THE cold weather slowed me down this month. I’ve been learning to bake sourdough bread. The house is small enough that the oven heats the whole place, so every fresh loaf warmed my insides and my outsides.

I’ve been pottering at odd jobs too. I have an old two-deck tape player I was given when I turned 13. Now it looks unaccountably bulky, but once I thought it sleek. It contained mysterious worlds. I remember listening to Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ and feeling entranced and uneasy.

For over a decade the volume control has been unreliable and the sound has rattled and risen like a coming train. No amount of adjustment could stop it.

Finally, I decided to find out why. I opened the shell of the tape player and cleaned the relevant parts with a cue-tip. That’s all. But now the radio glides quietly into the right station.

Confident of my newfound volume control expertise, I assured my friend Mischa that I could repair her over-loud alarm clock. I disassembled it and found a flimsy, broken plastic knob that could not be re-attached. Even so, I took pleasure in the discovery: at least we knew the problem. And the alarm clock still works. With a slender implement and a slice of dexterity, the volume can be adjusted. Right, Mischa?

Simple fixes. Maybe it’s beginner’s luck, but I’m convinced that adequate patches could be found for many malfunctioning gizmos just by taking a quick look inside.

A second small project:

Our house has a north-facing courtyard. On clear winter days, there is no better place to be than resting against the rear wall of the house, looking at the veggie patch, taking in the sun.

But the ground has a concrete lip that doesn’t suit a chair. So one afternoon I assembled a bench from reclaimed framing timber, according to a tried and tested Urban Bush Carpenter design: three parallel lengths to sit on, and x-crossed, reinforced legs below. I sawed the legs to match the awkward split-level concrete.

Maybe the bench accounts for my subsequent lack of practical work. I made my perfect sitting spot and then I sat there, reading, whenever the sun broke through the clouds.

And now I’ve left town. I’m on my way, slowly, to Cairns. I’ll be on the lookout for bush mechanics between here and there. 

FIXERS are everywhere I look. They’ve emerged from their cluttered workshops and entered my field of vision.

Tired of reading polemic non-fiction, I picked up a novel by Italian writer Primo Levi, called If Not Now, When? It is a story of a band of Jewish partisans in the second world war, a jumble of Russian and Polish Jews, men and women who fight against the Germans behind their lines. Sometimes the Red Army, other partisans and villagers support them; more often, they too persecute the Jews.

As I turned the second page, I discovered that the main protagonist, Mendel, is a watchmender.

Mendel is the book’s moral conscience and his trade is not a coincidence. He is a village craftsman: grounded and resourceful, but also compassionate and thoughtful. He is balanced and patient, like a clock. The novel is a meditation on the ethics of war, and Mendel is the melancholy pendulum, his mind rocking back and forth the atrocities they witness, and the violence they perpetrate.

Early in the book, he and Leonid, a young soldier from Moscow, seek respite in an encampment of Jews and other refugees in an old monastery hidden among the marshes. For food, the small community traps frogs and collects grasses, herbs and mushrooms. They tan hides using oak bark and make boots for partisans. The two newcomers meet Dov, the leader of the camp:

“Do you have a trade?” he asked, addressing Mendel.

“I’m a watchmender by trade, but I also worked as a mechanic in a kolkhoz.”

“Good. We’ll find work for you right away. What about you, Muscovite?”

“I studied to be a bookkeeper.”

“That’s a bit less useful, for us.” Dov laughed. “I’d like to keep accounts, but it’s impossible. We can’t even count the people who come and go.”

I think I know how he would have responded had one of them replied: “I’m a freelance journalist.” Thankfully, I am not in the war.

All this, however, brings me to my latest tussle with a toaster.

This time, armed with tamper proof screwdriver heads, I was able to remove the outer casing, then the second layer, to reveal the wires and the filaments. Using the multimeter, I slowly tracked the source of the broken circuit by testing the resistance between different points. One of the thin wires in the filament had snapped.

I searched a while on the internet and I don’t think it’s possible to buy replacement filaments. The toaster was not made to be mended. So I couldn’t fix it. But I still count my foray as a minor success: I identified the problem.

THE assembly is over. The courtyard studio lives!

One afternoon not long ago, Michael Kelly and I gathered what we had built over the last few months: five separate segments of the frame, ten panels of cladding and eight shutters for saloon-style swinging doors.

Michael had cleared a space inside his shop. He decided to display the little building there, for passers-by to see (and perhaps, order one of their own).

We began to assemble the pieces, inching the frames into contact with one another. Accurate measurements are particularly important for a modular building like ours. One length awry and a whole panel might not fit.

Hence, the carpenter’s maxim: ‘measure twice, cut once’. Michael stated his variation on the accepted wisdom while we slotted the panels together, as certain as jigsaw pieces. “Measure and re-measure, and check and re-check, over and over again,” he said.

And indeed he had. As we laid out each panel, he had measured, scribbled numbers on his hand, returned to the frame, then measured again and again; back and forth like a cook between pantry and pot.

I’ve just read a book by the American writer Michael Pollan, called A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams. It is his story of building a small, wooden hut on his property in Connecticut. While he learns to build, training his “radically” unhandy hands, Pollan ponders the nature of shelter and the history of architecture.

Although the hut appeared small and simple, the architect’s design was deeply considered and intricate. Pollan’s project took two-and-a-half years of Sundays to realise.

He built the frame from Douglas Fir, commonly known here as Oregon – the same timber we used for our studio. On the day they raised the roof’s ridge pole, Pollan recalled feeling abashed when he first saw the fir timbers he’d ordered; being, as they were, milled from hundred-year-old trees.

In the early years of the American colony, carpenters would mark the topping out of the frame by nailing a bough of a conifer to the highest beam of the structure. Pollan enacted the tradition, and speculated on its role in celebrating the new dwelling and the achievement of the workers, and also recognising the trees cut down for it.

“People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame, acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox of being human – the fact that so much of what we desire for our happiness and need for our survival comes at a heavy cost. We kill to eat, cut down trees to build our homes, we exploit other people and the earth.”

It seems to me that Pollan’s “heavy cost” of being human rises or falls according to the choices we make as individuals, and those of our societies as a whole. But he’s right: there is always a cost.

One of the rewards of working in the physical world could be a heightened appreciation of its materials, a better understanding of the composition of the things we use. The makers among us must be more aware of the stuff of life, and perhaps, too, the damaged goods discarded along the way.

We did not nail an evergreen bough to our studio. It is made from timber carefully reclaimed from demolition sites. Several decades sheltered us from the full force of the paradox.

For our ritual, we stood side-by-side, arms crossed, leaning back ever so slightly, and murmured the studio’s praise. “It’s one thing to have an idea, but another to put it into practice,” Michael said.