Class conscious - Andrew Martin on carpentry and the middle classes
Published 28 March 2005
If you are middle class and want to hang a picture, you had best start with a test nail
I went into a coffee shop in glossy St John's Wood, in north London, and ordered a coffee, a sandwich and a cake. When the bill was presented I thought: "God, that's expensive." Then the woman at the till said, "Oh, sorry, I've forgotten to ring up the cake." So that was another £3. As I ate, I watched the junction beyond the window. Just as almost every dog in Hackney is a pit bull terrier, so almost every car in St John's Wood is a black Mercedes with tinted windows and a personalised number plate. After a few minutes I noticed, beyond the junction, a white van drawing up outside a big early Victorian house and two men, who were obviously carpenters, climbing out.
I wondered why they'd been summoned. The property boom has led to middle-class people making great demands on carpenters. At any one time, for example, somebody I know is having his kitchen converted. But the middle classes also make very small demands on carpenters.
Here's how it works. You want a coat hook putting up in what you self-consciously call your den or study. You've put it off for months, but the lack is beginning to be very aggravating. The trouble is that, having been educated in the top streams of a comprehensive, or at a grammar or a private school, you've never been taught any manual skills and do not feel confident about doing the job yourself. Do you need to drill a hole to put the screws in? If so, what kind? Presumably not one wider than the actual screws, because then they would just rattle about. It must be a narrower hole that's called for, but how much narrower?
You decide to call in that carpenter recommended by your lawyer friend, the chappie who - your friend noted with approval - plays Radio 4 while he works, as opposed to Talksport. But you're not so rich or rarefied that you can call him in just to put up a coat hook, so you contrive a few other minor jobs, in order to give the impression that it's the multiplicity of tasks rather than the difficulty of them that prevents you from doing the work yourself. And so a carpenter is kept away from another middle-class family that might need him for some more exacting work, such as converting a basement into a rumpus room.
Somebody ought to address this by writing a middle-class guide to manual tasks. It could be called DIY for the Cerebral, and would have to be written in language broadly comprehensible to a four-year-old. The entry on hanging pictures might run as follows:
"Picture hooks can be bought from even the most unartistic shops. They come with holes for either one or two nails. Given that hammering nails in straight is very difficult, and that no two ever go in straight one after the other, use the single-hole type if at all possible. Even so, there will be false starts, and it is best to think of the first nail - which is bound to end up headless or bent out of shape - as a test nail. The bad news is that you are sure to cause damage to your wall, but the secret of picture hanging for the middle classes is to ensure that the damage does not spread wider than the area covered by the actual picture. If you manage to get the nail three-quarters of the way in without causing any disasters, stop there. Quit while you're ahead. It doesn't matter if nails are left sticking out slightly.
"Be warned that hanging pictures is a job that takes a very long time: allow roughly one hour per nail. When the hook is finally secured to the wall, you will need a drink. You may then find that the picture is hanging too low or too high, in which case it is best to get a builder in to adjust the level of the ceiling.
"The healthiest way to think of picture hanging is as nature's check on spending lots of money on buying beautiful things."
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