I bought a pot last week, while I was on holiday in Cornwall.
It’s a simple pot: six inches of heavy stoneware, with a muted, speckled, grey-green glaze and faceted sides. There’s something ancient about it, something almost Japanese.
But that’s enough Antiques Roadshow.
Point is, it’s on my desk now, giving me enormous pleasure after a week of sea-swimming and pasties in the far west.
Now, one of the most pleasing things about the pot is that I know who made it. It came from the hand of a potter called Ruth Rodda. Thank you, Ruth.
But Ruth’s pot sits alongside other things, also handmade, that come from the hands of people entirely unknown to me: a stone carving; a wooden box; two cast-iron lobsters.
And those things are themselves surrounded by other stuff, even less identifiably the work of an individual: pencils; my clothes; the radio; countless other bits and bobs.
And it struck me, as I set Ruth’s pot among them, that the lives of every one of those things have involved the lives of countless women and men dreaming them up, gathering materials, making them and bringing them to me.
In the Bible, there’s an artist called Bezalel, whom God ‘filled with ability, intelligence, and knowledge in every kind of craft’. But Bezalel was surrounded by other makers, unknown and unnamed, and the story says that God gave ‘skill to all the skilful’; and together they made beautiful things and the people brought offerings in thanks.
Thanks are important. But I reckon that since it’s become so easy to get stuff, so matter-of-fact, I’ve found it equally easy to forget that people and their stories are hidden in everything that surrounds me; actual, real, human people skilfully shearing sheep in Australia, digging iron-ore in Russia, sawing wood in Canada, sewing jeans in Bangladesh, packing boxes in Rugeley, driving vans in Peckham, every one of them connecting me to their world.
So, I hope, when next I look at Ruth’s pot, or any of my endless clutter, I’ll remember those people and remember to be thankful for the miraculous thread they’ve spun, binding me to them; not just to the world but to a person; to people to whom skill has been given.
I wanted to write that Ruth’s pot had something of Bernard Leach or Shoji Hamada about it, but it wasn’t regarded as sufficiently relatable. But it does.