Tuesday, December 22, 2009

The washer josher of Christmas trees

Thus my executive de-luxe faux fir was described by Kevin, aka Starman, owner of the loveliest little tug at Bill Fen. And I thought to myself, he's right you know.

I went to a little soiree (well, more of an apres-midi-ee)* up the road at the weekend and two people expressed great amazement on hearing that it wasn't a real tree, although admittedly they had only looked at it through the window and from a distance. And I thought, yep, that's the washer josher; the fake that tries to look like the real thing but wouldn't fool anyone close up.

Then I thought about the green and silver tinsel tree we had when I was an (older) child (my mother got sick of the real thing a lot quicker than I did, and also this was in the seventies when a tinsel tree marked you out as modern and cutting edge. Having a real one was a bit like having Victorian furniture,. As indeed it was in the nineties, only by then it was trendy again). Anyway, this was an honest to goodness plastic tree, not trying to fool anyone, not expensive, but it gave us years of fun, and even now is probably still giving good, if superficially tatty, service. The Springer of Christmas trees, perhaps.

And for years I guess we had the Grand Union of Christmas trees; big, brutal and impressive, but not what you'd call graceful. We left those Nordmann Spruce joshers, elegant and tastefully decorated, to others.

So now I come to think of it, it's obvious why I don't feel the need for a real Christmas tree any more.


*I know there should be accents on that, I just don't know how to put them there.

6 comments:

Halfie said...

On my keyboard (and I don't know if this is peculiar to a Mac (but then a Mac is peculiar anyway)) if I hold down the alt key and press e, then release the alt key and press e again, I get an acute accent over the e. Like this: é. And if I do the same, but with alt and the key immediately to the left of z, I get a grave accent: è. Much fun is to be had holding the alt key down and pressing each character key in turn: you get some surprising, and potentially useful, results! œ ∑ ® † ¥ ø π etc.

I discovered this only recently, after I'd asked how to do it on my blog. Now I can get a breakfast in a café; if I were to go skiing I could, no doubt, indulge in some après ski; and if I could only think of something with an umlaut I'd show that off too!

Try it, I think it works on a PC too.

S said...

I tried that with great excitement.... but nothing happened. With one alt key I just got an ordinary 'e' - or lots of them if I persisted. With the other, I got the edit menu. It might be my very old keyboard, reinstated after the flashy wireless one that came with the computer gave up the ghost.

Anonymous said...

You can do some things on the keyboard with ctrl + something, but I don't think it stretches to accents. Do you prepare your blog entry in 'Word' first? If so you can use drop down menu 'Insert' then click on 'symbol' and you will find the accents etc in there.
By the way, loved your slippers! They look like real felt.
Kath (nb Herbie)

S said...

That's what I should do, do it in Word first and use the insert menu. But I didn't know until after I'd started that I was going to want to use those words. Slippers are great, they are real felt and were stupidly expensive - at least what I would consider stupidly expensive, for slippers... £15, reduced from twenty, but don't tell anyone!

Halfie said...

Sorry to have got your hopes up, Sarah. I'm now on a PC at work, and I can get é by holding down the Alt Gr key and pressing e. The Alt Gr key is immediately to the right of the space bar on this keyboard. I can't find the grave accent though.

Sarah said...

Didn't work for me :-(