So there I was, enjoying a glorious Autumn day in the garden, busily pruning my hardy fuchsias with my 24p secateurs, and thinking to myself what an excellent purchase they’d been. In short, I was feeling smug. Then disaster struck.

The 24p secateurs stopped working!

Closer inspection revealed that the nut holding the whole thing together had disappeared. I knew it had a tendency to work loose, but I was so lost in my smugness I’d been forgetting to tighten it up with my fingers as I went along and now it was gone.

I tried to locate it amongst the sticks, stems and leaves, you’d have thought a bright shiny silver thing would be easy to spot in the sunshine, but no. I searched in vain for several minutes, but finally gave up.

Now these secateurs didn’t exactly owe me anything, I’d certainly had more than 24p’s use out of them that day alone, but I don’t like to waste things.

“You can take the girl out of Yorkshire, but you can’t take Yorkshire out of the girl”. I like to think of myself as ‘careful’ rather than ‘tight’, but you’ll just have to make your own judgement on that one.

So, off I went into the garage. We almost never throw anything away in the belief that ‘you never know when it might come in’. It’s the Yorkshire thing again, though technically Peter is a Lancastrian!!

However I digress.  As a result of  this ‘make do and mend’ attitude the garage is full of ‘useful’ stuff. Surely to goodness we have a nut for my secateurs.

As it happens I knew perfectly well we had several nuts, along with their bolts in the ‘nuts and bolts’ jar. We also have a jar of allen keys, 2 jars of screws, a jar of plastic ‘things’, a jar of electrical connecting ‘things’ and a jar of left-over ‘stuff’ that doesn’t fit into any other category.

I emptied the nuts and bolts jar onto the floor and started searching. Eventually I was successful and found a nut for the job. Not a perfect fit, but good enough to get me pruning again.

The first pair of 24p secateurs march on.