The need to create

I thought I’d blogged about this before but checked and cannot find anything. One of the very few advantages of the pandemic has been the need to create your own entertainment. Going out among the hoards has, at times, not been an option. Holidays and their ilk were put on hold and so it was that my youngest daughter came up from Manchester to spend a few days with us, back in her childhood home.

But what to do? She is only young but has already created something that I have long put off – a bucket list though I am not sure she would have called it such. Anyway, one of the things that she wished to tick off was to make some furniture and she asked me if we could do this together over the break.

I had finally got round to converting the back bedroom, or playroom as we have called it for years, into an office. I’d been working from home for many months but eventually could stand working in the conservatory no longer. As its name suggests, the room had an old wooden bed, bought decades ago when the girls were younger and which had been cut down and reformed several times as their lives changed.

I suggested it and we agreed that the wood would make an ideal basis for a small coffee table. The bed already had legs and plenty of suitable timbers to be easily transformed. All it would require was some careful planning, a straight eye and a sharp saw. Everything was put in place and once she had arrived we got down to to the task.

Now neither of us are carpenters yet we made the most of our enthusiasm. We drew out designs, changing them to fit the available wood and eventually settled on the final shape. We took turns to saw, drill, glue and screw until a coffee table appeared on the workbench before us. In the end it still had some finishing off to do but looked impressive with its slatted top, sturdy legs and magazine shelf below.

Yet in the end, what it looked like was not the point. Being able to spend time working together with someone, using your hands to create something tangible, lasting and useful was a huge pleasure. The need to create is human, the need to create together even more so.

And my daughter got to tick something off her list.