Dremel

“What you need is a Dremel,” he told me. so I bought a Dremel. It turned out not to be suitable for the purpose (a technical matter involving the toilet cistern suddenly shifting forward two centimetres in the middle of the night - subsidence? ghosts? Nothing else had moved). So I had this Dremel.
A Dremel is a mini power tool that spins at 33,000 rpm - that’s what it says on the side.
When I was about sixteen I took a girl to a dance. This was in Cornwall, and long ago, when lying in bed in the still of the night I could hear the seas round Dollar Ogo and the Devil’s Frying Pan through the wisteria that grew into my open bedroom window.
Dances were held in the Village Institute, and we danced - the girls danced - quicksteps and foxtrots and waltzes. We tended to trudge, which was manly at the time.
I was in love with, and still remember the feel of, the middle of three beautiful farmer’s daughters who lived in the next valley, Poltesco, but that evening I’d met another girl, older than me, in the pub when I’d come back from fishing. She usually went out with navy guys from Culdrose air station, but she was at a loose end and she said we should go to the dance. I went home and I hope bathed or at least washed the fish scales off and dressed up a bit but I only had my black school shoes, so I borrowed a pair of sharp suedes from my stepfather. My feet were two sizes bigger than his. The effects of this were more lasting than I anticipated.
The evening was a steep learning curve. I did not shine, and the girl got engaged to a lieutenant the next week and never looked in my direction again. But I also suffered physically. Life then involved a lot of walking, from my house to her house at Prazegooth then down through the Cove and up the steep hill to Ruan, and all the way back again when the dance was over. By the time I had sorted out my emotions and limped home with bleeding feet (and scratches down my back which were more fascinatingly disturbing but more transient), my right little toe was basically finished, twisted over, mis-aligned, a prisoner beneath the next toe in, and abraded into a corn of amazing durability. The wages of inadequate sin have been with me ever since.
So I suddenly thought, the Dremel. Instead of those industrial emery boards you get in Boots, or a scalpel, I’ll try this miracle of delicate engineering. It worked perfectly. But afterwards my toe really hurt. I hadn’t anticipated that sandpaper applied to dead skin, even lightly, at 33,000 rpm, is going to generate friction and heat; enough to traumatise - on a miniature and delicate scale - the living tissue beneath. It seems that night will be with me for ever.