electric screwing machines

 Upon awakening realise that it is light outside. Get up to go downstairs, it is seven in the morning. This is not late and not early, it is time to make breakfast before the son gets up to go to work. Being a pensioner is strange, there are pictures in the mind of bow-backed old smokers in cloth caps and dirty jackets shuffling along the street to the next pub.

Straighten the back, walk upright, and be happy that it is now twenty three years since a cigarette was smoked. Perhaps it is nothing to be proud of, giving up a habit that costs money and gives no pleasure, but a certain amount of pride is there in the face of all the others who never give up for long. There seems to be no lack of young people who are starting to smoke now.

Finish all the pictures that had been taken yesterday. It is not possible to do easy justice to the collectors items, they are so varied and so seemingly haphazard. Resolve to take the pictures as the items aren never to change a position, never to remove anything that may be deemed unsuitable by personal taste at the time. If some ancient tribal artefact is lying on a copy of last weeks newspaper, then so be it. There is just too much stuff there to start gardening, without starting the thankless job of tidying everything.

Study the screwdriver bough yesterday in the flea market. It is a brand called Yankee, and with some astonishment see that there are still bits available for the devices. It seems a well-made pump action screwdriver, the type of equipment that has gone out of fashion since the existence of electric screwing machines.