Improvised implements

Most of the injuries I know about came from objects that were never meant for this. Not because improvising is wrong, since half the classic British implements are household objects, but because an untested thing has unknown behaviour and people find out what it does while it is already moving.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

Everything on this page is about consenting adults over 18.

There is nothing disreputable about using what you have. The plimsoll, the hairbrush and the wooden spoon are all household objects and all have their own pages here. Improvisation is also, for a lot of people, part of the point: something ordinary and domestic being turned to a purpose is a large part of what makes the whole business work.

The trouble starts when the object is chosen in the moment, by someone who has not held it before, in a state where nobody is doing careful thinking. That is the specific circumstance in which people get hurt, and I would rather say so than talk around it.

Three tests

Before anything touches a person, ask three things about it.

Can it land flat, with no edge, corner, rim, rivet or fitting leading? Almost every improvised injury is an object that concentrated force where it was not meant to. Run a fingertip round the whole striking surface. If anything catches, it is going to catch on skin.

Will it survive a hundred strokes? Household objects are designed to be used gently. Handles that were fine for stirring soup are not fine for repeated impact, and things fail suddenly rather than gradually. Flex it hard with both hands and listen for creaking.

Can it be washed? Anything that touches bare skin needs cleaning, and porous, laminated, fabric-covered or food-contaminated objects cannot really be cleaned. This one gets ignored constantly and it matters more than people think, particularly if the skin might break or if more than one person is involved.

What actually works

Two of those deserve a note. A table tennis bat is genuinely underrated: broad, light, no mass to speak of, and a rubber face that produces sting with no depth at all. Check the rim and check the plywood has not delaminated.

And a leather razor strop is the sleeper, being a purpose-cut piece of thick hide with a handle, which is to say a strap that happens to have been sold for sharpening razors. Take the hanging hardware off or keep it firmly in your fist.

What people reach for and should not

This is the important half of the page, and I have grouped it by why rather than by what, because the categories generalise and a list of objects never will. The short list of things that never get swung at all is on things never to use as an implement.

Anything with an edge or a corner. Chopping boards, metal rulers, books, picture frames, plastic spatulas with square-cut sides, anything with a machined edge that has never been rounded. An edge turns a broad implement into a narrow one and puts the whole force of the stroke through a millimetre of contact.

Anything that can break. Wooden coat hangers, which snap at the shoulder and leave a splintered arm with a metal hook attached. Wooden dowel from a DIY shop, which is not rattan, does not flex and breaks into a spear. Garden bamboo, which is hollow, splits along its length and drives long splinters into skin. Plastic anything, which shatters into shards. Thin plywood. Old dried-out kitchen tools.

Anything with metal on it. Buckles, studs, rivets, hinges, screws, staples, edging strips, the metal ferrule on a brush. Metal cuts, it does not flex, and it is invariably the part that finds the one place you were trying to avoid.

Anything electrical. Cables, flexes, chargers, extension leads. This one turns up more than it should, presumably because a cable looks like it would work, and it is the worst thing on the page. A cable is a thin, dense, whippy line with a moulded plug on one end, it wraps unpredictably, it cuts, and the plug is a hard object travelling at tip speed. There is no safe version of it.

Anything that cannot be cleaned. Fabric-covered objects, unsealed or cracked wood, laminated boards, anything with seams or joints that trap material, anything that has been used with food. If skin breaks, and with improvised objects it is more likely to, this stops being fastidiousness.

And anything from the garden. Switches and the birch have a real history and there are people who want them, but a twig cut off a hedge is dirty, unpredictable, full of side shoots and liable to break. If that is genuinely your interest, buy something made properly rather than pruning something.

Test it before it touches anyone

Take the object, a cushion or the arm of a sofa, and give it thirty strokes. Not as a formality. You are finding out four things: whether it stays flat, where it actually lands relative to where you aimed, how much force a light swing delivers, and whether it makes an alarming noise or comes apart.

Then use it on a person at half of whatever you had in mind, for the first dozen strokes, watching the skin rather than the face. Every implement page on this site says a version of this and it is more important for improvised objects than for anything else, because nobody has calibrated these and there is no accumulated wisdom about how they behave.

The other reason improvised objects go wrong

Purpose-made implements get bought in advance, which means somebody thought about the evening before it happened. Improvised ones get picked up in the middle of it, and picking something up in the middle of it is often a sign that the negotiation did not cover this.

I am not against spontaneity. I am against a category of moment I have heard described too many times: something escalated, somebody grabbed whatever was nearest, and afterwards neither person was quite sure whether that had been agreed. If the object was not discussed, ask before using it. Sixty seconds of conversation, and it costs nothing. There is more on this in negotiation and, for the times it did not go that way, when it goes wrong.

What it costs to stop improvising

Very little, which is the honest bottom line here. A pair of plimsolls is a few pounds, a beech spoon is two or three, and a rattan cane from a proper maker is generally somewhere in the fifteen to forty pound range. Improvise with the things on the first list, which a century of people have tested for you. Buy the rest.