Arts and Crafts

It was so much easier, so clear cut when I was a youngster.

If you were practical but yet academically challenged you were channeled into an apprenticeship.

Others, like me, a bit cack handed, misguided, naive with tools and only able to think and visualise in one or two dimensions were destined to remain in education for as long as possible so as not be unleashed into society as somebody who contributed nothing really useful.

Of course I went through the motions of practicality.

In junior school I produced a very convincing and useful clay pot. It did take a whole term to make. It was a bit wobbly on its base and not really big enough to actually be useful for anything more than the temporary storage of a sole Murray Mint or a stray Malteser.

I excelled at the medium of papier mache but only if you needed something balloon shaped. That was a fun art form involving lots of mess from shredded newspaper that left hands blackened with newsprint and a sticky flour based adhesive that, at a push, could also seem quite tasty if you were hungry in between breakfast at home and dinner at school.

At big school, by which I mean secondary level, the stakes were upped in terms of ambition and safety risk when it came to such activities as woodwork, metalwork and basket weaving.

In the former it was the case of another term-long session to fashion a box with a sliding lid. It took the first couple of months to draw up the design, yes, a rectangular shape with a fixed bottom and that elusive sliding lid feature. The wood then had to be selected from the offcuts donated to the school by timber companies, enthusiastic parents and demolition firms attempting to avoid a levy at the local tip. We were encouraged to adopt the classic principles of jointing although in reality a tenon and mortise was the only one we could hope to achieve.

The accident book in the school workshop was a sight to behold in terms of its sheer size and the rather disturbing reddish hue amongst the pages.

Metalwork was more of the same injuries and mishaps. My project was to make a coat hook. We were introduced to the then high tech process of electro-plating but most of us were lost on the theory and physics and just resorted to painting the finished article with Humbrol paints. At the end  of year exhibition for parents there was much debate about what was being displayed. To me it was an obvious coat hook but in the eye of the beholder it could have been a fancy tent peg, a bracket for a shelf or a bicycle stand.

Basket making presented me with a final opportunity to express myself and awaken any natural affinity for crafts that should have been lurking deep in my genes. I was a disgrace and ultimately disrespectful to my maternal grandfather who was a skilled joiner and woodworker. I am embarrassed about that fact even to the present day.

We were provided with an oval shaped, pre-drilled base made from plywood and instructed to thread through and secure the willow uprights. These would then be woven around with longer willow strands, each firmly tamped down and the practice repeated to build up the sides in an organic form. The critical issue was the trimming of the projecting vertical stays to finish off, up to that stage, what did resemble a reasonable imitation of a real basket.

One of my classmates started to cut away with sharp scissors. His concentration was mesmeric but as he slowly rotated his basket the relentless snipping did not level off but continued to cut down in a slow spiral motion. In no time at all his basket progressively reduced in size from the originally intended sewing companion promised to his grandmother for the containment of wools, cottons and accessories to a very shallow oval dish more suited to holding a single oval of Coal Tar Soap.

It is with irony that all of my own efforts at being a craftsman have remained in the shade of my unfortunate schoolmate as Terry Heseltine remains a bit of a legend amongst my family for his weaving work. The term Heseltines Basket has persisted in the folklore of the Thomsons being associated with trying too hard and yet achieving nothing at all.