Axis of Shaving

Part one of the new world order in shaving apparel has arrived, safe and sound. After almost two years of shaving with a Tesco Value Razor with Tesco Value Razor Blades

occasionally living it up with a Johnny Wilkinson Sword. Just the two shaves, and then you are you are using the dull, spoon-like wit of 'Roseanne' rather than the rapier class of 'Yes Minister'. So I decided to step it up a level and brought up a century of
Feather blades - the choice of Samurai shavers from Sapporo to Kagoshima. I'm yet to use one, but I hear that they will slice through unwanted hairs just by placing them in the next room and pointing your chin in their general direction. This should yield two years of shaving delight, less probably a month or so when I am cut to shreds by its diamond sharpened, or laser sharpened, or diamond-laser sharpened blades.


And certainly one needs sufficient support for such an investment. The £2.50 razor from Tesco which has travelled with me from the UK to Italy, Austria, Canada, France and Australia, is starting to bend it like Beckham. If I get the odd nick through to the keeper with this, and my bedulled scythes, then I will be peeling through the dermis in no time when the feathers arrive. Hence to the heart of Teutonically efficient shaving, and to the Merkur Heavy Duty.


The astute reader will note the light, aromatic Yin of the light blades, tempering the ponderous, imperious Yang of the heavy razor. No? No one? As Wino says, early doors... whatever that means.

Farmers' Markets swings, misses and DLF maximums

For the last two weeks we've hit up the local Lethbridge Farmers' Markets.

The polka-dotted scarves are the standard garb of the female Hutterites, a clan who are omnipresent at the markets. More seasonal produce than one could, and indeed should, poke a stick at. We nabbed some 'korabhi', or something similar, which was toted as 'like a sour radish'. That was more than enough to have my left hand throw it back into the pile, while my right grabbed Di to try to escape the madness. But not, I was overruled and we now have a brace of korabhi sitting in our fridge, waiting to be eaten. I have declared that I would need to suffer horrific olfactory and glossal injuries before entering the dragon and eating one of those; perhaps that explains the firecrackers I found in my cereal.

Anyway, you have your fair share of characters at the Farmers' Markets. One bird, who was English (and whom Di thought was from New Zealand) started to talk to us, thinking we were English - error. We were after some of aersol-freshener for the car, to douse the stale taste of cigarette smoke which the previous owner so lovingly left for us, and at no extra charge! Does PT stand for 'Pulmonary Terminator'. Now that would be a film I would pay and see. Well, that's a lie - everything is on the internet these days.

So anyway, this bird was selling all manner of deoderants, and after the first two, Robin Goodfellow and Portia, I spotted the subtle Shakespearian reference. Di said that were after something which wasn't 'too girly', and I grunted my approval in the deepest basso profundo imaginable. The bird recommended the Portia - to which I said, 'If this is the same Portia as in the Merchant of Venice then it shouldn't be too girly, at least, not in the second half'. I got nothing. Di stood, waiting for the punchline, and the bird stood, waiting for cold hard cash.

But we connected, in a Stanford Super Series fashion, with a bloke and his wife from Guyana. They make some of the best hot sauce I've tasted in a while

http://www.firenbrimstone.com/info.htm

since it has things in it that add to the taste (mangoes, cucumbers and the like) rather than a concentration of 10 litres of Peruvian Psychopathic Chillies in one tablespoon of mayhem. We talked about West Indian cricket for a while, before he made the schoolboy error of saying 'you probably wouldn't know about the great batsmen we used to have, like Worell, Weekes, Sobers.' That is where he made his first mistake. Good times were had, though, discussing CLR James' 'Beyond a Boundary' and the demise of the pace quartet.

Oh yes, and you can buy a proper fraction's worth of cow or hog. With our new chest freezer (to double as a heater during the winter) we are thinking 1/4 of the finest Albertan cattle will put us in good stead for a while.

Time for that DLF Maximum chilli.

Worth more than two birds

Last week marked the final week in the generic (although definitely a step up from the Burgmann Colleges of this world) accommodation at the University's temporary summer honeymoon getaway residence. I had the pleasure of a twin room, and Di arrived only after I moved out. That meant that I was able to sleep in one of the beds and make forts, on a miniature scale to Fort Whoop-Up

complete with a whisky store, at which I was the major customer, and a saloon in which I put my spurs up on the nearest stool and told the barkeep of the trouble brewin' down in Medicine Hat. Anyway, we are now in our new place, which has more character than an Agatha Christie novel.

I bought a bed, although that was after much umming and ahhing in the Lethbridge IKEA equivalent, known by the partially unpronounceable name 'JYSK'. I had gone a good portion of my life without knowing what a 'box spring was' - apparently it is the poor man's bed frame. So I bought a bed frame, and a mattress - with a future cricket captain on the way there was no need to skimp on the mattress... and, in a deer-in-the-headlights daze, I asked the attendant what the story was re the box spring. She said that it was not essential... but 'added some height'. BANG! Height adding is what I'm all about, so I had no hesitation in buying it. She was a little puzzled at my trio of purchases, but was good enough to sell them to me nonetheless.

I pieced together the bed, whence the title for this post. There was a classic set of 'non-language-specific' instructions, which brought all of us together as citizens of the world. This was the first page.

Note, not just the prison-cell depiction of the placing of one's bed, but that one bird had been crossed out, leaving two. I figured that, in the bed composition department (if nothing else) I was as good, if not better than two birds, particularly ones whose heads and legs were not attached, which must lead to very compromising times in the Allen-key rotational stakes, that is, if they can get the time off from moonlighting as toilet posers. Oh yes, and there is a hammer there. I had no hammer. I did, however, have the recent purchase of two 1kg cans of tomatoes to 'watch my back'. These helped in the hammering, with some judicious rotations to avoid the expectoration of tomato juice over the bed frame.

(Recently, I thought it a wise move to reacquaint myself with one of my childhood heroes, Sherlock Holmes. I tell you now, the second time round is a bit of a let down. Perhaps people were more easily fooled in the 1890s, or in their pre-teen book reading days, when the only other serious competitor was R.L.Stine, of the 60 chapters, each two pages, gambit. The climactic ending of one of the novellas hinged on Holmes' constructing a dummy which 'looked just like him', and thereby delaying the miscreants sufficiently long to gleam his incriminating information. Oh yes, and there is lots of air-time to the word 'ejaculated', in the classical sense meaning 'thrown out'. Thus, Watson will, periodically, interject ('throw between', sure) with 'But surely Holmes, you cannot be serious?!' with the customary first-person two-step of ', I ejaculated'. That seems to have lost its way in the modern world. It would be a brave man who brought that one back. I'm trying to bring back flat caps to Canada,


but the reintroducing of 'ejaculated' into family-friendly conversational currency, is out of my league.)

Anyway, the final product of the bed was an Everestian behemoth.


I had to perform a little run-up and primary-school-high-jump-scissors-kick to even gain access to this Procrustean bed, but, fortunately, my feet didn't ram up against the foot board. On her first night in the house, I had to provide Di with the two-step step-ladder (and some tanks of oxygen) to aid her ascent.

I'm not sure whether the inimitable JYSKians are keen on their refunds, but this is an exercise for the forthcoming week.