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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.

The thing about a drawerful of pruck is that, in my seven-year-old mind, there was the persistent belief that it could be assembled, somehow, into a novel, complete working system or machine. It didn’t matter that almost every individual component was comprehensively broken or rusted, somehow there had to be a way to make a realistic spacecraft or helicopter or printing machine from these remnants. Almost nothing was thrown out because there was always the possibility that someday ‘you’d be glad of’ a few cracked purple buttons, a pink birthday candle, a sewing machine foot or a dozed fountain pen filler.

When Meccano came along it was only a surrogate form of brightly-coloured pruck. As its parts gradually became lost, under the diningroom table, they eventually resurfaced in the drawer which was still kept for the purpose.

Much of my life since has been spent attempting to build such machines from such bits of recycled mind pruck that I have been reluctant to throw away.

Even though it’s a redbrick relic of the days of Victorian industry, it feels as if it the fishhouse has always been there -nestling in the leafy glen of Stranmillis. The door is glass panelled wood which has shed its green paint and been gradually ossified by the precious humidity which it guards from the northern cold. Only a few yards away is the stump of a tree which turned to stone…I never understood this. It was one of several mysteries which grandpa told me about. Some others were…

That an astronaut has the same mass on the Earth as in zero-g
That God is just an invention by people who are afraid
That he had seen My Fair Lady three times
That sweeties taste better when they have been well squeezed
That smoking gives you lung cancer, but he still did it.

There were many other mysteries which we didn’t discuss at the fishhouse, however. These required no explanation until I was much older -and he was no longer able to answer.