Carrying on

At one point Thursday, Roy and Darren, his helper (seen here sanding the living room ceiling), asked Arnold about where he was setting up his saws.

They didn't want to be in his way -- or have him in theirs -- and they were going to start staining in the kitchen and living room if he planned to be elsewhere.

He would set up outside, he assured them, so "Carry on."

He'd picked up the Briticisms just as I had. Roy's from Zimbabwe, Darren from Bristol in the U.K.

Of course my Wayback Machine flashed to my demented youth, when I had way too much fun with "Carry On, Nurse," a Brit sex farce that played inexplicably as part of a Saturday double feature at the Sterling Theater and used a mallet to teach me the meaning of double-entendre. (Nobody can be as delightfully dirty as the English; just look at Joan Greenwood in "Kind Hearts and Coronets.")

One "Carry On" reference led to another, and it turns out that Darren's brother, whom he came to visit briefly a year ago, recently got a boxed set of the "Carry On" series.

My first thought: astonishment that there was a boxed set. My second: He'd obviously bought in a drunken moment.