The Frumplingtons

After a couple of false starts, one involving a dull brown picture of Chester and the other being not entirely unconnected to a — gulp! — 3D puzzle, we have finally managed something bigger than a 1000-piece jigsaw. Yesterday, we finished Michael Young’s picture of a dress shop, called ‘Ladies Ready to Wear’. (Yes, I know there should be one of those ‘postrophy thingies after the ’s’ of ‘Ladies’; after all, it’s the dresses that are ready to wear, not the ladies themselves. But I don’t make up the puzzle titles: I just copy them down.) It’s a fun picture, full of pampering, preening and posturing — oh, and lots of silly hats.

The puzzle was a 1500-piece whopper, and we took six days to finish it (working in shifts, of course). On the seventh day — i.e., today — we rested. After all, I think we deserved a break. Don’t you?

[More pics of ready-to-wear ladies on our jigsaw gallery.]

If there had been any more blue patches on yesterday evening’s weather map, the land wouldn’t have been visible at all. This had to be the easiest forecast in the world. No-one, we were assured by the BBC’s man from the Met office, would be able to escape a drenching, and thunderstorms were a definite possibility.

We quickly donned our cagoules, each of us setting new personal bests as we beat the times we had previously recorded in our regular Frumplingtons emergency weather drills. Now that’s what I call enthusiasm, especially as we weren’t planning on going anywhere — least of all outside.

Alas! all we got was an hour of light drizzle. Not even a hint of a storm. And this morning it’s bright and sunny. Some forecast that turned out to be! Here’s a tip for those Met office chappies: ditch the satellites — just toss a coin instead. We’ll keep our brollies to hand.

Put the flag out: we have just mown our lawn!

Correction: Shana mowed the lawn; I merely minced about with a pair of edging shears.

At one point, Shana seemed to be getting dangerously close to me with the mower. My shoes started to get nervous.

“Oi, watch out!” I yelled. “I’m wearing me best pumps!”

Like all chores, though, it felt much better once we’d got the job finished and could come in for a cuppa and a good old moan.

“That lawn’s a real nuisance to mow,” grumbled Shana. “It’s not flat. It’s bumpy — a centimetre high in some places and three inches in others.”

That’s all we need, I thought. A lawn that’s a mixture of both metric and Imperial. I wonder: will we ever cope?

A little Thelwell puzzle with only 400 pieces has been a refreshing change for us from those intimidating 1000-piece jigsaw leviathans we usually tackle. It’s about 34-years-old, but although some of the pieces have faded a bit, the picture itself — a scene of children playing in and around a river — has lost none of its charm. Who cares if it doesn’t have any of Thelwell’s horses in it — there’s enough action in the picture already. One group of kids has caught a huge fish and are heaving on their lines as they try to bring it in to land; the look of alarm on their pet dog’s face is priceless. Another youngster is having just as much trouble trying to catch a minnow. And one unfortunate angler has caught a crayfish. Not surprisingly, he jumps back as the crazy crustacean snaps at him.

Other children in the picture are either splashing about, diving off the bridge, or catching frogs in jam jars. Here’s a good tip, though: do the old Spot the Ball trick and try to work out which direction all these kids are looking. That’s right: none of them are looking at us, the viewer. They’re all too busy doing their own thing. But there is one pair of eyes trained upon us, connecting directly with us; one big beefy brain that’s working overtime trying to work out not where everyone’s looking, but who to chase first. He’s just over the fence. Have you spotted him yet? I won’t give it away if you haven’t. But when you do, here’s a bit of advice:

Run!!!

[More Thelwell jigsaw puzzle pictures at our jigsaw puzzle page.]

An imaginary typo has been buzzing around in my head recently: the BBC’s latest ratings winner (yawn…) is called ‘Last Choir Standing’. What would have happened if a senior tv production executive, being unable to read his own handwriting, had believed the title was really ‘Last Chair Standing’? Would it — could it? — have turned into a contest to find a Thomas Chippendale for the 21st century? Help me out here, somebody…

Table tennis highlights were shown, albeit briefly, on the BBC’s Thursday evening Olympics programme. It’s a fast game, but we think it would be ideal for Britain’s former tennis hero, Tim Henman, since his retirement from ‘proper’ tennis. Just one thing worries me, though: Henman’s famous serve ‘n’ volley technique isn’t likely to get him very far in ping-pong — it’s all strictly baseline these days.

We had a couple of other stoopid great ideas for variations on table tennis. These are guaranteed to put ‘bums on seats’ in those half-empty Beijing stadia.

• Tiny table tennis: give the players a special pill or drink (see ‘Alice in Wonderland’ for full details) that would shrink them to the same height as the net. Then pop them on the table and have them play normally, as if they were on a hard court — except with a much bigger drop off the edge.
• Coffee table tennis: due to the much lower height of the table, players could remain seated in armchairs during play. 10-ounce styrofoam cups of coffee could be placed in front of each player, to provide an obstacle and give extra chances for penalty or bonus points if either player knocks over the opponent’s cup.

