Curios
Stuff (I’m using that word far too much) that doesn’t yet have a home elsewhere.
Childhood confusion
Here’s a few things that I have only just realised I was VERY confused about as a child.
I was told I had ‘catarrh’ by a doctor, which I knew had something to do with snot up my nose. I thought he said ‘guitar’, but that made sense, because the snot I had up my nose was very stringy. For years I thought my nose made guitar strings.
When I was about 9, a new boy arrived at our school. He was from Walsall, which is near Birmingham in the UK. I thought the teacher said ‘Warsaw’, or at least I’d heard of Warsaw, and knew it had something to do with Poland, and possibly something to do with the second world war, even though that had finished 30 years before. Anyway, I assumed this boy was a refugee from the Nazis, rather than from just down the M6.
I had a toy cement mixer as a child. A model of the sort that drives along to a building site and deposits its load. When you pushed it along the carpet, the barrel rotated. I’m now 45 years old. I still believe that these sorts of cement mixers can only mix the cement while they’re actually moving along the road. I saw one stopped at traffic lights today, and was amazed to see that the barrel was turning around even though the vehicle itself was stationery.
Vermiculated rustication
For a while I’ve been fascinated (well, intrigued at least) with the stonework pattern seen on some buildings. Usually on the ground floor of large buildings like banks, government offices, that sort of thing. I even started taking photographs of it.
So, being an inquisitive sort of bloke, I started pestering various institutions with my photos, and finally found out. The form of decoration is known as ‘rustication’, a term also used in some very posh colleges to describe the process of banning a student from college grounds for misbehaiour!
Rustication started in Roman times (I believe) and was actually a sign of lazy builders (a pleonasm or tautology if ever there was one.) Stone on the exterior of upper floors of a building would be ‘dressed’ or finished off nice and smooth, as the building progressed. But once the scaffolding was down, the stone on the exterior of the ground floor could be left until workers had time to finish dressing it off (“I’ll be back next Tuesday with a couple of the lads Mrs. Ceasar. Couple of hours tops. Lovely job. To you, three hundred denarii.”)
Over time, this unfinished look on the ground floor actually became fashionable, and worked its way into other form of architecture. There are many forms of rustication, including ‘vermiculated’ (worm-like carvings in the stone) ‘reticulated’ (net-like carvings), banded, and prismatic.
