things move around

I feel sorrowful, today. I tremble with the suppresion of my inner pain. The pleasures of life parade themselves before me, carnivalesque; yet, to my weary eye, it is a carnival of the grotesque. The cares of the world sleet down upon my shoulders, causing me to stoop in my toil; also a crick in my neck.

Crick, crick, it goes, crick, crick.

Then: I am Jimmy the Crick; I’m in your neck. I come courtesy of the cares of the world.

And in this dark hour splutters forth a wan beacon in the gloom; a happyhardcore anthem rings out like a clarion. I have found the nemesis of my depression in a tin of new boiled spuds. It strikes me like an ambrosial hammer of joy. There is someone less fortunate than I, whose empire has met with still greater ruination. As I eat my tea, I think of those whose lifeblood was the tin-opener. The factory workers, the designers, the buyers, the accountants (yes, even the accountants), the marketers, no, hang on, I couldn’t stretch that far, and also the caterers and advisors and secretaries and PAs who serviced the industry, in the heyday of the tin-opener, which I suppose was probably the mid-eighties, although by then the microwave had a hold, so perhaps it would’ve been the seventies, then?

Yes, the seventies were the decade of the tin-opener, if nothing else worthwhile. They brought prosperity to millions, and joy to millions more, as Fray Bentos pies and goulash and beans were devoured with gusto across the world. But the beginning of this story is long ago, in a certain little town, in England…

In the year of our Lord 1810, Peter Durand, a man of visionary energy and commercial acumen, had a dream. In his dream, he was lost in a bleak wilderness, parched and starving and leagues from the nearest living thing. Boulders and sand lay strewn as far as the eye could see across the moraine. Desperate, he clawed at the rocky landscape with his hands, and then beat upon stones with stones, and in his desperation he was privy to a miracle. He hit upon a seam of tin, which, glinting in the barren sunlight split apart under his raving ministrations. Inside were dumplings and gravy. He feasted, awoke, and promptly invented the tin can, or the tin cannister to give it its full name. “Cannister” had been the name of his pet dog, a terrier, when he was a boy.

Years passed and Durand’s legacy reverberated around an astonished world. To those at the ends of the earth, their wits or their minds, the tin can and its miraculously preserved contents brought salvation in their hour of despair. Becalmed mariners, polar explorers, and students came to depend upon it for their continued existence. But as with all sweet mercies, it came at a terrible and unpredictable cost. To open the blighters, the orthodox method was the hammer and chisel. Many an undergraduate lost fingers in the crude frenzy of metal-on-metal. On average, a finger would be pulped for every fourteen cans opened, although of course, novices were more likely to succumb. Soon, there were people who lacked sufficient fingers to even hold a hammer or a chisel, and were forced to beg the favour of others, like miserable junkies begging bail from a puritan judge, or like currs chained up outside a rural hovel, begging for offal.

It was a social problem, above all else. A problem of society.

Now, once more, the scene changes, as scenes are wont to do. The year is 1858, and Ezra J. Warner is hunched over a sheaf of papers in his Waterburg, Connecticut residence. He is patenting a device under false pretences. Since he has deceit and malfeasance in his mind, convention dictates that it be an inclement night-time, just after two a.m., in fact. His device is a heavy-duty schlock of pig-iron which he claims will greatly assist with the shucking of shelfish on the far Alaskan frontier. He claims that his device will enable one man to shuck upwards of a hundred shellfish inside a half-hour. He states clearly that its primary application would be an industrial one, although private connosieurs might also choose to avail themselves. But this is just so much baloney. What Ezra has actually invented is a hell-borne instrument of torture. It is to be used by the U.S. Military to mutilate the ankles of Confederate informers.

Lieutenant Paul Boyle is lost. The sky is like a polythene sheet which hasn’t been invented yet, and he feels like a row of tomatoes ripening into mush underneath. His horse fell over two days ago and didn’t get up again. In his pack are two ration-tins, an empty flask of water, some salt and a distorted piece of metal he’s been carrying since it was made standard issue for his troop eighteen months ago. It’s like a pair of pliers but with a big spike on the end. As every breath rasps more like it’s his last, and he see the black specks swimming in circles, unrelentingly, up above, and feels the sand and the stones beating the heat back onto him in waves, and heaves out vapour tears, and prepares to perish, the inspiration strikes him, too; the same inspiration that struck Durand after his dream, and the step-brother of the inspiration that led Ezra J. Warner to conceive vilely of the device Boyle (29) now carries in his pack. With his last ounce of strength (for so is strength measured, with the imperial system) he stabs and claws at the first ration-tin with the torture-claw. In fifteen seconds, it is open. And his fingers are intact.

Lieutenant Paul Boyle proceeds to feast on ravioli in a rich and meaty sauce.

Ten years later he tells his story to one William W. Lyman (great-great-grandfather to future English sports anchor Des Lynam) in a gentleman’s club in Maine. Lyman (William, not Des) spent time as a mining engineer in Oregon, devising systems of winches and pulleys for the extraction of water, spoil and ore. This career ended tragically when he lost three fingers on his drafting-hand in an horrific tin-opening misadventure. Yet Lynam is not a bitter man, and sees instantly that by applying his knowledge of wheels and leverage to his companion’s tale, great riches can surely await. Within three months, he has filed his own patent, which varies but little from the one filed with evil intent by Warner on that rain-beaten Connecticut night. The difference, however, is a crucial one. A new era of tin-can convenience is about to be ushered-in.

History will not accord these men the accolades they deserve. But when has it ever been otherwise? History is a slag.

Now let us riffle through the flick-book of history, forward a century, to the spatio-temporal excrescence that is 1970s England. Bob Ward has lived all his life in Stourbridge. As if that were not unjust punishment enough, he has a wife who looks like a sack of coal. Her name is Joan. They have two children, Bobby Jnr and Terry. Bobby Jnr will go on to play drums for Dexy’s Midnight Runners on their first single, “Dance Stance,” released in 1979. I don’t know what will happen to Terry, though.

Bob, in addition to living all his life in Stourbridge, has worked all his adult life at the Stourbridge Tin-Opener Plant, or The STOP, as it’s known locally. He is due to retire in 1999. And the 70s, in spite of everything, are OK to him. He gets overtime - the global demand for precision-engineered tin-openers is stronger than ever before. Bob can afford a few drinks when he feels like it. The STOP exports to Germany, America and Brazil. Of course, design has moved on over the last 100 years. Electric versions were first produced in 1931. The models over which they labour at The STOP would have blown William W. Lynam’s mind. These days you don’t even need fingers to open a tin can - you can practically look at the thing, think the thought, and presto, you’ll be tucking in to your fancy asparagus or petits-pois or mangetouts in no time at all. But a dark cloud of ruin is roiling upon the horizon, even as Bob and his buddies labour in blissful ignorance (as ignorance so often is). It will only take one cruel insight from one sadistic man to shatter the happy prosperity of this Black Country family (Bobby Jnr, who seems continually disaffected, excepted). The fates, as you might expect, are about to deal Bob et al a bum hand.

Cover your eyes, reader, lest you flood your bureau with tears.

The ring-pull can.
Bob, laid-off, in his car, fuming.
The ring-pull can.
The end of an era.
There is somebody worse off than myself.

But I digress.

I don’t feel so bad any more.