Our friend Bruce was a dwarf.
That is not to say that he was small, although he was, but he was small because he was a “proper” dwarf, legs and arms half the length of a “normal” person, he was born like that and the regular lifeplan for someone with dwarfism is to get an equity card and find work in the theatre, you can make a killing at christmas if you have an agent who knows which theatres are putting on Snow White – a dwarf with a shetland pony as a pet would be priceless.
I was reminded today of an extraordinary pair of trousers that I once owned and the extraordinary way in which I came to own them.
Loon pants were a 1972 invention, we had already seen flares and I owned a couple of pairs of Wrangler “Blue Bell” bell bottomed flares including the ones made entirely from patches, but loons were something different.
For a start they weren’t denim, they were a lighter cotton and therefore able to be dyed all sorts of different colours and the common practice was to have the part below the knees a different colour to the part above the knees.
The nice little cottage in Brittany situated right on a very nice golf course indeed was part of a block of ten brand new other ones which the golf club members had invested their euros in, although with hindsight perhaps they hadn’t invested quite enough euros in them as the build quality was quite crap, still, we were only there for two weeks, and it had a shared swimming pool, and did I mention the golf club ?
2003 was the year that France was hit hard by the hottest month ever recorded in French ledgers, assuming that the French keep such ledgers on the weather like we weather fixated Britons do, its a wild assumption that the French have an equivalent phrase for “phew what a scorcher !” because thats what they would have written in the ledger for the whole of the two weeks that we stayed at their posh golf club in Brittany.
Last week we had the story of “the car that no-one wanted” and I explained how I had purchased the car that no-one wanted in order to take mon famille au Britagne, to the non-Francophiles this means that we all went off on a jolly holiday to Brittany in Northern France to stay in a nice little cottage that I had myself picked at random from a brochure on the subject.
I state here and now that when I booked the nice little cottage I had no idea that it was on a golf course, no idea at all, oh no, it hardly mentioned the golf course in the brochure at all, maybe just one sentence, easily missed, golf was not the main reason why I booked the nice little cottage, not at all.
Not exactly Robert Newton’s Disney portrayal of the conniving ships cook Long John Silver, more my darker version and my entry for this weeks Illustration Friday theme of Tales and Legends in ink with watercolour wash .
So there we all were on Saturday, reporting for work down at the office so that we could clear out at least two years worth of junk from the workshop and see if we could create a bit more space in order to prevent us having to move premises and buy more space…
I had ordered a skip (dumpster), a big one, for we had much rubbish including at least one filing cabinet and 18 months worth of broken credit card terminals that we have removed from various supermarkets in the course of our work, said broken credit card terminals not requiring return to the original owners.
A bit of an indulgence today, ten and a half minutes of “Stairway to Heaven” from the Led Zeppelin documentary stylee film “The Song Remains the Same”.
It’s Sam Kirkbride’s fault that we were all introduced to Led Zeppelin in 1969, back in those days you weren’t allowed eclectic tastes, I was The Faces/The Stones/The Who, others only seemed to like chart music which could be dodgy (to say the least) and a small bunch, who were the first to let their hair grown slightly longer than the regulation grammar school short back and sides, were the “progressive rock” specialists, Deep Purple and Led Zep being their champions.
Sam Kirkbride was the class hippy though and as we grew through to our O levels he was the one in the afghan coat sometimes smelling strangely of sweet cigarettes, sometimes just smelling like a wet dog, the last time I saw him was after we had all left school, I saw him in the Cats Whiskers club in Meanwood, shared a beer with him and went back to the derelict house that he and his revolutionary hippy mates were squatting in at the time, shocked at the squalor I sat on the floor in the pitch black room with them for a short while, shared a bottle of vodka with him then made my excuses and left through the front door which was locked and nailed shut, access and egress by crawling through one of the broken door panels that they had kicked in.
I smell that evening when I hear this song.
Wikipedia definition…
Brake horsepower (bhp) is the measure of an engine’s horsepower without the loss in power caused by the gearbox, generator, differential, water pump, and other auxiliary components such as alternator, power steering, and AC compressor. Thus the prefix “brake” refers to where the power is measured: at the engine’s output shaft, as on an engine dynamometer. The actual horsepower delivered to the driving wheels is less. An engine would have to be retested to obtain a rating in another system. The term “brake” refers to the original use of a band brake to measure torque during the test (which is multiplied by the engine RPM and a scaling constant to give horsepower).
Hands up all of those who are still interested ?
Thats just the one of you then…
Rather fortuitously Peugeot had agreed that it was their fault, which was nice, and they offered to pay for all of the repairs under warranty, which was even nicer, so they did and we got the car back three weeks later.
10,000 miles later the rear suspension collapsed as had been predicted by another Peugeot dealership in another town who were customers of ours “get rid of it before the suspension goes” they had told me, I didn’t, so the suspension collapsed at 62,000 miles, I had to pay for new suspension thingy’s.
In the spring of 2003 I booked a family holiday to France, it was very nice thank you.
In order to facilitate this family holiday to France, which included my sister-in-law too (so thats five adults in the car) I decided, in a moment of extreme foolishness to purchase a Peugeot 307 SW, a seven seater estate car that offered lots of combinations of seating and such like, ideal for a happy touring holiday – I bought an ex-demonstration model from my local dealer, it was a late 2002 model – this is important please note this down.
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