Category: Meditative

Avatar The return of…

As the ravages of time affect us all, I stare into the mirror and I am greeted by a face that looks both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. There are traces of the young boy who once flapped around gurgling nonsense about loins and chagrins mixed with those unavoidable lines and bags around and under the eyes. It’s always the eyes that give it away.

I am awash with melancholy. Has it been twenty years since Reuben was born? Almost twenty years since I moved to Newcastle? Coming up to twenty-three years since finishing sixth form? Where has the time gone?

I look back through the photos in my phone to make sense of the madness, to try and find a firm grip on the rockface of life. I must shackle myself to something tangible because I will go out of my mind if I do not. My most recent photos are of the Florida holiday: cheery blue skies, sunshine lollipop backpacks and rainbow cookie wonderlands. All of it warms my soul to see it once more like an old friend visiting. Then I see him:

SERIOUS IAN?!

He’s crept into one of the photos. He is pushing boundaries this time because, sat in a tiny car going around the Toy Story ride at Disney, shooting at aliens with lasers for points with his technicolour space gun, there he is. The irony is delicious. When did he turn up? I didn’t see him flipping through t-shirts trying to find one with Launchpad McQuack on. I didn’t witness him stuffing burgers into his grill and then finishing up with a strawberry milkshake, pretending that in a way it would count as a “balanced meal”. He must have snuck into my suitcase when I wasn’t looking.

About halfway through the holiday I caught what felt like a bad cold and needed to rest more. Was it me that woke up every time or have I been myself less and less? Could it be:

  • Maybe he tiptoed out to watch the Superbowl at some aggressive masculine sports bar and put a huge wager on one of the teams to win, watching the TV with a pint and a grimace as he realises he’d backed the wrong side
  • Maybe he walked around the vacant tourist trap landscape, shaking his head about the silly offers in the windows of souvenir shops, muttering to himself, “this country used to mean something.”
  • Maybe he complained to the hotel because the swimming pool didn’t open early enough and that it should be available shortly after the time he usually awoke at 5.45am
  • Maybe he told the family in front that they needed to calm down and that it wasn’t the “real” Mickey Mouse that they were waiting to greet.

I mean I’m not Fight Club so that probably didn’t happen but if he can creep out when I’m living it up abroad then it means he can appear anywhere. Literally anywhere? Literally anywhere. You’d best watch out.

Avatar More lists

I’ve started using lists again. I keep forgetting things that need doing, such as uploading a bunch of photos to this here website that Chris asked for months ago, so I write them down and there’s less chance I’ll forget. Nothing is 100% foolproof though.

I should use them more often. I should have lists for everything but then there’s the risk of having so many lists that I won’t have time to do anything because I’m too busy writing lists. I need to tread that fine line carefully.

Walking through the “mean streets” of Morpeth, we came across this list scrawled on the glass door of an abandoned derelict shop. I clocked it, made a mental note of its location and then came back to it again on the walk back to the car.

I’m not sure if they were trying to be funny or not. It is a strange list for sure. Who is Soo-fee? Are they as well-known as Taylor Swift, Coca Cola and God? I would have thought that ‘bees?’ would have made the list and the fact that they’re missing is a crime.

I’m not inclined to write any of my lists on something that isn’t a piece of paper or a notepad. I can’t scribble something on a pub and then drag that around with me, it’s not practical. Perhaps the person with the pen lives nearby and needed a visual clue on the way to work or school. Whatever the reason, keep yo lists outta ma face. I’ve got enough of my own

Avatar Butter keks

I like those biscuits that are actually just a big slab of chocolate with a bit of biscuit loitering on the back. That’s the correct ratio of chocolate to biscuit.

Anyway, in the midst of battering my way through a delicious packet of them, I paused briefly to turn one over and have a look at the biscuit side. It had a message for me.

I have decided to start using this as a slightly condescending pet name for people.

  • “Hey, slow down there, butter keks.”
  • “Right you are, butter keks.”
  • “Alright, butter keks, you and whose army?”

If you have other suggestions for slightly patronising ways to use this as a mild pejorative, please post them below.

Avatar Woodworking: working with wood

My birthday present this year was a two-day workshop using traditional woodworking tools to turn some freshly cut logs into a beautifully finished stool, complete with a hand-carved saddle seat. Yesterday I had the first day of the workshop, which was enormously enjoyable and satisfying. I’m going back next week to finish my masterpiece.

