WORKSHOP LAMENT

The old family workshop has been demolished. It had stood in the back yard of a couple of shops and houses in Market Street, Long Sutton, since it was built in the late 1800s by my mother's family as a workplace and store for their ironmongery and household appliances business. Later, and at the time when I first knew it - in the late 1940s - it was home to two carpenters, one on the ground floor and the other on the top floor.
This upstairs workroom was reached by outside steps, and the last time I went there it still had the original oil lamps-cum-heaters dangling from the rafters, even though they had not been used for years because the roof was made of corrugated sheeting and there was a fear they might turn the place into a furnace. Other than the roof, the rest of the workshops was built of dry-as-tinder timber, with pokey pane glass windows.
During the 130 or so years of its existence wonderful things were made there, from quality furniture to modest footstools, along with countless repairs and carvings. Both floors smelled of wood shavings and glue, and the racks of tools, lathes, and entire untidy paraphenalia of the wood-working business, was covered in a thick layer of sawdust and cobwebs. Off-cuts and stored wood littered the floors, and the detritus of the craftsman was everywhere.
Now the workshops have gone because they were old and unrepairable and too out-of-date for modern use; and anyway, the site had to be cleared in preparation for the construction of some new flats. Demolition was inevitable, I suppose, because the old timber construction spoke of another age, of former generations and times when men could earn a living shaping wood. It was a good, gonest place, where good, honest work was done.

GENERAL KNOWLEDGE

There are moments in some of today's TV quiz shows when my teeth begin to ache, and it usually happens when a contestant, often under 40 years of age, protests that he or she has no knowledge of something which happened before they were born. 'It's before my time,' they say. Or, 'History is the past, so I don't need to know.' Which means that history is, to varying degrees, taking a back seat in today's world of general knowledge. Indeed, ask today's young contestants which came first, the First World War, the Boer War, or the Battle of Hastings, and you cannot be sure of getting the right answer.
In the same way, a knowledge of classical music has suffered, too, put on the back burner along with history, geography and literature. And replaced by what? Well, pop music, celebrities, TV shows and a knowledge of digital technology.
There is some point to it, of course. I recall one young lady - faced by 1950s teaching methods and struggling to put names to countries on a map of the UK - claiming she didn't need to know where Wales was because if she wanted to know she could 'look it up.' Fair enough. To an extent.
But general knowledge has a different shape these days.