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I bumped into Monica and Melanie in Einstein Bagels last Saturday and we started reminiscing, as one does at our ages, about our pasts.
Mine of course turned out to be quite, quite nefarious.
You see when I left high school, back in the sixties in England, I bummed and hippied around for a few years; because, you see, at that time, in England, university was not only free, but if one was a mature student (or, if not actually mature as such, could at least be seen as independent of one’s parents) the state not only paid all the uni fees, but provided a stipend for books and living (and, truth to tell a few beers---Beer Good!!) so that one would end up with a degree (and not just one of those crappy Mercun ones, but the real, genuine Great British McCoy) and no debt (at least if you avoided the bookies and the dealermen you did); so all I can say is “Eat your heart out Capitalism, Socialism rocks!!!”
Anyway, politics aside, that was the excuse I gave my parents (and the world in general in so far as it bothered to ask) for three gloriously fainéant, laid-back, evil-ish years. Of course it wasn’t all psychotropic indolence, in fact I actually worked---at least at first.
At that time I was still interested in the chemical arts, even after having blown myself up a few years earlier (as I’ve elsewhere rehearsed ), and so I applied for, and actually got, a job with British Soya1 Products in their labs in Puckeridge in Hertfordshire, and so my first job was as a food chemist.
And there I was in my food chemists’ white coat, tall amidst the alien test tubes, and the petri dishes and the distillation apparatus and the ...so forth---and I took part in tasting trials (which, when you are dealing with raw soya, are utterly gross), and in quality control, and analysis, and it was all really ... really ... somewhat boring. And, as is Nature’s way when she restricts some species in one direction She then promotes it in another, and so it is that all chemists tend to be wild, crazy and above all funny guys---what august body other than the Royal Chemical Society would have upon the walls of their lavatory the question “What’s the difference between a gentleman and a chemist?” only to answer it “A gentleman washes his hands AFTER going to the lavatory.” And it tells you a lot about chemists in general that they view those as mutually exclusive categories.
Oh! The fun we had!
For example, in those pre-computer days, we had, for statistical analysis, an electro-mechanical Olivetti calculator that was (for those primitive pre-computer days) extremely sophisticated, However since it’s calculation was mechanical, we quickly discovered that if one just ... happened to set it up to divide all the nines that were by the number one, and then quickly unplugged it from the mains before it could start working, then the poor analyst (or as we came to think of them, victims) who next tried to use it would have to wait and wait while it chugged and clattered for absolute ages.
Oh! How we laughed!
Then there was the glass tubing.
From time to time (in those primitive days) we would have to construct some primitive piece of chemical equipment, so we always kept a stock of glass tubing on hand. This typically came in nine-foot lengths; to be cut and bent and ... so-forthed.
However, in its uncut, pre-bent state it had this wonderful property; that it was exactly a fraction of an inch wider than a soya bean and thus made the most incredible long-barreled sniper’s peashooter---it would send a pea ...I mean a bean... zinging across the lab’s yard to ricochet off the low roof of the garage opposite.
Now it so happened that this roof was frequented by a number of birds (or as we came to think of them, targets)---mainly pigeons, nothing too cute or endangered, so it wasn’t really evil, and since they always came back---presumably to gobble up the evidence, it didn’t seem to cause them too much damage and anyway it was (to our chemistically deranged minds) quite amusing to see them jump with surprise before eventually deciding that something untoward had happened and that it might be prudent to fly off for a bit.
Then ... ... then we started putting out bread for them
Cheerio for now
from
Richard Howland-Bolton
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Notes:
The title is a reference to that old John Wayne movie “The Shootist ” (Paramount, 1976)---though since it was soya1 beans rather than peas, I probably shouldn’t have bothered, especially since ‘peas’, being properly a noun of mass (in the past often spelled pease, peese or even peaze), makes ‘pea’ a barbarous back formation which would force me (as a devout etymologist) to analyse the word as *peas hootist---and a world of trouble with owl, not to mention Mammo-Centric Publicans of America*, lobbyists awaits there. 1 (Oh! And before we go on, that really is ‘Soya’ with an ‘A’, and it says something or other about the state of our two countries, that we in England seem to have taken the high road with the formal form, ultimately from sho:-yu or siyau-yu whereas you casual buggers took the low road with the more colloquial shoy or soy.) And I took the even lower road, but that’s a story for a different time---probably for a different audience too. __________________________________________
* At least I didn't title it 'Peas Hooters"!
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