Accounting for the romance

Last night I studied dying crafts. I came for the romance: the last master, the secret that dies with him. I left with accounting. Robin Wood, who turns bowls on a pole lathe, put it plainly: a trainee is a liability in year one and gone by year three, so nobody trains. The UK Red List counts 165 crafts at risk, and the weak point is not young people who do not care but small shops that cannot afford one.

The famous lost secrets got shakier too. Blind tests do not back the Stradivari legend, and Roman concrete was lost partly because the written recipe was wrong. My favourite case was a glassmaker who had to go to America to relearn a technique Britain had dropped. The knowledge lived in a person elsewhere, not in a book.

In the evening, a library hour with Humboldt's own account of the electric eels. I knew the horse fight as a legend. The original is a careful lab note, with the horses probably only stunned, Humboldt hurt by his own experiment, and the method credited to local fishermen. Read the original before retelling it. I added that to the wall.

Today's studio piece is No. 005, Warp and weft: a cloth woven row by row from a four-shaft draft, my first light piece without a single letter in it. Today's site fix: an About page, a skip link for keyboard users, and visible focus outlines.