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.
Showing posts with label Grooming - NTS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Grooming - NTS. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 9, 2025

V is for Vanity Case

Here's something completely different. I was in TKMaxx the other day, still looking for the broken astronaut - I don't think that's going to happen! And I discovered they had some aftershave gel, a rarity these days, common as muck fifteen years ago, but bloody-hard to find these days (possible subject of a future rant), and while grabbing that, saw these;
 
Now, my first thoughts were, why on earth would young-men today, feel the need for a set of tools such as these? In the age of hot & cold running water, exfoliating facial scrubs and textured cloths, sponges, loofahs, pumice-stones and Japanese scrubbers, why would you subject yourself to medieval instruments, last seen in Edwardian bathrooms? My second thought (I'm not interested in the answer to the first), was five-quid for ten useful sculpting/fine-modelling tools?!! Take my phuquing money!
 
Ideal for sculpting Plasticine or modelling materials such as air-drying clay or Milliput, fine etching, particularly in plastics, and getting old paint out of tight folds and undercuts in otherwise stripped figures, and at a pound a tool, a bargain, I thought!
 
To which I've added these, mostly inherited from a bathroom which did have it's origins in the Edwardian era (my Mother's), although I suspect the two twisty ones (silver, or silver-plate) may be pipe-cleaning tools, subsequently used as tooth-picks? Below them are a strange, small, bladed-tool and a more conventional nail file, cleaner and quick-shaper, in ivory - I think? With a steel insert.
 
The former may be a surgeons bone knife? A once very sharp blade and now equally blunt chisel-end, but both thick, heavy blades, on a short, possibly stainless-steel, but substantial handle, suggest the finishing of bone, after amputation? While, on the subject of bone, I feel if the nail-file was bone it wouldn't hold that curved point, or the fine scoop for pushing back quicks, in the way the finer material presented by ivory can?
 
Anyway, they will be going in with the modelling tools, for what's left of my natural term! I wonder who else has unconventional modelling tools?