Tag Archives: books

Inch by Inch – – –

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Jack just makes it in time – –

One of my early memories is of being given a new jotter (exercise book) at the beginning of each school year when I was attending primary (elementary) school. Some pages were plain, some were lined and some were graph paper. The cover was blue but it’s the back I particularly remember!

On the back cover were various lists of measurements – all incomprehensible imperial ones!

Pounds, shillings and pence – 20 shillings in a pound, 12 pennies in a shilling, 4 farthings in a penny – –

Just to confuse further there were guineas! 21 shillings!!

I won’t get into the slang terms – a bob, half a bob, half a crown, a tanner – –

Then there was linear measurement –

Furlongs, chains, miles, yards, feet and inches – –

I was so used to feet and inches that, when I eventually started teaching apprentice painters (who had grown up with decimals) I had real difficulty converting.

Also, there was capacity –

Gallons, quarts, pints, half pints – –

Paint cans went from gallons to 5 litres, but when I moved to the US I found that an American gallon is smaller than an imperial one – –

Finally –

There were weights as well – tons, hundredweights, stones, pounds and ounces.

We were required to recite all this stuff regularly and be tested on our knowledge!

Eventually decimalization and the metric system arrived and everything became much simpler. But for some reason wallpaper continued to be 21 inches wide and 7 yards long – – –

I wondered why ‘jotter’ also crops up when you are ‘given your jotters’ – in other words fired/sacked/laid off. So I asked my friends on Facebook – that will be a different post – – –

Not Gardening in Eden

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Yesterday morning my daily Bible reading was Genesis, the creation story. It’s a very beautiful and mysterious story: the water was already there, it had to be gathered, there needed to be separations of many things. It never fails to move me and ignite my curiosity.

Especially yesterday, because after the Earth is full of plants and other things, dominion over them is given to the humans. I was thinking happy thoughts about the long line of connectedness with me putting in a garden, working with seeds and dirt, reaching back to God giving humans the first garden. That whole blowing it thing and the expulsion could wait. Give me my moment.

That moment was coming. Our friend Philip arrived to help, and he weeded one bed while I put up supports for peas in another. Then I went and got a truckload of dirt and compost to amend some soil; it took us 21 wheelbarrow loads to get it in the right places. By 2 pm, that 8 am “what a glorious thing to participate in” was more like “when is this going to be over.”

I doubt muscles in the Garden of Eden screamed “what the hell Lady” at Eve in the afternoon. I doubt their chickens decided eating new seed was better than eating grubs–which we were feeding them every time we found one. I know for a fact that Adam never had a blister on his baby toe from dirt getting inside his shoe and rubbing–they weren’t wearing shoes.

According to the story, at that time getting good food from the plants didn’t involve having to grow them yourself. Taking a line from Genesis, I snipped a bunch of fresh hosta shoots for dinner. Free food we didn’t grow, tasty for the taking. Philip, his partner Geoffrey, Jack and I sat down to last year’s carrots canned overwinter, the hosta shoots, and some nice Scottish Sausage patties Jack put together for us.

Go by mad world. Gardening may not be Eden, and my muscles may have the vocabulary of sailors this morning given the obscenities they are offering up with each move, but it was still fun.