Dear Deirdre, my hands are size C, what can I do?

To the world of slavering woodworkers the 1970s brought forth the Record 044c and so much more besides. Glam- rock flared up and lapels grew as weeks shrunk, there were stand-pipes, biblical plagues and the Walls Kinky, plenty of platforms and not many trains, dirty streets, Dirty Harry, Debbie Harry and Hari Krishna; truly the decade that had it all.

Some people have rather derided the 044c for it’s plastic handle, completely overlooking it’s cellulose acetate open-form modernity and it‘s actual raison d’etra. Record cited the excessive amount of casting failures with the integral enclosed handle design of the 044, they also stated that with the new design there was now no limit to users hand-size. Whether the devastating outbreak of Sheffield Bigmitt in the mild winter of 1968 clouded their judgement on this, is impossible to say for certain, so many years later. However, the accolades heaped on the 044c by the Design Council can‘t be easily dismissed, someone must have thought it was cutting-edge technology. I wonder if any judge on that council ever adjusted the depth stop; I doubt it.

Putting that plastic expander issue to one side, and the knurled screws that hold everything in place, the rest of it, though quite roughly finished compared to the 044, is robust enough and does do what it was intended to. Should you ever find yourself in need of a French-sized groove you could do a lot worse than consider the 044c. I think someone was going to make a modern version of this plane, but I may be wrong or perhaps it never happened.

Pete-mate did ask me not to tell anyone, presumably he meant Mrs Stimp, he didn‘t mention the internet, about his Sharon-related confession. As if I would. I told him that its as if it had never happened. It did happen though and I have thought about it since in an ambivalent way, on one hand I’m disgusted with what he is doing behind my sister-in-law‘s back, and if pressed I may go as far as to say the swine, the unspeakable swine. On the other hand, he’s just a man, like any other, who is confronted with the rejection of one woman and his feelings for another. I envy Pete-mate his ability to not analyse everything from at least four different angles, it’s so simple for him. As simple as, that Sharon has apparently got one hell of a posterior, in not so many words. He is, as always, just saying what we would all be thinking.

I’ve been researching this whole casual attitude to infidelity thing and have found there’s nothing new in it at all, there is some evidence of it possibly happening several years ago. It comes from the journals of the prolific diarist Sir Thomas Houghton. This, from an entry dated 25 th July 1757.

(The first part of which was indecipherable because, for some reason ,the pages were stuck together on the original manuscript.)

..and as I was overwhelmed by the bestial crescendo I bellowed “God… save… King… Geoooorge” as is my habit, this brought Lady Houghton hastening from her chamber familiar as she is with my customs. Leaving scant time to tuck my old bowed psaltery away before she appeared at the library door. Mrs Harford much flushed as a love-apple through the exertions of her rather boisterous fandango sought the concealment of her kerchief. Lady Houghton was thankfully without suspection of our scrim-jiggling and I was much overcome with relief and sent Mary for pickles giving her 4d.

Lady Houghton and her companion played at cards til eleven, but as Mrs Harford bade us goodnight I was unable, due to my over-zealous worship at the altar of the pickle, to contain the expulsion of a series of thunderous ventings as I ascended the stairs. Both Lady Houghton and Mrs Harford took to giggling like farthingtarts and vigorously fanning of the hall in a much exaggerated manner, my countenance was most dangerously reddened and Doctor Franklyn was summoned forthwith to bleed me.

Andalucían triple meter folk-dance aficionado Sir Thomas Houghton; coarse certainly, yet touchingly sensitive.

Man-talk talked by two men talking in a place.

Ensconced in a comfortable chair, a drink sharing a table with my quietly drumming fingers, my face covered in an opaque layer of understanding and slightly frowning concern, I nod slowly and look across the same small table at Pete-mate. We were in a quiet pub last Saturday evening and as I watched Pete-mate’s earnestness soften, melt and dribble into the mould of self-loathing and guilt I silently prayed, ‘please don’t, just don’t Pete-mate, stop talking now or you’re going to blub, just stop talking please, like now would be good’.

