One of the diseases of our society is the rash of small museums all over the country. Wherever one goes, it seems, there is a self-styled museum to waste our time, dedicated to the literary achievements of some long-forgotten poet or novelist and showing the typewriter he wrote on or the inkwell he used, or exhibiting photographs of museum pieces rather than the real thing. And if the local Town Hall can find nothing older than yesterday’s newspaper, they open a retail outlet for a local agricultural produce that needs marketing and call it a museum. A much more interesting option is the local hardware store.

I was thinking of this while walking around one of those monstrous do-it-yourself chain stores that have sprung up in shopping malls over recent years, not looking for anything in particular, but as I’ve always liked to do in this country, just looking. This store, I quickly realised, offered everything one might want to do it oneself and nothing one might simply want to look at. And if one did happen to need something specific, it lacked the one essential piece of furniture in a hardware store, which is a counter upon which the owner or assistant can lay out the tools and pieces of equipment one does not know one needs. The supermarket formula is not suited to the sale of goods that require identification and a short lesson in use before purchase.

The local hardware store provides this and a lot more. It is a repository of living history, the only place where goods are made by local craftsmen, usually in the traditional way, and exhibited for sale to the public. Most of us will never need a hand-embroidered harness for our mules, or a brush made from twigs for sweeping the street, or a hand-carved wooden holder for our sharpening stones while we scythe the grass, but these, and many other fascinating tools and oddities, are what make a small-town hardware store a lot more interesting than the average small-town museum.

The range of items on sale in any one hardware store may not be huge, but it varies from region to region, telling us more about the place we happen to be in than any tourist office could ever do. In Andalucía, for example, one finds locally produced sandals made from canvas and chord, used by farm workers in the hot southern climate, while in northern Spain, the locally-made footware includes wooden clogs designed for walking through the mud. Rare musical instruments used in different regions of the country are often available only in small hardware stores, as are pieces of kitchen equipment designed for preparing and cooking regional dishes not made elsewhere.

My weakness is for cheap objects whose function has long since been superseded by technology but can still be used and are beautiful to look at.

An example is my collection of metal lamps shaped like holy-water fonts but into which one pours oil and places a wick. Whenever the electricity is cut, the house lights up like a medieval banquet hall and stinks of paraffin. But it is a link with the past that no museum visit can provide.