Ah, the romance of honest toil—how it glints in the rear-view mirror like a miner’s lamp in a long-abandoned seam. One pictures those sturdy forebears of ours, the miners, the shipbuilders, the factory hands, the farmers, bent double under the weight of actual achievement. They didn’t “facilitate stakeholder synergies” or “curate content strategies.” They dug coal, welded hulls, turned lathes, and coaxed crops from reluctant soil, all while the nation they were building quietly got on with the business of existing. Their hands told stories in calluses the way our palms now tell only of repetitive strain from scrolling. And yet here we are, heirs to their sweat, wondering why the inheritance feels so suspiciously like a participation trophy wrapped in student debt.
It is a truth universally acknowledged by anyone who has ever tried to assemble flat-pack furniture without swearing that manual competence has been quietly airbrushed from the national portrait. We speak of “deindustrialisation” as though it were a polite meteorological event rather than the collective decision to swap forges for focus groups. The miner who once emerged blinking into the daylight with the honest grime of productivity on his face has been replaced by the graduate emerging from three years of media studies, blinking into the daylight with the honest grime of overdraft on his soul. Both are covered in something, mind you. Only one of them built anything that could still be pointed to with pride decades later.
I confess—and here the self-deprecation must intrude, for I am hardly the man to lecture on the nobility of labour—I possess all the practical skills of a particularly indolent house cat. My attempts at DIY tend to end in tactical retreats to the pub, where I can at least philosophise about the shelf I failed to put up. Give me a hammer and I become a minor health-and-safety incident. The thought of spending a day down a mine, or wrestling with the rivets of a ship, fills me with the sort of awe one reserves for Olympic athletes and people who can parallel park on the first attempt. What must it have been like, I wonder, to finish a shift knowing you had added something solid and measurable to the world? Not “value” in the vaporous sense beloved of management consultants, but actual, tangible stuff: a ton of coal shifted, a hull strengthened, a field ploughed. The satisfaction must have been almost indecent.
Instead, we have perfected the art of training an entire generation to be unemployable in any weather that doesn’t involve Wi-Fi. Universities, those cathedrals of deferred adulthood, continue to churn out degrees in subjects so ethereal they make medieval angelology look like hard science. The students emerge blinking, diploma in one hand, loan agreement in the other, ready to compete for jobs that consist largely of attending meetings about the next meeting. Meanwhile the shelves in the supermarket still need stocking, the lights still need keeping on, and the drains—dear God, the drains—still need unblocking by someone who actually knows which way a spanner turns. These are the quiet heroes who prevent civilisation from descending into a particularly fragrant apocalypse, yet we speak of them, if at all, with the faint condescension usually reserved for people who still listen to vinyl.
There is something almost comically masochistic about a society that celebrates the abstract while quietly depending on the concrete. We lionise the “knowledge economy” as though knowledge could power a hospital during a blackout or keep a tractor running. The office class, of which I am a reluctant and underachieving member, has convinced itself that thinking about things is superior to doing them. We write reports about productivity while the people who actually produce things get treated as picturesque relics, suitable for heritage documentaries and little else. One almost admires the audacity of it all. It’s rather like a man standing on the roof of a building he didn’t build, complaining that the foundations are terribly old-fashioned.
And yet one wonders—what if? What if, instead of stumbling through a series of arts degrees and journalistic misadventures, one had learned to lay bricks, or weld, or coax machinery into reluctant obedience? There is a dignity in that sort of competence that no amount of LinkedIn endorsements can replicate. The quiet pride of the craftsman who knows his work will outlast him; the farmer who understands that nature doesn’t do focus groups; the engineer whose mistakes announce themselves with alarming immediacy rather than hiding politely in a spreadsheet until bonus time.
Perhaps the greatest satire of our age is that we have managed to make uselessness expensive and usefulness slightly embarrassing. We pay fortunes to be taught things that nobody needs while paying rather less to the people we cannot do without. A strong nation, as the original observation had it, honours its working people, not merely its office class. Until we remember that, we shall continue our elegant decline, tweeting furiously about sustainability from buildings whose plumbing was installed by men who never needed a wellness app to tell them when they were tired.
The lamps may still be on, for now. But one suspects the chaps who keep them that way aren’t checking their notifications while they do it. More’s the pity. And more’s the wonder.