I have known a few people who have expelled their entire myriad of emotions by overflowing quite regularly, and in women it’s heart rending of course, but easier to understand and cope with, sometimes it’s as simple as just 'ahhh'. But blokes? It’s difficult, almost tricky, I suppose I should be okay with it by now, it is 2010, but I’m not really. I think it’s probably my own fault that I ever have to witness such rawness, I insist on over-sympathising and you know how that works, it’s the worst thing to do with someone who is feeling vulnerable and emotional. I just can’t be the one to buck them up with a brisk slap round the face with a coldly sensible advice-fish; instead, I wallow right down beside them in their widening fetid pool of self-pity, and carelessly keep splashing them.

Wise sort of people are always gleefully prophesying that it, meaning anything vaguely enjoyable I presume, will all end in tears. Sometimes they’re wrong. I’ve had a relationship that all began with tears and just continued from there in a generally wet way, she saw everything through a pair of reddened eyes until the inevitable break-up where she didn’t cry at all. The arid irony, not even a faintly misty welling-up of relief.

Two Men Talking in a Tavern by Jean Charles Meissonier, son of the more famous Jean-Louis Ernest, shows how the evening should have been enjoyed in a more conventional way: jovial, wearing some tassels (a must) and everyone leaning at uncomfortable angles as if we’re on a boat. I’ve always appreciated Pete-mate’s simple straightforward bloke-approach to conversation and it generally follows a pattern: Melbourne, his job, Melbourne, the economy and how it affects him, Melbourne, politics and how it affects him, and sometimes Melbourne.

Being a social chameleon and a lazy one at that, if he wants to talk about the best place to have a meal in a certain south Australian city, the name of which escapes me at the moment, then I’m right there for him. But this quiet, heartfelt outpouring was something I hadn’t expected and wasn‘t prepared for, but here it was anyway, this time Pete-mate scuffed away the line we had clearly drawn for ourselves, and trampled all over our virgin ground-beyond. It was once such an un-blurred line, I think we can, and will, redraw it, just as distinct but moved forward by about twenty years. I’m not sure I’m completely happy about it, but who else can I blame other than myself, I could have told him, “Pete-mate, unless we start talking about cars within the next 30 seconds I’m going home.“

I didn’t of course, I just sat there, all acknowledging and ear-like, an unconventionally un-bearded campfire councillor at a man-retreat in some well-hugged woods, repeating ad infinitum and nauseam, “let it out, that’s it, let it all out.” Everything he wouldn’t say to his wife was let out, and from the same bag some revelations escaped, one called Sharon, that I still find difficult to assimilate, I was shaken, but I am as easily shaken as a wet lettuce leaf.

If you’ve read any of the previous things here, you’ll know. But if you haven‘t, Pete-mate is married to my sister-in-law, an absolute angel, and since their return to this country there’s been some fraughtness, which has been simmering under the surface, she is the younger sister of my wife, who I am distanced from, we have two children that keep us locked together, but not together, sister-in-law has no such children and Pete-mate has been somewhat wayward in the past, and from what he told me over a drink, still is apparently, she didn’t want to stay in Australia where they went to save their marriage in the first place, he did, she didn’t want him to, but he followed her back here anyway, hoping that things would improve between them, but now he wants to go back, she won’t, sister-in-law, who really is an absolute angel, has spoken too candidly to me over lunch, I wish she hadn’t, but she did, which shocked me hugely (again), I find some of what she said hard to believe, now that I know about Sharon, especially concerning a certain snake without a rattle, as far as I know she hasn’t told Mrs Stimp, who might or might not be surprised or even care if she was told anyway, Pete-mate is in a quandary, sister-in-law is at a crossroads, and in a nutshell, I am an innocent bysitter caught up in a tangled web of interactive information sharing and user-participation.

On a more savoury and uplifting note, the possibly excruciating one-man-sitting-in-a -pub-with-another-man-who-is-actually-crying situation was narrowly averted by Pete-mate rapidly turning sadness to anger and then to detachment and finally arriving with a fanfare and tumultuous applause at this week‘s upcoming test match. There was some harsh language along the way, but we got there eventually, panic over, well-done Pete-mate that was a close one. I was so relieved I bought him not only another drink but also a nice bag of crisps, good old cheese and onion; I wasn’t going to take the chance of it all kicking off again with a packet of those soured dream and chive flavoured prompts.

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.

