I've been waving my sickle around all day, but I don't think I've made the slightest impression.
Monday, November 7, 2011
A wave of green is threatening to engulf my house
And I like it.
I've been waving my sickle around all day, but I don't think I've made the slightest impression.
I've been waving my sickle around all day, but I don't think I've made the slightest impression.
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"waving my sickle" reminds me (in vulgar fashion, and I apologise) of an eminent aeronautical engineer(and CP Party member) I once knew (that is, I knew his daughter), who kept a glorious 17C walled garden in Anglesey, and who would, without hesitation, begin to pee on his rhubarb without any warning, for he argued that the mineral contect improved rhubarb's growth
Ha! Substitute 'pizzle' for 'sickle' and the picture is set! I don't doubt that while his rhubarb would have enjoyed rude health, visitors to his garden might have felt a little queasy, especially if he offered them, as gardeners often do, an arm-load of rhubarb to take home for stewing. I heard a similar story from a woman who had been a girl at the time there were Chinamen mining gold at Round Hill (nearby to Riverton), and at the same time, growing vegetables for sale, which they would hawk door-to-door. Her mother sang the praises of the magnificent lettuces a particular Chinese gentleman would bring to their house (the father was the mine manager and no doubt was offered the pick of the crop) The Chinaman was regarded as an excellent worker, holding down as he did, several other minor jobs, including the emptying of the toilets at the local school. Need I say more? The woman described vividly, the moment the mother, and subsequently the family, realized why the salad vegetables they'd enjoyed over the years, grew so extraordinarily well.
Good word "pizzle".
And it's old "night soil" story - why you never ever ate strawberries in Latin America and Africa in the 1960s and 1970s (I speak from experience)
I once used a sickle - many years ago! - until my grandfather said, "Young fellow, it is no use just waving the sickle about like a cows tail after flies. You must drive it with intent to move forward and make progress".
Your grandfather was right, fred.
To date, I've driven one sickle (with intent, though I intended otherwise) into the knuckle of my left hand, and had another driven with someone else's intent, into the calf muscle of my right leg! Neither experience is recommended.
Oddly, neither hurt. Nor did they bleed much at all. I had the first stitched but tended to the second myself, though the slice was much larger (exposed bone et al). The former is not the tidiest scar you'll ever see, the latter almost invisible. I should have been a surgeon.
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