Brass Head

Yesterday was my birthday (#71: how did that happen?) Anyway, I don't feel significantly more decrepit than I did the day before, so...

I decided to give myself a present (My wife gave me two little bags: one filled with old pocket measuring tapes, the other with French cookies, made in nearby Verd Mont. Not bad. I ate the cookies and plunked the tapes into a bath of kero.)

You can probably guess the sort of present I gave myself: a Jones Family CS handcrank, offered emphatically as Not working and with a "patina" best described as Victorian ratty. Who cares, right? I mean, if it was good enough for Her Royal Majesty (so saith the decal), it's good enough for me.

I bought it because I saw - or imagined I saw - one of these in my favorite British B/propaganda movie of the war years, Millions Like Us, starring the lovely Patricia Roc. The film is full of un"improved" Victorian interiors with bits of more modern technology winking out here and there out of the darkness: an electric light, a radio, a sewing machine. Beautiful.

And there you have my excuse for buy another machine.

I won't do anything with it until the Morse and the Husqvarna are on their trial runs in my wife's sewing room, but come the time I'll be looking for advice.