Lambswool and its care

Being of little imagination, generating new posts can be a struggle. The following will be an example of such a struggle.

I'm not really a texture person and when I first got on the internet I discovered that many people who share my fetish (or something like it) are in it for texture. I have never been much concerned about smooth, fuzzy, whatever.

There is one exception to this. I do really rather like lambswool. Even this covers a range of textures and as the years have gone on seems to have got thinner and thinner, presumably as technology has enabled less and less wool, or perhaps more and more reclaimed or re textured wool to be formed into a cardigan-like garment. They're getting like tinned ham, they have a passing relationship to the animal of origin but stuff that is contiguous in the garment was never so in the animal. Uniqlo, Woolovers, I'm looking at you; your cardigans have gone down the pan.

Despite this being the case I find myself owning a few. I must have made a conscious decision to buy because I make a point of never going on ebay (or anywhere else that money might be spent) with even a trace of drink on board. So it's my own fault I own some rubbish cards that I particularly like the texture of.

That few always have the wrong buttons, so substitutes are made. Two hole and if at all aesthetically possible, white. This gives some specimens the look of being rescued and refurbished and never works with saturated colours. An example where I think it works well is presented below. I like it, perhaps you do too.

 

It's from Uniqlo and bought in the last couple of years, so it's a bit thin. Quite inappropriate for this time of year so it's on my mannequin and not me.

A note before I close to those who might find accidental deposits of gentleman's relish getting into their favourite cardigans. I'm told the stuff stains appallingly and washing this poor quality lambswool turns it into felt. Just thought I'd pass that on. Anyone wishing to see the terrible consequences of mixing lambswool and gentleman's relish can email me. For some reason I seem to be in possession of a picture of just such a mess. Probably best not post it here.

Long Time, No Post.

I could call all my contributions long time, no post but that would get monotonous. This one I'll call obsession and it describes cardigan related events in the early nineties.

Where I lived in Sarf Landan there was a gentleman's outfitters which I used to pass occasionally while out shopping and pass daily on the bus as I travelled to and from work. It vanished some years back and is now a sandwich shop.

At this particular time it never really drew my attention until one day a cardigan appeared in the window. It was from the Tootal Manatease range and of a style which had never really appealed before. Five button, elaborate, chunky four hole buttons designed to be manipulated by the arthritic and constitutionally clumsy.

It was displayed buttoned up with one of the sleeves pinned up such that the top button was not visible, very provocative. It was a pale blue colour, acrylic, patterned, ribbed and spectacularly naff. It was also £25 which I considered outrageous back then.

It is all the more surprising therefore that I became utterly obsessed with this specific cardigan. I used to make detours to walk past the shop to see it, I used to tempt myself to buy it. I even had fantasies about owning it and wearing it.

When I passed the shop on the bus I used to look out to see if I could catch a glimpse of "my cardigan" and even when I couldn't, I got a frisson of excitement from being near it. All most weird and almost incomprehensible now. I put it down to my working spectacularly long hours at the time and imbibing a little too freely of the alcohol to make it tolerable.

On one occasion I actually went to the shop with money in  my pocket to buy the thing but failed even to enter the establishment through sheer fear that I would have been found out. Perhaps I would have been made to try it on and given myself away through obvious arousal or syncope at the sheer excitement of having the thing on.

After a few weeks it disappeared from the window but I always remembered it.

Some months later I took a look round the sale in a department store not too far from where I lived and shock, horror they had that variety of cardigan on sale. Not in my size and not the colour of the special one, but near enough. I bought one and very nice it was too.

Fast forward some years and someone invented the Internets and Ebay. All that was then required was for me to check every day for eight years and suddenly, there was my card. And so, dear reader, I bought it. Here it is.

I have others in beige, almost like it but this will always be the one that I became obsessed with for a few weeks, really obsessed, all those years ago.

They're on kid's telly now.

There is a kids television show here in the UK called Big Cook Little Cook. I’m not sure if it’s still shown, most things are to fill up our multi-channel world so it probably is. The interesting thing about it is that both the protagonists (or “cooks” as the show would have it) wear rather attractive cardigans. They get mixed up in cookery related shenanigans mediated through cheap CGI, little kids will be thrilled, or perhaps as bored as I was.

The cardigans are however pretty good, though much of the time obscured by aprons (boo hiss) and the two blokes who wear them are reasonably easy on the eye. I wonder where those cards are now? Stuck in some costume repository doing no good at all I would imagine. Sad loss. Still, you can catch them on youtube  in perpetuity probably.

Here’s a couple of screen-grabs including what I believe would be called a facial if it were gentleman’s relish, most likely pudding batter.

                                                                     Christmas Card

                                                                              Facial

The Cardigan Riots

Great moments in Cardigan History

Back in 1964, the era of the mods and rockers, many men wore cardigans. They were fashionable though still, perhaps, considered a little wimpish. They were often hand knitted by mothers and grandmothers.

For anyone who liked them, cardigans were as attractive then as they are now. What they had then that they don’t have now is a following. Men who were inclined to wear them stuck together and identified. To apply the taxonomy outlined above, they were unlikely to be rockers. Though even at the time, when society was in denial about homosexuality it was understood that a gay man could belong to that particular group (cf The Leather Boys, book and film from 1964, a title which at the time was not freighted with the meaning it has now). In short, cardigans were most likely to be worn by mods.

