I live in a half-timbered cottage built maybe four hundred years ago, with beams and wainscots and mantle-pieces. I use my mantle-pieces, like generations of my family before me, for storing completely useless objects that I don’t want to throw away. One of these is a small piece of polished oak about six by four by two inches with six inverted square conical shapes neatly carved out of the large face. I haven’t the vaguest idea what it is. I found as it in a derelict pub along with a Victorian policeman’s one-candlepower bullnose lamp and they both sit on the mantle-piece alongside a wooden toad of a similar vintage carved by my brother from a bit of Weymouth pine, with eyes painted black and yellow using a paintbrush made of hairs cut from the tail of our dog Sam. You had to make your own paintbrushes as well as amusements in those days.
Gizzard Stones
Gizzard Stones
Gizzard Stones
I live in a half-timbered cottage built maybe four hundred years ago, with beams and wainscots and mantle-pieces. I use my mantle-pieces, like generations of my family before me, for storing completely useless objects that I don’t want to throw away. One of these is a small piece of polished oak about six by four by two inches with six inverted square conical shapes neatly carved out of the large face. I haven’t the vaguest idea what it is. I found as it in a derelict pub along with a Victorian policeman’s one-candlepower bullnose lamp and they both sit on the mantle-piece alongside a wooden toad of a similar vintage carved by my brother from a bit of Weymouth pine, with eyes painted black and yellow using a paintbrush made of hairs cut from the tail of our dog Sam. You had to make your own paintbrushes as well as amusements in those days.