Feeding the chooks

When I was a kid, hardware stores were one of my favourite places - second only, perhaps, to auto parts stores - to spend time. Spend time I did, of course, with the old man forever needing to restock and tool-up for various home improvement missions. This was the era before big-box retail, when hardware stores only contained actual hardware, rather than homeware, whiteware, teetering skyscrapers of 99c plastic buckets and endless crates of parallel-imported landfill-elect shit from China. Fuck you, Bunnings. Old-school hardware stores reeked of potential creativity. Of all the possibilities promised by every shade in the Dulux paint chart, by all the different varieties of stick-on mailbox letters, by endless lengths of timber and the hi-vis orange sturdiness of the Triton Workbench. Also in variance to their current equivalents, old-school hardware stores also contained people who actually knew stuff about hardware - in fact, becoming one of those cheery, helpful, expert-on-everything blokes who staffed hardware stores of the time was and perhaps still is one of my only career goals. Because, as Red Dwarf's Craig Charles once said in a book largely ghost-written for him, there is nothing in the world more useful than Someone Who Knows What They Are Doing.

Because I am now a Lifestyle Farmer (translation: a wanker townie with three chooks in his backyard), I now have reason to frequent rural supplies stores, such as I did this morning to pick up 10kg of shell grit and a large fuck-off bag of layer pellets for the girls. And I've come to the conclusion that rural stores are the new old hardware stores. Like old-school Mitre 10s or BBC Hardwares (remember them? Anyone? Bueller?) everything in a rural supply store is there For A Reason. No cafe. No soccer balls. No fuck-off-cretinous branded stuffed toys. Everything that is stocked is there because it is fit for purpose and because it is needed to do a job. Huge rolls of fencing wire and stacks of star pickets. Back-breaking bags of horse feed and fertilizer. Proper fucking boots you can drop bricks on and still have toes. The whole place exudes 'Fit For Purpose'. Which, when you're a wanker townie pretending to be a Lifestyle Farmer, is exactly the look you're trying to appropriate.

Our local rural co-op, one of the biggest in NZ, is called CRT. To my knowledge, not the same CRT as in Australia, but walking through their feed shed this morning a childhood earworm suddenly lurched forth from prehistory like a creakingly hideous and obvious horror from a condemned carnival Ghost Train:

Your local bloke from CRT
Is the bloke for the man on the land to see
Because he gets to know you per-so-nal-ly
The local bloke from CRT...

Ack. The 1980s were shit weren't they? Particularly on regional television. NRTV, we're a part of yoooouuuu....

The first and only time I can recall going into a CRT as a kid was in East Lismore. Which, then as now, was a shithole. As good a place as any to place a rural supplies store, on the Kyogle Road. From memory it was actually on the site of an old Norman Ross store - which dates it, and me - which once Gerry Harvey had subsumed into his egregious empire, had been abandoned to the likes of CRT and a local cash-n-carry discounter called 'Jack the Slasher' whose business branding could have been rethought more carefully, I figured. You never knew whether the proprietor was about to go you with a bowie knife or piss down your leg.

From what I remember of Lismore CRT, rural supplies places haven't changed much in 20-30 years. And that's a good thing. Long live old things which are old. Erm, we seem to have reached the end of this post, and there isn't really a witty punchline to finish it off. However, feel free to use the space below to write one in for yourself.







Haha! Not bad. Bit derivative, but what do you want for nuthin'.

The Doctor is OUT.