By hand or by brain?

Former broadcaster Kent Barker exchanged his white collar for a blue one, and extols the advantages of manual work.
 
 
It’s one of those lovely summer evenings.  The sun is dipping across the orchard, lengthening shadows from the apple trees and radiating warmth on the sheep below.  Birdsong fills the air.  At least I’m pretty sure it does.  I can’t actually hear anything above the clatter of the tractor’s massive three-cylinder diesel engine. But the noise notwithstanding, it’s a pretty perfect evening and my most pressing decision is whether to pay a visit to the Woodcock or to the Bull for a pint on the way home.
I’d never driven a tractor before a couple of months ago.  Now here I am mowing a meadow and grappling with power take-offs and hydraulic lifts.  As the topper (a huge rotary grass cutter) pulverises the thistles and nettles, there’s plenty of time to reflect on my change of circumstances.  Not so long ago at this time of day I’d have been elbowing my way through homebound commuters at Oxford Circus after ten hours squinting at a computer screen and side-stepping office politics. I suppose I must have spent the best part of 30 years in jobs involving suits and desks and telephones and meetings and coffee machines.   I had a meeting the other day. A man from the Soil Association came to the orchard to discuss progress on our transition to organic status.  We both wore Wellies and wandered round the 50 acres discussing non-organic sheep (yes, there are organic flocks) before sharing a coffee from my thermos flask.
There’s a nasty grinding sound from the topper and I yank back on the hydraulic lever by the right of my seat and peer over my shoulder to watch the assembly lift into the air and pass safely above a tree stump. On the next run down the rows of our mature fruit trees I get to thinking about the recent book by Matthew Crawford, The Case for Working with Your Hands: Or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good.  The title may be lugubrious but pretty much sums up my current thinking about work. Not that a few hours a week pruning and mowing in a community orchard can really be described as a job.  But tomorrow I’ll be working as a carpenter, building an elaborate tree house for the children of a local GP. I’ve always been keen on amateur building work (I hate the expression DIY which makes it sound as if you can just about assemble simple flat-pack furniture) and have renovated the various houses I’ve lived in, getting progressively more ambitions installing RSJs, demolishing supporting walls and turning attics into loft living spaces.  But that was all for me and all done in my own time.  Working for a client is a different matter.  I’ve become far more self critical, and can’t help feeling a bit of a fraud, charging good money when I have no qualifications whatsoever.​
But looking back I suppose I had no qualifications when I started in broadcasting. I’d borrowed a Uher (reel to reel tape recorder) from a friend and blagged my way into a press reception for the opening of the film That’s Entertainment. There were Gene Kelly and Liza Minelli hanging around looking for someone to talk to – even if it was an unkempt 21year-old who clearly had trouble mastering the controls of his recorder.  Despite my inept questions they were just wonderful, and I managed to persuade Capital Radio’s evening news programme to run it.
From that moment I was hooked, and by dint of considerable perseverance and a lot of luck found myself working in local and then national radio, at Westminster, in New York, and then for ITN.  And great fun it was too.  Mostly.  But it still meant an office environment, and often windowless rooms and studios. Entire summer’s days could pass me by without ever seeing the sun except perhaps briefly on the walk to and from the tube station.  Now I’m intimately involved with the weather and the seasons and, perhaps more importantly, have much more control over all that I do.  Broadcasting is essentially a co-operative venture with a large number of cogs whirring to produce a bulletin or programme.
Michael Crawford, a Ph.D in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, compares this type of modern day office work to mass manufacturing and argues that many if not most office jobs are increasingly debased into factory roles where each person does only part of a job. As result the job satisfaction disappears and the work is less intellectually stimulating.  His satisfaction, he says, came from running a motorcycle repair shop or working as an electrician.
There are two rows left to mow and the tractor is bouncing over a warren of foxholes.  It has no suspension, but the seat in the cab is mounted on springs, so every jolt sends you bouncing up and down like a demented Zebedee.  If I hurry I can get to the Bull before 7.00 and take advantage of their early-evening cheap beer.
​It is certainly true that a few hours tractor driving or a day’s carpentry here or there doesn’t bring in a banker’s bonus. But I can actually make more money now on an hourly or daily basis working with my hands than I could get in my last incarnation as a freelance radio reporter at the BBC where the rates were pitifully low.  And for a long time any plumber I’ve used has charged more than I could make behind a desk.  What it means is that I now do many of the tasks for which I previously paid others.  I sweep my own chimney, service my own Aga, and do almost all the maintenance around the house and garden. In fact I find myself calculating whether I can save more by doing it myself even if it means forgoing orchard or carpentry work rather than having to pay someone whose hourly rate is higher than mine.
​On the other hand there’s no doubt that the satisfaction of completing a physical task whether it’s a precise carpentry joint or a neatly pruned apple tree is much more immediate than an annual review from the office boss. One must beware, of course, of  creating a sort of Laurentian romantic view of the dignity of manual labour.  I know an awful lot of physical jobs are sheer drudgery, poorly paid with awful conditions.  But perhaps William Morris was nearer the mark when he said “A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body.” And Morris’ contention that the division of labour removes craftsmanship from work and de-humanises the worker precedes Michael Crawford’s similar theory by a century and a quarter.
​So as I park the tractor by the hedge, clean the grass cuttings off the topper, and listen to the now fully audible evening songbirds, I reflect that I don’t miss office life, commuting or city living one bit. Intellectual stimulation may be a bit rarer than it used to be.  But the reason I took up the orchard work was to provide a counterpoint to writing the fiction that I’d left broadcasting and moved to the country in order to try.  Had an agent or a publisher taken up the first novel with any alacrity I might never have found myself up on my tractor.  I could have been financially richer, but spiritually certainly poorer.  And at least I do now have plenty of time in the tractor cab to ponder the plot of the next book.
 
Kent Barker’s first novel is available for download at www.RevolutionCuba58.com