Ian Wood: Hands-on role in seasonal Blockbuster

Published on Sunday 27 December 2009 21:22

LAST week, while quietly going mad attempting to wrap gifts in a way which didn't suggest they'd been involved in minor explosions, I arrived at last at the point at which small greetings cards are attached to – or in my case, stuck on to – the packages. The cards have gummed areas which do the sticking after small protective labels have been removed. The labels bear the instruction: "Peel off and stick," which, for some obscure reason, I've always found faintly offensive. Of

However, on reflection, a remarkable number of such instances have occurred over the years around the Christmas period and I was reminded of some the other day as I searched for something or other amid the debris of what has become known as, for want of a better description, the spare room, and came across four hand-warmers on a dusty shelf. The objects are the residue of a spate of hand-warmers which came my way during Christmases many years ago when either they were all the rage or else we were going through an ice-age. None of the hand-warmers has been used and as I surveyed them, I felt a pang of shame. People had gone to the trouble and expense of giving me the things with the best of intentions and here they were, untried, deprived of doing the very thing they'd been created for – namely, lying in trouser pockets warming golfers' hands.

Strangely enough, there was one occasion on which I used hand-warmers, two of them in fact. They must have preceded the four which found their way on to the shelf, and even then they weren't used as hand-warmers. To anyone who hasn't stumbled upon such objects, a word of explanation might be in order. They were, to all intents and purposes, giant wicks, dense pads of felty material housed in a metal casing, the top half of which could be removed in order to light the wick, which was then re-covered and left to smoulder and generate heat. The warmers didn't generate much heat, but would have been better than nothing to someone who happened to be clinging to a glacier.

The pair in question came in handy one very cold winter when cars were seizing up all over the place. We're talking here of an age when technology was not as sophisticated as it is now and one of the hazards facing car drivers was that in seriously low temperatures, what garage mechanics termed "The Block" tended to give up the ghost and freeze solid. I didn't know much about The Block, but I had a vague idea where it was situated and as the cold spell continued, I became increasingly paranoid about my Block and what might befall it.

One day, inspiration galloped in. I had, as usual, received my Christmas crop of hand-warmers and at last saw a way of putting them to good use. Accordingly, I went to the lock-up where I kept my 1938 Rover saloon – "the poor man's Rolls-Royce," as I once heard someone call it and whoever it was got the bit about the owner right – and set to with pieces of string which I attached to the hand-warmers before suspending them from various spars and projections in the engine compartment so that they dangled somewhere in the approximate vicinity of The Block. Looking back on it, I don't suppose the Health and Safety people would have gone a bundle on the notion of dangling smouldering materials in a car's engine overnight, but then vigilance wasn't so intense in those days. How we all survived is a miracle.

Hand-warmers were usually given to golfers by people who didn't play golf. They were a fine idea and car engines might have been festooned with them, but they were seldom seen on the course. On the other hand, home-knitted sweaters were often seen in the wake of the festive season. Into each life, some rain must fall. Some of those sweaters were appalling, but as they'd been slaved over by doting aunties, they had to be worn. Apart from the fact that they tended to be either too big or too small, they were generally adorned by knitted illustrations designed to ensure that no-one was left in any doubt that the person wearing it played, was playing, or was about to play golf.

Often, a golfer would be depicted on the back or the front of a sweater. The figures thus portrayed seldom did the wearer of the garments any favours. Right-handed golfers could find themselves saddled with left-handers on their pullovers. Not all aunties were au fait with the sport and its little subtleties. Things like the grip could be badly misrepresented. Some grips could look sketchy and uncertain, others downright impossible. Some of the less well-finished examples suggested that the model on which the image was based – if indeed there was a model – had been thrown a fish and didn't know quite what to do with it.

I was never fortunate enough to receive such a sweater, but if one had arrived during the hand-warmer phase, I'd probably have wrapped it round The Block.