The Howkins plane.

I’ve seen some mangles that have, and a few equally old garden rollers that have, even the occasional antiquated farm implement but there are very few woodworking planes that have the definite article cast into them. The Howkins Plane proudly does and it is a small self-importance entirely deserved for a such a unique blip in British woodworking tools. It was patented in 1913 and went into production in 1920, presumably the ‘war to end all wars’ put paid to an earlier introduction. I found something quite poignant in reader's questions section of the March 1923 edition of The Woodworker.

The Woodworker wasn’t in any way obviously political or socially campaigning, a few years later their editorial would regularly bemoan the lack of training and education in manual skills, but in 1923 it was all meat safes and enclosed washstands. So it is probably not surprising that on the face of it they took E.W. and others’ enquiry at it’s most pragmatic level. It is very difficult to find any accurate statistics on post-war suicide rates and even then the prevailing economic slump and political manipulation would have had a bearing, but 3 million British men experienced the ravages of life and death in the trenches and about 2 ½ million returned to a land unfit for heroes.

In 1917 Henri Barbusse, soldier and author, wrote, “People are machines of forgetfulness”, but unfortunately they are not always, and some men could not expunge the horror of war and I can’t imagine how many were living quiet lives of desperation until one day they decided to not. There was some enlightenment in the diagnosis of shell-shock, what is now known as combat stress reaction and 48 psychiatric hospitals were established to deal with those who were suffering. By the time E.W and others posed their question there were 65000 victims receiving disability pensions and 9000 were still hospitalised. Shell-shock was relatively short-term and well understood, respectable in a way and accepted after 1918. Post-traumatic stress disorder is far more enduring and the fear, acute depression and debilitating anxiety became apparent, as the name suggests, only after the war and would ensure, if someone sought treatment, an attached stigma that would make employment almost impossible to find.

Kafkaesque beaurocracy ensured that many discharged servicemen wouldn’t receive any monetary assistance, pittance as it was it may have gone some way to at least alleviate some parts of their troubled lives. The relentless hell that 1914 had brought on these broken men continued for many to the end of their silent nightmare, and a simple coffin must have seemed a simple way out. Lessons were learnt very slowly in subsequent aftermaths, and that there is a charity combatstress , doing great work that the NHS obviously can't fit in around it's fertility and gastric band priorities, speaks volumes on how far we’ve gone or haven’t in the intervening 90 years.

On a more uplifting note the Howkins’ cutter could and still can be raised and lowered by a well engineered mechanism as seen here.

Spot the difference, there’s only one.

There are some very good things about the Howkins, not least a flattened section at the front of the body with a thoughtful contour that is a nice bearing for even the most spatulate thumbed and the plane’s willingness to accept any type of cutter.

                                     

Well, I hear you say, that’s all fine and dandy, but if I buy a Howkins can I expect much in the way of travails or humiliation going cross-grain as if I were making a dado? No, despite your strange use of all of those words you can relax, there are bifurcated spur cutters that fit below the main cutter and goes wherever it goes. However, this isn’t the best plane to do that, if, and I think this may be a huge if, but if this was your only plane then you could perform the dado cut, but not with the aplomb and certainly not the flourish you might have been hoping for, as you will find yourself adjusting your cutter depth after every couple of strokes.

This constant twiddling will almost inevitably lead to a puff of between fingers derision from your audience‘s face, I assume there always is one of some sort or another who have a deep and meaningful relationship with their plunging router, and it will leave you with the telltale flushed countenance of 39 deficiency. But if on the other hand the dado is a stopped dado, or for that matter a groove of the same ilk, then you can raise your eyebrows, momentarily close your eyes and nod slowly with pursed but still grinning lipped and detached nonchalance, because it is in precisely the tricky subject of stopped ploughing that the Howkins has an o level. Not only that but it can also cut a groove that describes a circle or ellipse pivoting around a screw or similar put through one of a choice of holes in the extra drilled iron fence, stored conveniently above the quite crude wooden affair.

Some I’ve seen have threaded rod used for fence arms, this one has two countersunk set screws and for making an arc, longer arms will be needed. I have read some wild assertions about sliding dovetails somewhere, the fantasy for every combination planer, but without a handbook or instructions it may have been a different model. This is a model B, there were others that went back as far as A and then stretched to D, and there were without a doubt differences, without a doubt. There is also a complete mystery about their origin, nobody, not even the internet, seem to know where these strange outlandish planes were made or by whom, call me Nactus von Däniken if you like but what if ….

Litterolly on the edge of barbarity.

For forty years at 52 West 8th Street, Greenwich Village, Electric Lady Studios has been the hired host for a host of the great and good of popular music. A dream realised for Jimi Hendrix as an ambiance conducive for his creativity, sadly only experienced for four weeks before the official opening celebrations in august 1970. Three weeks after the party he was famously dead in London; undone and immortalised by his amazing talent.

Among the first artists to record there was another exceptional guitarist, Elliot Randall, who recorded a song that was never going to be played at the RSPCA dinner dance, Take Out The Dog and Bark the Cat, which is great in a way and here in the top corner. The only reason for this historical snippette is that Electric Lady Studios used and still do use Neve world-leading recording and mixing equipment from the Oscar winning Burnley company. It was on Neve technology again, twelve years prior to the studio on Montserrat being buried in volcanic ash in 1995, that The Police recorded their album Synchronicity, and it was on Jungian synchronicity and possible uncausality that I thought to type a few ill-chosen words but couldn’t think how to start. As you can see a start of a sort has been attempted but I've thought of something else, and not necessarily better, to maunder away over. So fortunately to avoid starting again, it just happens that at some point Lou Reed recorded at Electric Lady Studios; a man whose song about doomed youth (maybe) and needles, appropriately with some synchronicity, made over two million pounds for children in need.

