When Lady Platt was appointed chairman of the Equal Opportunities Commission in the 1980s one ‘fact’ that made into the profiles was that she always carried a screwdriver in her handbag, a habit which supposedly dated back to her days as a pioneeering woman aircraft engineer.
At that time I too used to keep a set of screwdrivers in my handbag, though my skills for using tools are very limited.
It was a selection of small electric screwdrivers in a plastic pouch. We were beginning to get personal desk top equipment – usually just a VDU monitor & printer, connected together via old fashioned large D plugs.
After having had to pay a £90 call out fee+ for an engineer to come out one day & diagnose that the problem was that one of the very short screws which held the D plugs together had worked loose & one of the pins had got bent, I decided that a handy set of electric screwdrivers could, potentially, save me a chunk of my budget.
All this by way of attempting to explain why a half page newspaper advert showing twenty different types of screw attracted my attention & inspired several minutes of wonder at man’s ingenuity. Even better when I realised that it marks the arrival in the UK shopping malls of the Swedish firm clas ohlson, purveyors of homeware & hardware.
Since the demise of Woolworths the occasional buyer of such goods has been ill-served by the High Street, & shopping centres which, with their ever rising rents, have seemed to offer nothing but high margin fashion & fripperies. The only hope was the £ store.
I look forward to going to the Arndale for a good mooch round.
