Dexterity

I wanted to write about a Christmas present but, as this is Substack and unedited, you’re going to get a load of self-indulgent waffle first, by way of context.

I don’t like to talk about Covid much. I wrote some stuff and they tell me that’s why I don’t have PTSD. They got a laptop in to me while I was still barking mad and I told the story... got it out of my system and so could move on. People sometimes remember what I wrote and are kind about it, but most of it is over now.

I decided early on that I didn’t have ‘Long Covid’ and didn’t really want to be part of that whole thing. The medics were very clear that Covid itself was going to be insignificant compared to what they called the sequelae - the long term effects - of the induced coma and life support. Of immobility, intubation and heroic quantities of drugs.

They tell me that when I finally came round, I got out of bed and fell over. My right leg didn’t respond at all. I don’t remember that. I still thought I was hiding from Mossad and being drugged with dishwasher tabs by the daughter of the Turkish prime minister.

Most people who know me know what happened next. It took a while to get my voice back... the tubes had trashed my vocal cords... and there was a lot of physiotherapy. Today, the right leg obeys, though, from my end it feels like I’m swinging a frozen ham from my knee joint. You’d never know from watching me move, but my right lower leg is now something that just travels around with me and will comply, reluctantly, when asked to prop me up.

There were other sequelae, but I felt so lucky to be alive at all, and to get back to functioning normally, that I never really discussed them with anyone.

Firstly, I suppose, there was the cognitive stuff. Initially it was about clearing my brain after the drugs and the psychosis and then it was about adjusting. The shrink at the hospital was great. I told her I was having trouble remembering names and she said “You took enough drugs to put you in a coma for a fortnight. You drink. You’re in your fifties. You’ve got lots of reasons for mild cognitive change. All I can reassure you of is that you don’t have Alzheimer’s”.

After that I bought a notebook and a voice recorder. I’d never taken notes in my life... now I do it religiously. My notebook sits on the bedside table, it’s at my right hand now. It works.

So on the face of it... I’m just a bloke, with a gammy leg, who’s occasionally absent minded and I can live with that. Totally. That’s just like 9 out of 10 of my uncles growing up.

But something else thing happened in the hospital. A while after they realised the leg was shot, they wheeled in a load of electrical kit and wired up all my extremities. I spent a pleasant afternoon hitting a big red button, like some sort of lab rat, every time I felt a tingle and they took away the results for analysis. Two days later a consultant came back with a map of my body, with scores. I remember them.

‘Lower right leg - 10%’ was already pretty evident. So I guess “right hand 75%, left hand 60%, left leg 60%” seemed like a result. A good one under the circumstances.

I’d never run a marathon and had no intention of doing so. Had this happened a few decades earlier, I’d have been devastated that I could no longer dance like James Brown and instead channelled a stunned circus bear... but generally, the whole thing seemed like a big ‘so what?’

But what I didn’t think of was the amount I work with my hands. The constant pleasure of making things. Fiddling. Tinkering. I’ve always been defined by some sort of bench. A flat place filled with tools where I could make or mend stuff. Food, circuitry, watches, locks, cameras... anything I could take apart and put back together.

Over the intervening years, I’ve frankly found an inability to put names to faces quite socially functional. Most people just aren’t that memorable. But cross-threading screws, tiny nuts springing out of my sausage-like fingers like they’re larded... fumbling components, burning or cutting myself through clumsiness, breaking things through inability to feel pressure or torque feedback. There have been too many times when that has reduced me first to frustrated rage and then finally to silent, angry tears.

Then, earlier this year, I spoke to Lib about it. I think we were probably doing one of those things we’ve always loved to do together... cooking or fixing... something at a bench. And I must have started talking about the anger... the frustration.

My fondest memories of Lib, from the very earliest years, were of making and mending things together. Art projects, messy things. Stuff with glue and glitter. I think she was about 5 when we built a wooden model boat together. It seemed important that she should feel the joy of making, so I’d sit with her for a whilew every day, guiding her funny little hands to bend wood and dab glue. I’d help her develop dexterity and judgement, to feel the feedback from her developing fingertips... and yes. Each night, after she’d gone to bed, I’d take apart anything that would diminish the finished project and quietly reassemble for the following day. The boat was beautiful and still sits on my window-sill.

I used to look at it and wonder if that was some kind of weird control freakery but I’m hoping, as I get older that it will be interpreted as what Hayden called “love’s austere and lonely offices”.

This Christmas morning there were odd-shaped packages for me. Tools. I’ve bought Lib tools forever. I’ve given her some of mine. My Grandfather, from whom I inherited the Tinkerer’s Gene, believed that money was never wasted on good and appropriate tools... and I’ve tried to past that on. But Lib had found a small electric screwdriver with every imaginable bit, and a kind of magnetic work tray. A place that ‘catches’ escaping components. The base is a wipe clean so you can lay the pieces out as you take them apart and label them.

Today, I took the tools out and started a new job. I’ve taken on a couple of commissions for mechanical keyboards. Jobs that take dozens of picayune, disobedient springs and hundreds of sub-atomic screws. Jobs, I realise, I’ve been putting off for fear of the red-misting fury of impotent frustration.

There were times, when Lib was tiny, when the most important thing was to calm her frustration. When parts wouldn’t fit first time, she learned to back up... not to force things. To pause and look at the problem from other angles. The weird Zen of the maker where the work itself pushes back, demonstrating that fighting the project is the only sure way to screw it up and that contemplative, slow and respectful handwork is the only path to its own reward.

My new tools are perfect. They’ve slowed me down. They’ve realigned my understanding of what I’m trying to do... they are revivifying forgotten muscle memory.

But what’s best is having my daughter teach me exactly what I taught her.