There’s a shop in York called Fabrication. It’s one of two (the other lives in Leeds) and it’s a magical space supporting local artists, giving them space to create and a place to sell their work. They also offer workshops on various crafts, like jewellery-making, metalwork and textiles. Two months into living here I have already formed a dangerous little habit of stumbling in and stumbling back out again with treasures – a shieldmaiden peg doll; a magnetic bottle opener featuring an acrylic pour painting; and the earliest Christmas gift I have ever gotten myself: a pyrographed copy of the iconic medieval marginalia that is a nun plucking penises from a penis tree to fill her basket:

Okay, so in my version the penises are a bit vague. But I know what they are, you know what they are (if you didn’t a few seconds ago, you do now), AND the tree has a little star and some tinsel on it, what could be more festive than that?! I personally now cannot wait for Christmas so I can have people round and either bemuse or delight them by explaining what it is.

Anyway, I digress. On my first visit to the shop there was a flyer at the till on upcoming classes, and one of those was a workshop in sixteenth-century book binding. WOO! said I, sign me up! I’d never stumbled on a workshop like this before (in fairness, I hadn’t been looking but the fact that it was so readily available is important and I’ll get into that in a second). It whisked me back to heady days of cataloguing rare books in the university library, swooning over bookplates and marbled endpapers and Morocco leather (side note – none of these things actually have any relation to the type of book-binding the workshop was concerned with, which was limp binding – I’ll come back to that too), the totally incomparable thrill of touching 400-year-old records and jamming with awesome people who researched early modern books, print, and waste paper. As wanky as it sounds, it felt like a step on a journey back to the person I used to be, part of why I’m here in the first place.

The day arrived and, reader, by about nine-thirty in the morning I was already dissolving into an anxious mess. Two hours of faffing about, trying very hard to breathe, and two coffees-and-a-bacon-sandwich-while-staring-into-space later I was signed in and sat with five other people in the surprisingly spacious workroom above Fabrication’s shop.

I’ll go we were actually there to do because at this point I was still faintly confident and laughing and keeping it together. The workshop was run by a frankly fucking fabulous Yorkshire-based bookbinder called Linette who runs a business called Anachronalia. She loves all things books, grew up with and works alongside heritage crafters and decided to set up her own craft business, and teach as many people as possible about bookbinding and book repair, after she realised how challenging it was to track down accessible, affordable bookbinding classes when she started out. Now she runs her own Leeds-based bindery, runs a stall at the yearly International Medieval Congress and even designed her own D&D supplement for book-lovers called Incunabula – honestly, my heart soars a little bit just recapping all this. In our workshop we would, as I say, be learning the technique of “limp-binding” – a cheaper, more sustainable alternative for those who could not afford the luxury of fully-bound books. They were often used for keeping accounts or just for taking notes (I meant to ask if they might be used for commonplace books – think historical scrapbooking – another side note: it turns out people still keep them, which makes me very happy) The bindings would be made from recycled illuminated manuscripts made from vellum (calfskin), or parchment (animal skin in a more general sense).

We were actually using artists’ paper, sewing thread and and crafting paper from The Works printed with all sorts of lovely designs for our notebooks, but Linette had a lovely “reconstruction” with her of a book limp-bound in a piece of music, and explained that music and liturgies could be frequently used for binding, as they were discarded as liturgical text and music changed over time, an amazing thought now when we consider how we view illuminated texts as such precious and sacred artefacts, illuminating the walls of a British Library exhibition from behind glass or carefully leafed through in the reverential hush of a reading room. It was interesting to dwell for a minute on the “everyday”-ness of this kind of text, the Church being so central to daily life that its teachings and its trappings readily ended up in the proverbial medieval and early modern recycling box without contemporaries batting an eyelid. Anyway, I digress again and there are many other incredibly knowledgeable people, Linette included, who could talk about this more articulately (and using less commas) than I have here. In Googling this I did end up stumbling on a paper recycling company called Pulp Friction, which I thought was too amazing not to share here.

This is the bit where we actually had to start binding and where I kind of get to the point of this post. On cue, my head started to unravel. We had instructions in front of us, illustrations, Linette explained things to us, but it felt like my brain was sieving it all out in real time. I couldn’t add up measurements, couldn’t cut or fold damn pieces of paper consistently, and don’t even get me started on trying to sew the paper sections to the cover. The page of instructions could have been written in another language for all I knew; I forgot spoken instructions the second after I heard them. Minutes passed staring at paper and thread as if they were impossible riddles.

