The Tale of Boughton’s Nail
In the late 1950s or early 1960s my father embarked on a major reconstruction of his printing works in Station Road, Wood Green. We ripped out large quantities of rubbish and covered the walls in corrugated asbestos sheets to hide the damp. It worked very well, but what would modern Health and Safety have said. At one point in our destruction we came across a cm. thick plank of wood, which someone had attempted to fix to a six by four beam with a six inch nail. As he didn’t have the strength to drive the nail home, this bodger had attempted to bend it flat. He’d failed. It was and probably still is, the worst bit of carpentry I’ve ever seen. I can remember that my fsther said it was probably done by a man called Boughton, who.d worked for the family firm some years previously. So to me whenever I see some really awful handiwork, I think of the unfortunate Boughton. Incidentally, I’ve never met anyone with that surname and I don’t know how I’ll react.
But perhaps one of his descendants did this?
A Very Bad Door Stop
The doorstop is too small and whoever put it in cracked the tiles and did a lot of damage. It’s even more stupid as just round the corner in the Balls Pond Road is one of the best shops for door furniture in London.
I do have a thing about door stops, as I was mugged by one in Belarus.
I shall be visiting the hardware store!
The Anonymous Widower 
[…] mentioned Boughton before as a sense of great hilarity and a running joke between my father and […]
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[…] Perhaps he put it up, as he had a spare one and it would cover up his dreadful plasterwork. I sometimes wonder if Jerry’s surname was Boughton. […]
Pingback by Where Did That Go? « The Anonymous Widower | January 31, 2015 |