I grew up on the east side of Loch Lomond in a cottage without mains electricity. We lived with the friendly guff of oil lamps and paraffin heaters and a water supply that came from the burn that ran down from the hill behind us. The smell of the engine shed housing the rackety generator with which my father had a love/hate relationship, his oil soaked workbench and the clink of spanners and screws on the stone flagged floor are amongst my earliest memories. Aged about six, I’d learned to wrap sandpaper round a pebble to help prime our old boat. I’d watch my father prise open the tin of varnish with a screwdriver to reveal the heavy silky liquid underneath and then be instructed how to charge my paintbrush and systematically cover my little patch.
For a treat, we’d go on the Maid of the Loch paddle steamer. Each time I was entranced, not so much by the views (which were on our doorstep) but by descending the white painted iron steps down to the enveloping heat of the engine room and the rhythmic thundering of the huge, gleaming pistons.
My great grandfather worked with the Saracen Iron Foundry in Glasgow. It made decorative ironwork for buildings and bandstands all over the world as well basic pipes and sanitaryware for homes in Scotland. Saracen rone pipes still spiral like sticks of barley sugar down the terraced houses in Russell Street in Rothesay. Utterly practical engineering, yet decorative and playful.
Despite this auspicious start, I didn’t become an engineer or a carpenter or a craftsperson. I’m not even good at DIY. My work has been mostly in the world of education and free lance writing. But those early memories are hardwired. Every so often, I need to be around people and places where the smells and sounds, the textures, colours and the light remind me that there’s still room for those who understand and are interested in creating and in fixing things.
I’ve come to crave this reassurance in the face of the explosion of consumerism and the tendency of manufacturers to offer us goods that nobody, or very few people, can fix. Matthew Crawford, in his book The Case for Working with your Hands, points out that some current Mercedes models don’t even have a dipstick. Supposedly, this offers the driver a freedom from keeping a can of oil in the car or the garage. Instead, it simply makes the driver more dependent on going to a dealer when the screen flashes ‘service required’.
All of this led me Into Ironmongers. Intending to write about these remarkable shops I 
took photographs initially as a record of where I had been and whom I had met. The images conveyed a lot of the shops’ qualities; the complexity of the stock, the depth of knowledge and pride of the owners and staff and the pleasure of the customers. So while the book is brewing, some exhibitions of photographs show this ‘work in progress’ as I continue to visit ironmongers shops across Scotland.