Even what should be a perfect day can be marred, perhaps by a thoughtless remark, or the absence of a thoughtful one, possibly even by an ill-judged smile taken to be the worst type of smirky look and definitely by the same category of laugh. All this after you’ve managed to have pleasant weather, at least moving traffic and possibly edible food. But sometimes that really hard pip in the Satsuma comes from the least expected segment. A perfect day at the seaside with perfect Sarah promised to be so carefree, euphoric and filled with sun-drenched laughter, and it very nearly lived up to all those expectations. You may remember, because I keep bringing it up, she gave me up for Brussels, but this was before that cross-channel trauma. This was summer; our only summer.

Unbroken sunshine with light wispy high clouds (cirri in geographical terminology) and a gentle off-shore breeze covers the weather at the time, a small red bikini just covered Sarah and, if I remember correctly, I was covered by Norwich Union and sand flies. Ding-ding-de-ding-dong: we queued with the all the children for two 99s. For ill-mannered reasons known only to himself, Mr Whippy manhandled mine first, in the usual way with a sarcastically sullen dollop of ice-cream and then a haphazardly poked stick of chocolate in the top. I wasn't particularly surprised by this primitivism but when he carefully placed Sarah’s Flake at an unmistakably suggestive angle and gave it a gentle little twist with his thumb and forefinger just to make sure it was settled before handing it to her with a grin; I literally couldn’t believe what I was seeing. A few years ago, and really not that many years, my riding glove would have been out of the back pocket of my shorts and round his leering face quicker than he had time to say, “There you go darling."
 
For some while after, I mulled over whether I should actually challenge him to some sort of combat, demand satisfaction in the way of, "Outside Whippy, now!", or more politely, "Outside Whippy, at dawn!", but on reflection, what would it have looked like to Sarah, resorting to vendor violence at a resort, over an obscene ice-cream? Not good, she was such a gentle thing when she was awake, and I’ve always been non-confrontational and placatory. This is not a particularly worthwhile evolutionary mechanism, survival of the calmest doesn’t have the same ring of alpha-male confidence, but the guiding precepts of a civilised society can’t be for everywhere except the beach, a place where I think they should be more strictly adhered to if anything. It can, after all, be a place of near-naked vulnerability.
 
I have spent far too many weeks with sand in my crevices for the benefit of people who wouldn’t notice if I crept away and returned every couple of hours to apply more unction to places they couldn’t reach. I’ve looked at so many horizons, at so many boats and ships moving so painfully slowly across them, wished for so many kids to conceal large sharp rocks in their sand castles before leaving them for passing corpulently loud middle-aged Teutonic men to later take manly flip-flopped kicks at in front of their own kleine kinder. I’ve been on empty beaches where people have settled themselves so close by that I’ve caught their gaze of, “You don’t mind do you? It’s not your beach and anyway it’s safer if we huddle together when we’re in large open spaces”. I’ve been on crowded beaches where the odour and hum of humanity hovers like a shimmering pall just above the carpet of prone sizzling pinkness, punctuated by the occasional joyful squeal and splash of holiday hand on holiday buttock. Other places where, probably driven by their neighbouring cacklers, everyone prolapses into the mind-set of a flock of spiky nesting seabirds, most noticeably on Corsica, or it might actually have been Cromer.
 
I have only ever once expressed a desire to go to a meeting of sand and sandal and that was when I made a long detour, to everyone’s utter disbelief and horror, from the ordained migratory route south to visit St Marc-on-sea where Mr Hulot’s Holiday was filmed in the early 1950s. Surprisingly and disappointingly the village had changed. The hotel was still there but modernised, the tennis courts had gone and I couldn’t find the graveyard or the guesthouse where athletic plaited Nathalie Pascaud stayed and spent most of her holiday voyeuristically watching Hulot from her second-floor conservatory. In an effort to take their minds off what was a becoming a slightly disturbing day of enigmatic searches, they hadn’t seen the film, I tried to explain to the young Stimps the difference between coast and shore as in seaward boundary of land and vice versa. Younger Stimp pointed out that the tides are variable at different times of the year so where is this old person’s so-called boundary, fortunately we had brought a so-called beach ball so I was able to give it a sturdy boot and shout, as any confronted father would, “Last one to the ball doesn’t know anything about geographical terminology.” It turned out that I was the ill-informed and hyperventilating laggard. I'd kicked the ball up the slope of the beach, by half-distance I was ignominiously like George Stevens in The Hill. How we all laughed the next day when I’d recovered just enough to faintly utter another simile and another film they hadn’t seen.

Back at the jewel of England’s Eastern Riviera, not in the least exotic but charged with more seething glaucous undercurrents of passionate and erotic confusion, misunderstanding and doubt than any blanched Caribbean shore (or coast) basking gentle and mugging under an azuline sky.

I couldn’t bring myself to eat that 99. I discreetly let it slip silently from it’s soggy cone. If I was at all artistic, called Ingmar Stimp and this was Summer With Sarah, right there would be the metaphor for our relationship disappearing into the sand, with both of us just silently and passively watching it slowly melt away to nothing.

“He’s still there, go and get another one, you like 99s.”

“No, I don’t think I will, I used to like them, but not any longer." I sighed, “No, not any longer Sarah.”

"You are silly, I love them...loads. I could eat three."

"Could you though, could you really?"

"I'm insatiable. Look at that perfect sky."

"Yes, it's perfect."

"Umm."

She had kindly saved it all up for an unintentional iconic big Flake finale.

Languidly, stretched recumbent on the sand with closed eyes, a vision of tanned epicurean drowsiness and glistening sensual abandonment. I might have been patently the crumbliest flakiest of the two of us but I didn't care, I had to look away; only to be confronted by another hazy and blurred horizon harbouring one or two clouds I couldn't possibly have noticed at the time. I was preoccupied with pondering over how almost relieved I'd be if I turned around to find Sarah gurgling with gluttonous satisfaction and her lovely face completely veiled with smeared moist chocolate fingerprints and tiny brown bubbles inflating and popping wetly at the corners of her smacking lips. But I knew that would never happen, it couldn't, she was insatiable and perfect, so I probably continued staring out to sea and probably to the southeast and towards that country probably famous for producing just one thing. Well, maybe two: chocolate and the bitter taste of rejection.

All things to all men: The universal fallacy.

