people have various ideas about what's wrong with the world: some say it's plastics, as in new watering cans that leak down your leg from under the handle, some say the high cost of footballers, others think it's unsolicited mail offering gold medallions to commemorate the fall of khartoum. personally i put it down very largely to diversification. not so much at the top level - amalgamated wallpapers can branch out into deep sea trawlers and it hardly touches me - but when it gets down to the small man, or mr chuddy the ironmonger, i feel things slipping.

my idea of an ironmonger is possibly a bit dated. i think of him as standing in front of a lot of little drawers with string handles and when you ask for a hinge he opens the drawer labelled "putty" and sells you one. our mr chuddy used to be like that, and plenty of old fashioned service thrown in. he'd spend half an hour trying to match a nut to a bolt -- usually when i waiting as the next customer, but it was worth it when your turn came. ask him for a gimlet he'll show you twelve, and make a parcel of your final selection all tied up with a loop on top, and that isn't easy with gimlets.

i was sorry therefore to see his full page ad in the local paper the other day -- well i didn't see it acutally, my wife mrs potter read that. it keeps her up with her friends who'd been done for parking, not to mentioned it once interviewed her in her capacity as famed romantic novelist magnolia badminton, under the headline ""i am no trollope," says local authoress." being summer, which you'll recall was a warm friday in july this year, we were taking our annual breakfast in the garden. nothing elaborate, just toast and wasps, when she addressed my attention to the announcement that our mr chuddy had diversified. i was pretty absorbed in my own paper at that time, which had a gripping story about the election landslide in belgium.

....

it was the fridge she was after, of course. i knew that because she hardly mentioned it. husbands of long duration can spot straws in the wind when they blow along - enormous finesse of course - all that smokescreen about loft ladders and fitted kitchens, then just a tiny touch on the fridge, and off into the reaping machine. very neat. that's how we got the buttoned leather drawing room, as seen on tv -- if you watch tv drawing rooms at all you can't miss it. she kept talking abt goatskin hearth rugs and the new dining table that wouldn't rock under the tough cutlery, and before you can say "genuine imitation raw hide" we were all buttons and sliding around the sofa like a cast of two in "play of the month."i like to get these things over quickly myself. domestic reshuffles circling to land impair my concentration (such as it is) and later that morning when i was down in the garden in my author literary loggia, or genuine wooden shack, chapter two of "death came slowly" was coming even slower than usual. the fridge was hanging over me. would the welkin ring or would it not, to the rasp of a large truck raking the gateposts, and strong young voices yelling "up a bit your end, trev!" with intimate thuds, booms, and a jimmy young recipe with intensity 12 on the richter scale. well it would actually yes. it would just be nice to know when.

"the small, intricate life of gerald c. potter" series 3 episode 5, "the fridge." to be cotd.