Open Writing

They found a Stone Age Stanley knife in Robin Hood’s Cave - or one of them: the one somewhere around Nottingham that Robin probably moved out of as soon as he came up on the lottery and got the chance of buying the castle after the Sheriff went bust.

He’d have got somebody else in to fit the parquet floor once he started to move in those sort of circles. But the chap who first fitted out the cave clearly wasn’t in the same tax bracket, and had to do his own home improvements.

The ice in the last Ice Age apparently stopped round about Doncaster (which could explain a lot about the A1), and so a chap could sit there in his rather chilly semi-detached cave a bit south of the ice sheets, and warm himself up with a bit of DIY on the days he didn’t fancy skating up to Huddersfield to invent woolly vests.

You can just see Mr Ug sitting of an evening beside the fire contentedly studying his catalogue of vinyl flooring, whilst Mrs Ug boils up a nice bit of woolly mammoth for their tea, and the sabre-tooth tigers gaze in, mystified.

(The tigers had had a bit of a problem with the larch-lap fencing he put up last back end. Half of it keeled over to port, and the other end keeled over to starboard, and it kept you out because whichever way you tried to go – over it or through it – it always ended up falling on you and making a heck of a din. And a half-used can of Polyfilla doesn’t half get stuck in the sabre teeth when you try gnawing it. Things like that are very bad for a fearsome predator’s street-cred.)

Nobody mentioned finding a Stone Age sander and polisher, or even a Neolithic screwdriver and the odd flint Rawlplug, but Ug could have managed a fair old bit of cave improvements with just that flint Stanley knife.

Probably he’d start with the odd touch of carpet tiling (bearskin seems to have been all the rage in the smarter class of cave, especially for the bit forwards of the fire where you shove all the bones under the rug for archaeologists to dig up in a few thousand years time), or the fitted shag-pile rhino skin in the back cave with the en-suite stalactites.

That would all have been something of a doddle with the latest in home-improvements tools. Mind you, he’d have had a job with the marquetry in the guest bedroom if Mrs Ug kept on nicking it to skin the latest mammoth, or to cut the kids’ hair.

Once old Ug had invented the Stanley knife (or was it the Ug knife, back then? Or possibly his name was Stanley Ug, we will never know), he may have been content to stick with the latest line in flooring, with possibly some stylish wall-hangings in sticky-back reptile.

Or he could have left the thing behind because he’d simply outgrown it.

Somewhere under Castle Hill, there may be a cave they’ll break open when excavating for a car-park, and find a fully-plumbed flint bathroom suite.