Started off at the tip where we were reminded as we disposed of an unwanted piece of furniture how much furniture gets chucked away - although I dare say a lot of it was damaged in some way and like so much modern stuff, more or less impossible to mend, or at least impractical. Not like the days when you could simply cut a new bit of wood from the garage into where somebody had thought to carve their initials with their pocket knife - or whatever.
Then through the small Thursday market to buy three pineapples for £1. To think that someone has tended the things for months somewhere out in the tropics and then shipped, probably thousands of miles, to me to buy at this knock-down price. Hard to see much profit in all this. And equally hard to know what to do with them now I have got them home, with the Boston Cook Book reminding us that for most purposes tinned pineapples work better than fresh ones. On the up side it did offer a dozen or more different things to do with pineapples.
On up East Street where I came across a heap of green plastic twine, most of which I was able to recover, only leaving a few yards on the spool which had got inside the hedge somehow. The garage padlock key proved able to sever the twine where the back door key was not, being rather older with the points a little worn. Back home to wind it into a hank, observing the maxim learned from a professional yachtsman one day on the Solent that rope just chucked down does not tangle. What might look like a tangle will tease apart - provided you do not try to help the process along by threading the free end through all kinds of loops and crannies. The maxim worked and a few minutes after the snap the hanking up was completed and the completed hank was hanging from the garage roof awaiting a use. Something will turn up one day.
Odd how I like string, something I have noticed before (see 20th February 2011 in the other place) and an oddness which at least one other person I know shares. Perhaps it is the original artefact, the making of an ideal object - a uniform and flexible line of arbitrary length - out of raw nature where such things do not exist. Once you have the line, the way is open to think of circles, triangles and squares. Of space. You also have knots and tangles (with the green twine having just one small knot which I came across at the very end of the hanking. Yachtsman wrong to that extent). And so science is born.
And, back in the real world, onto spinning thread, twisting yarn and walking ropes.
And, back at home, there is clearly a lot more to learn about the camera bit of the new mobile phone. Why, for example, has it only stored one picture when I thought that I had snapped three? At least they are much bigger and better than those from the old phone.
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