Tag Archives: history

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 – – –

The Problem of Pain–

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Jack gets in just over the line again – –

The title of this post is also the title of a book by CS Lewis based on a lecture he presented. In both he tried to explain why a nurturing God would allow people to experience sometimes terrible pain. He likened it to a sculptor chiseling at a piece of stone to eventually reveal the perfect person inside. The pain is the chiseling, and it has to be endured before you can emerge from inside.

I know some people who have chronic pain and who might question that analogy!

However, I am an admirer of Lewis, and this post is on a simpler level. I have often said that you can’t enjoy the lack of pain until you have first experienced it. I’ve been mostly lucky with my health over the years, so my brushes with pain have tended to be fairly short lived, but when it goes away, there is an almost indescribable feeling of relief – almost euphoria.

A recent example –

A couple or so months ago I bought a new pair of shoes and immediately felt as if they were pinching one of my toes. So I swapped back to the old pair, but that didn’t help. I even went to a pair of soft slippers but still felt the same pain with them. So I made an appointment with the local podiatrist. This very nice guy had a close look and found that I had an ingrown toenail that had caused a callous to develop. Half an hour later I walked out to my car with no pain at all.

There’s another side to all this, which is, of course the opioid crisis sweeping America. Originating in the overprescribing of painkillers and then spreading to wider communities experiencing both physical and emotional pain. But that’s Wendy’s area of expertise and research – –

I certainly don’t mean to denigrate Lewis or any others who have tried to theorize about this subject. I’m not particularly religious, although I am a believer in He She or It. But I struggle to understand how a truly nurturing Deity would not intervene to prevent the worst pain. Something worse than an ingrown toenail, I mean.

Maybe opioids are the answer, and we as humans have screwed that up, too.

Come back next Wednesday for more from Jack