’Tis the season to be tinkering

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Fourteen years after he died, my father’s workshop remains a meticulously arranged treasure chest of tools, bolts, screws, gadgets and machines. Soon, when I return home for the holidays, my mum will dispatch me there to collect some contraption or other he fashioned in the service of home decoration, meal preparation or household maintenance. I’ll pad out the journey with minutes spent scanning neatly stacked shelves, reading his handwritten labels on old tin tobacco boxes full of washers, willing his memory to appear.

My father was devoted to my mother and me, passionate about sailing and enchanted in the company of friends. But he was most alive when tinkering, whether holed up in that draughty outbuilding fashioning some new apparatus, or half-inside a kitchen cupboard while fitting it — applying his intelligence and manual skill to practical problems about the house.

The English may be a nation of gardeners, but we are a tribe of tinkerers, too, delighting in a certain type of nest-improvement: those idiosyncratic, bespoke, functional adaptations we create to make domestic life easier, prettier or more satisfying.

Tinkering is the craft of the opportunist and the magpie. Once, my father spotted a golf cart gathering dust at the back of his twin brother’s garage. For the 20 years that followed, my mother would wheel along the adapted trolley — on a new wooden base and secured with bungees — neatly stacked with feed buckets for her horses, its wide, flat wheels perfectly designed to plough through the waterlogged fields.

This winter, aged 80, she will trudge through those fields on the coldest mornings to the water troughs, carrying a scoop he fashioned from chicken wire and a miniature hammer he bought at a local farm sale. With the hammer she will smash the surface ice before scooping out the fragments, saving her fingers from the cold.

During the pandemic, lockdowns and abundant free time saw millions surrender to their tinkering impulses, marking the latest chapter in a long-standing national fascination with the craft.

The Victorian-era cartoons of William Heath Robinson so entranced the English his surname entered the language to describe ingenious but overcomplicated mechanisms for simple domestic tasks like peeling potatoes. The animated clay figures of Wallace & Gromit, a middle-aged bachelor and his oversized beagle, whose main activity is fashioning unlikely inventions over a bench and vice in a dimly lit domestic workshop, rival James Bond for the nation’s affections (Wallace wears a tie and a tank top to tinker, exactly as my father did when I was a child).

Their creations exhibit a plucky fastidiousness that is at the heart of tinkering. For my father, a child during the second world war, the activity was informed by the frugality of rationing and government exhortations to “make do and mend”. It combined for him the satisfaction of work with the reassurance of home — its only pressure the desire to satisfy himself or those he cared for.

In their way, his inventions are beautiful: stripes of tightly wound wire, perfectly aligned, to refasten a perished leather handle; the smooth unvarnished surface of a wood offcut supporting a sagging shelf. They may lack the elegance of a sleekly designed interior, but these were the creative expressions of a practical mind. Tinkering was the closest he came to a vocation.

I didn’t inherit my father’s practical intelligence or his manual skill, and every year my visits to that draughty workshop are tinged with the regret that I never shared in his favourite pastime.

But often I will find there some creation or half-completed gadget that is new to me and, turning it over in my hand to guess at its use, he will come to mind: toiling away in the cold, chapped fingers gripping a file in one hand, adapted metal utensil in the other, arms braced against his sides to direct his effort, filthy jeans pressed up against the workbench for support, truly fulfilled.

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