Mantiques.

Bro has a habit of buying mantiques as he terms them. His passion is for anything that looks as though it was a tool for something. We have all studied at least one thing he bought simply because no one knew what it was for. The walls of the workshop are decorated with a wide assortment of (now redundant) wood working, metal working, automotive type hand tools.

If you have any educated guesses what this is suggestions will be passed on to him.

Having been on an 8 year drive to reduce our possessions to only those things we use I have diverted a large assortment of domestic tools (cream skimmers, irons that are heated on the stove, boot lasts, assorted canning gear, brass jam pans, old hanging scales sets,  cast iron bakeware... and so on) to second hand shops, freecycle and charities. 

What I have sought to OBTAIN is an effective and efficient manual coffee grinder.

My head was turned last Sunday in Havelock as I walked past Mills Mussels. (This is not an advert - you can buy and eat the same mussels anywhere but the name is the clue)  Outside the restaurant stood this

I walked by, processed the image, wondered if it was a commercial size coffee mill and went back to investigate.

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They encourage their customers to grind up their empty mussel shells as they leave - take it home for your chickens if you want. Nice gimmick. An old mill. Bet you don't see those every day.

On Wednesday I went down the wrong street to get to the solicitors' (lawyers) office. I had to walk past the only 'antique' shop in town. Sitting on the footpath outside the open door to the storeroom was this

Some people use the excuse 'it was clearly meant to be' or lazily call it Karma. 

It's just one of those life coincidences of which there are remarkably many and easily explained mathematically. 

I probably walked past it last week. This week I noticed and it got shovelled into my van and is currently residing on Bro's welding table while we can make a plinth out of a huge block of hornbeam that he has been threatening to turn into firewood. And so that he can bronze weld a small corner that has been knocked off the iron casting of the mill's body.

The best part is that in trying to find the shop proprietor I walked right through the place and found this...

...coffee mill. And it works beautifully, efficiently and produces very evenly ground coffee. No more winding away for hours on a thing the size of a pepper grinder. I love it.

Now THAT might have been the Greek goddess Nemesis at work....😉