No Way To Make A Living is a sociological space about work, generating discussion and exchange on what work, paid or unpaid, is like in today’s world

In tune

I recently went to the work­shop of a double bass maker and repairer. My friend was tak­ing his battered bass there to see what parts might be glued and oth­er­wise made to hold together again. ‘Can’t you clean it up whilst you’re at it?’ I asked naively, attend­ing to the fin­ish rather than the sound. Appar­ently there is value in lay­ers of var­nish and Roger is cau­tious. It seems to me that he’s sort of ‘read­ing the wood’ as he looks at the instru­ment, and he knows not to touch where he can’t be sure of the impact of chan­ging some­thing. ‘No, you wouldn’t want to do that…’ he concludes.

Wait­ing

The work­shop is an extraordin­ary place for an out­sider. There are pieces of instru­ments all around the single room, sec­tions and strings and bridges and necks, and a pan of glue on the boil on an old camp­ing stove. I can’t take it all in, and I can’t see how Roger man­oeuvres his way through the arrange­ment of objects. As well as mak­ing new instru­ments, what he does here is to work on things pro­duced through the crafts­man­ship of oth­ers, undo­ing and remak­ing them. It takes a care­ful eye and a trained ear, an under­stand­ing of the whole pro­cess of cre­at­ing a double bass, a lot of patience and dex­ter­ity, and a kind of respect it seems to me. He’s not an old man but he’s been doing this for a long time already. Sev­eral years ago, he decided to take a break. ‘I tried being a driv­ing instructor,’ he said. ‘I las­ted a year.’ When he was doing his appren­tice­ship, the man who taught him had already told him his future: ‘You’ll never do any­thing else.’ And here he is, in his own work­shop, in tune with his instruments.