Palm Readings

[steepholm]

This evening I found myself wondering idly whether my mother still has the sailor's palm that used to belong to her father. I've a feeling it was in poor nick last time I saw it - it was kept in a box of odds and ends, and that hadn't done it any favours - but I hope it's not been thrown out.

Come to that, I'm not sure I've ever heard the words "sailor's palm" mentioned outside my mother's house. Is it an object the existence and use of which is known to all? Is it ultra-obscure? Or - as I shrewdly suspect - somewhere in between? There's only one way to found out...

[Poll #1879835]

What's the most obscure object in your house?

Comments

[owlfish]

How would I know it was the most obscure object? If it's something I've discovered was obscure by asking LJ about it, then there are already other people who know about it, and it's not as obscure as it was before I'd found out it was obscure.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Get back in your box, Professor Schrodinger!

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Now that I've looked up what a sailor's palm is, I am pretty sure I've seen it called something quite different, but now I can't remember what. (My first association was with "Here I have a pilot's thumb/Wrecked as homeward he did come." Then I thought of millers' thumbs a la Jan of the Windmill.)

[larryhammer]

The most obscure is probably either the green-and-gold flying frog hanging over my head or the wedding pot across the room. But neither is particularly obscure.

---L.

[eglantine-br.livejournal.com]

My mom had one, also a fid and a fleam which I took from her house when we cleaned it out. For that matter she also had an awl and a scythe, (which I left behind.)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

A fleam would be a lovely thing to have, but what is a fid?

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Well, we spent much of today trying to figure out where the small agate penguin came from.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That sounds strangely like a Wallace Stevens poem.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

We have some seriously weird stuff, as the spouse has collected strange objects used in various religions.

[colyngbourne.livejournal.com]

We have an uli'uli which was a rather weird wedding present...

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That one I had to Google!

[dorianegray.livejournal.com]

Your poll fails to include the option "is it not just what it says: the palm of a sailor's hand (possibly pickled)?"

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

We do have a set of tallyman's sticks............

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

Definitely hadn't come across one, but guessed that it would be a sewing aid and wondered if it might be something akin to a darning mushroom. Now not sure, having looked it up, whether that was informed guesswork or if the data is stored just out of reach of my conscious mind.

PS. I do own a darning mushroom.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I'm fairly sure that my mother kept a darning mushroom in the same box as the sailor's palm. (Darning is her one needlewomanly accomplishment - not that she does it these days. She has never so much as sewn a button, she tells me.)

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

For some reason I misread this completely as 'monkey's paw.' I don't know why.

There are: a piranha keyring, something's foot and a raccoon penis bone on the mantelpiece.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I think the man who brought the monkey's paw into the lives of the family in the story was indeed a sailor - or at least that's how I remember it.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

What's the most obscure object in your house?

A blank copy of The Father Christmas Letters?

A bronze-age spearhead?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

A blank copy? Was it a printing error?

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Either a printing error or a publisher's dummy - we're not sure which.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

We don't have any exotica, but several things that are becoming obscure with the passage of time: an enlarger, for example (and the old starting handle we keep because it's so efficient at cracking coconuts).

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

An enlarger, as in a pantograph (I think that's the word)?

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

No, a photographic device; looks like a death ray machine of the Dan Dare era.

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

I had a similar sort of darning-mushroom-thimble notion which (having now looked it up) I'm not sure was stored knowledge or a guess inspired by the Age of Sail jag I'm on at the moment...

There was once a caul in my mother's family, allegedly, of which my great-aunt spoke of having seen, but it vanished. No luck there. I've inherited my (paternal) great-grandfather's moustache cup, an unfeasibly delicate bone china object which doesn't look quite capable of supporting a moustache, or hot liquid.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

It pleases me to know that such things have existed.

[joyeuce]

I'm sure I've read about a sailor's palm somewhere - Ransome? Or C.S. Forester? Or it's possible that I knew it from reading The Oxford Dictionary of Ships and the Sea cover to cover.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

My father, on the other hand ... adaese is convinced that the contents of his old tool-shed belong in a museum of country life.

Some of the contents of his gun cupboard are interesting, too. A shotgun with external hammers, for example (which dates it to pre-1920s).