Picture yourself hesitantly entering your village hall where you find an ambiance of loathing and no more than six or seven fellow residents spread amongst the serried and optimistic rows of chairs, you choose one near the back and sit uncomfortably. As you do, the chair grates sharply against the wooden floor, a middle-aged woman turns her head sluggishly, and warily stares at you with tired grey eyes. You think you may have seen her a few times in “The Decapitated Stranger”, you nod and smile wanly, without acknowledging she returns her attention to her lapped and wringing hands.

An unprepossessing man in jeans and v-necked green wool emerges squinting, from a kitchen at the back of the hall, dabbing at traces of Ribena on his chin he closes the long yellow-streaked muslin curtains covering every window. A soiled and faintly xanthic gloom spreads like sulphurous Tahini over the room. He leans down and flicks a switch, the ancient slide projector he has set up earlier hums into life and a long mote-filled cone of light misses most of it’s intended target of an unfurled and creased screen. The man sighs quietly and adjusts the beam. He is impatiently gripping a pointed wooden stick and starts to rhythmically pummel the palm of his left hand. He stares expectantly and with frowning foreboding at the door as if he's waiting for one particular person, yet to arrive. He checks his watch and with a staccato sniff of fleeting petulance finally begins to speak. Not as you had anticipated, eruditely and entertainingly on the incursion of flaxen Viking hordes into your village a millennium in the past, but instead, in jaw-hanging disbelief, you hear my unmistakable and uncannily accurate impression of Barbara Windsor:

“’Ere mister, looking for a good time?”

“Er…would you um…I mean do you… do….er, centre beading?”

“ Alright darling, but get yer skates on, I ain’t got all day.”

The Victorian harlot of plane-world is the combination plane. It is a remarkable piece of metal originally designed, and not by Stanley, to replace a multitude of single-minded wooden planes. The most commonly famous multi-plane must undoubtedly be the ubiquitous Stanley 45, which like many others had a variety of different cutters that could be used in one body. Rather unsociably, Jack the Ripper was doing precisely that to the above, four years after the first 45 hit the shops, sometimes the way things effortlessly juxtapose and interrelate can almost look deliberate.
 

 
This very early example dates from around 1884 and for Stanley this could be thought of as the forerunner, the vanguard even, to a dynasty that would survive for well over a century and right up to the present day, still made by other people who sadly no longer wear bowler hats while at their labours. It was originally supplied with 18 cutters and a mislaid slitter, which might have disappeared 125 years ago, stealthily over the back of a workbench into a pile of New England shavings, a sobering thought. All the securing screws are of unslotted brass and short rods were still a distant dream. The familiar 78 type tri-lobe slitter was present on the main body and the sliding section, and would remain unflustered and not that good while everything around it contorted and painfully transformed for the selfless good of the whole.

The cast iron body was finished with black japanning, which has lasted very well, if it hasn’t been repainted. There was no thought initially of interrupting the flowers in the casting with the Stanley name or number, but that was soon to change.

For the next few years there were minor tweaks, the screws became slotted and the fence got scrawled on, but it basically remained recognizably the same.

 
In 1890 the 45 underwent a major non-invasive facelift, nickel-plating all over, several of Stanley’s products were forced to wait years to be blinged-up and another bestseller the 78 never got this treatment at all, maybe a cost consideration. I prefer the japanned look anyway, more cosy kitchen-range and less Mitsubishi Pajero.

A few years earlier the fence had become reversible with a flat section, giving more reach from an edge.

With this particular plane someone and probably more than just one someone has been very careful in the past century with the slotted screws, they’re surprisingly hardly burred at all.

By 1907 huge changes had taken place.

The front knob had moved, cutter adjustment was screwed and the right-hand depth stop was now taken up and down by an excellent captive knurled-screw arrangement, I wonder why a similar device couldn’t have been used for the cutter and saved a lot of complicated casting, if you know and it’s not too embarrassingly obvious please comment.

The rods were no longer screwed into the main body, but free to be fixed at any distance, the Stanley 46, very similar in design and pre-dating the 45, never got any of this attention. To put this into the context of mankind’s evolutionary development, we would be walking upright at this stage but not yet going to a disco.

The front knob had become secured by a cast threaded protrusion from the sliding section, this was later to revert to the brass screwed method and I think this was the only retrogressive step. The cutters from here on were all notched for the new adjuster‘s lug, also the lower part of the handle had been re-contoured and is only slightly more comfortable but somehow looks more fitted and modern and consequently less interesting and charming. A rosewood fence appeared around 1896.
 

 

These two childhood sweethearts are from the 1920s.

Er, where have all the flowers gone? Pete Seeger reckoned they’d all been picked by young girls and lamented ‘when will they ever learn‘? Never Pete, until they’re named, shamed and given a hefty fine, sometimes you have to be cruel to be harsh. So here we are with the final incarnation of the 45, not that there’s a carnation or any other type of flora to be seen and hadn‘t been since 1910. Strange how the 46 kept it’s decorative squiggles right to it’s demise in 1942, bitter boardroom battles and motif compromises maybe.

1915 saw the introduction of the two-part fence with fine adjustment and other than some minor changes to trademarks and a blunting of the handle again, that was it until Stanley called a halt to the stippled madness in 1962.

The Stanley 45 evolved for the first thirty years or so, until reaching it’s ultimate form, it could have developed further but by the 1960s nobody cared, most of the world was getting plugged in to the new age of hot rotary action, trad-linear was for yesterday‘s squares, but there were a few cats still digging that old-time ‘to and fro’ scene. I’m very old-fashioned in many ways, always opening doors, throwing coats in puddles, that sort of thing and I have given up my seat on a train to a woman who wasn’t incredibly old, blonde, noticeably pregnant or in any way less-able, she was just standing there minding her own business. I have never been a commuter so am happily innocent of their ways, but I think I detected a little smirking at a neophyte.

