Boys and pen knives

When I was a lad every boy that I knew owned a penknife or pocketknife.  Essential equipment for boys activities. Not for the original use which gave the penknife it's name,of course, sharpening quill pens,but necessary for pencils. There were few pencil sharpeners about then.

And then there were all those other uses.

Making Bows and arrows.
Removing broken football studs
Whittling tree branches
Carving bones into strange shapes
Hoof cleaners if you ever came across a lame horse and were game enough to give it a try.
Making Boy scout woggles from broken belts or other odd bits of leather

The list was endless.

Swiss army knives were just making an appearance and were objects of envy.


It's a shame that these innocent activities have given way to being offensive weapons in the hands of children.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Musical memories

The first time I heard the melody of O Sole Mio was a slightly bawdy song my grandmother used to sing which went something like: Old Mother Riley She bought a cow But to milk it She didn't know how She pulled its tail,instead of its tit Old mother Riley got covered in snow. My cousin Vicki, who lived in the same house as my grandmother as a girl refused to accept this.  She had never heard our grandmother sing and in any case would not of have sang a song like that.  Well this is not a false memory and anyway I could not have made up words like this at the age of ten. When one of my older brothers returned from serving in Italy during WW2 he had learned quite a bit of Italian and lots of Italian and Neapolitan songs. One of his favourites was O S ole Mio which he would play on the piano and any other instrument he could get his hands on, which included a mandolin which I had bought out of curiosity in a second hand shop. It was only much later that...
Read more

what's in a name

Image
Street names are often changed over the years and often there is a rational reason. But sometimes it is difficult to find. In Wapping there are two prewar blocks of flats on Greenbank. Willoughby house and Vancouver house and there was a road running between them from Greenbank to Wapping high Street named Red lion street.  This road is now called Reardons Path. Of course it is not a path it is still a vehicular road. And even more strangely there was already a Reardons Path,still there, which is actually a path. It runs from Greenbank to Watt Street. All very strange. Just as odd as the local council replacing tarmac covered roads with ancient cobbles.  This all in the name of progress or am I being cynical in thinking it is more to do with a sop to property developers. The cobbles of course did not bring the old dockside atmosphere back: a bit difficult with land rovers and porsches being parked on them. In Red Lion street there was old  warehousing  being develope...
Read more

Press button B

Image
 Many phrases like this one, well known in the past no longer have any meaning.  It of course referred to the system of payment in public telephone boxes.  The red public phone box was on almost every street corner in the days when there were few telephones installed in private houses and before the invention of mobile phones.  In many remote areas of the Uk, they were the lifeline for a village and the only means of communication with the rest of the county.  To use a public phone box it was necessary to make a prepayment of the necessary number of coins before dialing the number you wished to call.  If someone answered the call then it was necessary to press button "A" to make a connection.  If there was no reply then press button "B" to get the coins back. Quite straight forward you would have thought but it did not always work that way.  The coins used for many years were pennies.  Probably the most common coin in the Uk in terms of usage...
Read more