Monthly Archives: November 2022

Dentists, Drills and Dread

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Dentist tomorrow – not something I’m looking forward to, though the difficulty parking is taking more space in my thoughts than the possible pain from the filling. I’ve generally found that they don’t hurt a lot in the hands of a competent dentist. Unfortunately, it’s my experience with the incompetent ones that I tend to rem,ember. I once had a dentist that terrified me. To be fair, she wasn’t keen on me and told me that “people like me” required special treatment and medication (sedatives) because we were so scared of the dentist.

I asked a friend of mine who knew about dentistry and he identified the problem as her lack of skill in placing the anaesthetic. I went to another dentist and was able to have the work done painlessly. In fact, after blocking one side and doing the filling, he asked if he could work on the replacement filling on the other side without anaesthetic. As it allowed me to escape another appointment I said yes, and he drilled out and replaced a filling without anaesthetic and without pain. I took that as proof that the terrifying woman (who was clearly fresh out of college) was the cause of our problem, not me.

That’s enough about dentists.

We had a normal day at work – several parcels to be sent off, several orders coming in during the afternoon, several enquiries that came to nothing and that was about the lot. It’s one of those days that promised little and lived up to expectations.

Featured image is a Boris Johnson “banknote”. Look on it as a taster for a post later in the week.

 

The Smuggler’s Box

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A few weeks ago The Owner was sorting boxes of old copper coins. This included a lot of worn out coins of George III, and he noticed that one of them seemed very light when he picked it up. It also didn’t sound right when he examined it (“examine” in tis context means “hit it with another coin then dropped it on the counter” – these are truly clapped out coins and their value is unlikely to be reduced by his treatment).

1797 Penny – George III and Britannia. It’s worn and the date has gone, but we know it’s 1797 because of the size – all the “cartwheel” coins were dated 1797.

It turned out to be a box made from a 1797 Penny. I’m not clear how they do this, but suspect it involves hollowing out two coins, rather than just splitting one. I had a look on YouTube but drifted off into how to make a knife using cheap Amazon tools. It looks fun but I think my days of dexterity may be behind me.

I just thought it was a box made from a penny, but when we checked up on eBay we found a couple of others, described as smuggler’s boxes. They clearly aren’t, for a number of reasons. One is that the penny is very worn and smuggling was probably out of date by the time this penny was worked. The other is that it’s not really a practical size for smuggling. What are you going to get in something that size? It might be a pill box (if you like your pills to taste of copper) or a patch box. I know very little about patches. Deep down I think it was probably made by an apprentice, or even an engineer with time of his hands and a lathe at his disposal. However, it’s an interesting novelty and I doubt that you could make one for £30.

Modern penny for size comparison

I’m not one to let reality get between me and a sale, so Georgian Smuggler’s Box, it became. Or possibly spy box, I said “It is tempting to think it may even have been used to transport secret messages by a spy in the Napoleonic Wars.” Note how I didn’t say it had been, or even that it was likely. And having put the idea out there, I waited . . .

It sold in auction for a reasonable sum – just over £30. The only other one on eBay at the moment is in much better condition, but at £180 it’s a lot more money. If I had the good one I’d feel I had to keep it in a cabinet. With the one we sold, you can shove it in your pocket and show people – a much better use of an object.

Can you see the join?

1797 Penny – a conundrum, and possible even a smuggler’s box.

A Rag Bag of Thoughts

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The latest issue of Cattails is out and I appear in it twice – page 89 and page 91. However, they aren’t the best bits of the issue and there are 193 pages of good stuff to read. These two mark the point where I was really struggling to write. Things, as I have said, are looking up again now.

One of my neighbours has just been playing fast and lose with the laws of gravity, but has finally succeeded in putting a bird box in his conifer. It’s at least twelve feet off the ground, and much better than my weedy attempts. I usually chicken out when it gets to eight feet. I have bounced a number of times when falling off ladders and don’t see any point in pushing my luck. The strange thing I find is that if I were writing a novel I would have the fall in slow motion with plenty of time for flashbacks and reminiscence but in real life I often only have time to think “Oh . . .” as the ladder moves, then find myself lying on the floor. In fact, once I merely found myself lying on the floor, without the initial “Oh . . .”

