Swarf

Losing track as a way of life. It started when I was rereading a passage by Deakin in his book Wildwood, about willows and basket making. Sidetracked by Cricket-Bat willows, then into the making of cricket bats. The word swarf was used for the pile of debris that accumulates around a maker of bats, which is still, usually, a completely by-hand operation. I first met the word in a machine shop, where it was used for the metal shavings that accumulated. Digging a bit, I find an earlier usage relating to the grit that's worn away from a mill-stone. Drifted afield from basket making, which itself had started as a question about eel weirs, creels, and those very expensive hand-bags they make on Nantucket. A further diversion is my habit of scanning the words around the specific word I'm looking up, especially when I'm using one of my dictionaries of lost words. Swarth (variant, swath) is the reach of one stroke with a scythe. Other questions, to further extend the field, are always being held in the unanswered-questions part of my brain. Willow is a fairly soft wood, though we call it a hardwood because it loses its leaves, therefore how can it be made into a bat? The blanks (as we refer to bats that are only crudely formed) are actually hammered and then compressed, then finished. Light and strong. Cricket bats are quite elegant. John, Himself, when he and Barb owned the pub, kept a cricket bat around, for crowd control. Our attempt to start a local league failed. Time accumulates as swarf in the corner. Swarf, the musical, or as "Swarf", a line of personal hygiene products. I needed to visit the outhouse, and the crows had been around for an hour or more, with their yapping, so I nuked a mouse and sliced it open, took a book to read. Always take a book to read, never be in a hurry, always have a list and a pencil. Nothing though, prepares you for Threes Crows Eating A Mouse, one of my best soundscapes ever. Three crows eating a warm mouse on a cold morning. The roof is one layer of reused metal, it doesn't matter if it leaks, and it's right there, just over your head:

Swarf In Dios,
I'm with him,
That guy in Wellies.

TR found me out on this, admiring ankles at a wedding buffet.