So much for ‘make do and mend’. I’ve been desperately trying to patch things up in the spirit of credit-crunch thriftiness but I am getting absolutely nowhere. This is because shops do not stock ‘the bits’ any longer. I have spent the last week trying to do DIY jobs around the house and I can confidently report that there is a highly organised global conspiracy to stop us mending anything.
This is why retail parks that used to be full of useful places selling spare parts are now resplendent with emporiums called ‘Kiss Me Hardy’s Wacky Warehouse’. On closer examination, this turned out to be a children’s soft-play centre attached to a pub — ‘Let the kids run riot while you take a well earned break!’ Lord Nelson would be so proud.
Anyway, having driven around looking for a retail park featuring a hardware store, and not a Battle of Trafalgar-themed toddlers’ indoor playground where parents can get drunk, I finally alighted on a collection of vast warehouse-style places off the A3 where I thought it likely I might be able to buy a bag of curtain-pole rings.
Oh dear, how wrong I was. We live in an age of manned space missions and hadron colliders and yet if you need five small metal hoops to make your new curtains fit the pole in your front room you are in for severe disappointment. The man standing in the curtain-accessory aisle in B&Q looked at me as if I had lost my mind. ‘What? Rings, to put on a curtain pole? Black, you say? No, definitely don’t have those. Don’t think we’ve ever stocked such a thing.’
I pointed out that as they stocked black curtain poles one might assume, if one wanted to use logic, that this could lead on quite naturally to their supplying the rings to go on them. He shook his head wildly and advised me to give up my mad, foolish search now for I would never find such a thing as a separate bag of black metal rings. Not in any hardware store in this land. And he was right. [page break]
The man in the Paul Simon curtain superstore looked at me as if I was not only Still Crazy After All These Years but had also asked him if he and his wife wanted to make up a threesome. ‘What did you say? Black? Black curtain-pole rings? No, no, no. Not black, no. Oh, no. Silver. Pewter. Gun-metal grey, maybe. But not black. No way.’ And he gestured at a wall, which was indeed teeming with little bags full of rings which were every shade but the one I wanted.
‘But surely people have asked you for black curtain-pole rings before?’ I pleaded.
He looked at me whimsically for a moment before leaning in close and whispering, very much as if revealing something he would rather not, ‘There was a time, yes, when you could get black curtain-pole rings. You’re right there. But that was a long while ago. Not now, love, not now. People don’t want that sort of thing any more. Now, I’ve really got to get back to my customers.’ And he hurried off to help a couple who were buying pewter accessories.
Maybe, I thought, I might have more luck buying a new power cable for my land line, which had been chewed in half by my rabbit. I started in PC World, where the assistants gawped in disbelief at my bare-faced cheek in asking for an accessory to fit an old appliance. So I went to Dixons. But in Dixons a grown man in overalls doubled up in giggles until his head banged against the floor as I explained my requirements. ‘What? A power cable? 500 volts?’ And between snorts of laughter he advised me that I should, of course, stop being so silly and buy myself a nice new phone.
And so I settled upon the mission of trying to find chandelier light bulbs. ‘Excuse me,’ I said to the man in Homebase, ‘I’m looking for soft-light candle bulbs, bayonet cap.’ Please, please, just let this one person smile and say, ‘Of course, madam, right here.’
But, alas, it was not to be. He did the scandalised smirk and shook his head. ‘Oh, no. We don’t stock them. Not soft-light candle bulbs, no. No, no, no. We haven’t stocked them for years.’ And then it happened. As he moved away from the shelf, he revealed behind him an entire rack absolutely jammed tight with huge, bright-purple multipacks of soft-light bayonet-cap candle bulbs.
I’m going back to Simon and Garfunkel’s Wacky Curtain Superstore. I know those black rings are in there somewhere.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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