Big washer

I am not doing much on the washer collecting front these days, but there was the weight from York, noticed at reference 1, now a piece of study paraphernalia. 

And yesterday there was the disc snapped above, recovered from West Hill. One side smooth, the other rough, as if it had been coated with something abrasive. My guess was a part of a car and that the mechanic at Epsom Autos would know straight away what it was. As it was, I asked Google Images.

Without any indication of size, his guesses were a bit wild, including something from Streetelite - a motor parts supplier which only seems to exist on Facebook - and mower blade washer - whatever one of those is. I then worked out how to add some descriptors to the image search and got the very specific response snapped above. Which I believe is wrong, although not wildly wrong, with the thing suggested having a dished face rather than two flat faces. More work needed.

In the meantime, I associated to the stone balls of reference 2, more tactile objects, not so big that you could not carry one around in your coat pocket. The idea being that you belonged to some kind of men's club, perhaps a dining & drinking club, perhaps Masonic, and the form was that when fellow members met they had to exhibit their washers. The member either without his washer or with the smaller washer had to buy the next round.

In the absence of any washer, you just adjourned to the nearest public house anyway, for refreshment.

I further associate to a club which did something very similar with ties which were sober striped on one side and saucy on the other, as in seaside postcard of old. I at first thought that I had known a member of such a club, but now I am not so sure. Maybe it was just a story. Bing was pretty hopeless on the key 'ties with saucy images on the back', but Google did rather better. Not quite what I had in mind, but at least he got the idea.

And just to be sure, I fed the top half of the image above back into image search, and he found it without trouble, quite properly not paying any attention to the missing bottom half. From there to the greeting screen at reference 3, which certainly suggests that saucy ties might be part of the offering, but everything in the tie department is terribly sober. And terribly expensive - you pay a great deal to get 'D&G' in the corner.

My washer will join the York among the study paraphernalia.

PS 1: puzzled why searching for 'York' was pulling up so many posts since that at reference 1 - until Edge's 'find on page' feature revealed that the York in question was New York, often as in the New York Times. The vagaries of even simple searching.

PS 2: it came to me later that the story about ties probably came from a colleague at what was then called OPCS, now vanished inside ONS. I now think that he was actually wearing such a tie when he told us the story. Maybe fifty years ago now.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/01/useful-weight.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-carved-stone-balls-of-aberdeen.html.

Reference 3: https://www.dolcegabbana.com/en-gb/.