Handcrafted

I was a[n over educated] late developer. Didn't get a proper job, commensurate with all that training, until I was 29. Three years later, my contract with the university was renewed for another 3 years. We decided that if we were stopping in Geordieland we might as well buy a house rather than paying rent forever. Ah the privilege of being born in the mid1950s: so much choice. We 'viewed' +30 properties in the Summer of 1986 and eventually plumped for a dilapidated mid terrace in a respectable working class suburb of Newcastle upon Tyne. It cost £21,000 = the £15K mortgage about 1.3x my salary. The Boy was a tween, I'd just got a pay-rise, the mortgage was less than the rent we'd been paying, life was pretty good.

One aspect of feelgood was that The Boy could walk down the street on Mondays after school and buy his copy of 2000AD [for 28p - was that expensive?] a weekly SciFi comic which featured inter alia Judge Dredd an amoral law enforcer on a bike [L]. At about the same time, I started spending most Tuesday evenings in the basement of library learning the fine craft of book-binding. After a tuthree years, I'd put manners on all the oh-so-useful hardbacks bought for 25c at US yard-sales. Coming up for his 12th birthday, I made off with a year's worth of The Boy's 2000AD collection. Over a couple Tuesdays, I sewed them all together, constructed a hard-cover 'case' and bound it in maroon library cloth. With The Boy and '2000AD' in gold lettering on the spine, it made an acceptable gift. Albeit the size of a family bible.

Fast forward 6 years, we'd sold the house on Cheltenham Terrace [for £53,000 as you're curious] and embraced further adventures; starting with moving home to Ireland in 1990. At a free-gaff at the farmhouse where we lived out by the airport in No Dublin, a miserable entitled young bravo pal of The Boy [we never found out which/whom] made off with the 2000AD compilation volume. I'm all for wealth re-distribution so we finish up with a more equal society. But there really is a difference between things bought for money and things crafted with love [see recent].