Of course it rained. After fretting that I should have started the job a month ago, the day I finally pulled finger and got stacking our winter firewood in the First Best Woodshed, the heavens opened.
Of course I panicked. It must have made for quite the sight. A sweaty, sweary Henny Penny in gumboots leaping off a ride-on mower and dashing about covering our four huge piles of pine and mac with tarpaulins. Fortunately, just like in space, out here in the country no one can hear you scream.
Aside from washing the car or a MetService forecast giving a cast-iron assurance that it definitely won’t rain, there is, in my experience, nothing quite so guaranteed to cause water to fall from the sky than me moving firewood.
Still, an unexpected early-afternoon downpour aside, I had been making excellent progress on safely stacking away our guarantee of a warm winter at Lush Places. In the space of a few of hours I had the shed almost a third full and my back was barely aching.
Then again, I must now be closing in on the 10,000 hours of endeavour that the woolly-haired self-publicist Malcolm Gladwell once claimed one needs to put in to make oneself a world-class practitioner at something like, say, buying, seasoning and stacking firewood. Or mowing lawns.
In fact, I would suggest, immodestly perhaps, that I am now so good at both mowing lawns and buying, seasoning and stacking firewood, I could proclaim myself a Mowing and Firewood Professional.
Instead, I am wondering whether I should make both my hobbies.
I have been in desperate need of such a pastime since we moved to Lush Places. But neither mowing nor firewood stacking likely qualify: yes, they involve kit and know-how and they are bloody time consuming. But unlike proper hobbies, they’re not without purpose.
Still, having a proper hobby, like possessing knobbly knees, is a (male) Dixon family tradition, and thus I ought to have one.
My father, now in his 90th year, has had many of them. As a boy, he built fixed-line, balsa wood and tissue-paper aeroplanes, powered with little spirit-fuelled engines, that took hours to build and moments to crash when he flew them in the park across the road from his Lower Hutt home back in the late 1940s and early 1950s. What a melancholy thing that must have been, I’ve always thought, to watch hours of work nosedive into the grass.
Maybe that is why he only partly renewed this hobby some 30 years later, when he began creating a series of beautifully made and meticulously painted World War I biplanes, each half a metre long. These took many hours to construct from scratch, too. But they never flew. He’d clearly learnt from his boyhood disappointments. Instead, they sat in the family garage, where they were occasionally admired by us both as they gathered dust.
At various times, Dad has also taken up picture framing, family history and doing up vintage cars as hobbies. As for me, a bloke in my 60th year, there still remains a great big hole where my own hobbies ought to be.
The pleasure to be had by (mostly) men from hobbies is what our current lunchtime watch, the charming British comedy-drama Detectorists, is all about. Written, directed and starring Mackenzie Crook – probably still best known as Gareth in The Office – it is a wry, beautifully observed rumination on friendship, but also what it means to be a dedicated hobbyist.
In every 30-minute episode, Crook’s Andy and Toby Jones’s Lance wander about the Essex countryside with metal detectors hunting for Saxon gold and talking bollocks before deciding, after finding nothing but rubbish, to go to the pub.
In one scene, from (I think) series two, Lance sums up the reason it’s mostly men who have hobbies. “It’s the way it’s always been,” he tells Andy. “What you want is your partner to shake her head, roll her eyes and look at you and say, ‘You and your hobbies. I’ll never understand men.’”
