Sound and Vision

Me again. What, already? What can I say - must be Spring has got to me. Not to the point of getting the workshop, natch, but I did almost think of getting in there today, which is some serious improvement.

I also dallied with the idea of trying a April Fool on my reader, but it'd hardly be fair. Not to mention the fact that probably the reader has wandered off by now. Instead allow me to draw your attention to a collaborative effort by two national newspapers and Aunty Beeb which I think may have hauled in a few gullible fish. Nice touch to have David Attenborough on BBC Breakfast as well I thought... Of course for us woodies, Lee Valley is the place to go for April Tomfoolery, and this year is no exception. Although it seems dangerously useful if it really does such a clean job of de-corning cobs...

Of course, being now hopelessly trained to see a Veritas tool and immediately analyse it, that's what I, in fact, did. Terrible, innit? I'm a changed woman, that's what I am; I can't just look at something any more. It doesn't just have knock-on effects in woodworking either. I'll let you into a terrible secret. Pretty much the only thing keeping me sane these last few weeks has been staggering from one weekly fix of the telly series Ashes to Ashes to the next; I'm ashamed to say I was tending to count the hours to 9pm on  a Thursday. I don't get really into TV series that often (last one was Inspector Morse) but when I do, well... and this just happened to come along at just the right moment. You know how I can go on about planes? Yeah, I can get like that about A2A as well. Scary thought, eh? Heck, I'm not proud, but at least it isn't some soap opera.

Anyway, one of the big end-of-series "reveals" involved the identity of who took who's hand. Hands? Man, I'm so abnormally tuned into hands nowadays I knew the answer three weeks into the run. The actor's unusually bendy thumbs gave the game away to such a trained analyst of freaky hands. Sigh. Reminds me of the opening scene in Ngaio Marsh's "Artists in Crime" where the detective hero's powers of observation prove useful to the artist. I used to wonder about what he meant by having "trained his eye", but now I know. Poor blighter didn't have any choice in the matter... ;-)