One Fort In The Grave - sixtysomething Keith Fort's sepia-tinted take on life

JUST when I thought I'd got everything sorted out at home so that I could leave for the hols with peace of mind, I seemed to develop a strange form of the Midas touch. It wasn't as if everything I touched turned to gold. It just broke.

First the toilet cistern started overflowing. Then my electric razor conked. The car exhaust fell in half. Then the real blow. My big metal up and over garage door collapsed. Or, rather, one side of the wooden frame supporting the mechanism disintegrated with rot. It was only seven years old.

Tried to buy a decent piece of timber recently? No small job replacing that 7ft length of what I call 4x3 with the 300lb door still in situ. But I was determined to do it myself. A quick coast around the modern day barns that replaced our good old fashioned corner hardware shops soon revealed they didn't "do-it-all" after all.

The nearest sizes I could find were heavily knotted, split or damaged somewhere, were expensive but worst of all, warped -- and not even slightly. "Can I help you?" inquired an assistant just out of short pants (at least he would have been in my day). "No thanks. I'm not making bows and arrows today."

So it was off to the old bespoke timber yard which I've been using for about 100 years, or so it feels. "Can I help you, old man?" This, I must point out, is no longer a term of endearment for me but a statement of fact.

"Yes, I want a 7ft piece of timber, two and eleven sixteenths by three and eleven sixteenths, please." "What's that in millimetres?" "How the blazes should I know?" "Well, I'll have to work it out -- we've gone metric now, you know."

Well, unfortunately when they built my house they were in feet and inches. And I still am. He messed about in this time-honoured woodyard that had been dragged screaming into Euro-land and came up with something measuring 225mm by 95mm by 68mm. "Might be a sixteenth bigger than you want, but will it do?"

At least he spoke my language if he didn't measure in it. At least it was a solid and sound piece of timber. And straight.

I had to go "up the yard" to a sort of pre war office full of time clocks and ledgers, to pay. It was manned, or rather, womaned (sorry girls) by one solitary, grey-haired old dear who still wrote in a ledger with a pen. They rang through from the yard with my order.

While she was working out my bill a telephone rang and she started barking out prices off the top of her head. While she was still talking, her other telephone rang and she answered that, too, dealing with a query from the yard.

And while she was doing that in walked one of the bosses ignoring the fact that I was there and that she was on the telephone and started straight in asking her what he should do with some supplies that had been delivered there but should have been sent to their other place.

She looked at him patiently. "Just send them on" she sighed. "I can't, we're not supposed to," as if he was expecting her to come up with some magic solution. She did. "Well, send them back."

The guy in the £300 suit left obviously pleased to have obtained a managerial solution. Then she finished call number two. Then she dealt with call number one. Then she looked at me. "Now, where was I?"

"You could do with some help," I observed. "Help," she said. "I've worked here all my life. I have one year to do and by now I thought I'd be coasting to retirement. Fact is I'm working harder than at any time in my life. The world's gone mad."

"They'll miss you when you go." It sounded like the understatement of the decade. I glanced over. She was using tables to re-convert from metric to feet and inches. Then multiplcation and long division to calculate the cost. No calculator in sight.

I didn't think there were any of us left. I remembered the bored vacant girls with their electronic barcode scanners at the superdrome checkouts. "That'll be twelve pounds 98 pence," said said, suddenly bouncing back into decimal.

My eyes wrinkled. "Would you mind if I gave you twelve pounds, nineteen shillings and seven pence?" She looked up with a wry smile. "I only wish you could," she breathed. "I only wish you could."