Things I Learned Whilst Thinking

I've been back at work in the last few months helping my son at the house he's building on the Island. It's been a lovely experience for many reasons not least of which is feeling useful and spending time with Gaz. 

I have spent time painting walls and ceilings and it gave me time to think.

Gaz has BBC Radio 6 Music playing all the time. Until I started working with Gaz I'd never listened to the station. I have always considered myself to have very catholic tastes in music: opera, operetta, religious music, classical (romantic classical being my principal source of listening), jazz (blues slightly less so), country and western, folk, pop/rock and other genre. However I have learned that there is a huge amount of what may possibly be described a non-mainstream pop and rock out there. More than that though I have heard music which very much reminded me of Simeon ten Holt and Steve Reich and it made me ponder on the blurry divide between some pop and rock and classical.

The second thing it made me think about was good old apprenticeships. I've been painting and paperhanging since my early 20s and although I won't paperhang any more I do paint. I discovered, though, that after nearly 50 years I still really didn't know much about it nor did I have the skills I thought I had. This last few weeks I've done a lot of painting and have been watching a master painter and decorator at work. My painting, though far from perfect, is now much better than it was a few months ago. Most of us won't notice the difference between our amateur painting and that of a master craftsman but I do now. It made me ponder on a subject that I used to think about a lot: apprenticeships. Craftsmen used to learn at the side of the master. The master could have pride in the craftsmen he'd trained and the apprentice acquired the skill and learned the 'tricks of the trade'.