For better or for worse - much, much worse...

Yesterday we visited Kew Gardens with our friend Katy and her children Tilly, Tallulah and Oscar.  It was great to see them again, and as usual, it was a super day out, despite the cold grey start.  We enjoyed many different aspects of our visit, although as not uncommon with Kew, we didn't manage to fit in everything we wanted to see and do.  Personally I feel two things we should attempt next time are the treetop walk and the "enormous family sharing sundaes" on offer at the ice creamery by the children's playground...

Anyway, when you come to the end of the perfect day, it's always good to have something out of the ordinary to round off with, and this wedding group was most definitely in that category.  Katy has already blogged about it at http://katyboo1.wordpress.com/ and I can't resist joining in, as I discover that I have a couple of photos of The Dresses.  Not since the 1960s have I seen such fabric as the lady first left below is wearing - my parents were florists then, and I well remember my mother's notebook with samples of bridesmaids' dress fabric.  Da-glo tamgerine, turquoise, salmon, raspberry and mauve - and polyester is SUCH a blessing!  Do observe also, as Katy remarked, the focus on the bra beneath; and as Keith pointed out, the stylish Tesco bag accessory!  I also have to assume that they knew what they were doing being photographed in front of the temple of Bellona, goddess of war.  The Strife is O'er, the Battle Won, or just Fight the Good Fight?

You Never Know What You've Got Until You Look (2)

And oh, brother, do you not know!  I'm currently clearing space in the loft so that we can have some of it boarded, and so far have found many a forgotten item among the expected ninety gazillion tons of old cardboard boxes and polystyrene packaging:

Wire filing trays, 1970s vintage - the kind that stack together with spring clips, which is a nice theory, but...

Cassette racks - what?  Oh, yeah, like about three lifetimes ago we had these quaint little plastic slabs full of magnetic tape containing recordings of stuff.  GREAT fun if they lost the plot and spewed tape out, whereupon you would rewind them with a special technical tool called a Bic™ biro.

A Spong™ hand-operated food mincer, made of iron with a wooden handle.  Ah, antiques - even longer ago, when Keith and I were sprogs, we would watch as our mothers clipped one of these to a table or chair seat and minced up ingredients for cooking - typically meat for a shepherds pie.  And afterwards you could mince a piece of stale bread to help clean it.  Since they pushed the food down onto the mincing blade with their fingers, I have no idea how they didn't mince their fingers as well - but also remember a cookery page in a newspaper at the time advocating 'Try your hand with eggs and cut down on the meat bills', which may have been a passing reference to such things.

Some small bifurcated plastic traylets, purpose completely unknown.  Suitable make half-cylindrical ice lollies (to use advertisement-speak) but no slots for sticks.  Ah, more childhood memories...

A Philips Ultraphil™ Health Lamp, complete in original box (sadly not the rare early 1950s version, of which I've seen one currently for sale on the web at £240).  Wonder if our nearest 'Electrical Charity Shop' would be interested in it for its collectible status anyway?   

An exercise bike - yes, well...

A late 60s/ early 70s gas fire.  How we put it up there is a mystery, as it weighs a ton, and why we put it up there is an even bigger one.  Will probably act on the advice quoted by a friend who had a similarly redundant example - "Put it in your front hedge" suggested the gas fitter "the gippos will take it".  Now we used to have a perfectly good totter, aka rag and bone man, though I haven't seen him for a while.  He was always known as the Agbo man after his 'cry' of "Aggg.... Bo-o!" which he would shout in strangely lugubrious tones as he motored slowly down the street.  Perhaps in another life it had been "Bring out your dead!"?

The cats are quite happy, as ever, to take advantage help out of course...Harry decided to subdue a nice piece of 1970s wool carpet offcut by sleeping on it.  Only trouble was, it was at the foot of the ladder...

The Stone Menagerie no 3

One of my favourite aunts was sometimes heard to observe "Some people aren't hardly human, are they?" - but this monkey from the Entrance Hall of the Natural History Museum in London looks all too human to me!  Here again I'm cheating a bit, as this is terra cotta rather than stone, but stone is definitely the effect produced, especially with its exposure to the gentle habits (and grime) of the visiting public since 1881.

