Elementary, my dear Watson...

Said the Great Detective, but I've just gone one better than his large magnifying glass.  I rarely buy something as a pure self-indulgence, but I couldn't resist this when I realised I'd missed it for a while and it was being "bumped" on a forum.

So I told Chris about it and she admitted she'd always wanted, but never got, a microscope as a kid. And I was just the same.
But this one is special. It is a product of S.E.L.....Signalling Equipment Limited.

Something special I did get as a kid was a steam engine.  It was also an S.E.L.  I had it until we moved afloat in 2003, which pissed me off BIG time.  A colleague sent me the two cylinder version recently which was really nice of him and I have found an S.E.L. electric motor, mint and boxed and a marine steam engine in similar condition, but the single cylinder machine has eluded me since my original went missing in the move.  I will find one some time, I'm sure, but meantime, this will do very nicely.
The strange thing is that those oddly shaped tweezers were already a part of my childhood and I don't know where they came from or when they disappeared, but a pair just like those oddly shaped things accompanied my slot car and model railways days and the oddness of the shape used to fascinate people and here we are with them in a mint, unused S.E.L. microscope set!

Life is strange.