Friday, July the 9th, 2004
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I'd hammer in the morning. I'd hammer very early in the morning, in what are called the small hours. I wouldn't hammer in the big hours, but I would use a big hammer. If I had a hammer, it would be a big hammer, and I would hammer in the small hours of the morning. But I no longer have a hammer. I have lost count of the times people come up to me and say, “Thaddeus,” they say, “For Christ's sake stop adjusting your eyepatch for one minute and tell me why you don't have a hammer.” What can I say? If I tell the truth—that I donated my hammer as a raffle prize for the Toffee Factory Charity Gala Night—I get that look of bewilderment and condescension that makes my blood boil and makes me want to start hammering my putative big hammer at four o clock in the morning. I then feel compelled to point out that all of the prizes on that fateful night were specifically requested by Mistress Brockbracke, who asked for donations of items that ended in -ammer, or its phonetic equivalent. So, in addition to my hammer, she was given a windjammer, a clamour (of rooks, in a spacious if rusty birdcage), a copy of Glamour magazine, a rubber stamp of the Greek letter gamma, several more hammers, and a banner, the latter given by the partially deaf man who loiters outside the post office with an eel wrapped round his neck. And I simply cannot be bothered to explain all that to the kind of people whose lives are so empty that all they can think about is to stop me mucking about with my eyepatch and to ask me why I haven't got a hammer.