The dichotomy of truth and belief.

When Dave golf-friend, puffs out his chest and tilts his head slightly back and to the right, he’s either having a fit or going to make a pronouncement, and sure enough: “I happen to know for a fact that…..” But quite often he actually doesn’t. He believes and turns that belief in his own mind into fact; it could be that it’s more reassuring to know for sure than to merely believe something is reality. Reality can sometimes be a generally accepted unproven truth, but that acceptance is based largely on a desire to believe, people believed in the reality of climate-change and it grew from theory to truth for many in an amazingly short space of time.

It may well be true that our homemade carbon dioxide is a culprit and not just a gas and we can believe that, but we can still believe that it is just still an innocent gas, and that the climate is fluctuating as it always has done, which we could believe to be demonstrably and indisputably true. How did we become this ball of tail-following sardines, with ears full of Bluetooth, ignoring the hardly-hidden agenda and passively buying carbon indulgencies, like leafy twigs, to brush away our footprints? Maybe it was the contagion of mourning during royal 1997 that started the ball rolling.

I sometimes have doubts in firmly accepted theoretical truths, but I have enjoyed some serious cognitive dissonance at times. As you know, that can mean knowing that something is true, but refusing, for your own benefit, to accept it, in a way ambiguity can be accepted and tolerated, even justified. Changing your own perception of the reality of a situation to assuage the unacceptable in unavoidable circumstances you find yourself in, could be called self-delusional I suppose. I think it differs in that you are conscious of, and not deluded by, the factual known reality and you choose to adopt your version of the perceived truth and avoid the intrusion of a paradox that is impossible to accept, unless you blatantly ignore it, which seems delusional. Not as harmfully dishonest probably as Roman Catholic  Mentalis restrictio, the convenient doctrine of mental reservation, a salve to apply liberally when deliberately deceiving anyone from a child to a court of law. Just come up with an equivocal answer to a tricky question, that you know will be accepted in it’s dishonesty, and if it’s ‘permitted’ on your part to be believed, and supposedly not ‘willed’ then you haven’t lied, and you can still go to Heaven. Hooray.
 
You may be shrewdly thinking this is all flabby trumpery, and it probably is, but there is an indisputably believable truth, that my left buttock is absolute agony, I have tried standing up and perching on one leg like a heron, but it hasn‘t helped much. In the last two hours it has decided to have it’s own migraine, finally disproving my long-held theory that only one thing can hurt at a time because my right elbow is also discontentedly mumbling. I could ask my colleagues about the possible reasons for a suddenly painful double-entendre, and it seems cruel to deprive them of such promising subject matter, but they’re not medical experts, a fact that hasn’t stopped us all in the past diagnosing each other with everything from post pharyngeal-trauma syndrome to a hiatus hernia. We have never once, not even once, been able to triumphantly plead later: “Ha! Told you it was, didn’t I? No, d‘you remember I said it was, didn‘t I ?”

The weakness of the human condition is full of surprises.

Without stunning, or any other type of good looks whatsoever, or even a charming or amusing personality, it was always a pleasant surprise to find that there were women, so obviously too good for me, who would find me initially vaguely tolerable. Some were not just out of my league they seemed to belong to a different species altogether, or so it seemed in those first few months of discovery, repeatedly convinced that I could cross any boundary, overcome any barrier (yes, even that we should have speciated apart 4 million years ago). But of course I couldn’t, and as the realisation cruelly dawned on me that, yet again, things were going downhill, and if I didn’t find an insurmountable flaw in her first, she would certainly, sooner rather than later, find one in me, I resigned myself to the thrill and optimism of another fresh start.
 

Grimacing uncle Norman would be so alarmed if he read this, his grimace could reach critical mass and implode, he comes from a generation where tolerance and convention could be relied upon to cast their resentfully benevolent and obscuring shadows over every problem. This can’t be the best way can it, or can it?

While I consider this question and some others, you may be interested to know that I’ve found one way relationship difficulties were tackled or possibly caused in the past, a past we can barely recognise now with all our apparent sophistication. It comes from the journals of the prolific diarist Sir Thomas Houghton. This, from an entry dated 25 th June 1757.