I’ve fallen off four times, which is hardly a great sample, but at no time has my life flashed before me. That might be because I was between six and twelve feet up when it happened. If you fall off from fifty feet it is probably different.

Random Poppy Picture

It was also slightly different the time that I fell off due to the wood-wormed rung. I don’t count that among the four falls, which were all due to my carelessness – over-reaching or setting the ladder up on soft ground (correct, I’m not a fast learner).

On the way up, using a ladder from the shed of a gardening customer, I note the woodworm on the way up and thought “I must be careful on the way down”. However, I was so grateful to be on the way down (it was a tricky trimming operation twenty feet up a pear tree) that I forgot to be careful. The rung collapsed, as did the next one, I began to overbalance, I thought of the concrete slabs that were waiting, and I grabbed a branch, ending up swinging like a monkey. It is funny now, and you have permission to laugh.

I did learn from that. I bought a ladder and never used a customer’s ladder again.

The funniest thing i ever did was cut a dead branch on a tree. It was about twenty feet up (it seems an ominous distance when you read this post. I cut it using my pruning saw on a long pole, and my feet were firmly on the ground. The lesson I learned from this was that branches fall faster than you think so you should never stand directly under one you are cutting. I protected my head by fending it off with my forearm. The impact drove flakes of bark into my arm, which took some cleaning up, and ten years later I still have a lump on my arm where it hit.

I think 500 words is enough for now. If anyone is interested I have another selection of disaster stories, some of which feature electricity.

Bear with tools

Clearing up the Confusion

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I seem to have caused some confusion in my last post when referring to TV licensing. Sorry about this, here is the full story.

We have two sorts of Tv in the UK, the BBC and commercial TV. The BBC is mostly free from adverts, though they do till have adverts for their own services, and sometimes, about License Fee Evasion. It funds itself by the tax which we still call the “license fee” despite it now being legally a tax. The rest of them (and they are mostly a woeful bunch of purveyors of old American TV and  “reality” TV) finance themselves by selling advertising. This is often lengthy and dull.

So, when we were struck by lightning about 35 years ago, I was on my way back from work in the middle of teh worst rainstorm I have ever experienced in this country. I only kept driving because I was on a motorway and it is (a) illegal and (b) dangerous to stop on a motorway.

Julia, meanwhile, was at home. Advice is to shut off the TV during thunderstorms, but she doesn’t like thunder so she turned the TV up to drown out the sound of thunder. This was not one of her best ideas.

The resulting lightning strike on the TV aerial damaged the aerial and sent a bolt of electricity through the TV plug which reduced the ceramic fuse to powder and scored the brass terminals in the plug. It also blew part of the back of the TV apart and covered the interior with soot. Finally, it sent a ball of lightning across the room. Julia watched it move across the room, gradually getting smaller. This was a little upsetting for her and she was sill shaken when I arrived home.

We decided to throw the TV away and do without it, which we did for a couple of years. In this time we got regular letters from the BBC about our lack of license. I wrote and explained that we didn’t need one as we had no TV. They wrote again, three months later. I repeated my reply and advised them I didn’t want more letters as they were useless, time-wasting junk mail. They replied that they would keep reminding me as they often found that people forgot to get a license when they eventually bought a new TV.

So, I relied that if they wanted to waste time, energy and license payers money on junk mail they were welcome, but that I would like a list of the employees in their office so that I could write them pointless letters demanding details of the furniture they had in their houses. In those days I could be quite bolshie.

They wrote to thank me for my letter and said that they wouldn’t write again, but would appreciate it if I remembered to get a license when I eventually got a new TV. When we got one a year or so later, we did get a license.