The Nat Hist Mus building was designed by Alfred Waterhouse as (quote) "a cathedral of nature", so it's not surprising that I've always enjoyed its architecture, but I'd forgotten the amazing quality of the creatures that decorate it so lavishly.  I was charmed to learn that Waterhouse's intricate designs, many of them with a background of foliage, were translated into their 3-D form by the not inappropriately named Monsieur Dujardin - not that there seemed to be any info about the building on display, which is sadly quite usual for London's museums.  Happily the website is fairly forthcoming:
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit-us/history-architecture/architectural-tour/terracotta-ornaments/index.html

You Never Know What You've Got Until You Look (1)

The other day I was repairing our coat stand for the umpteenth time and thought it might actually stay together a leetle bit longer if I used some rawlplugs for the fastenings. A quick rummage in the toolbox revealed that there were none that would do, but that there was a tin of something called Rawlplastic. I opened the lid and cautiously prooded the plastic-wrapped greyish contents: "Hmm, that looks like asbestos". I closed the lid again and looked at the instructions - yep.

CAUTION: This product contains asbestos, but will present no health hazard if used with care. Always keep container closed, even when in use, [now THAT is CAUTION - if I can't open the lid to get any out, then it's true that it's unlikely to do me any harm], and avoid inhaling fibres [true, never a good idea]. Dampen the product immediately after removal from the container [still haven't worked out how to do this while keeping the container closed, but I'm sure that's just a minor technical difficulty], and thoroughly wash hands after use.

 So it sort of isn't safe but is? But then as it came from the long-changed hands Homepride D.I.Y store in Greenford Road, and cost the princely sum of £1.27p, I would guess that we've had it for something above twenty years - apart from anything else, I can't imagine that any product these days comes with so much punctuation in the instructions - so I think I shan't be using it after all...

At least we don't have to panic buy nostalgia, it's free

I am somewhat taken aback by the current spate of panic buying: petrol, stamps and pasties. I understand the stamps one best, I guess, as buying stamps that are designated 1st and 2nd class (rather than a specified amount of money) will save you money when postage is hiked at the end of the month.

But none of this stuff is actually life-essential, and I'm beginning to wonder if queuing and shortages haven't become part of the nation's vision of the past, and we consequently feel the need to revisit them now and again (I'm thinking here of the sugar and bread shortages of the 1970s, for example).

You don't have to ask whether the British are nostalgic - we make an industry of it. It's one of the things we do best, and pretty much always have, from at least the days of the Tudors and Stuarts getting misty-eyed about Arthurian times. Brits also dearly love a bargain, even if it isn't one: I doubt I'll ever forget seeing a sales assistant barely escape unscathed from the scavenging mob after she'd pushed a trolley of rather indifferent-looking reduced items into the central area of a local M&S branch. She judged it prudent to flee without attempting to arrange them on the racks, for which you could scarcely blame her.

A lot of Brits also have a liking for hoarding household stuff (one reason why so few people use their garages, if they have them, to contain their cars). The relative who could have run a cleaning products market stall with the contents of hers, and the former colleague whose caravan was lined with loo roll, are probably not untypical. So stock up now, folks - it's our heritage!

The Picture What I Did Not Buy

Yesterday I did something I'd not done for quite a while - I went to a pre-sale viewing for an auction. Chiswick Auctions had used this painting of a child to publicise the fact that in future their online catalogue would have a photographic image to accompany every lot, and the painting itself was in this week's sale. While I'd quite like a fiver for every child portrait I've ever looked at in the course of my museum work, this one struck me as unusual.

The gender of the child, for one thing: to the modern eye, this is clearly a female, what with the dress, the curls and the floral wreath, but I rather think this is a boy, remembering that boys under the age of five or six wore dresses at this date, and taking into account the bare knees, the shortness of the garment and the slightly tousled hair. What's more, I think it may even be an American boy. The neckline/ dress construction is one I associate with American portraits, and it has the clarity of colours characteristic of many of the American naive artists. Then the wreath is bound with ribbons apparently inscribed with the names of characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet, for no very obvious reason - unless this child's name is also Hamlet?

I'd say the portrait is early nineteenth century, 1805 or so, but it was hard to tell, as it is no longer in original condition, having been cleaned and re-lined - which is why in the end I decided not to bid for it. It was fun going and looking, though, especially to see all the other toot, I mean lots, in the sale: plenty of large and ornate pieces of furniture, including three partner desks; a stuffed pheasant (allegedly); boxes made to look like enormous books; a collection of repro dolls in da-glo sateens and gold braid; and a table whose top had been made from a framed sampler, as you do...



