This year I took a different sort of holiday: in autumn, rather than summer, in a Sussex wood rather than on a European beach, and sawing logs rather than lounging on a sunbed with a glass of wine.
I went home with something more than an expanded waistline too: a chair, each leg and spindle of which I made myself. Given that I didn’t know what a lathe was a fortnight ago, it stands surprisingly straight. Most days I pause at the dining table to look lovingly at it, as on a child whose brilliance is a wonder in an otherwise dull family.
Handicrafts do not form a large part of my life. I tend to regard the division of labour as not only the fount of prosperity but also a blessing to people like me who were born with ten thumbs and are shamed by friends who run up an Aran jumper before breakfast.
But I’m keen to impress my new partner, so when he came out with the suggestion that we should spend our holidays learning carpentry, I replied that I had dreamt of nothing else for years.
I loved it, of course: working the lathe in dappled sunlight under trees, whacking lumps of wood with the adze and bringing out their grain with the travisher. My hands, it turned out, are happier shaving and shaping wood than tapping on a keyboard.
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Once converted to handicrafts, I discovered that everybody is taking them up. Friends have been off on courses making cloth, pottery, bread and dry stone walls. The urban middle classes are paying to do the work that medieval peasants would have murdered their feudal overlord to stop doing.
That’s economics for you. Making and mending come naturally to us, but capitalism has no room for amateurs and technology has mostly wiped out the jobs that let us touch and feel things.
Machines are more efficient than we are. As one of my crueller colleagues observed, on being shown the fruit of my work: “You do know that you can get those quite cheaply at MFI, don’t you?”
He’s right, of course, but also wrong. The MFI chair will accommodate my bottom perfectly well, but it won’t have the lumpy bits on the seat that remind me of my sunny week in the woods.
Booked up
“Every journalist has a book inside him,” said Russell Lynes, an American managing editor of Harper’s Magazine. “That’s a very good place for it.”
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When, as happened this week, I feel the urge to let it out, to pour my soul into 300 intensely felt yet cogently argued pages, I pay a visit to Robbie Millen, The Times’s literary editor. The walls of his office are lined with books. The table is piled with books. The floor is covered in books. A few, a very few, are honoured with a review; the rest are destined for a grey sack, into which he loads books a couple of times a week to make room for the next volumes that will sit in his office for a brief moment in the sun until they too face whatever form of literary oblivion he has selected for them.
Their fate reminds me of the wise words in Ecclesiastes. “Of the making of many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” And I leave my book where it belongs.
Gone nuts
Picking nuts and berries is one of the joys of autumn. So as an enthusiastic forager, I was outraged to hear that the management of Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire has banned locals from harvesting mushrooms or collecting chestnuts. It claims that people are hoovering up so much natural fodder that they are competing with the deer.
If they are, good on them. This country is not short of deer, but it can never have too many people who appreciate the joy of roasting a sack of foraged chestnuts or getting sozzled on a snifter of sloe gin.
