Beginnings...

I've just finished watching this beautiful old footage of a Sheffield penknife cutler fashioning a basic pocket knife, for the second time in two days. It just illustrates to me how far down the rabbit-hole we've gone when it comes to the loss of basic skills: virtually everything we buy, consume, and use these days is the product of anonymised CNC machining or 3D printing techniques, entirely controlled by computers. There's absolutely nothing wrong with any of these technologies, obviously; but the underpinnings of it all are the very basic skills beautifully illustrated by this film: design, prototypes, templates. These hand skills are the more analogue equivalents of the computer-controlled movements: cruder in accuracy, but in this context no less effective, except maybe in profit & loss terms; but that's another story entirely. The top and bottom of it all is that without the fundamental skills of using simple tools, complex tools would not exist: it's a simple chain of cause and effect. One thing enables the next and so on. The problem we face is that without teaching the basics, if everything goes seriously pear-shaped, we would find it very difficult to get anything useful or needful done at all, which would have us floundering around helplessly simply to survive. I suspect that most would not: not a pretty prospect. In the beginning was the human realisation and implementation of the hammer...