(photos by Keith Marshall)

What did you sing at school?

I nearly typed that as "What did you sing at school, Dad?" My father died many years ago, but I expect his answer would be "Much the same as you did at junior school" - lots of hymns, folk songs and popular/ traditional stuff. You know the sort of thing, to be found in books like 'Songs That Will Live Forever', a 1930s compilation (by Maurice Jacobson) that an elderly lady passed on to me the best part of half a century ago: The Ash Grove, Frere Jacques, What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor, John Peel...except that by great good luck there was some much more unexpected stuff as well.

I remember the arrival of an inspirational music teacher, Russell Farman, at my school when I was about nine. He gathered up a choir by the painless method of getting us all to sing something in unison and walking round listening to us, played us lots of Vaughan Williams' music, and was keen on early music too. The Christmas carol repertoire got an injection of pieces like Lullay Myn Liking, The Angel Gabriel, and A Virgin Unspotted, though the first year infants continued to sing Away in a Manger excruciatingly flat every year, but that's traditional, after all.

I was actually prompted to think about all this because in the last few days I've heard two pieces on the radio that I remember singing at Grammar School, and haven't heard since. The first was Thomas Campion's Never Weather-Beaten Sail (1613), the second was Bach's Magnificat (Et Exultavit Spiritus Meus) - and anyone would be forgiven for thinking that whoever chose those for school use was out of their tiny mind, especially the Bach, which was for class singing (boggle).

In fact I enjoyed singing the Campion, and it's remained a favourite piece of mine. It was for the house choirs to sing in competition at our school's annual arts fest, so no more than about ten or twelve voices to each group and it's quite simple, despite being a bit esoteric (not to say a tad morbid, to modern ears). The Bach, on the other hand, is showy, taxing, and for solo female voice - couldn't be less appropriate, really. I listened to it being professionally performed in astonished silence that we had managed to get even part of the way through it!

The Food Fights Back

Yesterday I cooked the evening meal - now that's not unusual, but the amount of resistance I met with from my ingredients certainly was.

First up was the meat: a neat collar joint of bacon, cooked in the oven in a huff (pastry case). Huff pastry is just water and plain flour (you don't eat it, it's just ye olde equivalent of baking foil) and so there should be nothing to go wrong really, especially as I've made it so many times, having seen it demonstrated by Sara Paston-Williams on tv in the 1980s. I measured the flour, put it in the food processor and added the water: a few whizzes later I found myself looking at something nearer the consistency of paint than dough. Whatte?? Oh well, better add some more flour and hoist it out onto the worktop - oops, still not enough (hastily slosh more flour on until we have a suitably elastic pastry in which to wrap the meat). This accomplished, and the meat in the oven, I also added the jacket potatoes and turned my attention to the apple and rhubarb crumble. Nothing went wrong with that, praise be, it's just a lot of peeling and chopping, though I almost did too much fruit, even for the biggest casserole we have. But then can you have too much crumble? I think I know the answer to that...

Also on the menu were steamed fennel and carrot - I gave up boiling veg years ago when I'd ruined a few saucepans (and nothing burns quite like carrots, on account of the sugar). Anyway, they gave little trouble except that the carrots took longer than usual to cook and so held things up a little. The potatoes, on the other hand, were still like bullets after an hour and a quarter in a hot oven - OK, let's cheat: microwave for a few mins then back to the oven to crisp up.

Final finishing touch: the parsley sauce, which is after all only basic white sauce with chopped parsley added, and I'd quite like a pound coin for every time I've made white sauce. I put the butter on to melt on a low heat, left it for a minute and turned back to it to find that it was already beginning to burn - and continued to, even when I took it off the heat. And admonishing it makes no difference, either, sadly... OK, let's see if we can get away with this - in with the flour, shuffle it about a bit, add the milk. Hmm, this is turning into a meditation over a pan of milk and roux - for the longest time it simply wouldn't thicken, so in desperation I added some butter and flour. I go away for a minute to put a few things on the table, and of course come back to find it's turned into something very like wallpaper paste. OK, more milk - I win! It's no good, food, resistance is futile - we piled our plates high and scoffed the lot.

