When I was a teenager, I came to a mutually beneficial arrangement with a classmate. Every year for design technology we rotated between textiles, food technology and resistant materials, one each term. She was terrified of the sewing machines; I was terrified of the jigsaw. And so we traded: for one term, I surreptitiously did all her machine sewing; the next, she would surreptitiously do all my dividing-of-wood-with-giant-moving-blade.
I was not naturally the most practical of children: a voracious reader, firmly indoorsy, a greedy consumer of every kit Hobbycraft could dream up. I was (am) not particularly well coordinated: I couldn’t (can’t) catch a ball; couldn’t (can’t) do a forward roll; couldn’t ride a bike until an embarrassingly late age (this, at least, I’ve conquered). My brain is lacking that 3D net thing that allows others to look at something flat and see how it will come together. I was innately cautious, particularly regarding physical pursuits: scared of injury, scared of public humiliation.
To long-time readers of Deleted Scenes none of this will be news. But I repeat it now to explain why, though I have a great propensity for making things by hand – baking, sewing, knitting, pottery throwing and God knows what else – this never extended to woodwork. My father was a supremely talented joiner (though he was too humble to use this word about himself), and leaves behind an excessive collection of tools. Over the years he made me several pieces of furniture: shelves, tables, a caddy to make useful storage out of an awkward-shaped void in a rental kitchen. He hung the same mirror on the wall in every single flat I’ve lived in over the past decade – and, as you know, that’s a lot of flats. Over time, this became a more equal exchange of skills: I repaired his clothes and made him new ones, he hung more bookshelves than he’d care to remember. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know how to change a drill bit or the difference between a coping saw and a tenon saw, because I had Dad. And I always thought that one day, when I got round to asking, he’d teach me. Of course, he did not.
In the days after Dad’s death, I mentioned to a school friend that there was, a mere 15-minute walk from my flat, a place called Blackhorse Workshop, which runs introductory woodwork courses. She seemed to take a surprising level of interest in this concept; perhaps, I thought at the time, she might want to join me in learning. Mere days later, I had in my inbox a gift voucher from my brilliant friends. And so, last Saturday, with some trepidation, it was back to school for “introduction to hand tools”.
The measuring up and marking out was familiar from sewing – though in woodwork measurements are done in millimetres, rather than the inches customary in sewing. Next, our instructor demonstrated how we would cut the shapes required to craft the tool caddy we were attempting to make. He showed us two methods: one, the safe, wary method we were technically supposed to use; the other was the way that felt more instinctive to him. It made more sense to me too. My workbench was directly next to his, and so when it was our turn, he offered me the two different saws he’d just been using: how was I going to do it? This choice, I felt, would define my approach to the whole day. I plucked for the less cautious approach.
I was, I was pleasantly surprised to discover, not bad at all. I was not the speediest, but I was also far from the slowest. I didn’t break any drill bits, or put the whole thing together upside down and back to front, or cause injury to myself or others. I left at the end of the day, exhausted but feeling rather pleased with myself, carrying my caddy and with all my fingers intact. I took a photo of my handiwork and sent it to my mum. I wished I could send it to my dad.
Next up: “Introduction to Power Tools” – and the dreaded jigsaw.
[Further reading: Searching for London’s most performative male]
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This article appears in the 08 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The truth about small boats