WorkAid

Over the years I’ve collected a vast number of tools as well as sundry bits and pieces that belong with said tools.  But I’ve got to the stage where my ability - and need - to make use of them, is starting to diminish.  It seems only a few years ago that I built our kitchen.  Now I’m limited to using it.

I learned to do what we now call DIY from my Dad.  And a few of the tools I have belonged to him.   He was born 101 years ago and his tools would not have been new.  So it’s reasonable to assume they’re older than me.

Chris too, has accumulated a large number of similar tools which he now wishes to store in our garage.  So we’ve had a giant sort out and rationalised the lot.  Unlike Noah, we decide to keep just one of everything.  I spent the morning sorting them into three piles; keep, dispose and ‘not sure’.

The first two are relatively easy; the newest or sharpest stays.  The opposite goes.  But then I come to the ‘sentimental attachment’.  I find, at the bottom of a box, my Dad’s veneer hammer.  Now there is no way I am going to be veneering furniture in the near or even distant future.  The last time I used it was probably aged about nine, hammering nails that were far too big for it, into an old piece of wood to make a toy of some sort.  But it goes in to the ‘keep’ pile.  There are only a few of his tools left and I find room for them somewhere.

Eventually I end up with just two piles.  The ‘keep’ pile go neatly to their appointed place in the garage.  The ‘dispose’ pile is put into boxes to take to WorkAid, a charity based in Chesham, Buckinghamshire.

WorkAid was inspired by BandAid.  While BandAid attempted to ‘feed the world’, WorkAid set out, in 1986, to ‘make the world’.  Thirty years on it’s still going strong, helping people to  break the cycle of poverty by making the things they need to build a better life for themselves.  How? With our old and no longer wanted tools.  They’re cleaned, repaired (if necessary) and then sent to various parts of East Africa.

Tomorrow we’ll load up the car and take these boxes down to Chesham.  My garage is  now tidier and cleaner.  So is my conscience.