I sustained a number of blisters while using an axe, making these the most manly injuries of my life.

Anyway, I thought you would enjoy learning about some of the traditional woodworking tools that I used to work the wood.

Froe

This is a long blunt metal blade on the bottom of a big stick. You place it on a log and then smash it with a huge wooden club. Several such macho whackings will force it through the log and split it in two. This is highly enjoyable. If hammering your froe isn’t sufficiently noisy you can cast it aside and use an axe and a metal lumphammer instead, which will cause everyone’s ears to ring.

Axe

This is a sharp thing on a stick and you’ve seen one before. By putting a bit of wood on a block, and holding on to it with one hand, you can swing the axe at alarming speed towards the wood, and your fingers, causing bits to splinter off in all directions. If you are the sort of sturdy gung-ho chap who runs a woodworking course, you will do this with unbelievable force and precision, turning a log into a chair leg in a matter of seconds. If you are me you will spend ten minutes ineffectually chipping away at it while giving yourself blisters.

Shaving horse

For obvious reasons the mention of this device terrified me, but once I had been coaxed back into the room I discovered that it is a wooden apparatus, sometimes called a woodland vice, that you sit on. By bracing your feet against a footplate, you pivot a bar down onto your piece of wood, holding it in place while leaving both hands free to tinker with it. The wood can be released, moved and held down again with great speed by using your legs. I much preferred this device to both normal vices and normal horses.

Drawblade

This item has a name in two parts. “Draw” refers to the action of pulling it towards you. It has two handles, so you can grip it in both hands, and you pull it forcefully towards your stomach. “Blade” refers to the fact that, mounted between the handles, is a foot-long very sharp blade which, as mentioned, you are pulling forcefully towards your stomach. You can use this to shave slices off a piece of wood, turning an ineffectually chipped-at log into something resembling a chair leg.

Spokeshave

Once you’ve drawn your drawblade enough, you will have a roughly shaped piece of wood. To finesse its shape you can use a spokeshave, which is a little bit of wood, big enough to grip in both hands, with a razorblade mounted in the bottom. You use it in the same way, but get a much finer slice, enabling precision smoothing. It can also be used across the end grain to produce a surface as smooth as if you’d spent all day sanding it. I achieved a state of zen mindfulness while using this tool.

Adze

These tools vary between terrifying and precise. The axe was, for me, at the terrifying end of the spectrum until I met the adze. It’s like an axe, but with a longer handle, and its blade is curved and at right angles to the handle. You use it to carve curved shapes out of a piece of wood, and you do this by standing on the wood with your legs apart and then swinging the adze, with as much speed and force as you can muster, between your legs. Ideally you will hack lumps out of the wood without damaging your shoes or removing your own toenails.

Also this week, I used a hand drill to put a one-inch drill bit through a solid piece of ash. Next week I will have my first encounter with a travisher, which I expect will be used for extensive amounts of travishing, and I will then form a mortise and tenon joint using means I cannot yet explain.

I will, assuming I am successful, allow you to sit on the stool, and I will repeat to you the story about getting blisters.

Avatar Quennell

Most days I drive to the station and go to work.

Like Ian, I use my eyes while driving, both to look at things, but also to observe them. Sometimes my looking and observing is simultaneous and sometimes both have to take it in turns.

There is one thing that sticks out when I drive to the station, and it’s this:

If it was called Clennel Hill I’d know exactly where I was. We all know that Clennel is a small village and a former civil parish in the parish of Alwinton, in Northumberland, England. We also all know that a clennel is a genteel way to refer to a kind of arse flannel. But it’s not called that, it has a name that’s far more obscure and meaningless. A quennell? Nobody knows what that is.

I’m posting this here in the hopes that, having declared that this is a meaningless word and that nobody knows what it is, I’ve created the right circumstances for Kev to put the word into Google and immediately tell me what it means.

Quennell.

Avatar Shoe

Oxford Circus late at night
Crowds of wankers, lights shine bright
Down below the crowds that mill
Sits a sneaker calm and still

Who would drop you in this place?
Who has joined the unshod race?
Who would think their grand night out
Is better with one bare foot out?
I see you, shoe, and I see beyond
I see how great you’d be if donned
I see potential through the grime
I see the reason and the rhyme

Oxford Circus late at night
One lone trainer shining bright
The key to one foot’s endless roam
I envy the toes that take you home.