Upon crossing my threshold was most enthralled to confront the comely Mary galloping down the main staircase holding her skirts so high as to almost reveal her fadge-warbler (no, a cheap whistle ladies carried for their protection, sometimes under skirts, impractically). If the fair Lady Houghton would condescend to descend similarly I might be most euphorically disencumbered.

At seven we were with neither pickle nor lobster and shortly to be visited by Mrs Harford and Lady Houghton’s sister, Miss Dulch. I called for Mary to hasten and purchase victuals giving her 4d.
Miss Dulch arrived alone, Mrs Harford being in a poor state of dropsy and indisposed to join us. We played at cards til nine when Lady Houghton repaired to her chamber complaining bitterly of an ague on her spleen.

Partaking of copious pickles my blood had inflamed most dangerously and the vision of Miss Dulch languishing gloveless on her chair drove me to belay all propriety and invite her to give my Crumhorn a blow. My suggestion met with such an uproarious hystericalism from Miss Dulch that it brought Mary from the scullery and Lady Houghton from her bed. Was so mortified as to suffer a miasma of shame and collapsing before the library door. Doctor Franklyn was summoned forthwith to bleed me.

The very much misunderstood and music-loving Sir Thomas Houghton, a man of his time, in his time.

Bligh, blight, blogs and Barry of course.

Like Ellen Ripley, wresting optimism from the champing maws of disheartenment, Karen is back on top, stronger than ever and dragging me, the implausibly oversized newt in this analogy, joyously along with her. Her unintentional blight on potatoes, which is laid bare here, can already be consigned to the extremely practical three-tier plastic stacking vegetable storage system of history, what a relief to brush that under the carpet. We were idly chatting, passing the time of night on old sandwiches, namely the cheese and marmalade, a life-long favourite, and the medium to high-risk cheese and tomato, with it's inherent danger of bogginess, when she rather self-consciously and completely adorably admitted to cutting her tomatoes in a zigzag fashion, even though they‘re just for herself. She went on to say something about mozzarella cubes but I was only half listening, half wondering about the skill, aestheticism, and heroic impracticality involved in her impressive solo salad-sculpting. In fact I was deeply moved by how dedicated she really is, and looking back, how cruelly admonishing I had been over potatogate.

I have also been looking at some blogs, and I’ve been hearing the wet slap of the ‘next blog’ button too frequently, it’s hard to feel engrossed in even the ‘two lines and a picture of a raindrop’ minimalist’s damp-dream entries, though I did try. I’m quite tolerant and interested in stranger’s lives, but it was tough and I couldn’t do it for long, which tells me that if even interesting snappy blogs are easy to leave, then it’s just the three of us here, Dan, Benoit and myself, and at least two-thirds of us aren’t finding it a completely rewarding experience. But I’m going to put in more effort, I’m thinking along the lines of those raindrops mostly.

You can’t say I don’t, when the need arises, go the extra mile, on the very first weekend of last winter’s snow, with unusual foresight, I bought a Landrover and then ferried two of the guys to and from work when conditions demanded a more forthright approach. They of course, complained constantly about the ride-quality, dismal heaters and that we were going too fast, little realising that they were just there as ballast, they were merely pig-iron to the Indies and not, as they thought, valuable and delicate breadfruit plants from Tahiti. Barry, possibly the most whinging man I’ve ever met, after myself, actually hugged himself and closed his eyes for most of the journeys, but he was still there the next night, outside his house, shivering, waiting and whining. I don’t know why he didn’t understand, it was fun, we had empty roads and we had traction baby, real traction.

Another thing that struck me while looking in other people’s diaries when they weren’t there, was how unashamedly cheerful and positive most of them were, one that I can remember from about 7 minutes ago was Tim and his wife Rebecca and they had a sweetly chatty dual-blog, where they inhabited ‘Timbecca-world’, for what looked like about five months, then suddenly a redirection to the new blog, ‘Tim-alone‘, oh no, she’d left. Though he struggled on manfully, faithfully recording the everyday details of his life-alone, I also had to abandon him right after the photo he’d taken of a scratch he’d sustained while insulating his loft, it was too poignant and I felt too intrusive, he was in his bathroom actually photographing the top of his own head, alone at the time of course. Tim didn’t come across as a deliberately disingenuous diarist, but even if it’s not altogether true, it should be. And there might have been kittens, I saw a lot of kittens on blogs, and that really was genuinely lovely.