So it should come as no surprise to me that I don’t often use a spinning Jenny and prefer the much more arduous, slow, frustrating and inconvenient but peacefully contemplative and esoteric ways of changing the shape of a piece of wood. Pete-mate can’t grasp the metaphysical concept of the doing transcending the done, neither can my brother, or any of the eight golf-boys, nor any of the villagers at “The Decapitated Stranger”, nor can the younger Stimp, or the critical Jesuits next door, sadly not even my angelic sister-in-law, or my elderly parents, or even grimacing uncle Norman, or anyone at work other than Karen. After the potato debacle, somewhat redeemed by a tomato, it seems hard to swallow but I can't believe a woman would fake a Luddism, would she?

As I mentioned about a week ago, the 45 continued to be made after 1962 by other manufacturers, from 1933 Record had been producing their copy: the 405. With the exception of only one other copied plane, the scrub 400½, and then because they had already used the number 040, Record always placed a 0 before the original number. Was the number 405 a typing error that persisted to the pattern makers and beyond? The 050, a smaller combination plane had been introduced the previous year, so perhaps the thinking was that there’s no way our most complex plane is getting a lower number. The 405, despite Record’s deviation from their usual numenclature   ( possibly nonword ), was made for 49 years with only packaging changes and thus giving it the longest unaltered run of any of their planes.
 

 
The one above is from 1959 and doesn’t look as though it’s been troubled with too much work in the last fifty-one years.

Sitting at the back but not lurking by any means is a modest hero, war finish was un-plated grey, Britain didn’t survive the blitz by having shiny 405s pinpointing every nocturnal woodworker for a passing Ju 88 to have a pop at. The plane at the front is from the pre-conflict careless banana-gorging days, and came with some extra cutters which I have painstakingly laid out with no regard whatsoever to any order or sequence. It must have been the era of the multi-bead, a moulding which always reminds me of those strips of childhood plastecine, starting life so brightly colourful and aromatic before eventually, care-worn and cynical, becoming brownly lumped and disillusioned. Like pasta, allegorising can be overdone and eventually becomes a soft and unappetising simile as if like a …..

Interestingly the boxes changed, becoming smaller but taller after 1945, I don’t know why, but I suppose we’ll just have to rely as always on what Jack Hawkins said, and with some feeling, to Donald Sinden in the 1953 film The Cruel Sea, “It’s the war number one, the whole bloody war!”
 
A great British film filled with snorkers, submarines, asdic, cocoa and guilt-laden voice pipes, that couldn’t have been made during the hostilities with it’s blunt honest realism, In Which We Serve served very well at that time and understandably so.
 
The 405 was a copy and a fairly identical one, but Sargent made their own version of the medium-sized combination plane and called it the 1080. There are a lot of similarities to the 45 but there are also some improvements.
 

 
As can be seen in this stunning and uninformative photo the 1080 was supplied with what by now had become the standard and indispensable array of cutters. This is quite a sturdy and simple plane, with a very comfortable and attractive handle and an adjuster that captures the cutter in two places; these are good things.

On the downside there is no micro-adjustment on the albeit reversible fence and the round headed set screws are frankly illegitimate, why have the shallowest slot at the points of most pressure, there is no film I know of that can even begin to give the answer to this domed conundrum. A problem, that could be more of an issue today than when this plane was still being made is the spur-cutter wheel, if you were indulging in an unnatural and embarrassing amount of cross-grain planing and wore the tiny teeth down on both your discs it could be awkward to replace them. Before your very own eyes your Sargent could die like an old sheep, but thank God there are many other ways to do ‘across‘ as it were, I outlined some a few months ago. The 1080 was manufactured from 1916 to 1949. For four years after this Stanley made it for Sargent and it looked very much the same as the rest of their badge-engineered clones. It might be best, if you can, to avoid keeping your 1080 under your pillow, it’s coated in cadmium.

There is no such problem with the Lewin as it’s mostly aluminium, there was a report years ago about a connection with dementia and aluminium but I can’t remember a thing about it now, however the Lewin only poses one danger and then only for the unwary or, through no fault of their own, the forgetful.

Sitting innocently in the corner of the spacious box like a gaping crocodile, the plane itself is less reptilian and more of a hedgehog. The numerous little spikes operate cams which lock the parts very firmly and quickly, it’s a pity that the fence locking cams have to have slotted operators, but I suppose it would have led to constant jabbing otherwise and mild complaint in the letters pages of woodworking magazines, as people used to before compensation was invented. Dear Sir, having recently lost three fingers to gangrene I would like to draw your readership's attention to the Lewin six fifteen's inherent…

If weight is an issue for you then the Lewin improved universal plane, and that’s what it is, could be just the thing you need, it weighs a size zero 3¾ lbs, little more a third of the Stanley 45. I’m not sure that a lack of heft is necessarily desirable in a woodworking plane but if you believe the handbook it was the number one priority for discerning craftsmen, along with an aluminium handle that was far more comfortable than a traditional wooden type, well it would be, especially if you‘ve just made a lot of planes with aluminium handles. A coupe handle at that, low-set to give a more aligned and direct focus for your push.
 

 
The cutters are the usual suspects with the narrower sizes left wider where they’re clamped for a better all-over clamping feel. The cutters are really more akin to a smaller plane like the Stanley 50, but the Lewin has enough of the larger Stanleyisms in it’s concept to be mentioned here, and I’ve taken it’s picture now so it is.
 

 
This plane from the late forties to somewhere in the vague fifties is absolutely British and slightly eccentric with it‘s cams, but nevertheless well-made and totally useable. There are also a vast number of them still extant and they’re very reasonably priced sometimes. I once acquired one for less than the price of 3¾ lbs of fresh Scottish salmon which Tony-golf, who is something of a gastronome, told me recently as salmon goes is nothing, and he spat the word out as if he‘d just found a contemptible tartan fish head in his mouth, compared to wild Danish.
 
As cups of tea are passed about, you murmur a few words of politeness and hastily leave the village hall for a cigarette. Stumbling into a drizzling crepuscule, you shiver and raise your collar against the dispiriting numbness you feel, and wonder if that was the nearest you are going to get to hearing about Vikings; maybe the second part would be better, maybe. You consider leaving, there is still time to catch a sizable gobbet of Midsomer Murders if you hurry, but for reasons that would require a cross-legged professional and an easily-reached box of tissues to explain, you push open the door to discover a new picture on the screen and the disconcerting mumbling has already started again.
 
