the ping-pong rifle

Crap things break. It's a simple fact of life. We have a great big thing in the loft, dating back to the late 1970s, which is labelled 'Ping-Pong Rifle'. Much as we'd love to tell you it was a surreally named Japanese footstool or board game, the truth is as mundane as the name - it's a plastic kid's toy that, in theory at least, fires ping-pong balls. But, in a particularly sadistic design quirk, when you pull the trigger what actually happens is that it divides lengthwise into two halves and flies apart, catapulting a large spring and some pieces of firing mechanism at your eyes.

Back in the mists of time, some doting relative obviously bought this barely sane toy for one of us while we were in gnarly child mode, to keep us quiet. It probably cost the equivalent of £1.49 or so, and broke pretty much instantly. Conclusion? The Ping-Pong Rifle was, and is, completely crap.

So why do we keep it? Well, it doesn't bear thinking about how much stuff like this gets churned out of factories all over the world, and then broken and thrown away before you can say "Take me to hospital, I have a spring embedded in my eye." Which is why nobody does think about it. We're only human at pie-man towers, and sometimes we are tempted by the cheap and the flashy - the bargain CD by an artist we kind of sort of like, the unbelievably cheap DVD player, the cookery book that's in the sale and never mind that it's a book of recipes themed around African spiny cucumbers and we'll read more of it in the shop than we will after we buy it.

So we keep the Ping-Pong Rifle, and every so often we see it in the loft and it reminds us not to spend our £1.49 today on something crap, but to wait a few weeks, put a few £1.49s together and get something we actually want or need, something that might last a while.

When we were casting around for a t-shirt supplier, we had to do a lot of research. When you're not already in the trade, it's surprisingly hard to know where to find people who make t-shirts. So when we did find some manufacturers, and their stuff turned out to be dead cheap and reasonably cool-looking, we were so chuffed that we almost did the African cucumber book thing. And now we'd have been exhorting you to buy shirts that were a bit shoddy round the edges and would give up the ghost, not to mention their shape, after a few washes.

But thankfully the Ping-Pong Rifle worked its magic, and we kept looking. We think the howies t-shirts we sell are the best quality t-shirts in the UK, if not the world. Plus, unbelievably, they're completely organic. They'll last you years, they won't fade and they'll keep their shape. We're more proud of them than we can say. Sure, you can buy cheaper t-shirts, but don't come crying to us a few weeks down the line with springs in your eyes.