You blink once and 6 months goes, just like that. Hmm. Think I’ll have to unload various random ramblings on a more regular basis, they’re not doing me any good stuck inside my head…

So anyway, around 3 years ago the zip on my leather jacket broke. Well actually the little brass stopend came off and meant there was no way of doing up what was otherwise a perfectly good, nay extremely cool jacket. I was told recently that cool is not cool any more and hasn’t been for some time. Hey, if it was good enough for the Fonz.

What do you do these days when you need to find out about services? No madam not that sort of service. The sort you aren’t concerned your wife might find out about. Actually you do the same for both I am given to understand by certain tabloids. Yes you hit t’Internet. So I did. And got nowhere. Either there weren’t any suitable repair services in the immediate vicinity, or they didn’t know people might look for them on the Internet. I even resorted to this yellow booky thing where you have to turn paper called pages to find businesses. Weird idea, it’ll never catch on. No luck there either.

Being of a patient disposition, and not coming up with any better options, I decided to wait. Jacket in cupboard, ocassional Google, no dice. Until last week. Now the thing about Google isn’t that it knows everything, it doesn’t. In fact it knows nothing. What it does know is how to look for what you tell it to look for. Wherein lies the rub. Ask for the wrong thing or the right thing in the wrong way and you’ll get a lot of results which even if you go all the way through to the 20 millioneth result you won’t find what you want. You have to think like a shopkeeper, or in this case a clothing repair service. What are the likely to think you might be likely to want to find that they do? Nail that and you find what you want.

Turns out that there is a small business in the entrance mall to Asda in Southampton (also Poole, Bournemouth and Winchester) that repairs leather jackets and pretty much everything else so far as I can see. Their site’s not much to look at, being as how it has apparently been being updated since 2009, but it’s got contact telephone details on it http://www.sewquickonline.co.uk/ if you need such services.

Jacket now repaired for reasonable dosh and all good. Just in time for what passed for Summer passing quickly into Autumn. So long as it doesn’t rain (hah!), should be pretty warm now.