We hope to road test coffee table tennis soon. It might have to wait, though, till we can find a suitable umpire. If you think you can take any of this seriously enough, please apply via the comments section. We must warn you though: the pay is paltry. Well, the Olympics is supposed to be amateur rather than professional, isn’t it?

I’ve done so much cutting and snipping this past week, that I’m starting to feel like Edward Scissorhands. It’s all been for a good cause, though — Shana and I are trying to save the planet! The easiest way to do it, we figured (and hey, why wear yourself out when you can save the Earth without breaking into a sweat?), would be to increase the amount we recycle. So, taking inspiration from a project Shana found on the ‘Net, we decided to recycle our old supermarket carrier bags and turn them into one single super-duper recycled shopping bag.

Luckily, we had plenty of raw materials to hand. We needed them, too; by the time it was finished, I had cut up a total of 47 Asda bags. I used a special spiral cutting technique and reduced the bags to one-inch-wide strips of plastic yarn; Shana then knitted (yes, knitted!) the yarn in much the same way as you might knit with wool, and transformed it all into the luxury recycled bag pictured below.

If you work out what Shana’s labour costs would have been if she had been doing this for an employer, you will soon realise that the bag she produced is worth something like what a genuine original Louis Vuitton bag would be. (Just for the record, I checked earlier and found one bag called the ‘Hampstead’ that was priced at £665 on the Louis Vuitton website. Guess what Shana won’t be getting this Christmas!)

Go and see Shana’s detailed instructions if you want to know how to make your own recycled shopping bag.

Synchronicity — or what?

During my spell as assistant recycled bag maker, I didn’t do much reading, so I was browsing in our mini-library this evening, looking for something interesting but not too taxing. I chose the New Scientist book, “Why don’t penguins’ feet freeze?” and opened into it at a random page. Here’s the question I found:

What generates the energy that makes thin, white supermarket bags so noisy?

Now, of all the questions I could have landed on (and there are 115 of them altogether), why the heck should it have been that one? You don’t think someone’s trying to tell me something, do you?

If young Polish-American Harry Wysocki hadn’t been ill in 1950, we might not have been doing this jigsaw picture of Thicketberry Cove this week.

Harry Wysocki didn’t paint the picture: his brother Charles did. But in 1950 Charles Wysocki was all set to join the fighting in the Korean War. At the last minute, however, he was granted leave to visit Harry, and was afterwards sent to do his two years’ National Service in Germany instead — a much safer posting!

After serving in Germany, Charles Wysocki became a full-time artist. He built up a successful commercial career, but decided to concentrate on his preferred ‘Americana’ or folk-art style from the late 1960s onwards.

Charles Wysocki artwork is unmistakable and you can buy it in all sorts of forms, including prints, wall hangings and calendars, so there’s no excuse for not having some Wysocki in your house. You can even buy Charles Wysocki jigsaw puzzles — if, of course, you like that sort of thing…

[Or, ‘More waffle about feeds‘]

Just a small change, but observant readers might have spotted it: the link for our RSS feed is now down at the bottom of the page. It’s never been our main source of traffic, but if you want the link, there it is.

I also decided to go back to Blogsome’s own feed service. It works fine, so why not? And, in any case, Feedburner has seemed to be getting slower and slower every time I tried to log in (i.e., not very often but often enough to notice how slow it was).

All of this might mean nothing to you. Trouble is, RSS feeds (and their little cousins, Atom feeds) seem to be beyond most people’s understanding, certainly those in the UK. If you read lots of blogs, feeds are so convenient I don’t know how anyone manages without them. So, is it possible to educate the British public about the wonders of RSS? Does anyone feel up to the challenge? Don’t all volunteer at once.

Retail therapy is supposed to be a great antidote to stress — unless, that is, you happen to be shopping in cartoonist Jan van Haasteren’s local mall. The Haasteren jigsaw puzzle, ‘Shop till you drop’, which we completed last week, includes so many examples of potential — and actual — accidents that, if it were a real shopping centre, the local health and safety tsars would have to close it down.

There’s an ape on the loose near the seating area, a big cat (a very big cat, judging by the claws and tail, which are the only parts you can see) hiding behind a pillar, and several shoppers have fallen on the overcrowded escalator. Oblivious to the chaos, one man clutches his parcel and strolls away through the crowds. As the man is carrying a box containing clogs, I suspect this could be van Haasteren himself.

Haasteren is a keen observer, though, and has drawn these two women arguing over some boxes of bargain clothing, just right.

Shopping hasn’t always been about fun and frivolity. During and after World War 2, shortages and rationing of basic items such as butter, sugar and bacon were what most people had to put up with. But as those who lived through those times are often heard to say: Ah, bring back the good old days!

This week’s puzzle was a picture of Elliot’s family grocers, which is part of the Britain in the Blitz Experience at Flambards Village Theme Park, Helston, Cornwall. The original photo was by Adam Woolfitt.