Monday, November 02, 2009

News of the screws

The door of a kitchen cupboard came away in Best Beloved's hand. Diagnosis was easy, the cure even easier. The two screws that hold it to the top hinge had worked loose and didn't grip the wood. They just went round and round and round. It wasn't hard to find two similar screws in the jam jar full of loose screws left over from this job and that: similar but longer, so they do actually dig into the wood but not so long that they go all the way through.

Job done.

Yet now I find myself thinking of that jam jar. I have never consciously cultivated a screw collection, but there the jar is, full of them, all lengths and widths and sizes, long and short, bronze or steel, flat head or Phillips.

Should I be worried that I have accumulated so many left over screws? What are they left over from?

2 comments:

  1. I think it's a Man thing. Real Men always have jam-jars with screws in them. In extreme cases, they have 2 jars, imperial & metric.

    I understand that the jam-jars traditionally decend in the male line, which is why my dad now has jam-jars of his own, plus the ones he inherited (as senior son-in-law) from my grandfather.

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  2. That is indeed an extreme case. I'd have said Real Men go on the "oh, that will fit" basis.

    It's probably possible to trace the ancestry of a screw back through the generations, a bit like X-chromosomes.

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