On an even lovelier and even more uplifting note if it’s possible, I have seen a lot of Karen up-close lately, the training in our particular vitally important IT work continues at the pace of a W reg Fiat Seicento in a head-wind, but we get side-tracked. She likes books by Carson McCullers and Faulkner to mention just three and has perfect teeth shining in a perfect smile, so there lies, along with sandwiches we have known, a few big distractions from the excruciating, nails digging into palms thrills of reflected cross-site scripting, possibly even less interesting than it sounds.

However, she does seem to be very interested in, and knowledgeable about, cooking (I’m trying to forget the p word), hydroponics, literature and probably loads more. I am tentatively beginning to ask myself if it is too soon, really too soon, to dream that if there is quite a big disaster, could we as a group that somehow, probably through nerd instinct, lived on and surviving in this office, be the start of a new post-apocalypse civilisation? I could take charge of making the tea and foraging for chocolate digestives amongst the nearby ruins, and Karen may well be, and I’m now certain she is, more or less perfect at everything else.

Paint and beauty are only skin deep, but potatoes….

Chatting idly to Karen at lunch tonight, I was able quite adroitly to steer the conversation eventually and finally away from Midsomer Murders and onto new potatoes, and naturally I asked her if she scraped hers, how I wish I hadn’t. “Of course not, that’s such a waste of time and anyway the skins are good for you, full of vitamins and things.”

I tried to hide my disappointment and returned, crestfallen, to the vitally important IT work, but I was struck by how little I knew this woman, on the surface more or less perfect, but then comes this revelation, ‘such a waste of time’ also hints at a far deeper malaise. I was sure she was going to be a scraper, really convinced of it, and then to find she’s a ‘just wash and boil’ person, well, I was taken aback and left feeling a bit disillusioned.

Perhaps Karen prefers the taste of the skins, or possibly she harbours a fear of nail-loss, she could be hydrophobic or relives a traumatic pre-divorce experience each time she holds a knife in one hand and a potato in the other. It’s symbolic. Here is just the place to apply Occam’s Razor, shaving away all the spurious theories, the simplest and best fit is that she refuses to spend her time on what she considers an unnecessary waste of it, or, exactly what she said.

I can’t recall many people in my past, if any, ever having been very willing to make the tubers go commando, and one or two wouldn’t even look at a potato, which left me either having to bow and scrape or just bend and scrape. Some are better than others for this I admit, but I’ve never found one yet that hasn’t benefited from some attention in a bowl of water. Nobody in their right mind would boil an unpeeled King Edward so why the carefree attitude to the new varieties? Titian wasn't very new, around 85, when he painted The Flaying of Marsyas, and it’s a painting I often think about when preparing the Murphys-nouvelle, I’d prefer not to, but it‘s a vivid reminder that there are worse things in the world of excoriation than just making potatoes all nice and smooth.

Marsyas, a Satyr punished by Apollo for some flute-based triumphalism, seems very stoically detached considering his plight, and during the laborious monotony of spud-stripping, it’s that kind of detachment that makes it all bearable.

The snacking dog was probably necessary in that gory scene in Hannibal, it was a gory film after all, but I think Titian could have omitted his small mutt; it is possibly the most disturbing part of the painting. Like any juxtaposition of intense horror and the blasé, it takes the suffering of the flaunting flautist beyond physical pain alone, to an undignified humiliation. Blood-spilling was just as popular with some people in the sixteenth century as it has always been, and was Titian pandering to it in a painting intended to shock?

This painting's subject matter is more subtly abhorrent than Bosch’s big triptych that is by comparison a grown-up page from My First Thousand Words or Goya’s uncooked-pork nightmares. Which, along with all the depicted decapitations of John the Baptist and Holofernes, are too animated and too impulsive, filled with urgency they lack the quiet concentration of the torturers and absorbed onlookers that Titian has captured, himself amongst them. The figure accompanying this scene on the viola is Apollo, who interestingly is shown as either disinterested or horrified with what he has imposed on hubristic Marsyas. It’s an oppressive and difficult work that by it’s parallel viewpoint and closeness makes it inescapably met head-on. Almost enough to make me think that I should just tip those spuds straight into a saucepan and escape the torment, but I know that would be wrong and I’d regret it, if not then, certainly twenty minutes later.

