hardware

on objects of use

My parents called it The Really Useful Shop. This iteration was tucked into the far end of the high street in our local market town; unprepossessing from the outside, but Tardis-like once you were through that door with a jangle of the bell. Lengths of pipe and tins of paint and balls of string and drill bits in packets and neat little draws of screws and nuts and bolts in every size and variety available. I suppose I was taken there; our childhood were peppered with patient and less patient waits at the counters of paint or builders’ merchants. We would have gone on Saturdays in the Nineties, somewhere between swimming and a jaunt to the Tip. But I mostly remember it as a victorious phase - as in: “Found it at the Really Useful Shop!” - trilled as the object in question was plonked on the kitchen table, one step closer to being ticked off the to-do list.

I’ve grown into an impractical adult. The kind of woman who would rather train her child to safely manoeuvre himself downstairs than suffer the inevitable marital argument involved in installing the stair gate (we will do it, eventually). I can summon a skilled tradesperson with a brief WhatsApp exchange, and do something else with my weekend afternoon instead. Still, I frequent the Really Useful Shop. 

These days my preferred one exists a 15-minute walk away, sandwiched between a greasy spoon and an estate agents’ in Camberwell. I would take the baby in when he was small and watch the gruffness dissipate as the men behind the counter would coo at him, tell me about their own children as I waited for the paint sample to be mixed