Matt Daughtrey fixed his umbrella by replacing the el cheapo rivets with stainless steel barbells he bought off Ebay. Very clever!

We’ve all seen this before – the ‘broken spoke’ which seems to me to be the most common failure of the contemporary umbrella, from the $4 street corner specials to the $20 upmarket models with the ‘lifetime guarantee’, which I assume means the lifetime of the average housefly.

This is particularly aggravating to me because although the metal can be recycled the lifetime of an umbrella is incredibly short considering how often it is actually used. In my case my umbrella had not even been in the wind; it’s just so poorly made that part of it broke.