Happy New Year

New Year's Greetings to everyone - may your 2012 be healthy, happy and prosperous - a fab year altogether, in fact.

We will be seeing in the New Year in the comfort of home, as is our custom: I shall toast it in Bacardi and coke, while Keith prefers gin and tonic. Earlier on we had a luscious lamb curry of his concocting, which should perhaps become another New Year's Eve custom, and I finally remembered to put out the hansel money (a custom inherited from my mother). This consists of putting outside the door before midnight on New Year's Eve a coin for every member of the family/ household, and fetching the money in after midnight: this is supposed to make sure that they have enough money for the year. Very much to the point in these times, I'd say!



Festive lights at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington

The Stone Menagerie no 2

Two of my favourite creatures in all the vast collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum are these medieval lions, from Southern Italy (their museum numbers are 324-1889 and 324A-1889).






The lions currently reside in the recentishly opened Medieval and Renaissance Galleries (which being a V&A person, I still think of by the working title of Med and Ren), but when I started work they were in the sculpture galleries, and I walked past them most nights on my way out of the building. As the label comments, they are column bearing and likely to have been for an external window or door. While, yes, this no doubt accounts for some of the worn appearance, the fact that most of it is around their heads suggests to me that I am not the first person, nor the last, in the 900 years of their existence who has found them very tactile and wished to run a hand over the luxuriantly carved manes. And as with the dog in Chipping Norton church, ribs and claws are still visible, though in this instance unlikely to have been based on real life - these are more your heraldic or at least symbolic lions, with tails as long as their bodies.

Re-reading: Georgette Heyer x 2

These days, where fiction's concerned, I do more re-reading of what's already on my shelves than anything newly acquired.

While that's very unadventurous of me, I'm not really being drawn to any of the new stuff - and I do still look, especially when I'm in South Kensington or Harrow. On the plus side, it's a significant economy of shelf space - I still have books stacked on the stairs for lack of anywhere else (despite having taken at least six boxes' worth to charity shops recently), and I'm still buying non-fiction.

So, what's been re-read recently? A couple of Georgette Heyer's 'Georgians' for a change: The Talisman Ring and Devil's Cub. And (always a test of re-reading) did I still enjoy them? Yes I did, despite having a preference for her 'Regency' titles on the whole. In fact I was surprised at just how much I did enjoy The Talisman Ring: it's a very adroit mixture of a lot of Georgette Heyer's interests , writing genres and favourite character types and situations, many of which she went on developing. The book was published by Heinemann in 1936 (to my further surprise, my copy is not only a hardback but a first edition), and somehow I can just see it sitting in a late 1930s sitting room, even if only as a library copy.

Anyway, to the book itself - a historical detective story, with strong elements of romantic and social comedy. The book opens with the last days of Sylvester, Lord Lavenham, who has been a most outrageous rake in his younger days and is now a most outrageous old man bravely giving death a hard time. In fact he steals the show, for my money, and I much regretted the necessity of his, er, departure so that the plot could proceed.

Sylvester's dying wish is that two of his young relatives, his great nephew Tristram and grand-daughter Eustacie, should marry each other, which looks unlikely to be successful if only because the characters have no real respect for each other. Tristram is one of Heyer's Corinthian heroes, dark, taciturn, intelligent, judicial and more than a bit handy with his fists and firearms - now that's a proper hero, as I and I don't doubt many other female readers have murmured while turning the pages. Eustacie is flighty, emotional, wilful and irritating, rather like her cousin Ludovic (see below) - Tristram would be wasted on her, so it's fortunate that he encounters Miss Sarah Thane, who is tall, venturesome, resourceful, and actually punches an assailant in the face at one point .

Most of the difficulties, however, arise from another grandson, Ludovic, tenth Baron Lavenham on Sylvester's death, whom I have to say I found rather a rather tiresome young person too. Ludovic is on the run from the law, accused of a murder two years previously and needing to prove his innocence and find his missing talisman ring which was the cause of the situation. As if this wasn't enough he is also a smuggler and has been injured in an encounter with the local excisemen. Naturally everything is sorted out in time for a happy ending, largely down to Tristram and Sarah's efforts, but also aided by Sarah's brother Sir Hugh (a marvellous comic character who is clearly related to Lord Rupert Alastair in Devil's Cub) and a supporting cast of The Lower Orders, notably the wonderfully lugubrious Mr Bundy.

