The Sewing Scissors

Take the Sewing Scissors. I never understood why Mum got quite so angry when her red scissors marked Sewing Scissors, do not touch, got touched. I mean, what else was I supposed to cut paper snowflakes with? It is only now, years later, that I’ve come to realise those scissors were no ordinary snipping things. They were the tools of an elite trade, like a surgeon with his scalpel, or Mr Kipling with his exceedingly good pastry. If you used the Sewing Scissors to cut snowflakes, they got blunt, and all they were good for was cutting snowflakes. Which suited me perfectly at the time. Fast forward eighties, nineties, noughties and when my own newly acquired Sewing Scissors disappeared and reappeared suspiciously close to some newly cut paper I went ballistic. In that second I finally grasped the vital importance of the razor-sharp edge – and knew that I could never look a paper snowflake in the eye again.