Y'know, sawdust has had a pretty bum deal through the ages. Cowboys used to cover their saloon floors in it to soak up all the spit and spillage, butchers covered their floors with it to soak up the blood and gore(and give the maggots and things somewhere to hide in - probably still do) and nowadays it's used for small rodents to defecate in(wood shavings are betterer y'know 'cos they don't clump in soggy lumps around their butts). You can pick up a large bag of sawdust for as little as £1 from a pet shop as we put such a small value on the highly useful, necessary and rather unpleasant job it does. It's tough being sawdust.

Incidentally one of my earliest childhood memories involves sawdust. Oddly, I remember a butchers shop which had a floor covered in sawdust which I just loved for some reason. Y'see the floor was shiny tiles and the sawdust made it slippery and a simply great skidpan. You could skid for MILES on that floor...or of course it felt like miles but it was probably just a few feet. When you're only a few feet high yourself it feels like miles anyway. Odd memory but there ya go, I'd like to pay a brief poetic homage to sawdust anyway for having such an important role in my formative years..

There once was a man full of lust
Who had jack-hammer trouser thrust
When he found a tight knothole
The trees would say "uh oh!"
"He's gonna turn us all into sawdust!"

There once was a big bag of sawdust
Whose owner you just could not trust
With good reason it seemed
For a knothole he'd reamed
And that's how he'd got that big bag of sawdust.

There once was a tree of great age
More noble and wiser than a sage
'til a woodcutter came
And sawed it up for a game
Now it gets p-ed on by rats in a cage

There once was a pirate from Seville
Who was caught with his hook in the till
But it wasn't &q
uot;off with his head!"
They took his wooden leg instead
And turned it to sawdust with woodworm from Dill

There once was an industrious woodpecker
Who lived in the forest of Nordströmbecker
Then one day in mid-May
He got carried away
Leaving nothing but sawdust and that woodpecker


Enjoy your sawdust but don't take it for granted and spare a thought for the poor murdered trees too....