Devil's Cub, sequel to These Old Shades, was written four years earlier than The Talisman Ring, and I think it shows. It's still a good enjoyable read, with an attractive heroine in Mary Challoner (set off to great advantage by her avaricious mother, frankly idiotic sister Sophia and spoilt friend Juliana Marling), but I feel it's a little less polished than The Talisman Ring; the 18th centuryisms, carefully researched though they are, I found a little intrusive in this book. The heroine spends most of the second half of the book repeatedly running away from the hero, which I got a little bored with in the end, and a certain amount of skipping set in. Once again the older generation are the scene stealers, especially His Saturnine Grace the Duke of Avon (dressed to kill, in silver lace over black cloth, oh my!), his lovely and volatile wife Leonie and his brother Rupert (whose enthusiasm for alcohol masks a dry wit).

At one point I had most of Georgette Heyer's historical novels, but there are some I found I didn't want to read any more, such as Bath Tangle, which seems to be written between exclamation marks. Those two titles are certainly for the keeping, though.

The Garden Shed - Excavations

(A view of garden sheds in the area - ours is barely visible on the right, after years of growing things up it!)

OK, so Mrs Beeton's suggestion for the domestic work on a Wednesday was cleaning the best bedrooms and the windows, but this week we did something a little different. With help from our friend Tom, we emptied the garden shed: very exciting, not, surely? Well, no, but we were not without some trepidation about what we might find in the way of inhabitants...many rodents in this area, and quite a few foxes, for starters.

What's more, we knew there was a hole in the back wall of this historic edifice (complete with asbestos roof, natch) and over the last year the shed has filled up with some four or five inches of soil/compost, as though something were nesting within. Hmmmm. And as is the traditional way with garden sheds, it wasn't exactly clutter-free. We took out two bicycles (Keith's with a chunk out of one wheel!), two bookcases, tins and tins of old paint/ wood sealer/ paint stripper/ barbecue fuel, three thousand (well, that's what it felt like) flowerpots, an oil lamp, assorted bits of watering equipment, six (or was it seven?) defunct pond pumps, a pond hoover (yes, there really are such things), hanging baskets, a quantity (as the auction houses say) of hosepipe, an assortment of garden tools (including a probably 1930s rake we inherited with the house), wooden shelving, and a seemingly infinite supply of deteriorating bags of sand, gravel, grit, cement, cat litter etc.

But in fact all we found by way of creature was one dead rat - and quite enough too, I hear you say. Could have been much worse, of course - but the real acid test will be when we take the edifice down and find anything that may be nestling underneath (see rodents, foxes etc above). Tom's comment was "That was a good job we did there. Of course there's just one trouble with having started it - we have to finish it!".

The Stone Menagerie no 1

Well, alabaster, to be absolutely accurate, rather than stone - but I really couldn't resist taking a shot of this carved dog on the Rickardes tomb in Chipping Norton church. The detail is amazing, and it was surely carved from life - you can even see the claws, and I can just imagine the collar with what were probably a gilt brass buckle and matching quatrefoil decorations on the leather. Some sort of bull terrier, I would think - I saw one very similar hanging its head out of a car window only a few days later, looking for things to chase, as it were. Pity this one looks so melancholy (and I wished I could un-muzzle him!), but I suppose he's partly intended as a mourner...

The Ancestors Say Hello

Yesterday we had a day in Chipping Norton in search of my Meades ancestors. The weather was bright and breezy and the town looked at its best with all that pale gold stonework reflecting the September sunshine. We made a beeline for the church - often a good place to start anyway, but in this case there was an extra that put a smile on my face straightaway. One of the first things I saw was this inscription:



for all the world like a welcome.

We also found Mowbray Meades on the war memorial plaque, and a group of at least three gravestones to members of the family just outside the door. And Richard Meades who was my great great great great grandfather was the mason who led the rebuilding of the church tower early in the 19th century. Salute!

Electric Flowers?

A slightly bizarre image taken at the end of a coach tour during the recent biennial conference of the Anthony Powell Society in London. Not actually electric flowers, despite appearances! (Best effect achieved by clicking on the image to enlarge it).