1881 saw the last chance to celebrate a palindromic year before 110 more of living with an asymmetrical annus, and the publication of A Study In Scarlet, “ Make haste Watson, there’s the invention of a whole new genre afoot!” A genre that would inevitably lead eventually to Magnum PI. More relevant for here however, 1881 saw the introduction of Jacob Siegley’s No 2 combination plane, capable of ploughing, beading, looking great and everything in between.
 

 
Throughout it’s long production life, much of it in the hands of Stanley, the Siegley underwent several changes of cutter adjustment, they just couldn’t quite get it complicated enough. Yes, that does look suspiciously like a wood shaving, I can't help a feeling small surge of pride.
 

 
This one from around 1891 used a thumbwheel-controlled block that matched with a groove in the cutter. The sliding section is on the unorthodox right-hand side, which leaves your left hand free to multitask as there isn’t really a convenient place to place it on the front of the Siegley.
 

 
By 1902 a levered cutter adjustment was the answer that had been staring everyone in the face for years, again with grooved cutters. Any cutter can be used in these planes but if you want to make the most of all the bygone head-scratching you’ll have to file some transverse clefts in them. At this time the Siegley cost $4.50 and the 45 was $4.90.

The handle is the most comfortable of any of these type of planes and the spurs by their nature, that of a hardened nail, could conceivably outlive the most ardent dado enthusiast.

In a perfect world there would be a combined plane with the Sargent cutter adjuster, the Stanley depth-stop, the handle and spurs from a Siegley, housed in the capacious Lewin box or lounge, covered in floral fripperies and with Stimp cast into the fence. But in this imperfect world that is all the 45ish things I can think of at the moment.

As I kneel on the floor to scrape up the slides spewed from the box I have dropped, the door of the now deserted village hall swings open. I shiver as the frigid fingers of night air trace a path along my spine and I look up at the faceless figure standing motionless, shadowed in the doorway, and though I have never seen him before, I know who he is and why he is here.

“I‘ve finished, it’s all over. You’ve missed it, you must have mistaken the time, it’s much later than you imagine, much later.”

“Put it on your blog. Was it any good?”

“I don’t think so, one bloke kept asking about Vikings. I don’t think it was very good, no”

“I’ll see when I read it.”

“Yes, of course.”

“None of that other stuff?”

“No, very little, hardly any, not enough to notice really.”

“Good. I'm going now.”

"Yes, you must. I think you'll find it's all going to get better from now on."

"It needs to."

"Well yes, it does need to."

Holiday irony and some steamy scenes of ecstasy.

Steadily the tension and the mountain grew until I had to do something, something called a ‘load‘….Then I was caught in the headlights.

For reasons that are known only to Mrs Stimp and millions of others, there are two boxes of washing powder of different brands near the washing machine, both open and ready to be scooped. I couldn’t be troubled with the small print so it boiled down to a Stimple choice, one based on an irrelevance of colour or shape, still nothing between them as washing powder doesn’t have a shape and they both seemed to be flecked with specks of blue so I had to waste yet more time still on this quandary. You might think an obvious preference could be based on fragrance, but they both smelt like sweets quickly unwrapped  on a January afternoon under a louring sky outside Debenhams, so nothing to help there.

Eventually I danced like a marketing person’s best gimp and chose the aspirational product, it assured me clearly and I hope honestly, that it would ‘make me and my family look and feel great‘, that really spoke to me, what more could anyone want from their mixed colour-fast load? I can’t wait for the drying and ironing to be over and done with, so I can at last look and feel great as promised. If something goes wrong and I find I am still a shuffling monkey-gargoyle when I wear these newly washed clothes, I am definitely not going to feel great either and I will send the manufacturers a photo of myself and demand an explanation.

I hadn’t realised how much torture lay in wait before I could start to even think about sending snap-shots of complaint.

If the standard unit of measurement for a mass of ironing is the pile, and three piles are equal to a heap, then a couple of hours ago I was facing what I would estimate to be two heaps and a pile of ironing. However, when ironed it doesn’t cease immediately to be ironing, that would be too simple, no, that only happens after it has been put away in drawers and wardrobes and it then reverts to it’s constituent parts which are collectively known as a ‘wardrobe’ and never a ‘drawer‘. When the day arrives, and all too soon, that a huge bundle has been worn or used, it amalgamates again to become washing. This rainbow congregation of mixed fibres will remain as washing, even after it has been washed, until it’s moisture content is reduced to a predetermined level when it instantly transforms back into ironing. And the whole sickening process starts again.

Mrs Stimp is on holiday with some of her friends somewhere hot, it happens once or twice a year and usually her mother comes to stay and enjoy a week with her grandchildren, but shingles have intervened, which leaves me with dire domestic responsibilities, and all this laundry. So noticeable it can’t be ignored as I’m working at home this week, mainly to prevent the younger Stimps from either running away, not running away and acting responsibly or worse, finding an inadequate selection of apparel from which to assemble the next hour’s ensemble. Working from home is neither a complete pleasure nor is it total purgatory but I do find it incredible why anyone ever chooses to do it permanently, it constantly see-saws between too many and too few distractions.

As I finished ironing the last shirt, sock, chemise, curtain, ceremonial robe or whatever - after the first thirty minutes it had all become a mesmerising steamy blur - I experienced with dazed euphoric relief one of Abraham Maslow’s famous peak experiences. It was an almost mystic enlightenment of a higher truth, but I had inhaled a large quantity of fabric conditioner fumes; Comfort’s Strawberry and Lilly Kiss is definitely one to think twice about if you’re ever offered some outside a school gate.

