pumpkinstrokemarrow

No wind in the rain on this occasion but a breezy & sunny day. Given that not all parties were fully up for a full performance, decided to go for doing both sides of a row at once, rather than going down one side then coming back up the other. This made for a certain amount of bumping, but did mean that I got around the whole thing. Perhaps a first.

Total haul was one scarf, possibly a gents scarf, four secret seven books by E. Blyton and one jigsaw by Waddingtons, total expenditure £2.40. The point of the secret seven was to investigate my mother's allegation that Blyton books were impoverished both in vocabulary and otherwise. My own first impression today is that the secret seven stories are a good deal more complicated than stories like 'Little Deer' (from the Janet and John stable, once hugely popular and now almost invisible in bookshops) which I have been looking at lately. But I may be neglecting Freudian and autobiographical angles, of which, for example, 'The Ugly Duckling' is full. Don't know about 'Little Deer'. Angles which would probably not come out in analysis of vocabulary, clause and sentence.

I mention analysis of clause because that was bread and butter for my mother's teaching of English in the 60's. This despite the fact that I do not recall doing much of that sort of thing outside of Latin classes in the school that I went to, at about the same time. And I do not suppose that it figures at all in the teaching of English in schools these days.

The jigsaw was a world map, political variety, about three feet by two feet in 300 pieces. A well made thing from Waddingtons. Helpfully supported by a full size poster of the finished product, so that if one is feeling a touch lazy, or perhaps just a touch old, one can lay the pieces on the poster, rather than doing the thing freehand. Sold to me by a lady who probably lives in the same sort of house as we do and who gazed at me long and hard before suggesting that £1 would be a fair price. I suspect that she and her family paid rather more than that for it and have had a fair bit of fun with it - and so found it hard to let it go for so little. But I guess they decided that that was the best that they were going to do. I suppose I might have gone to £2 but certainly not to £5.

This afternoon I thought to ask Google about it, but find that Waddingtons, while well known to him, do not appear to exist as a company. Not like Sony who are only too pleased to tell you about all their products and where you can buy them. In fact, I was unable to find this particular jigsaw at all, despite poking around the sites of various jigsaw retailers. So why is there a Ravensburger site which tells you all about everything they make but no Waddingtons site?

Perhaps I will try again when fresher.