All of which explains why, each time I fly back to London, I end up buying door furniture. Which gives me something to do there, and which gives me very odd looks when I go through customs.

This time, I ended up getting hold of a Victorian style pad bolt for the bathroom door. Totally unobtainable in the Antipodes, they were produced in their millions in the UK from the mid 1850s, and are still made today. Alas, the Cambourne B&Q (where I ended up doing my shopping on my way back to Newquay airport – but that’s another story) only had brown ones, not the classic black. But no matter – 12 thousand miles later, and I came to put it onto the door. And there I found that there were some old screw holes from when the door was first put on the bathroom back in 1865. And would you believe the screw holes match perfectly.
I can only conclude that the English chap who built this house 150 years ago imported – as you did then – his locks from the England. And a century and a half later I did exactly the same thing, and got the same type of lock which has probably come off the same machine that has been pressing them out ever since.
I then repeated exactly the same trick with the window catches. The builders who did such a terrible job of renovating this house back in 1993 put on some fake ivory ones from Bunnings. They were obviously wrong, as they fouled the glazing bar of the sash window, taking chunks out each time I opened or closed it.
However a small hardware store at the back end of Covent Garden had some lovely brass ones which looked as if they would match the only original window catch in the building. And they do – even down to the screw holes.
There’s a certain kind of serependipidy about finding bits to put back on the house that are still made exactly the same way as they were when the house was new.
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