Doubtless you know the Maslow theory diagrammatically starts with a wide base without which you are not even alive, gradually ascending and narrowing through ever more desirable qualities and achievements until you arrive at the zenith of realising your full potential. An ordinary launderer may well reach the top of his own pyramid, his Hierarchy of Needs fulfilled, but with one hiccup you’re slammed back to level three, or are you? If you have reached such a level of externalisation and self-actualisation then what can displace you from the heady heights of Maslow’s moral high ground? But then how can your pyramid hope to stay up with a couple of blocks missing?

It seems too obviously reliant on a self-regarding motivational neediness, and ignores any fairly normal altruistic compassion. Arthur Koestler’s Holarchy, a construct of his Holons, differs little in it’s dependence on those basic lower levels providing a wholeness to upper echelons, but not so dependant as some management training consultants fatly relying on a hijacked version of both concepts scribbled, spread-eagled and ‘consciously raised’ aloft on flip-charts for a focussed two-hour babble of last straw-clutching.

While I was hotly flattening away I was thinking about these two chaps and how they may have thought their clothes came naturally flat and smooth, that is if they ever spared a minute to consider anything other than big thoughts, hugely big thoughts. I believe Art had a recorded promiscuous proclivity of priapic proportions but I don’t remember reading much about any other pressing. I don’t know if you’re familiar with ironing at all, but there is a button that when pushed gives an exciting and desirably directable extra jet of steam, I used this facility frequently as it was there, so much so that I had a recurring vision, interspersed with the two old cogitators above, of the prison steam-burning scene from the 1949 classic noir and white film White Heat, and Cody Jarrett’s very much made it ma, top of the world ultimate of peak, but shortish, experiences.

Abe firstly found his paragons, none resembling Cagney’s Jarrett, and then backtracked to see why they were paragons, completely overlooking the fact that none of them ever had to struggle with two heaps and a pile of ironing and cook dinners that horrified the faces of two teenagers. What exactly is so menacing and baleful about chicken casserole? Particularly one which I had laboured on for what seemed well over forty minutes, assiduously excluding from the recipe everything I knew they disliked, which was actually quite a lot, only to have it described as, “like a kind of old fashioned skanky gruel”. This seemed a little critical but thankfully in the final analysis it wasn’t thought to suck, which though unfortunately physically possible, used in their parlance would have been too deeply hurtful.

I suppose you could just go Taoist from the start and forget slavishly building your pyramid altogether, but then I’m seeing it all from the twisted perspective of a still warm ironing-board. Traumatised so deeply that I had overlooked until less than twenty creases from the end that there is a Samaritanistic local ironing service. They would have understood, they would at least have listened.

Small moments of rapture, similar to that when I could finally relax my claw-like grip on Rowenta‘s pale smooth neck, are not a modern phenomenon at all, there is some evidence that they occurred several years ago. It comes from the journals of the prolific diarist Sir Thomas Houghton. This, from an entry dated 14th May 1757.

Have suffered a furrowed and bitter mien no better than a churlish Huguenot, from the shame of being violently ejaculated from Covent Garden prematurely last evening and was melancholically musidorous on the state of life in this our island today. What is the world becoming when Englishmen cannot for 3s ameliorate their weary constitutions in the most natural of ways, strangled eel pie, bruised turnips and a Stratford strumpet, and withal finally exagitating several sniffling personators of the stage. My custom for long has been with roisterous vociferation, to exhort and hurl pickles at many a blanched and fop-straddled player during performances of Hamlet and divers tediously vexatious plays. They do I believe enjoy such attention as do all the wretchedly famed.

With a mighty victory for the common man, was able most adroit and secretive to pursue malmsey-streaked pock quiffling Mr. Garrick along Drury lane this fore-noon and land a tremendous kick arseways on him before bolting for an ally and avoiding exposure. Was left gastrickly, nay garrickly! contorted by mirth, pride and an excess of vengeful superbia on reaching home and Doctor Franklyn was summoned forthwith to bleed me.

The unforgiving punster Sir Thomas Houghton, man of several letters and proto-picklelout.

Inertia: A warning from history

There is very strong language from the start, it’s generally gratuitous but worse even, it‘s unnecessary, thank goodness then there is no violence. My teeth, buttocks and fists have all led peacefully unclenched lives, a little outrage sometimes without much rage, firmly stoppered but still always evaporating away, in a bottle of sulky indignation. Not then, the stuff revolutionaries are made of, maybe that’s why I admire dissenters so much, I’m not sure if I would have the pent-up belligerence or insurgency to even make an effigy let alone burn one.

Through leading a wholly cosseted life there are only small things left to be annoying and even those far more so in the past, proper personalised outrage today requires too much concentration and self-importance. Mildly chagrined then is the best I can muster and then only if it’s something meaningful, something of massive importance that gets as they say, with probably more relevance for a Taureg bloke, my actual goat.

Over the years I have probably cooked and eaten quite a few fried eggs, would-be flocks of them, and up to a few years ago almost one in three would deposit it’s lovely runny yolk into the frying pan from it’s bottom, giving birth to a litter of tiny instant omelettes as it was gently, so gently lifted by slice to travel to it’s penultimate resting place; to lie in state on a plinth of toast. I was disappointed, peeved, saddened, frustrated and perpetually bemused with this outcome, nice as white is, without the centrepiece of the yellow domed bubo it is just a gelatinous support system. Essential in highlighting and providing a rubbery counterpoint to the viscid smooth warmth of yoke, but that really is all it can ever be, something of a wrapping foil to it‘s superordinate.

This confounding anti-climax has largely disappeared, whether eggs have grown stronger bottoms or my slice handling has improved or it’s yet another virtue of olive oil, whatever or whichever it hardly ever happens now. A ratio of probably less than one egg in twenty sags yokeless on leaving their oily bath, which naturally is still distressing, painful, and brutally harrowing when it does happen but in comparison to even just five years ago, generally thought to be an acceptable casualty rate.

I also rarely feel personally offended. I can feel exceedingly offended on behalf of other people and frequently do so, and sometimes by objects like cameras that shut their eye when you try to take a snappy of the moment picture by pressing the wrong button, and then you’re forced to watch them while they go through their getting-up ritual. “No I won’t be hurried, if I miss this bit my whole day is just ’wrong’.”