On a more uplifting note and this definitely is one, in bloke-mode there is the alternative, and far more pleasant potato-distraction, the very mild and appealing peeling scene to be found in the heady world of 1960’s Italian cinema, Sophia Loren doing her best in Ieri, Oggi, Domani. A film too enjoyable to even question if it’s any good.

However The Squeeze really was unquestionably a good film, so good that it’s not available on DVD (why?). It’s bleak and brutal British gangsters in 1977, and if you’ve seen it you’ll know the infamous scene with the disrobing, talented, but self-destructive Carol White, is not one that fits at all happily into potato world.

It might be better to not think of any of these things at all. But instead, contemplate the genius detective from Midsomer Murders, very much available on DVD (why?) formally Mr Bergerac, and if Jersey Royals are the best type of new potato to scrape, which was how this all started. I’m sure they’re not, and Karen can’t really offer an opinion, because she ‘just’ washes them. I’m now wondering if she cuts the skin off of cucumbers leaving each slice a perfect octagon, or does cucumber skin also happen to be, so very conveniently, full of vitamins and good for you.

Ploughing and a fruitless search for a neologism.

Retuning to the making of grooves scene, lets just pick it up as if we’ve never been away, the metallic plough plane is a very useful tool and I like them, not inordinately, because I am saving that reckless-love for the next group of monkeys sitting on a higher branch of the evolutionary tree. Other than their drawer bottom-duties, they are indispensable for a multitude of jobs and I find the Record 043 and the 044 the most useful for things like making guiding-tracks for moulding planes or cleaning the outer-edge fillet on a Grecian ogee for example. Both of these planes had some imitators.

Planes from the cold-war era.
“You have done well comrade Pemuvar, production of the P44 was up by 4% last month, one day there will be a statue of you right here in the square. Why don‘t you come to my flat this evening to celebrate, my wife has a beetroot.”

Russians are tough, being one-quarter Russian myself I let the motherland down badly a couple of years ago when I bought a British Anzani Iron Horse. It’s a two-wheeled motorised plough made for smallholders in the 1940s, when smallholders were still expected to walk a few steps behind their ploughs. After the customary hour of fiddling we eventually got the JAP 6 engine to start and I impetuously thought, great, lets plough.

It was an evil piece of machinery with a blind hatred for me, it has a form of skid-steer arrangement for turning, where you lock one or other of it’s two wheels, which, if you’ve ever driven a bulldozer you’ll know how turning can be quite violent if you’re on ground that’s at all sticky. With the Anzani it’s worse because you are walking behind it holding onto handles probably about eight feet from the centre of rotation.

What passes for fun in North Essex isn’t actually always necessarily funny, or in fact, fun at all.

We clattered and wheezed to the point where I had either to turn, or demolish the greenhouse. The revs wouldn’t drop, and as the machine has a centrifugal clutch, there was nothing I could do, and it punched me in the stomach with one of it’s metal handles and threw me aside like a rag-doll as it slewed round, I was doubled up in pain and half-buried in a hawthorn hedge as the brute ploughed it’s lone furrow heading towards my brother’s car, which at least stopped him laughing. I gave the orange monster to him and he took it away that same day. If ever there was a single object to define resistentialism, the malevolence of the inanimate, it was Christine the iron horse. There are a few words that I imagine are never spoken they just live their entire life on paper or worse just in this cyber-ephemereality.
 
I hate using the words snog or snogging or snogged in fact I can’t use them, it puts in my mind the unlikely and unpleasant vision of hogging snot, another word I can‘t tolerate. The alternative to snog is kiss but that is so mild sometimes, why isn’t there a good word for more passionate lip-nerdling? If you know the Latin for lips you’ll also know why that is a no-go area. However, philema and osculate are technically correct I think. Possibly.

There is a debate, not ferocious in any way, about the three strengths of Roman kissing, the osculum, basium, and suavium, from mild to Sue, and there is some confusion amongst classical references. Ovid, Vergil, Tacitus, Catullus, et al. have differing interpretations of the physical and social potency of these labels but perhaps a simple woodwork blog isn’t the place to delve into the possible misinterpretations of what for themselves at the time may have been a problem area.