I see from Wikipedia that you can’t stop them sending letters because they aren’t adverts, but you can, as someone did, send them a bill for £40 as a fee for opening, processing, reading and filing the letter. The BBC, of course, refused to pay, so he took them to small claims court and won, getting his £40 and costs.

Interesting . . .

 

Featured image is Robin Hood, a notable defender of the peasantry. Or a fictional character.

Robin - singing

15 Minutes

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The title is the time I have allotted myself to write this post. I have been using my time to sit with Julia in the evenings rather than sit in the dining room typing. It seems a slightly better use of my time at the moment. After 33 years of marriage you start to think (I do anyway) about the barren wasteland that would stretch out in front of you if you didn’t have a wife. So, as I’d like to stay married I am being a caring and solicitous husband. It will pass, but until it does I am finding it difficult to fit blogging in. Sorry about that, I will answer all comments by tonight.

I watched a programme about Victoria Wood last night. I’ve seen it before, but it was better than most things that were on, and it finished at the same time as Forged in Fire began.

In the old days we had two Channels. They were in black and white and apart from Watch with Mother at lunch time the only daytime Tv was school programmes. Somehow it seems, looking back, to have been far more enjoyable and better quality than the multitude of stations and repeats and “reality TV” we have today. Personally, I’d be happy to spend much of the evening with it witched off but Julia puts it on for background noise and we never seem to switch off. Some of my best days recently were the ones in out early married days when the aerial was struck by lightning and the TV blew up. We did without one for 18 months (endured a number of letters from the Licensing Agency about not having a TV) and only got one for the start of Julia’s maternity leave.

I’ll leave it there as my time is up and the shop beckons.

 

A Post in Need of an Inspired Title

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The front door has been sticking recently. We checked all the usual culprits like foreign bodies, sagging hinges and the like. The fit is so bad that we aren’t troubled by it swelling in winter. It may well swell but it never comes close to catching. Left on her own today (having taken time off to recuperate from dentistry, Julia identified the problem as a loose floor tile and corrected it. She was, I believe, much better than she had thought she was going to be, and had spent the day doing odd jobs and being active. Yesterday I was treating her like a rare flower, and today she is regrouting floor tiles.

Do you have grout in America? My WP spellchecker doesn’t like regrouting and is offering  rerouting and regrouping as alternatives. Strangely, it doesn’t mind grout. Maybe you only grout once and it lasts forever. My Dad once stayed somewhere in America and his hosts told him they would take him to see the oldest house in town. It had been built in 1928, the year my dad was born. He was not keen having the label “Historic” attached to a house that was the same age he was.

I have been looking up a number of strategies for coping with conflict at work. One is to ignore it. Another is to talk about it. Neither has produced much of a result up to now. The best advice I could find, and there wasn’t much good advice online (I suspect the word “online” is a clue to the value of the advice you find there) was to ensure that I don’t get dragged down by it, and don’t let it  get into my head. Strangely, this is advice I have given the kids in the past – seems like I knew the answer all along but just forgot it for the last two days.

(Lightly edited 4.11.22 as some of the phrasing implied criticism and though it’s how I feel, it’s maybe not how I should be writing about someone else when they don’t have a chance to reply.)

 

Distractions, Dentistry and Difficulties

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Sorry, I’ve been a bit distracted over the last few days. Julia has just had some major dental work and sympathy and nursing have been called for. Along with soft food. This isn’t my natural area of expertise but I made fish pie (which lasted two days and managed a reasonable impression of sympathy.

I’ve also been very disturbed by a recent conversation at work. I generally don’t discuss such things for a number of reasons – what happens at work is not for general discussion, my colleagues and their doings are not for me to discuss in public, except in broad terms, and, finally, it involves pay, and I was always brought up not to discuss this in public. However, I have found this so disturbing that I am going to mention it, even though I won’t go into detail.

It turns out that my workmate thinks I am being paid more than him. Not more per hour, just for more hours. A simple calculation would show this isn’t true. However, he obviously latched on to something that was said a few months ago and has magnified it into a problem despite there being no truth in it.