Mods and rockers did not get on. There were skirmishes, often at seaside resorts where the two groups came into conflict at weekends and on bank holidays. These conflicts formed the basis of the big moral panic of the day and were a topic upon which the paid gobs of that time pontificated ad nauseam. Contrary to their predictions the world did not come to an end, although their world did. These days we are a lot better informed and alert to the crap that the likes of  Lord Boothby and Malcolm Muggeridge poured forth. They were hypocrites and quite frankly cunts.

Anyway, my point is about the picture I’ve posted here. I fancy that it was taken during the Great Cardigan Riot of 1964 on Brighton seafront. The cardigan wearers were demanding a change in the law to permit the wearing of cardigans during acts of homosexual congress. This was illegal at the time and many men were in prison as a result. It was believed back then that incarcerating gay men in large, thinly supervised, single sex institutions would go some way to rehabilitating them.

[The information in this piece was drawn from the Quarterly Journal of Idle Speculation and is unlikely to be true. Except for the paid gobs bit, those people really were appalling.]

It's been a long time. I've moved house, I no longer live in the Great Wen. Home will still be referred to as cardigan towers but there'll be a lot more room.

Having all this space has led me to ponder on the nature of space and seeing a story in the papers today about the discovery of gravitational waves led me to reading about the big rip. The big rip is a theory about the end of the universe that will come about in about 22 billion years if certain assumptions are met. All a bit cosmological but anyway, matter falls apart so my cardigans won't need washing any more. The involvement of cardigans in this cataclysm doesn't end there. The illustration below indicates what will happen in the run up to the big rip.

Now it may just be me, almost certainly is, but that image looks decidedly like a cardigan. If I were a "spiritual" person or given to being messianic I'd be writing a couple of paragraphs of bollox about this. As it happens I'm not.

Cardiganwearer is back!

I have the wonders of chemistry to thank for my return.

Regular readers may have noticed my recurring mentions of poppers. I snorted the stuff for years and since the real (butyl) thing became illegal the rocket fuel that powers my obsession has turned into a smelly and much inferior fuel that does frankly fuck all unless inhaled in concentrations that turn one's red bits blue (google cyanosis).

Now I have long known that synthesizing isobutyl nitrite can be done at home but couldn't find some of the raw ingredients anywhere. The missing bits and the rest are now available on a well-known site where you have to put in incremental monetary offers to buy stuff (no names, no picking up on word searches; they're awfully prudish over there and I'd hate the supplies to dry up).

I won't give the recipe here, versions are easy enough to find, if not very easy reliably to execute. Strong acid is involved, no not that sort, the sort that burns holes in things. Take a look at the accompanying picture to see the effects. Other effects include the discovery that so-called stainless steel, the material out of which my kitchen sink is made, simply isn't. It turns black on contact with concentrated acid and the stains seem very reluctant to go. Who would have thought such chemical exposure wasn't part of the manufacturer's quality control?

So, I've managed to make small quantities of the gorgeous sweet smelling supposedly carcinogenic oily ester and it has taken me back to the days when Cardiganwearer was a real character, a man of substance and many exciting cardigans. It's hard to describe the effect it has on me. It's more than a vasodilator and I've rarely used it for that purpose (if you really want to put your fist up my bum, you're going to need a much smaller fist!). It seems to free the imagination and make the faintly ridiculous seem solid and concrete. I used to joke that it releases a hormone called preposterone that makes even the most preposterous things seem deeply erotic. It is interesting that the very few people I've spoken to who share my fetish have used poppers, let's hope they're good at chemistry with expendable kitchenware and cardigans.

While I haven't given the recipe here I'd be happy to exchange notes with anyone engaged in a similar endeavour. I can't and won't be supplying chemicals of any sort.

Now that I've got my mojo back, as it were, I'll see if I can't post more often.

                         

I Like A Good Orgasm.

I am, in common with many, partial too a good orgasm. So, since this blog is not noted for its good taste, I'm going to relate the story of one.

As with most things in my life this is inextricably linked to cardigans, an example of which I always like to wear when protein is to be expelled in the most pleasurable way possible. On this occasion I was wearing a nice lambswool five-button number; it's getting cool enough in this neck of the woods to make wearing such a garment a non-sweaty proposition.

I doubt whether the trajectory of my persuit of orgasm matches exactly that of anyone else, but I imagine that there are certain features in common. The slow start, followed by the incremental stage and then the logarithmic stage reaching an asymptote to the actual expulsion of fluids.

By sheer force of will and the imagination needed to keep the cinema of onan showing  more and more exotic sequels to the blockbuster that got me this far, I find it possible to hover at the asymptote for a protracted period. This was just the stage I was at; incessant thrashing; head thrown back; eyes rolled up into the skull, all accompanied by hyperventilation and loud groaning. Oh yes, it was going to be a good one.

I was on the home straight now, about to slip through that asymptote into uncharted gasm space. Breathing deeply and verbalising some of that wild fantasy, I was ready to splash gentleman's relish onto one of my favourite cardigans. I'm gonna...

"Have you any intention of buying that magazine?" Asked the man behind the counter.

Hence the picture below of an unbesmirched cardigan.