What is pruck?

This definition given isn’t exactly the one I was taught at my mother’s knee, but at least it confirms that the word isn’t just another of those vivid memories that I’ve invented to explain my childhood. It was always used to mean the bits and pieces which I collected or just admired in my aunty’s kitchen drawer. Bric-a-brac would be too posh a term for stuff like an old service penknife, clothespegs, keys, nameless bits of broken mincing machine, some hairy string for holding up tomato plants…any grouping of domestic items that give the impression of having been scraped together.

The pruck drawer represents a tool for lowering the entropy of the wider universe by concentrating chaos in one of its dustier corners. Don’t be too surprised, therefore, in reading what follows that there is no theme: this disjointed style is simply helping to delay the heat-death of the micro-universe between my ears.