Soul Searching

I have discovered the place where the souls are sucked from human beings, condemning them to watch Netflix reality shows for the rest of their existence. It is called something like 'Sofas For U' and it exists in a drab, grey meta-world somewhere on the outskirts of a town near you, that you know about but have never before had any reason to visit. Luckily, MrsM is too strong for such dark magic and got me out in time, prescribing strong tea and carrot cake as a restorative

By some much more benign divination she found a Tudor farmstead where someone is trying to establish a centre of craftsmanship in the half-timbered barn, a place of learning for traditional skills and handicrafts. It includes a cosy tearoom, where a cheerful young woman, proud of her craft, ensured that our shared slice of cake was meticulously divided into equal pieces. I hope the centre and the tearoom are both successful

Our son built our garden shed in a modern variant of the half-timbered, Tudor style - large structural timbers, joined by mortise-and-tenon joints, fixed with wooden pegs. He machined the timbers and prepared the joints off-site and brought them here to assemble. To ensure that the right tenon went into the correct mortise, he marked each part of each pair with a chisel - the same number and pattern of marks on each component of the joint. Four hundred years earlier, a carpenter did exactly the same thing in the construction of a farmer's barn, little knowing that his craft would be part of the spell to restore our humanity

On the way home, we stopped at a tiny shop in our local town. At the back, they also have an old barn, newly painted, with chairs and sofas in it, built by craftspeople whose joy in their work can be seen and touched and felt, even in fading light on a grey afternoon. Sofas For Us