pumpkinstrokemarrow

So it is hard to make a living at many arts & crafts. We have the case of the trestle table recently built by yours truly with the materials costing more than the finished table would probably cost at IKEA. So even allowing for a considerable speeding up if I was doing this sort of thing for a living, I would not make much of a living. I could not possibly charge the £60 or more an hour commanded by car mechanics around here. I heard recently about the plight of tailors and dressmakers: very few people are prepared, for example, to pay for the labour which goes into their new suit, perhaps a week's work, at the car mechanic's rate. Much rather go to Marks & Sparks for which they only have to pay at China factory rates and blow the balance on booze. Then we have artists proper. How many people are prepared to pay for the two days it takes to produce an original piece of modern art? The sort, that is, which involves a bit more work than emptying litter bins onto unmade beds. So these sorts of arts & crafts don't work very well because people are not prepared to pay what it costs. Too much craft chasing too little money. Factories possibly producing inferior goods, but at a superior price. Other sorts of arts & crafts are hard because there are too many people at it. How many of the dancers pumped out by our stage schools wind up getting paid to dance? How many of the musicians pumped by by our music schools wind up getting paid to do that?

Whereas we do not seem to be able to deliver the quite modest skills required to keep our verges neat and tidy. This is not unskilled work but somehow the council never seem to wind up getting people with any skill to do it. Let alone care or sensitivity. They just whang their sit and ride lawn mowers around with gay abandon, rarely troubling to adjust height or pace of the cut to the condition of the ground or to the condition of the grass. Often bumping into young trees, with the result that the bases of many of the young trees planted at some considerable expense along Horton Lane are badly, in some cases, fatally, damaged.

The same thing with the flails that they use to trim the hedgerows. Plenty of young trees down the same road carry scars large and small from being hit by a carelessly manoeuvred flail. And then why do they use a flail for mowing suburban hedges at all? They would get a far less ugly job done by using a hedge trimmer.

Last but not least, we have the chaps that lop branches off trees. To be fair, the ones who work for the people that call themselves tree surgeons, do seem to understand that you cut a branch off at its root, where it joins the parent branch. This both looks neat and heals over. Whereas horns look ugly and are apt to die back. Something not understood at all by the verge chaps. With the worse case I have seen recently being a tree lopped to facilitate the construction of a temporary bridge at Earlsfield Railway Station. I can understand that the chap doing the lopping might not know or care, but one might think that at least one of his or her colleagues did.

Here, we have no craft at all. Just cheap labour. But I suppose another aspect of the same problem: collectively, we are not prepared to pay for quality in our daily lives. We focus of quantity rather than quality. Two pints of rubbish ice cold lager are better than one decent pint of warm beer.

The good news is that for the first time since I gave up my allotments, I have picked some hazel nuts. There are quite a few hazel nut bushes down Horton Lane, enough that the squirrels have not stripped the lot, well before there is anything inside them. Which is what happens to the hazel nuts in our garden. So, the other day, I picked three rather green looking hazel nuts. One contained a nut about the size of a large pea, one the size of a small pea and the other small. The first two tasted OK. So we shall go back in a few weeks and see what we can do. Seems a bit of a waste to pick them when they are so young; better to take a chance and leave them for a week or two. Hope that neither squirrels nor humans catch on. I shan't wait until the Autumn which is when we picked them when I was a child. Global warming no doubt.