Rene Yasenek could have said that, ‘osculating is a means of getting two people so close together that they can't see anything wrong with each other‘, and it would have been okay. But that word holds too many connotations of the osculum infame, a parody of bishop ring-kissing, you may remember the Goat of Mendes offering up his fundament in The Devil Rides Out, and elsewhere, and we probably don’t want to stray into that whole area of paraphilema. I imagine you might be sighing and thinking that to create a neologism by trying to revive an archaism, with the basium of life, is in itself impossible and not what neologism is about at all. Perhaps there isn’t a good alternative for 'kiss', but there certainly is for ‘movie‘, which is just marginally less hateful than ‘snogging‘.

How rarely films are accurately portrayed in real life. The doctor, played by Trevor Howard indulged in ‘violent’ philemi with Celia Johnson publicly on several occasions in Brief Encounter, but they got away with it because for some reason none of Celia’s many friends saw them doing this and then straight away phoned her husband to drop large 1940s hints.

Celia played the part of Laura with such believable inner-turmoil particularly when she was torn between joining Trevor in the borrowed flat or going home to her husband, children and middle-class security. It was implicit that, had they taken things beyond interosculating at that point, it would have meant the end of their respective marriages, leaving them free to be burdened with each other. She did eventually choose to commit to that fate, only thwarted or saved by the waving of the probably compulsory prohibiting-fist of war-time propagandist morality personified by the interrupting flat-lending surgeon. She was brought back abruptly to her dutiful reality.

In Coward’s original short play, he left it unsaid as to what happened in the flat. In 1945, films were for the masses and theatre perhaps for people who were less likely to find a new acceptability in the ‘respectable’ Laura character’s behaviour. The doctor’s dallying, despite having a family, is somehow portrayed as much less controversial or unexpected. It is a great film, perfect music, Coward’s brilliant screenplay and with moments of David Lean genius, letting Celia’s floppy-hair flop over her face for a long close-up when she narrowly avoids doing an Anna Karenina, and the opening scene of a train hurtling through the station must be one of the best of any film.

It would have been more understandable and possibly excusable if Jackie and I had been running out of steam before I crashed us into Sue’s unfeasibly resistant buffers at that epochal birthday party, but things were going surprisingly well, which makes it even more unconscionable. If I was Jackie’s mother I think I would have spilled the treacherous beans the second the door closed behind the last osculated-cheek goodbye, and I guess she did.

There are some people who defy your best efforts at affability, it seemed every time I saw her I left her with a bad impression, before I’d even left. Our introduction should have warned me things were going to turn ugly and stay deeply unattractive between us for the entire length of our parent/boyfriend anomaly. Jackie’s parental driveway was rather narrow and twisting, two basic faults in any driveway but nevertheless full of scenic beauty with a variety of bedding plants providing a riot of colour right up to and along each side. By avoiding her brother’s youthfully-parked moped I may have inadvertently put a wheel near the edge.
“ Mum, this is Nactus.”
“You have just driven over my pansies.”
“Oh God no, really? I am sorry.”
“You drove over mum’s pansies?”
“I don’t know, I don’t think so, maybe a bit. I’ll buy some new ones.”
“There we are, mum, he’ll buy some more.”
“Hmm well, we’ll see, what time will you be in Jacqueline?”

This last comment was directed at her daughter so no need for any sniggering, but in truth I’d fallen awkwardly at the very first hurdle and had to be helped away, from then on I saw motherly disapproval in every wrinkle on her face, and felt her pejorative secateurs twisting in my back every time I turned to leave. Before I turned to leave for the final time, I asked Jackie if a three minute sauvium was so terrible, so unforgivable, that because of it she had to end our relationship. She explained that it was just the tip of the iceberg, and that if I could do that, I could and probably would do anything, and now go away. She used some alternative words that, if anything, made it even clearer.

On a more uplifting note, even at the most Stygian times, there can often be found something good, something redeeming, almost something to be proud of, of all the birthday presents Jackie’s mother received, mine was the best of all, all her suspicions and hostility graphically justified, just beyond her herbaceous border.