Getting your hands dirty

Nicci:

I have a good friend who is an artist - a real, old-fashioned, oil-paint and watercolour and turps and brushes artist. She wears tatty layers of clothing and old paint-spattered shirts to work in. She mixes colours onto a pallet, swirls brushes in jam jars of murky water. She stretches canvas and has strong views on the grain of the paper. At the end of the day, when she cleans everything meticulously, screws caps back on tubes, her hands are stained and there are new daubs of colour on her clothes. It's such a physical process, so satisfyingly connected to making. Writing, by contrast, is a clean and unphysical business, especially now - from the brain to the computer screen, with mistakes swept away with a cursor. Writers can have rituals, of course - pencils (who uses pencils now?) to sharpen, objects to arrange around us, music perhaps - but it can still feel like creating something (words) out of nothing, thin air, and that's rather scary. It feels like writing is always on the edge of not-writing, of a horrible silence.

I often long for the mess and craft of painting, but I can't paint, and have never been patient and determined enough to get beyond my failures to even the most basic competence. So I've turned my efforts to other things. Last year, I grew chillies from seeds. I bought a propagator and compost and for weeks sprayed water onto soil and finally saw green shoots. I felt a bit like a scientist in a laboratory. I overdid it a bit. I grew hundreds and hundreds of chilies, of different sizes and colours (purple, yellow, red, even a chocolatey-brown) and then I made them into jellies and jams and dried them. 

Then a couple of weeks ago, I booked myself onto a pottery course, and spent a weekend learning to use a wheel. When the teacher showed us, it was like seeing shapes grow out of her calm hands: candleholders and bowls and mugs rising in smooth columns from the spinning surface. Magic. When I did it, bits of brown clay flew round the room and shapes mushroomed and then collapsed into ugly lumps. But in spite of that, it was such a consolation and relief to be using my hands in such a way - like being a cook and a gardener, kneading mud, cutting it, shaping it, baking it, watching it grow.

This week, one of my daughters has persuaded me to knit. Many times, I have cast on 125 stitches in nice green wool, and after two or three rows, I mysteriously have 128, 141, 121 stitches instead. I have spent two days repeatedly beginning again. My eyes are sore and my wool is kinked and I have nothing to show for it. But I'm going to persevere. By the time I'm sixty I will have a green jumper. You can't write with wool, or chillies or pieces of clay - but you can move away from the clean terror of the computer screen for a while, into the rich mess of the material world.