Every now and then I stumble over a sunken small-scale business out in the middle of nowhere. In the cases where there is an equally decayed residential home just adjacent to it, one starts to wonder about the story behind it all.

In this particular case, a story of a local blacksmith and workshop wizard living here, dealing with everything from pulling out a decayed tooth to performing tractor repair just comes to me. It is fascinating to walk around in the total silence and sense of stuff being untouched for decades, just imagining what it must have been like to be a jack-of-all-trades in terms of tech stuff some fifty years ago. Before electronics, computers, special tooling, injection molding – in a time when almost everything could be fixed, and if it couldn’t, it was fixed anyway – maybe in the shape of a new thing for a different purpose. Nothing was ever thrown away, and loads of bolts, wrinkled nails, washers, bent saw blades and other indispensable stuff can be found more or less assorted in empty tin cans.

I sometimes wonder how many such places are around – probably thousands, just in this country.