Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Standards

I got called away to the bath yesterday and deemed this unworthy of inclusion where I left it, but today I have dropped my standards.
I am not a spic and span fanatic, but I do clean one window every morning in the season and that is the round one on the stove. I have had several sprayers to assist me in my task, but I always forget to move them away from the stove and they get deformed with the heat. Now I just keep a rag along side a drop of water in one of those perfectly manufactured aluminium juice bottles that are designed to be thrown away and melted down. I do like to be able to see the fire.
My first memories of noticing the odd balance of this posture are from watching my dad looking in the window of a tool shop in a rather fancy roofed over shopping area called the arcade. Through the window the walls were covered with implements and there were terraces of novelties at eye level for the hunkering adult as well as stuff hanging down from above. It is somehow a mark of the times that there were hardly any tool shops to invoke any degree of fascination when I last went to the city, perhaps things are different further north.
The obsession with tools continues to this day, and I suppose it will until I am no longer able to potter.