Fake 162

 

When I was young there were two sorts of potato peeler. The old-fashioned sort with a wooden handle, a fixed blade and bound with thick twine, both to hold the thing together and to give the wet right hand a good grip on it. Generally used by bracing the right thumb against the potato held in the left hand and then pulling the blade towards one, although, to be fair, some people preferred the forward stroke. The two cutting edges were both usually rather blunt, which made the thing hard work. 

Notwithstanding, the sort of thing mostly used up north for bashing spuds - in the home, in a canteen or in a school kitchen. Then there was the up-to-date speed peeler, of lighter construction and with a blade which could move slightly to accommodate the contours of the potato. It also seemed to sharpen itself on the potatoes. With practise, it was quicker, produced a much thinner peel and so wasted less potato. When very young, I only ever used a speed peeler, and only came across the other sort when I had occasion to peel potatoes at a camp or something of that sort.

Moving to the present, the kitchen cutlery provided by holiday cottages is generally poor. Partly, because a lot of people on holiday don't bother much with cooking. Partly, I imagine, because too many people are apt to pinch decent kitchen cutlery, perhaps euphemising the theft as a souvenir. However, after mentioning the matter last year, we now have a shiny new old-style peeler, completely fake in that it is very lightly made of plastic and the binding twine is actually a piece of textured orange plastic glued to the rest of the plastic handle underneath. The good news is that it is quite sharp and rather easier to use than the genuine article.

Peelers done, I moved onto the 'County Press' to catch up on the news. All the interesting goings on that you get in an old-fashioned paying-for local newspaper. From which one might take away the idea that the criminal classes on the island are rather into lock-knives, which I associate with Simenon and the Paris of the 1930's, with the teddy boys, flick-knives, knuckledusters and bicycle chains of the 1950's. The sort of people who were apt to gather at big seaside resorts on Bank Holiday Mondays.

On a  more peaceful note, on the right hand side of the left hand snap above, you get a glimpse of the Medina Marching Band strutting their stuff outside the east front of Hampton Court Palace.

And I have also been reading about the island's enthusiastic participation in the Island Games, biennial games invented by the Isle of Man which attract around 20 islands, mainly in and around the UK the Baltic and Scandinavia - but also some places from much further afield. I thought it rather a good idea, a big improvement on twinning. See reference 3.

PS: Google's Bard was quite good at explaining the difference between a lock-knife and a flick-knife, but when I asked it a supplementary about whether I could get a flick knife which locked when flicked, it fell back on 'I'm a language model and don't have the capacity to help with that'.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/fake-161.html.

Reference 2: https://www.countypress.co.uk/.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_Games.

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