THE curses came loud and clear from Ben the Bucket's allotment next door. I won't report the words - not in a family newspaper - but even the rabbits swarming on the beckside covered their ears.

Now this was quite surprising, for Ben is normally an equable sort of fellow and the most noise he tends to make while gardening, his prime and only hobby, is a contented, barely audible whistling.

I ambled over to the fence. Ben, who gets his name from following horses on the bridleway with bucket in hand, was just visible in a thicket of redcurrant bushes which he had been attacking with a birthday present bought for him by his sister Beatrice: a brand new pair of posh secateurs.

"What's up Ben," I called, "cut a finger off with your birthday pressie?"

He came charging out of the bushes, face red with rage, and waved some strange bits of metal and plastic at me. "Bleeping things," he snarled. "Brand new and snapped in half on t' first outing."

He came to the fence holding out Exhibit A: two separate bits, the rivet that joined them snapped clean in half. I had seen it happen with scissors in the past but not with what, essentially, should be a fairly sturdy piece of gardening kit.

Now Ben and Beatrice are perhaps the poorest folk in Beggarsdale. He has not worked for 15 years or so since the quarry closed and his gardening tools would look well in a museum for country bygones. Despite this, he regularly carries off top prizes at the annual Beggarsdale Show.

"Just look who made the bleeping things," he said, thrusting the ex-secateurs under my nose. And sure enough, they carried the name of a British company which had been manufacturing garden tools since Capability Brown was making over stately homes.

Then, on closer inspection, we saw the weasel words: Made in China. The penny dropped: a couple of years ago, I bought a hoe from the same company - and the handle broke within weeks.

"D'ye remember when they always said 'British is best' when we wus nobbut lads," moaned Ben.

And we laughed: that was when a third of the world was marked in red on the atlases, when the old Empire, although in decline, still existed. Those, too, were the days when the Japanese called a purpose-built manufacturing town Birmingham, so they could sell their then shoddy goods to people who thought they had come from the "Workshop of the World."

Today, of course, you never know where anything is manufactured but it is a fair bet that is wasn't in Britain. We don't make things here any more, just juggle with money - other people's money, that is.

The country that gave railways to the world can't run one any more without killing passengers. To me, the significance of the Railtrack collapse is that, when arguing with the Government to get their money back, they barely mentioned the railway as an asset: they only wanted their huge property holdings back so that they could sell them off like the good speculators they became.

For Ben - and Beatrice, of course - their mini-disaster came about because an old established and reputable British firm sold goods whose manufacture it had sub-contracted abroad.

Some cynic might even call this a con-trick. There most certainly should be a law against it!

* The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based on a fictitious character in a mythical village.