Re-Arcing the Lamp

Here's a thing. The curiosity of narrative structures, both fictive and historical, one imagined, the other remembered. We just watched the final episode of Lovejoy on the Drama (+1) channel tonight, the re-run of a series that originally ran on the BBC from 1986 to its conclusion with that episode in 1994. We videotaped a large number of episodes at the time of their original showing and re-watched them many times over the following years, eventually buying into the boxed set of DVD's that came out much later.

The thing is that reaching the point when the overall narrative meta-arc (if you like) reaches its conclusion is just as poignant as when first watching the original, never mind the fact we can and still will dip into the series whenever we want. It's a bit like children's stories: if the tale is well-wrought and archetypal, repeated re-telling never blunts the effect of the narrative.

Strangely, the narrative of my father and my recent, revived involvement in making things, continues to elicit some curious parallels. I decided a couple of days ago that I needed a better working light that would work both for my table saw and the bandsaw, so I decided that I might resurrect the little light that used to be fitted to Dad's bandsaw, and mount it on an unused table microphone stand (a bit like an Anglepoise lamp affair), but was disappointed to discover that it was completely shot.

Casting around for alternatives, I found an old office desk table lamp that also came from Dad's stuff, which was also shot. After a bit of head-scratching, I decided to cobble together an amalgam of the two lamps' various components plus a new UK bayonet lamp holder to replace the Edison screw holders; make an aluminium bracket to fix the bugger to the mike stand, and be done with it. 

In the process of discombobulating the original bandsaw lamp, I came across yet more traces of my Dad's expedient repair work, which probably date back forty or more years: another narrative arc reaching its end. But like our endless re-watching of episodes of Lovejoy, the reassembled bits of my father's creations are now in use in some like form, re-worked by myself for my current use - what goes around, as they say: I love it, I really do...