Big Adventures with Paula McGuire

THE devil, I’m told, makes work for idle hands. By now, I guess, mine should be stoking the big burny fire – or at least pointing newcomers towards its warmth.

Maybe I’m being a little unfair. My mitts aren’t so much lazy as absolutely useless. And who offers employment to the clumsy? Short of heigh ho-ing my way into the Seven Dwarfs, I reckon I’m back sharpening pitchforks for the Prince of Darkness.

Although, it’s probably safer than heading down the mines with Sleepy at the helm. I’ve just never been very practical. And yet, after 30-odd years of failing, I still love the thought of making something with my own unfair hands. It just seems so, I don’t know, rustic.

While I’m crafty – like cheese slices but without the poor spelling – and could fashion a napkin out of a swan, the functional stuff, which can actually be used for anything more than fun, has always been completely beyond my ken.

This week seemed like time to inject a bit of purpose into my adventures. The Handy Folk Group is a mixed-ability woodcraft project, allowing local people in Cambuslang and Rutherglen to use or learn the skills needed to build useable products for the area. As part of the Healthy n Happy Community Development Trust, the Handy Folk have, over the last four years, gifted picnic benches to local nurseries and kitted out the trust’s own renovated premises with a purpose-built reception desk. In short, they can pretty much do it themselves. So when this chocolate blowtorch turned up at Springhall Community Centre to join their usual Monday afternoon workshop, I was well aware that I was dragging the average ability down by at least a metre stick.

Luckily though, the Handy Folk are also very accepting folk, happy to welcome an apprentice into the masters’ fold. I arrived just as some of the stalwarts were setting up the day’s production, and was instantly embroiled in the moving and shaking of supplies. The moving was essential; the shaking, a personal choice. Mostly, the supplies were plywood and teabags, at least half of which I knew what to do with.

The real equipment was, of course, hidden in the back stores, away from unskilled hands. But these unskilled hands can’t be deterred by mere health and safety guidelines; unless, of course, there’s signage. Even I can’t defy a hazard warning.

Tom Harten, Healthy n Happy’s project worker and the Handy Folk’s chief go-getter, explained the current output over the afternoon’s first cuppa, while all around workbenches sprung up like toadstools, themselves made by the group’s craftspeople.

A nearby growing project, Grow 73, which is establishing a community garden in Overtoun Park, needs furniture and fittings for their budding fairy woodland, and who better to bring the magic than the Handy Folk? For my first foray into joinery, this was nigh on perfection. Not a flat pack in sight and an excuse to add a little sparkle to the world; all that could have improved the situation was a puppy with no sense of personal space.

But by the time I’d been given my remit and introduced to my teacher I was all the keen that the room could bear. Along with the likes of Andy Henry, Tommy Torley is one of the group’s regulars, whose skills in carpentry, construction, and basically making something out of nothing, are matched only by their willingness to pass them on to others. It’s not hard to see why the project’s 20 or so members reappear every week at the centre to sculpt mud kitchens and mend broken pool tables. It’s right there, in the encouraging words from the helpers, the moments shared as tea breaks, and in the ethic that drives everyone back to work afterwards. The Handy Folk allows people another opportunity to be useful – and isn’t that how we really all want to feel?

Since my desire to feel useful runs shallower than most, I followed Tommy around as he collected tools for our shared task – making a birdhouse for the garden’s seasonal visitors. As we carried a circular saw towards the work station, Tommy told me of his varied career and how life had brought him back round to woodwork. A fellow first-timer, Geraldine Robinson, joined me at the beginners’ bench to learn exactly how that one piece of uninspiring wood sitting before us would become anything more than splinters in our amateur fingers.

Tommy, however, had every confidence and, once I realised that my most valuable quality could actually be used in the process, I nabbed a little back for myself. You see, I have an uncanny knack of being able to stand beside someone who knows what they’re doing. And, as I hitched my star to Geraldine’s wagon, it seemed like the fairy glen might just clock up some cuckoos, after all. She could set a square, drive a screw, and knew a jig when she saw one. Together with my readiness to nod sagely at the appropriate time, a fine skill-set was formed.

With the wood marked up to within an inch of its life, I held a saw to its edge, as gingerly as a red-head at an Irn-Bru-tasting, bearing in mind the advice Tommy had given on the breadth of stroke and depth of pressure. The wood was damp, making it more difficult to cut but, before long, our timber was in more pieces than my nerves and ready to be Humpty-Dumptied back together.

All around, fairy doors and bug hotels were being expertly conjured into existence, while at our table the drill was out and I was being treated to a masterclass in assembly.

I can’t really explain the pride I felt as our birdhouse took shape. It wasn’t quite the carpenter’s cup, but at least it could leave the building without causing structural damage. And though every individual panel and screw had been carefully cut and turned by our will and work, it was the overall that really touched me. And no, I’m not referring to the blue workman’s onesie that Tommy had kindly loaned me to protect my own inappropriate attire.

For once, I had helped create something of use: a home, no less. And whether that home is used by the birds in the trees or the fairies of the forest, I’m proud to have put my heart into it.