What a crafty way to bring us together at Christmas
Barn the Spoon, aka Barnaby Carder, was carving a spoon in Hackney. Speaking to writer and presenter Tim Hayward on What If We Stopped Buying Stuff and Started Making It? (Radio 4, Tuesday), Barn the Spoon sounded so much like a parody of an East London hipster that I wondered if this was a comedy. It wasn’t, but Hayward clearly had the same thought.
“You’re sitting here, you’ve got braces on, you’ve got a beard, you’re in Hackney and you’re whittling spoons,” he pointed out. “The cruel jokes will write themselves …”
“But I’m the one that everyone’s copying!” laughed Barn the Spoon. “I started it!”
Crafting is definitely having a renaissance, and seemingly one largely undertaken by people with beards. “Suddenly, makers are everywhere,” said Hayward. Too right. We’re becoming a nation of people who yearn to carve our own spoons. Or, possibly even better, to buy one lovingly hand-carved by someone else.
I’m not looking down on this trend as I can’t get enough of it. My Christmas list is full of things like hand-juiced truffles, locally sourced organic socks, and artisanally sculpted, ethically spiced hats. I actually listened to this programme while knitting. And I’m considering growing a beard.
Hayward’s jaunt through British crafting was a joy; a lively, wellrounded journey through why we like stuff that’s been handmade. It was full of interviews with passionate and often self-deprecating full-time “makers” who weren’t shy of casting a critical eye over their own work. We met Laura at the Cambridge Make Space, which offers tools and skillsharing to people who want to make or repair their own things. She was wary of calling crafting a movement, because that suggests a shared political aim, whereas the desire to make something is often the only thing that makers have in common.
We often think of crafting as a return to a long-lost past where everybody made everything themselves, even though, as the programme pointed out, this isn’t quite true. If we all did actually try to make everything we need, let’s face it, most of it would be rubbish.
Making and repairing everything ourselves would be a strange blend of luxury and frugality. If we all made everything and grew all our own food and kept chickens on the driveway, we’d never get anything else done.
Craft has always been about sharing skills and calling on different people to make different things.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth having a go. Making stuff helps us understand how things work, the programme argued, and it builds memory of movement into our muscles that will stay with us forever. It’s nothing to do with returning to a non-existent past; simply put, handmade things are worth cherishing, whether we made them ourselves or not. What a lovely thought for Christmas.
False nostalgia was also examined in The Listening Service: Parapapampam (Radio 3, Sunday), with Tom Service asking why we draw a line between “commercial” Christmas pop music (your Whams!, your Sister Sledges, your Mariah Careys), and the apparently more sincere classical Christmas music and carols. With a dream team of Canadian mega-crooner Michael Bublé and historian Judith Flanders, Service revealed that even Christmas music we might consider “authentic”, such as Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, or the Nine Lessons and Carol’s at King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, are just as manufactured as the cheesiest modern pop. Bach had to write Christmas music to fulfil his contract as Cantor at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, and the Nine Lessons and Carols have only been going in Cambridge since 1918, even though many people believe they’re as old as the chapel itself.
“We have an inbuilt need to believe that Christmas was always better in some mythical time in the past, but music, let’s face it, is always commercial,” said Judith Flanders, adding that musicians always needed to be paid for their labours.
But if you’re thinking this was just an excuse to say “bah humbug” to all Christmas music, that wasn’t where Service was heading. His point was a warm and uplifting one: it doesn’t matter if the nostalgia and joy of Christmas music is manufactured, because the emotions it stirs in us are all real. Christmas and kitsch are inseparable, and life’s too short to be ashamed of the things we enjoy every festive season.
“Let critical faculties be cast aside for one day – there are no such things as guilty pleasures,” said Service. So crank up the Wham!, then.