I am now wondering if it is worth carrying on for the next 18 months until I can retire, or whether I should try to eke out a living on eBay. I have things to sell and could certainly still afford to buy the groceries until my Old Age Pension cuts in. Life is too short to spend eighteen months working with a man who forms grudges from nothing and lets things fester for months. We have differing views on a number of things, and I don’t always find the shop a comfortable place. As I’m not prepared to let someone else define my life or occupy my time it’s something that needs looking at. I’ve already spent a day and a half thinking about it, and have spent an hour writing and re-writing about it. Enough is enough.

By the time I wake up tomorrow I will have made a decision.

(1) Carry on and ignore him

(2) Take early retirement

(3) Work out the cost of option (2) and compare with the cost of hiring a hit man

(Lightly edited 04.11.22)

 

Waterloo Teeth

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False teeth, as I recall, date back to the time of the Etruscans. I’m not very clued up on the Etruscans. They were in Italy before the Romans and they made false teeth and pottery. That is all I know about them. Fortunately, a quick look on the internet and moments later I can also tell you that they seem to have been competent sculptors in stone and bronze and that they are linked to the modern day Cornish population by DNA. They fought a war against the Romans, but eventually ended up being absorbed by Rome.

After the Etruscans there seem to be no more false teeth until the 1700s.  The spread of sugar started a decline in dental health and though it’s possible to use many things for making dentures, human teeth are very convenient. Though it’s a widely used term, many Waterloo teeth predate the battle (there is a record of George Washington’s dentist importing barrels of teeth from other battlefields as early as 1805) and many came from grave robbery or the mouths of hanged men. Even in 1815 marketing would seem to be  a feature. It seems strange now that anyone would want teeth from a corpse, but they were the best sort of false teeth and if you want to eat you do what you have to.

George Washington is widely known as a wearer of dentures, but they were not made from wood, despite being mentioned so often. You can read more about Washington and his teeth here.

The market price crashed in the 1850s as teeth from the Crimean War came onto the market in great numbers, and the export trade was reversed in the 1860s when the Americans became great producers of dead men’s teeth. That would make a great thesis for a PhD – The Effects of Warfare on the Dentures of Europe.

Fortunately, the development of Vulcanite in the mid-nineteenth century gave denture makers an alternative material, and the use of Waterloo teeth fell out of fashion.

I’m going to use another Robin picture, as a picture of teeth isn’t a great advert for a blog.  The one I selected is the one that found its way into the garden Centre tea room a few years ago while I was eating scones with my sister.

 

Oooops!

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I fell asleep in front of the TV after Julia went up last night. When I woke up I still felt groggy so I made my way upstairs and, halfway up, realised that I hadn’t blogged. I’m a bit erratic, but even for me 24 hours is quite late. It’s not even as if I’ve used the time to come up with any ideas. I’m sitting here in the brief time between Eggheads and Mastermind and trying to come up with something interesting to say.

The shop has been suffering from drainage issues lately. It’s happened before in rainy spells and w have never quite traced or corrected the problem. Judging by the smell yesterday, the shop is either built over a plague pit or I was working in a toilet. BY the end of the day I was feeling quite queasy, which is unusual for me, as I spent many years in poultry sheds and my stomach is not easily turned.

Fortunately the smell had mainly gone today. This is also unfortunate, as it means the owner has another excuse to ignore it.

Whatever happens, I was at least able to spend a happy half hour trawling the internet for details of health and safety relating to drains and sewers, and renew my acquaintance with the word effluvium. It is a nice word foo an unpleasant occurrence. It is also a condition which causes your hair to fall out. I didn’t know that until I checked the meaning to ensure I was using it correctly. hair loss is not something that concerns me much, if I’m frank. Any concerns I may once of had about it have long since passed, and any fears it once held are mere phantoms of memory. Being a bald man is so much better than being a man who worries about his hair.

And with that thought I will post a random picture, load this post and go back to TV until I can think of something else to write.