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At gloomy times like this, what with an awful spring, my allotment under water and the trout too thin after a foul winter to be worth catching, I thought I would join Julie Andrews and go in search of some of my favourite things.

These include proper shops, people who make me laugh and anything I can buy to help the wild birds get through a very rough nesting season.

When I can get all this, plus a dash of inspiration from a man who has been fighting - and beating - real problems from birth, my little miseries are slapped into perspective.

It would be unfair to describe Paul's Hardware on the corner of Briggate, in Silsden, as The Old Curiosity Shop. Although it is wonderfully curious and much of its stock would be recognisable to old Charles Dickens, this is no place of anxious agony.

There is no Little Nell here, but there is Paul Waddington who would have every right to be pretty miserable. In fact, he is the life and soul of the party and his jumbled, packed-to-the-rafters emporium is as much a centre for sociable gossip as for small and sometimes baffling retail transactions.

Paul was born disabled 47 years ago, his right arm short and his hand almost unusable, his right leg almost as bad. And, as a child, he suffered from epilepsy - a cocktail of ailments that would sour most people for life.

Yet here is the man who makes me - and dozens of loyal customers - laugh as he burrows into his stock to find, to me at least, baffling items like electrical wiring clips or the cake baking tins which he hires out, along with carpet steam cleaners. I mean, who is so poor these days to need to rent a cake tin? There must be someone, because Paul Waddington - "I'm from the poor branch of the family which invented Monopoly," he fibs with a chortle - is one of those old-fashioned shopkeepers who gets in what his customers want, however small and hard to track down.

I had to do this interview with my notebook resting on a pile of garden compost bags: there was no other flattish space in the shop and most certainly not on the counter. That was far too crowded with electrical bits and pieces - as were the shelves reaching to the high ceiling. And Paul handles all this, the till, the telephone and a notebook of items "to be got in", with just one hand.

Now I have said before I dislike questioning people about their disabilities - it is none of my business or yours, dear reader - unless they are happy to talk about them. "Ask away," beamed Paul, as he served a woman who has used the shop since he opened it 28 years ago. "There's nothing I need to hide."

So here we go: his parents were travelling fairground people based in Bradford who gave up the road when Paul was born with his various problems in 1961. They bought a chippy in Silsden which, over the years, changed roles several times, one of its more recent incarnations being a Thai restaurant.

After leaving school at 16, he tried retail jobs but his disability made life hard: he was sacked from one store when the manager found out he had once suffered from epilepsy. Then the corner shop on Briggate came on the market and Dad asked if he would like to give it a try.

Almost 30 years later, despite the opening of several giant DIY stores in Skipton and Keighley, he still does a roaring trade, laughing and joking with all his customers. I drive there from Skipton to buy bird food for our feeders, stuff I could acquire 250 yards from home. It's daft, really, but this man deserves and has earned that support.

And, if you need a better example, as we talked in walked a young man in a state of high nerves. The night before, he had lost his wallet, stuffed with £250 and a bundle of credit cards, outside the pub across the road. Paul had found it, traced the owner from documents inside and phoned him. The man was so amazed by his good luck he could barely stutter his thanks.

If stories like this warm the old cockles on these wet and miserable days, how about another: that Thai restaurant his father owned attracted a young woman cook from Thailand. She could speak little English, so Paul offered to teach her. They got married last September and soon fly off on honeymoon to meet her parents.

"At last I have found the woman I have been looking for all my life," says Paul and this time he isn't joking. "Congratulations and good luck, Mr and Mrs Waddington, you deserve all the happiness you can get," I thought as I left the Old Curiosity Shop. I was beaming even as the hail stones bounced knee-high off the pavement.

1:38pm Monday 28th April 2008

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