For a while, after my parents divorced, my Grandma raised me alone. We lived on her small pension. She regularly went to markets and vegetable bazaars to buy food as cheaply as possible. She brought a lot of it at once. The bags she brought back from the market were heavy. When I was a teenager, I tried to lift them off the floor – and couldn’t.

My Grandma took this steelyard (a small and heavy device for weighing food) with her every time she went to the market. In the nineties, shoppers were often cheated at the markets. To avoid being cheated, she took this pocket scale with her. If she found that she had been charged more money than needed, she would go back and get her money back.