all man’s doing. Perhaps then, God should have recalled Adam for a few modifications before he let it go so far.

When John first called, we used to mildly argue, in a light-hearted and smiling way, about all the standard things that every atheist spouts off about to a fundamentalist, Peppered moths, Eohippus, and not forgetting the dubious memory and manipulative nature of Paul of Tarsus.

So now, after two years of occasional visits, we are at an amicable impasse. We never seem to get much beyond the basics, Jung’s demotion of Christianity to a level of other belief-crutches would be a step too far, as would Nietzsche’s ‘the one immortal blemish of mankind’; and so we continue for the sake of politeness, forever slowly turning on the jammed-on-go carousel of flippers that changed into feet and the manifestation of the haloed-one in every leaf, blade of grass and insect.

I really don’t know who would get the credit from John if we could look at the 15,000 small African corpses from the last seven days, courtesy of God’s sleight of hand called malaria.

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