That I find a little irritating too, the whole business of ‘my day’, my own, that must never be tainted with even a slightly sour note, day. If people would stop constantly asking themselves how they felt, they might feel better, the ceaseless inner monologue must become tediously repetitive after a while.

In a way, a continuation, sequel and prequel to this, probably best looked at first though it might not make any difference.
 
There is always going to be the opportunity, if you recognise and take heed of being slapped repeatedly round your metaphor to question yourself about the person you’re with, if they are the ‘right’ person or more pertinently are you the ‘right’ person for them to be with. I have had this feeling, instinct and dreaded eventual realisation far more than once or twice, and despite recognising the truth in a truthful answer, have done nothing to redress it and on the contrary, have actually made it worse.
 
It must be rare to have at the same time, the opportunity to be prodded, and not so gently that it tickles, with sharp quip-sticks by a cabal of self-congratulant shiny-haired jog-monkeys. Nevertheless that’s precisely what happened when Michelle and I joined a ’great bunch’ of her work-friends for an evening of wine, nibbles on plates, nibbles in divided glass dishes and social misgivings. These planned accidents are invariably conducted in a set-seated position, which leaves no escape from the stubbornly murmuring poly-babble, where two or more conversations form dissecting paths across a space. I expect you’ve also found yourself in the soiree situation where you are trapped in an endlessly vacuous listen and nod with someone reliving, like a drugged vision, their yoga class while you sit right beside another person, invariably bloke-like who is arguing the aesthetics of the Esprit over the Elite, and you can’t do a thing about it, as you chew over the finer points of the Lotus position.

Having met none of these people before, I had no idea if there was going to be much common ground between us, but I am always ready to forage semi-relentlessly until we discover something. No matter how tenuous, something that can make us nod simultaneously, smile knowing that it‘s just us this time, point at each other and say: “No, you and me both, I haven’t worn my Lederhosen outside since the Lisbon Treaty ratification either mate.”  

This time no yoga, federalism or cars and it doesn’t help when they all work together and insist rudely in chortling solely over the minutiae of everyday colleague interface hilarity. Which meant, mainly taking the piss out of the sales manager Derek, distinguished by his glass eye, a limp and a comb-over, I found my higher-self putting a chummy and unthreatening arm round his shoulder and gently leading him away, telling him: “It’s not you they’re talking about, it’s just transference, they are really holding a mirror up to their own inadequacies. Now Derek, have you thought about having your hair cu…..”

I was drawn back in from contented social exclusion with an innocent sounding question thrown right at my perceptibly borderline-obese and patently unfit for purpose face.

”Do you run Nactus?”

“Well no, actually I don’t.”

“He wouldn’t run if my life depended on it.” Three guesses who said that.

“He might run the other way Mitch.” Laughter, cruel and mocking.

“He’s never done any running, I don’t think you can run, can you?”

“He looks a bit run down” Diagnostic laughter before I can reply.

“That’s only because his nose is running.” Nasal laughter.

“As long as he hasn’t got the runs as well.” Not sympathetic laughter.

“I reckon he’s giving you the run-around Mitch.” Accusatorial laughter.

“Has he run out of excuses then?” Quizzical rolling-eyed laughter.

“This is turning into a running joke.” Laughter of itself, laughter.

“Unlike Nactus, this could run forever.” Laughter of the prophetic.

“He’s just another run of the mill non-runner.” Extra plaudits for the double.

“You can’t run but you can hide.” Pause to appreciate, then appreciative laughter.

“He’s running…his cup runneth…..he’s…” Subsiding stuttering dying laughter as they reach for Pringles.

“ He won’t play squash either.” She’d started it again, I couldn’t believe she would do that, like a Roman Emperor amusing himself, calling for more lions.

“What about ping-pong Nac?” Stunned, I just shook my head.

“He’s more pong than ping.” Laughter, irrational laughter.

“Phew yeah, you’re right there.” Simple, good old-fashioned derisive laughter.

And so it continued, through all sorts of sports and physical exercise until they sat back smiling, shaking their heads and looking dreamily into the distance, musing on their wit, pack reaffirmation, rude health and athletic superiority. Before Michelle could open her cupped and nurturing hands to display another of my scorn-worthy shortcomings to the assembled toned comedians, hostess and, I like to think, compassionate objector Tina, stepped authoritatively between us and suggested: “Mitch, you and Nactus should go to Venice, it’s so romantic.”

Later, what seemed a lifetime later, in my car outside her house.

“I told you they were a great bunch didn’t I?”

“Yes you did.”

“So?”

“So?”

“So what did you think of them?”

“I didn’t really.”

“What though?”

“Not much really.”

“What not much, though?”

“I didn’t think much of them.”

“Alright then, why didn’t you?”

“They just seemed like…well, I don‘t know them really.”

“What? Seemed like what? What did they seem like really?”

“Really? A bunch of complete wankers.”

“Oh for God‘s sake, just because they were having a joke, you’re so sensitive and you’ve got no sense of humour have you? You take everything so personally and why do you always think everything’s about you, all the time, these are people I work with, they’re my friends for God‘s sake, I care about them a lot. Why can’t you join in like everyone else? Oh …suit yourself. God, sometimes you‘re as bad as Derek.”
 
The car door slammed shut behind her retreating form in the darkness. I had upset her by not being what she wanted or I suppose who she hoped against all the evidence, me to be. How could she have been so uncaring I thought, that she knew so little about me after a whole year, I wasn’t complicated I was and remain simple, as simple as an egg. I only ever expected a smear of politeness, consideration, kindness and humanity and maybe hopefully a smudge of some sort of loyalty but she hadn’t it seemed taken the trouble to notice even that. I felt slightly offended then by her being offended, but still continued with hardly any regard to what was fairly obviously with hindsight, an impetuously fool-hardy and rash, of biblical proportions, decision.

