Things of wood, stone and metal (OK, plastic too) that have reached the end of their useful life, either obviously broken or simply worn out through use. A noble death or an ignoble ending? Either way, their time has come and gone.
The plastic stacking chair is so ubiquitous as to have become almost invisible. Nobody notices a dirty, broken down old plastic chair these days – old here being a relative term as even the most ancient among them are unlikely to have seen more than a few summers. The single-piece injection moulded chair is a […]
I can feel a figure of speech coming on. It is sweeping through me like a new… oooh I love a good broom and so do other people, judging by these examples which look as if they have been swept to death. The broom is the dry cousin of the mop but whereas the latter […]
Is it safe to say that this item has finally ground to a halt? Safe but, perhaps, not wise. The thing that strikes me about this death, and which, in its own way, is a small triumph, is that I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. I cannot recall ever having previously seen a […]
There seems to be a disturbing level of chair rage out there. These days, it is rare to come across a dead office chair that hasn’t been wilfully tipped over or mutilated in some way or simply smashed to pieces. Whatever happened to letting chairs die with dignity? Is it really necessary to humiliate them […]
There’s been an epidemic of dead mops in the neighbourhood recently. Perhaps they are victims of a particularly vigorous and brutal season of Spring cleaning, but it got me wondering as to why mops need die at all. When I was at school, the caretaker had a mop as ancient as the head of Medusa […]
Everybody has experienced a ‘dead’ battery from time to time, but this is a dead ‘dead’ battery – squashed, mangled and corroded. Not a pretty sight at all. Once upon a time, the humble AA battery epitomised convenience and freedom. The battery liberated light, sound, communication, time itself, making them all portable and instantly available […]
I heard a story on the news before Christmas about how a local council was offering a free pick-up service for dead Christmas trees because, according to the spokesperson, the sight of them lying in the lane-ways after Christmas was ‘depressing’. I don’t know. Burning a chocolate cake in the oven is a little depressing. […]