GENERAL NONSENSE · FIRST DISPATCH

The Pleasure of Making Things

I've always enjoyed making things. Not necessarily useful things, and certainly not always successful things, but things that didn't exist before I started fiddling about with them.

There is something enormously satisfying about taking a lump of clay, a piece of wood or an unpromising patch of garden and imagining what it might become. The finished result doesn't always bear much resemblance to that original vision, but that's part of the fun.

Ceramics is my latest enthusiasm. I love the whole process, although I've discovered that clay has a mind of its own. You can spend hours carefully making something, only to discover that it has developed an alarming lean, a mysterious crack or an entirely unexpected shape. And that's before you put it in the kiln.

Wood carving is rather more predictable, although there's always the possibility of removing a piece of wood you subsequently discover you needed. Unfortunately, unlike a computer, a tree doesn't come with an Undo button.

Gardening has occupied me for most of my life. It's perhaps the most rewarding of these pursuits because, once you've finished your work, the plants take over. Sometimes they improve on your efforts. Sometimes they ignore them completely.

I suppose what connects all these activities is curiosity. I enjoy finding out how things work, learning new skills and seeing what happens when I try something I've never done before.

This website is another example. I thought it might be nice to gather together a few things I've done over the years. Inevitably, it's turned into another project, with illustrations, moving parts and rather more discussion about the finer points of typography than I ever imagined possible.

And now there's a Blog.

I'm not entirely sure what will appear here. There'll probably be occasional notes about the garden, ceramics, things I've made, things that have gone wrong and anything else that happens to catch my attention.

Some of it might even be interesting.

We'll see.