I must thank my diary and therein myself for rekindling these wonderful memories, and she was wrong, I was actually not as bad as Derek, I was worse. I’m pretty sure, while standing on some no-name bridge over an Italian canal looking at her perfectly too beautiful face and holding her soft slim hands in his a few weeks later, he would never have asked her to marry him. He would instead, have rightly asked himself, “What am I doing? I don’t mean this, any of it, I haven‘t thought about it anywhere near long enough. What the fuck in a bag of mushrooms am I doing?”  

And in a perfect world filled with uplifting notes, that must exist somewhere, she would have answered my plighted troth not with a whispered and almost tearfully smiling yes, but with an indignant, haughty and this time contemptuously laughing: “Are you joking? No way, you sedentary unsociable fool, I’d rather marry Derek for God’s sake, and spend the rest of my life running around Grimsby eating fried egg whites. For God‘s sake,what made you even ask?”

Who the hell do you think you are?

My elderly parents particularly on my father’s side have spent a substantial part of his life ‘clearing out’ his paternal loft and last Sunday handed me a cardboard box that had once held a gross of ‘Privet’s Sternest Surgical Supports’. He thought I might find the contents interesting. Interesting tends to mean ‘take this home and dispose of it in your loft‘, for at least twenty years this generational passing the baton piecemeal has been going on regularly and relentlessly.

On Tuesday, I had a rummage through before depositing it in the attic and thus continuing the forgotten familial collective memory with an instinctual genetic imperative. My father’s latest assault on his roof-void proved to be a partial victory of sorts, the box contained several dog-eared photographs of old pets long gone, some volumes from the innocently named ‘How To’ series of books and a bundle or rack of magazines. These periodicals, dating from September 1935 to July 1939 seemed to be of only passing interest initially; perhaps a smile and puzzle at bygone quirks and a puzzle and frown at the prevailing climate of attitude in those halcyon inter-war dancing years. However, I found pressed and neatly nestling between some of the pages were a few drawings by my great-grandmother Effie Stimp, and on closer inspection her name also appeared in print. At last a possibly mildly famous antecedent, I felt like soon Dame surely, if not already, Joanna, for goodness‘ sake Lumley.

Long before I was born, Effie had tragically passed away when the side-car of my great-grandfather’s Triumph motorcycle had become sadly and suspiciously detached and she had overtaken two Morris Minors and a horse before coming to grief at the stanchion of a bridge on the A10. Having never known her I have only ever had a vague impression of who she really was, my elderly parents being reticent to the point of huffy on the subject. However, here in this box was at last something tangible that can’t just be simply not-talked about, no more of the shushing and waving dismissals or conveniently interrupted interrogation with faked asthma attacks or an irresistible Midsomer Murders esuriency. At the next opportunity, I may well pose some uncomfortably penetrative questions. It seems Effie Stimp regularly drew cartoons for various magazines and I have scanned in one that appeared in the March 1936 edition of Good Housekeeping.

When I get time, I’ll scan some more, and if possible find out why this wife, woman and possible victim of great-grannycide became so un-talked about even in a preternaturally taciturn family.

Terry, if indeed Terry it is or ever was, has been delayed and his arrival and imminence of or not has lost the interest of the office-guys, who are now optimistically juggling World Cup fantasies, fears and covoluted permutations of possible outcomes, all of which conclude with England winning the whole thing. A rare chance, and one to be grabbed for the quadrennial Zeitgeist of flag waving around the world.

Waiting for Terry.

A large open-plan office, empty but for four people each staring at their respective monitor, they speak laconically and sporadically and one of them types feverishly. Forty-seven minutes later these notes prove invaluable.

Trev: So when does he start?

Me: I’m not sure.

Trev: I thought you said tomorrow.

Me: Well, I said it could be. It could be tomorrow.

Trev: Well didn’t they say?

Me: They said it might be, you know what they’re like, I don’t know if they even know.

Trev: They don’t even know?

Barry: Where has he come from?

Trev: I don’t think anyone knows, do they?

Me: We’ll ask him when he gets here.

Karen: What does he look like?

Barry: Have you seen him then Nactus?

Me: I’m not sure, I thought it might be him.

Karen: Weren’t you at the interview?

Me: I was at some. I think there was a Terry, there were quite a few.

Barry: But you must remember him, were there many there?

Karen: How many were there?

Me: I don’t remember, ten maybe, there might have been more that I didn‘t see.

Karen: So tomorrow then.

Trev: Maybe possibly tomorrow.

Karen: If you think you saw him, what was he like then?

Me: I’m going to say he had a goatee and a squint, how’s that?

Trev: Did he?

Me: No, I’m just saying I don’t know, he might have.

Karen: I’ve never liked beards, no offence Mike, oh he’s not here. No, my first husband was a beardy, it was an awful thing.

Trev: Is he up to speed, where has he come from?

Me: Can’t remember.

Karen: Oh, hope it wasn’t my old place, I don’t remember a Terry, was he tallish?

Barry: Is that his name then?

Me: She wasn’t absolutely certain, maybe. Kate didn’t have the file in the corridor.

Trev: Ah, so it might be somebody else?

Me: No, it will be him alright, just maybe not Terry.

Barry: Who then?

Karen: Which one is Kate?

Trev: Short, brown hair.

Barry: Not that short.

Karen: Short brown hair about forty? I know who you mean.

Trev: Long hair about thirty, you’ve seen her. Quite short.

Barry: She must have been at your interview, or wasn’t she?

Karen: Oh her, mousy hair, quite long.

Trev: Yes, her.

Barry: How does Kate not know?

Trev: Who knows.

Karen: But she knew he was called Terry?

Me: No, she thought he might be, she couldn’t be sure.

Trev: Well, we’ll find out tomorrow.

Barry: Is it definitely tomorrow?

Me: Not definitely.

Karen: Not definitely you think?

Me: I don‘t think so, no.

Trev: Who knows.

I’d like to say a smiling, efficiently well-built and tightly uniformed nurse then entered from stage left, pushing a trolley wobbling with a water-filled jug and four small translucent plastic beakers each trapping a mosaic of brightly coloured pills. But I’m sorry to say there was no nurse and no trolley, and there probably won’t be one tomorrow night either, probably but not definitely.