Yesterday @TheBreadmonkey mentioned that I have a sword, and I realised I couldn't remember which of the two bladed weapons in my household I'd told him about. So while I wait to hear back about some experimental details over Whatsapp while email is down, here is the story of why my wife and I have two sword-like objects.
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Sounds like you need to build a shrine to make offerings to Anoia, goddess of things that get stuck in drawers.
@afewbugs @TheBreadmonkey my turn for a sword story.
A year or so after moving to the Netherlands I was at a work social event, and got talking to a colleague about driving on the correct side of the road. I explained about meeting oncoming riders sword to sword. He just shook his head and said "yes but how many swords do you own?"
I looked him straight in the face.
"Two"
He didn't know what to do at that point.
@afewbugs @TheBreadmonkey My best sword story is from my 20s when I had a goth housemate who for presumably good goth reasons had a sword. One night I came home late, very drunk and struggling with the keys. When I made it into the house I was greeted by him in his tight red underpants and long hair wielding said sword as he thought I was a burglar.
@pete @afewbugs @TheBreadmonkey
If your housemate has
Long hair
Red underpants
A sword
That's not your housemate, that's a Boris Vallejo painting.
@afewbugs @TheBreadmonkey I have a sword story...
As a young lad (8 or 9 I guess) both my brother and I were overjoyed to be given a REAL SWORD for Christmas by trouble making overseas cousins.
The sword was fantastic. I guess that it was about 40cm of unsharpened steel. It had a scabbard and genuine plastic jewels on the handle.
This was the 1980's so it was justifiably a child's toy because it was 'blunt'. It was also capable of a horrifying number of puncture wounds.
There followed a very happy, but brief, period of my life before my parents came over all Lynn Fawlds-Woods and the sword mysteriously disappeared
Object the first is definitely a sword. It was purchased by my wife's grandmother's sister when they went on holiday to Spain the 1970s - she was so excited to see swords on open display for sale that she bought one and smuggled it back on the plane down her trouser leg, airport security being somewhat laxer in those days and normal walking gaits apparently somewhat stiffer.
For some reason Charlie's Nan then ended up with it, in spite of not having been the one to accomplish the dashing deed to get it home. I'd like to imagine some sort of duel was fought for custody, but apparently the sisters remained close friends all their lives. It hung on her living room wall until her death, at which point it passed to my wife who had presumably proved herself the only one of her descendants badass enough to have a sword bestowed upon them.
We did consider using it to cut our wedding cake, but it was quite nicotine stained from hanging on her wall all those years and there is surprisingly little information on the internet about safely removing nicotine from Spanish steel.
(My Mum also visited Spain as a teenager during the same period, kissed a local boy on a beach and a gang of policemen immediately popped up from behind a rock, arrested her for indecency and marched her back to the hotel where her parents were made to pay a large fine to have her released. This was presumably shared with the young lothario afterwards. She has refused to go on holiday to Spain as a matter of principle ever since.)
The second object is affectionately (or not as the case may be) known as The Knife Crime Knife. During the first lockdown my then girlfriend and I broke our only kitchen knife cutting a squash that fought back a bit more aggressively than I was expecting. All the shops were closed and we (erroneously) believed that it wasn't possible to buy knives online. So we asked in the local buy nothing group of anyone had a knife they could spare, someone said they did, and we went round and picked up a Tesco carrier bag wrapped package that had been left in an empty doorway and proved to contain what was basically a machete. Seriously, you could fight zombies off with that thing. We were a little concerned someone was using us to dispose of the evidence of a murder, but as we had nothing to cut vegetables with we took it home anyway.
