About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Monday, October 16, 2023

F is for Found Objects - Three of . . . We'll See

Stationary here at Small Scale World usually means erasers or sharpeners, and sometimes pencil tops and while there are some pencil tops here, there's also a fake, a novelty pen and a pen-converter!
 
Some stationary items I found in an old desk, there was much more obviously, conventional stuff, one of which is here purely for a scaler - the iconic BiC Crystal, but among them were a joke rubber pencil (silver jobbie) and a teeny-tiny rabbit pencil top, on his own bespoke, teeny-tiny pencil, both credited to the Japanese Kutsuwa, who are still going 50-odd years later, this is just the kind of thing they were known for in the age of miniaturisation!

Either PVC or silicon rubber, it's not that clear, a bit soft for the former and a bit hard for the latter, I suspect PVC, as it has reacted with the 'paint' coating of the pencil, usually a form of powder-coating back on the day, to produce a chip-resistant surface.

Two more rodents turned-up a few weeks later in another part of the house/piece of furniture, and they triggered a memory of my having bought them for Mum, with my meagre pocket-money years before, they came in a little PVC wallet with a matching mousey notebook, and I think there were about eight or ten different little animals?
 
My brother bought a similar set of Snoopy ones I think (just printed pencils, no toppers and a little bigger), we wrapped them, and hid them in the tree at Christmas, so when she was helping us look for our chocolate bauble treats, she found them! I think, over the years, they were used as pencils with her pocket diaries, which always lose their little pencils!
 
This was mine! I don't know how it's survived, lost under the bed and found by Mum after I left home, maybe? It's an arrow! You could probably fire it, from a small bow, but you'd need to weight the end slightly to stop it spinning end-over-end! Unmarked polystyrene, but probably Hong Kong manufacture?

It was a Christmas stocking filler, we would have got one each (she was always scrupulously fair) but my Brother's may not necessarily have been the same, just another novelty pen of similar/identical cost . . . might have been a giant nail?

This actually came in recently, but I thought it could be added to this page for reasons of interest, as while we have a couple of pencil-top posts in the long queue, this is more of a converter, turning the writing instrument into a fish . . . of sorts!

It's actually too big for pencils, but works well with these Sharpies, I want a bunch now, different tails, dinosaur tails, a kangaroo tail . . . shaggy-dog tails!

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