"There now, three screws, three nuts, and a dog collar - and don't forget to soak the geraniums!" A typical end to a retail transaction in Quinn's, our local hardware store.
It could also, of course, have been three planks, a gallon of paint and a watering can, or any other combination of household needs; but the purchase would always have been accompanied by the kind of patience and service that are now almost a folk memory.
Vast, modern emporia offer dazzling arrays of packets of screws when you may need only one, or wall-to-wall cans of paint and a mile-long walk to find an assistant for advice - and no one to care if you've remembered the turps.
The late Tom Quinn opened his hardware shop in Donnybrook more than half-a-century ago and moved five years later to Ranelagh, where he lived over the shop with his wife Brigid and their young family. He traded through the hungry 1940s and 1950s in the days before the numbering of postal areas gave smart Alecs in the media the cheap thrill of sneering at "Dublin 6" and its inhabitants.
When he died in 1962, Brigid, who came from a farm in Co Offaly and knew nothing about hardware, found herself running the shop while rearing their six children.
Those were tough times and she fondly remembers the support of other shopkeepers. Mrs O'Hagan from the nearby grocer's shop came in every morning, sat her down and made her an egg whip with a drop of sherry, which Mrs Quinn says would set her up for the day. Sometimes a travelling salesman would look after the shop while she ran behind the scenes to get the dinner.
Three generations
The only home help she had was a woman who did the weekly ironing. She reared her children and put them through school in the days before free education, though her daughter Ann rebelled and insisted on leaving school to help in the shop.
Four years ago, Ann's daughter Karen joined her mother and grandmother, giving the people of Ranelagh three generations of Quinn women at their service amid the plants, gardening equipment, kitchen goods, crockery, nuts, bolts and tins. It was one of the busiest and most popular shops in the area, and in the week before it finally closed earlier this month, countless customers flocked in to grieve at its passing.
When Tom Quinn opened in the 1940s, his was one of five hardware shops in Ranelagh village. There were also 23 grocers, five greengrocers, nine butchers, four drapers, 10 newsagents and tobacconists, seven bread and cake shops, three fish and poultry shops, five dairies, four chemists, a cinema, a billiards room, a fish-and-chip shop and a cafe, as well as dressmakers, hairdressers, boot and shoe makers and repairers, pubs, bookies, painters and decorators and chimney sweeps.
The village was self-sufficient, and that is probably what held it together and made it a village, a community with an identity. But most of those shops are long gone now, replaced by take-aways, video outlets, auctioneers and launderettes. Quinn's former premises will be another launderette. Modern planning has ignored the importance of local shops to a community, but are the essential catalyst for any neighbourhood. In earlier days people walked to these shops - none of which had acres of car parking - met their neighbours en route, chatted to them and to the shopkeepers. In the vast housing estates surrounding the city, how many lonely days might be broken if local people had a few shops within reach, places where they could exchange a few words with a neighbour while standing side by side at the counter, instead of silently picking their items from shelves and then staring at the back of the person ahead in the supermarket check-out queue?
Dublin's Draft Development Plan says it will protect "old historical villages" and that the environment will be "safe and free from heavy through traffic". But the planners' good intentions are often thwarted by road engineers, who see villages such as Ranelagh simply as sections of an arterial route.
This is partly what causes the closure of old shops such as Quinn's. Great, faceless emporiums on the outskirts of the city deface the landscape with featureless car parks, while little centres such as Ranelagh are squeezed out of existence by the Corporation's efforts to move more and more commuters in and out of the city.
Family shops
Family shops all over Ireland are dying out because they are forced to compete against huge consortia, many of which have benefited from designated area incentives. Surely, some measures are needed to save the smaller town and village centres. Planning authorities should see single-family outlets as the vital social centres they are, and offer incentives such as reduced rates to encourage them to stay.
Not that that all the blame lies with the authorities: local shops have not been helped in recent years by some city residents - the newcomers who have spent hundreds of thousands of pounds to live in areas such as Ranelagh because of its "attractive village atmosphere", but who drive off every weekend to huge supermarkets do buy their groceries and hardware.
They are robbing themselves of the pleasures of living in a city village. They won't have dabbled among the nuts and screws, with young Karen Quinn giving knowledgeable advice on which ones are suited for what, or listened in fascination as Ann explained the process of expertly squirting shots of brilliant colourants into a tin of paint, or discussed the finer points of wallflowers with Mrs Brigid Quinn.