Weasling
The Village of Stuff-in-the-Wild
Found items
In a ditch beside a footpath joining two quiet country lanes, I spotted some large empty plastic flower pots. Having a use for large empty plastic flowerpots, in I went.
There were black dustbin bags full of stuff in there too, and old fertiliser sacks packed likewise, and just feral stuff, and of course, I fell in lurve. Evidently, these treasures were the onetime contents of a shed which must have been cleared by somebody of unSheddy nature, and being of Sheddy nature myself, I felt I owed it compassion.
Poking around, I uncovered a brass bell without its clapper; tins of gloss paint, undercoat etc.; an unopened tin of Cascamite; a tobacco tin with tintacks in it; a margarine tub full of nuts and bolts and a slim oblong metal case with rounded corners, divided longitudinally, 4¼ inches by 1 inch by one eighth of an inch, with the join at five eighths of an inch straight down the length of it.
The case was yellowed, and I took it for EPNS with the S worn off, as on closer inspection the outside was worked in a 'woven' pattern, and the panel each side of the dividing line was framed with a narrow raised border.
I packed the pots and some of the other stuff into an empty compost bag, it being the cleanest I could find there, and the appearance of which I improved further by swabbing down with handfuls of wet grass. Once home with my booty, I took the little metal case out and left the remainder, still lurking in its bag, in my workshop. I pulled the two sides apart, and there within, was the wrotten reckage of a real tortoiseshell comb. After digging it out of the smaller section of case, and extracting loose teeth from the larger, and permitting them to dry out, they became so brittle that they were quite beyond any sort of rescue or reworking - however - I had a decent comb which resembled tortoiseshell, and which I usually carried when wearing the tweeds, and serendipitously, it was of around the right dimensions to fit in the case.
So, I stayed up all night with a Dreadnought file, and some finer second-cut and first-cut diagonal-toothed files and planed the comb down to the right thickness, took a fraction of an inch off the back, rounded the edges and recut the now slimmer teeth using warding files, and then cleaned the case with a small piece of an old pyjama leg and Silver Dip, having seen from the hallmarks on the two halves of the case that it was not EPNS, but Sterling S. The result can be seen below. I apologise for the quality of the pictures, but my digital camera is about as cheap and cheerful as it is possible to get. I shall replace them eventually with better ones. And the camera...
