Making something from nothing is a special skill
As I’ve said before, this lockdown lark means I’ve been watching a bit too much daytime telly. I particularly enjoy Money for Nothing. No, it’s not yet another lame gameshow.
Instead it features a very earnest young woman called Sarah who rescues things destined for the council tip and gets an assortment of extremely talented artisans to repurpose them as desirable items of home décor. A sardonic commentary is provided by my fellow Bath Comedy Festival patron Arthur Smith.
Thus a pile of rusty bicycle mudguards re-emerges as an attractive chandelier, grandma’s tired old wickerwork commode is transformed into an unusual wine cooler and a couple of World War II jerrycans miraculously get a new life as a hipster cocktail cabinet, complete with a mobile phone dock.
The results are occasionally appealing but often they are horrendous, the big surprise being that at the end of the programme they are put online and actually sell, the profits going to the original donor. Why anyone would give houseroom to a standard lamp fashioned from a hospital drip stand coupled with some old bedsprings beats me.
Years ago, the Bath Arts Workshop, of which I was a stalwart, joined up with something called
Civil Aid. Civil Aid was similar to Civil Defence, but this being the era of the Government’s muchmocked Cold War Protect and Survive pamphlets (in a nuclear attack, cover your windows with brown paper and hide under the kitchen table) their activities tended to concentrate on dystopian matters.
As part of our training we had to go on a survival weekend, somewhere in the woods beyond St Catherine. Being hippie types, our improvised bivouacs were quite groovy. I remember mine had a fancy thatched roof. We acquired some useful woodcraft techniques, did a night-time yomp across Charmy Down airfield to the Bladud’s Head pub and learnt how to lie on a barbed wire fence so others could pass safely over.
But the best part was when we had to make something relevant out of stuff lying around. A bit like Money for Nothing but without the sales drive at the end. Having had a Women’s Institute guide to basic basketry dedicated to me as a child (I had to make all the baskets in the book pre-publication as a kind of practical proofreading exercise) I managed to weave a natty shopping bag out of bark, reeds and some old chicken wire.
“What on earth use would a shopping basket be in a nuclear holocaust?” fumed the burly sergeant major type in charge of the project. “Why, for looting,” I replied.
Before he completely turned into Windsor Davies in It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum, I demonstrated in the nearby brook that with its handles and hinged lid it could be used as an effective fish trap.
Must go now, as one of Sarah’s cohorts is about to show us how to turn a ukulele into a kitchen clock, or vice versa: either of which could be a useful skill to learn for when the bomb is finally dropped or we find the coronavirus vaccine doesn’t work!