Woodman, spare that tree!

The view from the back of our house in the leafy suburbs - looks quite normal, even fairly civilised, if unexciting. But it isn't as good as it was, alas. The other morning we heard the sound of a chain saw, and realised that the people who live about three houses along, in the road backing on to ours, were cutting down the conifer at the foot of their garden. Oh well, probably Leylandii, so perhaps one can't blame them - though a pity, as the birds seem to like perching in it, even those that are a bit large for it, like the crows! Oh, and they took down the rest, while they were at it, which is why we are now forced to look at the backs of the houses on the other side of these now deceased trees.

OK, so it's delusional to pretend that we're not surrounded by buildings - we live on an estate in a built-up area, for goodness sake. And our neighbours are entitled to do what they like on their own property. But I do regret those trees, as they were part of a screen - in summer you could hardly see any of the nearby houses at all. Now we have an uninterrupted view of the backs of the houses at that edge instead, and the photo really doesn't show how bare it looks. One neighbour recently asked why we have so many trees ourselves - and we could only say that apart from the important benefits to the local wildlife, we've never understood the fascination of gazing upon fences, drainpipes, satellite dishes and washing lines!

Feed Me! Feed Me! (Part 2)

This morning I happened to get quite a good portrait of Pussy-next-door, whom I am feeding while my neighbours are away:




Though it has to be said that this is the even more familiar view!

Feed me! Feed me!

(Finally managing to break out of the post-employment blogging silence) There are a-many things for me to do in my retirement, but at the moment I seem to spend half my life ministering to critters. This morning I got up and fed the pond fish, the birds in the garden, and four cats (of which more anon) and the long-haired one had to be brushed and have her eyes bathed and her soil tray topped up too. I have just dealt out the second (or is it third?) round of cat treats for three.

When I finish writing this, I shall go next door to feed the long-haired one again and probably change her soil tray, then come back, feed the pond fish, refill seed hoppers for the birds if it will stay dry enough, and feed the three cats again. The increase in cat numbers has come about in two ways - one neighbour came to us a couple of weeks ago and asked if I could feed their cat while they were away. To be sure I had said I would if they could find no-one else, so that's my choice, but I had forgotten that the long coat would need regular grooming, and I had not bargained for the fact that his cat is almost certainly pregnant. I just hope she manages to hold onto the kittens until they come back! The other extra is a stray cat that would like to move in - but that has sto be taken slowly as our two resident pussers are not keen...

So what's not to like, then?

OK, it's been less than a month since I retired, so early days, relatively speaking - but so far I really am highly delighted with it. I did think I would be, but some of my colleagues, bless them, seemed quite worried about me, and the professional advice beforehand all seemed to be very much of the 'it will take a long time and an awful lot of adjusting to' variety.

Not so. I am very much enjoying being on what feels like a holiday with pay, after the last thirty-six years of mostly interesting but demanding work. To be sure, there were some brilliant, satisfying and very enjoyable things in there, but precisely because of that, it's easier to let go. I had the great good luck to work with interesting people in a great job and did most of the things I'd wanted, plus a whole heap I'd never even thought of!

And no, I'm not being complacent - I'm only too well aware of my good fortune in having had the life I have had, at least so far. I'm also well aware of the contrast with some of my ancestors. What a difference a pension would have made to William the mason, for one - despite being a skilled craftsman from a successful family, he ended his days in the workhouse.

It has, of course, helped that that I had a great send off with lovely presents, that the weather has been so warm and sunny, and most of all that there's Keith to be with. At the moment we're tackling the mountain of clutter in the study (definitely not a job for the faint-hearted!) and coping with having the bathroom rebuilt, with much disruption. We reward ourselves in between with cooking good food - compliments to the chef for his chicken sag Madras tonight!

Today Is the First Day of the Rest of My Life...

...and I feel exhausted! I officially retired from work yesterday, but will have to go in until Tuesday to stand even half a chance of finishing off everything that needs doing, particularly the clearing of my office. Towards this last, tonight I brought home fifteen bags of my own books and files, and it really doesn't seem to have made that much difference.

Amazing what you can accumulate in the course of thirty-two years: knitting needles, sticking plasters, spare shoes and gloves, mugs, forks...erm, and a balloon pump, some fishing line, a bag of 1950s halfpennies...