Mr Bonface’s Curio Shop

We’re having a visit to Mr Bonface’s curio shop. It’s a gloriously arranged tin shack with a beautiful Zebra painting on the side.

There’s a significant crush in the tiny shop with all twelve of us volunteers, so I stay outside for a while with our driver for the week, Danson. He’s one of the reasons I love Kenya already. The faces of the people are so beautiful and they are completely sincere, which is a shock to someone like me, coming from one of the most bitter and cynical cultures in existence.

Just look at the beautiful Duchenne lines on Danson’s face:

Two of our party, Harvey and Leila are comparing carvings. Last night they both chose the same Spirit Puffin at the icebreaker I put on. Today they seem to be comparing the same carving. Clearly made for one another.

There’s real delight at the jewellery and animal carvings.

Eventually I’ll get the chance to go in the shop. I want everyone to have a good look first and then I’ll have freedom of the shop while they all queue to pay.

His assistant is outside the shop using the spare time to do a bit of oiling or waxing.

I stroll around the shop. I don’t want anything large, I would like some useful things which I can use every day and feel a connection to this place. I pick up a wooden spoon. Nothing is priced, but it can’t be too expensive, can it? It’s a beautiful wooden spoon and I’m going to really enjoy using it in the kitchen. It fits my hand wonderfully well.

There’s a small knife, which looks like a butter knife, with a stylised lion’s head on the end. The wood is dark and the finish smooth. Perfect.

There are beautiful bone and wood key fobs. I’m always short of something distinctive to hold my (many) bunches of keys. They will be perfect. The wood has a very decorative natural pattern on one and a beautiful painted dotted spiral pattern on the other.

Then I see the horn spoons. I love horn spoons. I’ve popped into Objects of Use in Oxford many times. It’s the ultimate destination if you fetishise household objects. I refuse to deny or confirm whether I fetishise household objects.

Objects of Use has the most fabulous descriptions of everything. Do you want an Atlas Mountains Hand-Blown Carafe in Green? “Whilst the workmanship might be a little rough, it is precise and cannot be said to be lacking in skill”. Or maybe the WaSa Solingen Hat Maker’s Scissors are more your style? “Each pair of WaSa scissors requires dozens of individual steps, with painstaking attention to the handcrafted precision worthy of the Solingen, ‘City of Blades’, standard.” No, you’re definitely a Yutanpo Japanese Hot Water Bottle kind of person, aren’t you? “In Japan, where despite cold winters central heating is even today something of a rarity, yutanpo like these are considered more a necessity than the luxury we might think in the west.”

Horn spoons. Beautiful horn spoons. There are four of them, two light, two dark. They are smooth, patterned, natural and stunningly beautiful. They are £18.50 each in Objects of Use:

“Natural ox-horn dessert, breakfast, or child’s spoons hand cut, formed, and polished in Carnforth, at the last remaining horn-works in Britain. The colours range from white, to translucent amber, through all the shades to black in natural tortoise-shell variations. Horn will not tarnish or taint food stuffs, hence its traditional use in the serving of eggs and acid preserves which would quickly discolour old silver or carbon steel cutlery, but characteristics which are still useful today for serving these or especially for babies when lightness and shatter resistance might be desired.”

I pick one up, and then two, and wander round the tiny shop. One of our volunteers asks me about them. I’m worried about raving about them too much in case she wants the other two, which is strange, because I’ve left them on the display. I scoot around and add them to my clutches.

I queue. I ask Mr Bonface the price. He points at everything as he does his mental reckoning. “4,000” Everything I’ve chosen is a mere 4,000 Kenyan Shillings. That’s just over £23. Fantastic. It’s all beautiful and a tremendous bargain. As he begins to wrap it, my colleague Liz appears and begins to bargain with him for me. She asks him for his best price. He goes slowly through the same pointing and mental reckoning and says “4,000” again and carries on preparing the newspaper to wrap. Liz says “3,000” a couple of times and he sighs and reluctantly agrees. That’s £17. Less for all of it than one spoon made in Carnforth and bought in Oxford.

I feel like giving him 1,000 Kenyan Shillings as a tip. I’d better not, Liz has just won me bargain of the century, and she’s still watching.

I ask Mr Bonface for a photograph and he poses for me. In every photograph he has a partial smile which never, ever reaches his eyes. There are no Duchenne lines here.

Maybe it’s because they’re all on my face. And on Danson’s.

More adventures in Kenya