Everything is broken

Yesterday's post started out as this one but turned into another post instead. So here's yesterday's post today.

Like many things in my home, my ironing board is a bit of a wreck. Or as Bob Dylan sang "everything is broken".

As you can see the screw holes have become so worn that the screws just fall out and the iron rest is just hanging there not very ergonomically functioning as an iron rest at all. The relevant screws are lost though.

I could claim that they went up the hoover if I had hoovered lately but I haven't! So who knows where they are, probably with all those lost socks. Maybe I'll find them one night while stumbling around the house barefoot in the dark.

Luckily I keep bits and pieces like random screws that have fallen out of other broken things. So I was able to reposition the iron rest and screw the screws in a less shredded part of the board. And voilà! As good as not new.

I particularly like the way the pink and red paint on the screws tell of their former lives holding a wooden toybox together and my ironing board now demonstrates a thoroughly virtuous mend-and-make-do approach to living.

And the point of my mentioning all this is not to bore you with domestic trivia though I have done a fine job of that, it is to reference a short article in the New Statesman, 'Why capitalism creates a throwaway society - how to deal with waste is the great policy failure of our age' by Peter Wilby where he states that the average British household currently spends a mere 60p a week on repairs and just chucks stuff away instead. So I just saved myself 60p and the citizens of this country and beyond the environmental cost of manufacturing a new ironing board and disposing of the old one. I hope everyone is suitably grateful.

He also looks back to a time when 'socks were darned, elbows patched and small pieces of string kept in the cupboard under the stairs'. I don't know about the other two but I certainly have some really useful collections of what are known in the art world as 'found objects' (pictured left).Though I use them in my own art installations which decorate my home such as the one called 'ironing board' above.

Much better is this wonderful site called www.re-foundobjects.com which does exactly what it says on the tin.

Check out their vintage jelly mould lights.

My iron though, isn't any old iron, its a Philips 4340 with automatic shut off -if someone rings up for a gossip while I'm ironing or I accidently forget that I was ironing, walk away and go shopping or on holiday (though that's a hypothetical example as haven't had one for a few years) or whatever it detects that it is not ironing anymore and shuts itself down thereby saving energy and the planet and then starts up again when it detects motion. Cool, eh!