May - alienated by modern tools
Written for and originally published by Homes & Gardens
As we settle into our house, we’re starting to put up shelves and open boxes of books and objects which sat together in our previous home. I had such joy rediscovering one of my treasured objects; a knapped flint hand axe I made under the tuition of Will Lord, a prehistory expert who is essentially a Stone Age man living in our time. I spent a day hitting rocks together with him a few years ago and became completely awestruck by our ancestor’s handskills. Our ability to create and use tools like these set us apart from other animals of the African savannas and set us on the journey of modernisation. That day taught me that we are all skilled makers deep down.
Years ago, one of our workshop team had an evening job with TaskRabbit, an app offering handyman services. He would hang shelves or pictures for people for £40 a pop and I remain perplexed by how small the tasks often were. I can’t imagine not being able to hang a picture. Could the clients just not be bothered? Downloading and booking via an app feels like more effort than tapping a pin into a wall. It’s not possible that we’ve lost the genetic aptitude for basic hand skills in a generation or two, so perhaps the app users hadn’t been taught practical tasks and lacked the confidence to have a go.
Frequenting Screwfix, as I do these days, I note that even our DIY hand tools alienate us further from repairing and making from scratch. Where once were tools and inter-compatible components, like nuts and bolts, now we have ‘systems’, incompatible across brands and clipped together and with their own specific instructions and purchasable add-ons. This perpetuates the lack of opportunity to connect our hands to our brains, even in DIY tasks. Materials are similarly systemised, I can’t source locally grown rough sawn woods at my local timber merchants, everything there is imported and homogenised, despite Kent being one of the more wooded counties of England. I bring wood for home projects from our London workshop.
This isn’t just a domestic issue; most carpenters don’t carry a sharp plane or chisel set to site, indicating that this distancing from raw and general materials is rife in trades as well as hobbyists. Carpentry has shifted from edge tools navigating knots to Sticks Like Sh*t holding pre-veneered MDF. The end result is no doubt smart and easy to achieve, but do we lose something in outsourcing our skills and problem solving abilities to a company with a clip-together solution? I believe we lose autonomy, confidence and a sense of connection to the things around us.
So it’s with determination to challenge a (to my mind) detrimental societal norm that I built a workshop in my cellar, fit for making a home. It isn’t a large space, but is one of the most important rooms in the house, and the engine room of our renovation project. Most of the things in our house, including our front door, four poster bed and our kitchen, have been made down there. It will offer service and repair facilities as the house tires too. We’re saving up for a potter’s wheel as Brogan is good at throwing, and I’ve bought a second hand mini forge because I need a fire poker and fancy having a go at restoring the original front railings. I’ve only had a short lesson in blacksmithing, but I’m going to give it a go and enjoy the results regardless of their quality. Mistakes will be welcome because the sense of self-reliance is more important than the perfection of the object’s form. I invite everyone to share this attitude.
I appreciate not everyone has the enthusiasm I do for making, nor the space to have a workshop, but the making task can be small to connect with our sense of ourselves as Homo sapiens. Before Covid, we ran box and stool making workshops, giving people a chance to work with solid wood with sharp tools. In a few hours, attendees left with a wonky stool or a neat box and a glowing sense of achievement. I’ve seen first hand that this stuff is good for us - like a walk in a woodland, it reconnects us to our origins.
Making classes like ours are easy to find online. I love the courses hosted by the Weald and Downland museum, who have a fantastic array of traditional skills available to try in a day. Whether learning to weave rush or to carve a spoon, these activities build fine motor skills and confidence, perhaps leading to building a tool set and, eventually, maybe a workshop too.