It’s 35 degrees in the shade and only four weeks ’til Christmas; a Sunday morning down at The Rocks Markets. Your hero, a few short weeks into his apprenticeship, is flying solo for the first time. Nervous? Shaking like a leaf…

He sets up his station and briefly considers ducking down to La Renaissance for one of those yummy ham & cheese croissants and a macchiato, all is quiet. He has no idea what’s in store. On Tuesday he recounted the tale:

“It all happened so suddenly, she walked straight up to me and said – ‘what’s the biggest lamp you’ve got?’ – I told her how we combine three large Nimbuses (Nimbii?) into one. I was tempted to use the word ‘coalesce’ to describe such a feat, as I so rarely get to use it in a sentence, but it was early in the day and I didn’t want to come off as a tosser.

‘Can you do it for me?’ she asked, ‘I’ll take it!‘.

‘Of course I can‘ I replied calmly, thinking: how hard can it be?

‘Great! I’ll be back in twenty minutes‘.”

Using advanced telepathy to Lamp-Jedi Simon-Gol-Nimobi in Canberra, all casual like, he asks
“so you know those giant three-in-one lamps you make? How do you do it?”

“Ohhh, you’re not ready for that yet. Have to show you how it’s done, I would. Training completed, when have you, your.”

“Too late, Master, she’s already paid for it, what should I do?”

“Well, grasshopper, hear my words and I shall guide you from the nation’s capital…”

The basic principle is simple; make twelve shell-like sets of five pieces, in the standard nimbus formation, then join each shell together. The only trick is to create a sort of concavity by pushing in at the junction as they come together. This gives the Comet the structure required to make it whole. Simple enough – but when you’ve never done it and when you’re lamp-making in public, at a busy market, well the pressure is really on.

Soon the spectacle of a man wrestling with what looked like all the King’s horses’ attempt to resurrect Humpty-Dumpty from the base of the wall was drawing a crowd. While maintaining focus on the task at hand, I was dealing with new customers, explaining the simplicity of the pendant system, the metric system, Daisy assembly 101 and how the Orbital isn’t as tricky as it seems; cash, EFTPOS & credit transactions, visual merchandising, and all the while creating the Level-Five Comet lampshade. The heat was really on.

Drawing deep on my resourceful nature, I persevered and about two-thirds of the way through I could see it was going to come together. A spring of self-satisfaction gushed from my heart as the final two or three shells came into place and, raising both fists in the air, I allowed myself a Mohammed Ali moment: I am the Greatest!, just as Josh turned up with a stash of Nimbus pieces needed for the popular pink-white-purple jellybean model. Time for that macchiato…

The moral of the story is that when it comes to lampmanship, no task is too daunting for the Electric Firefly Paduan. The technique is simple enough:

Be The Lamp and always follow the light!