Joe bennett
In which our Southern man realises that neither pot plant ownership nor power tool procuring are the key to distracting from an inconvenient tooth
Pot plants and I have never really got on. But then I had to go away for a few days and I asked a friend if he’d mind popping round from time to time to feed the fish and he asked how he was going to get in and I said I’d get a key cut. At the hardware store that I won’t name because I can’t remember if it advertises in this market-leading magazine I gave the key to the man and then I said I’d just nip down to Gardening while he cut the new one if that was all right with him because I needed to get something for the garden and he said that was fine.
As it happened I didn’t need to get anything for the garden because it is winter and I don’t even know if I’ve still got a garden, but I didn’t want to hang around while the bloke cut the key because of my teeth. You see, the dentist I went to as a child used the wrong frequency of amalgam so if I am within 50 metres of someone cutting a key my teeth start picking up the Concert Programme.
But I have found over the years that if you try to explain about wrong-frequency amalgam to a hardened key-cutting shop assistant he tends not to be especially sympathetic and suspects you of just being a guy who can’t stand the noise of metal on metal, which, on a masculinity rating scale of one to 100, gives you a score of approximately negative six. And that entitles the key cutter to call out to one of his colleagues, “Hey Gene, see this guy. Can’t stand the sound of a key being cut. No, this guy here with his hands over his ears and his mouth playing the Brandenburg concertos.”
Easier all round, then, to pretend to head for Gardening at the far end of the store. Though once I’d started in the direction of Gardening I kept going , partly because I didn’t want Key-man to spot me not going to Gardening when I’d said I was going to Gardening – “Hey Gene, you know that guy with the musical teeth. Said he was off to Gardening and now here he is in Solvents. Would you believe some people?” – but also because I wanted to avoid accidentally stumbling into Power Tools.
Even if you’re the sort of guy who has wrong-frequency amalgam there are dangers in power tools. Specifically one can find oneself between hammer drills and drop saws gawping at a video of a bloke with a check shirt and an American accent demonstrating how a thing called a multi-tool costing only $150 can make short work of such jobs as chamfering the dovetails on your bull profile skirting, jobs that you didn’t know existed until you watched the video and that you know with absolute certainty you will never have to perform this side of the grave. And sure enough the only time I’ve ever used my multi-tool was to try and get some dried chewing gum out of the tread of my gumboots and the oblique-angled oscillating saw-blade attachment housing broke.
“Are you looking for anything in particular?” asked the woman in Gardening who had taken advantage of my daydreaming about power tool misadventures to pounce. Of course I wasn’t looking for anything in particular for reasons already described but neither did I want to hurt her feelings, especially in winter, a period known among the sorority of garden retail professionals as Bumsville.
So I said I was looking for something that flowers with unstoppable abundance in the deadest of dead midwinter, and then, when she told me that sadly there was no such plant, I would act simultaneously astonished and downcast, yet impressed by her compendious horticultural knowledge, and I’d thank her and turn and head back to… “Oh, that’s pretty,” I said.
“It’s a cyclamen,” she said. It was covered in flowers.
Just as planned, Key-man had long since finished his cutting. “That’s got a lot of flowers on it,” he said. “Yes,” I said, “I always think a cyclamen brightens things up at this time of the year, don’t you. So lucky to have found what I was looking for. And a snip at $20.” I took the thing home with some pride. But then I forgot to ask the fish-sitter to water it. Ah well. Pot plants and I have
never really got on. ✤