Wednesday thoughts before work

Got back from London by midnight having stopped off to say hello to an old freind. Woke at 4am and my two hour dog walk was all in darkness. Pure darkness, or as near as we ever come to it does not make for a rewarding journey. Never again. various chores then back on to the desk I am working on. Making the cylindrical legs the old way, the Alan peters way. Stayed up to watch a film I've been waiting to see for ages, The Selfish Giant. Very good film. No Kes but he was hovering in the background. Sleep was patchy so thought I'd try the new AL-LAD. Left the house at 5.30 and took Dook a good eight or ten mile. Today my work is sanding up the cylindrical legs so no harm or danger there. Probably good for stamina on such a repetitive motion. Our job is like that. Days of mind bending puzzles. Visualising three dimensional imaginary structure that actually work and aren't just pretty whims, is there a more difficult task the human mind can do? I have not yet seen one. Then days of repetitive, machine like processes some seek to farm to apprentices or further machines. CNC.. Inevitably a products design is an expression of the technologies employed in its making. The human hand has an infinite spectrum of movements and marvellous as some computer drawings are, place them next to a da Vinci sketch and the paltry handful of tricks the digital can devise are easily revealed. The digital age has liberated the untalented. Anyone can produce an adequate drawing or photograph. Sadly we have succumbed, culturally, to the age of the adequate. Everything is 'pretty good'. The exceptional remains as rare as it ever was. As makers our sense of touch is far more developed than that of common man. We feel with a sensitivity that can only come from years of doing it. The tactile qualities of matter, of reality, are exclusively our knowledge. For it is a knowledge specific to our own personal private worlds. This kind of knowledge can not be passed on in language. Some may argue that our gradual drift away from the physical has always been the goal of the aspirational. To live never having to feel the cold, many people now never feel properly hungry, nor the pain of physical exertion. The goal of money becomes to feel nothing, because.no discomfort, no pain, no suffering.
I wonder who really wins. The super rich who suffer no discomfort. Or the homeless guy who feels the cold stone, smoothed by a million paces, against his cheek. I walk ten miles each morning with Dook whayever the erather and I do it for him. No rational human would endure that discomfort everyday were it not for the love of something outside of yourself. The junky, on his pursuit of having no feeling could find it so much more easily in just finding someone, something moe needy than yourself, put yourself second and for that time your pain is gone.