Perhaps the anxiety build up had been the anticipation of having to do a craft in a group setting, and now it was revealed that I was surrounded by rather proficient crafters whereas I wasn’t able to make a bloody paper tree a few months back for a Christmas work social and burst into tears as soon as my Zoom was turned off. I had feared that I would end up in this exact situation, surrounded by people I presumed to be far more competent and capable than me, and suddenly I’d “proven” to myself that yes, this had indeed happened and I had outed myself as not just a craft fraud, but an academic fraud too. My love of history and books, and any knack for creativity I thought I had, weren’t shit. I thought I’d stumbled back on my tribe, my jam, but in fact, I didn’t belong there at all.

Somehow, I made something vaguely book-shaped, and the pages didn’t fall out, though I think the phrase “hanging by a thread” never applied to anything more than in that moment. I said thank yous and goodbyes, eyes burning, texted a photo to a friend bemoaning the fact that the pages were barely hanging in there and then cried in the toilets of a Caffe Nero. I felt like an abject failure. I bitterly resented abandoning my PhD, the time I’ve wasted not learning, my big talk about creating with nothing to show for it, not knowing how to fucking sew. I went and bought food, went home and cried some more. Then I put Eurovision on and felt a little better.

The above might read a bit chaotically but I’ve decided to leave them that way, an attempt to reflect the mess in my head. Doesn’t it all sound ridiculous? At some point in the night I woke up and suddenly recalled asking Linette about how to tie thread to another bit of thread, like it was some ancient mystery, and she said it was as simple as tying your shoelaces: “it’s not that complicated”. I suddenly realised how many of these exact conversations I have with my boss where it turns out, after sometimes hours of agonising and wrangling over a problem, it turns out I overthought it and, Occam’s-Razor-style, the simple, obvious answer was the right one, right there in front of me.

I also recalled that towards the end of the session, in my mind-splattered state, I had run out of some thread and tied some more to it to extend it, something that had been described as a bit fiddly, without asking for help again. I also have a whole bloody limp-bound book to show for what I did yesterday. Yes, it doesn’t lie flat like it should. Yes, the stitching on the spine looks like a prison cell after the bars have been mangled in an escape attempt. But it does the job it’s supposed to do: as my friend replied to my self-pitying text yesterday, ‘pages not falling out is one of the key functions of a book so I’d say you’re winning’. I did the thing.

I also realised that in sinking into the murky pit of self-hate, I wasn’t appreciating some real golden moments in that workshop. I missed that I was actually surrounded by some seriously awesome people who study linguistics and learn new languages, have tried every craft under the sun, and do incredibly cool things like miniature painting and Coptic sewing. I heard those same lovely people tell me, and themselves(!), that it’s fine to mess up on a first go, that there are no stupid questions and it doesn’t have to, and probably won’t, be perfect, but I wasn’t listening. I didn’t appreciate how fabulous it is that there is a Red List of Endangered Crafts (including things like fore-edge painting, wainwrighting and even watchmaking) and people like Linette work tirelessly to preserve them. I missed that I did actually learn something yesterday, and that was the whole point.

I don’t think this is some sort of ground-breaking “life lesson” – pages and pages have already been dedicated to this. But the ground-breaking thing for me, I think, was that rather than spending all of today hiding away under my bedcovers feeling sorry for myself (I’ll admit I devoted maybe a few hours to this, but that’s by the by), I got up, I made a cup of tea, I finished reading Amy Poehler’s Yes Please (only took me almost 10 years to pick up a copy, but I feel like it found me just when I needed it) and when the thought “maybe you could write about the bookbinding thing” flitted into my head I opened up my laptop. I can’t tell you how many years it’s been since I’ve written a blog post from start to finish in a sitting (albeit unedited, and for that I’m sorry). As Amy says, I stopped talking about the thing and actually did the thing. Not to prove myself or demonstrate that I belong with the creatives, but because creativity is the thing that gives back to you if you feed it and are even just a little bit nice to it (both thoughts not mine, they are unabashedly nicked from Amy Poehler and Liz Gilbert but they’re useful here). It has wider application than just creative pursuits, of course – I have yet to put myself in a room full of strangers to make new friends, or take myself on hikes, or pick a barbell back up again. I might even give bookbinding another go. In any case, my wonky-ass limp-bound book is proof of the state-the-bloody-obvious that I’ll now share with you: it doesn’t need to be done perfectly – it just needs doing.

I’m both relieved and cringing having discovered that this blog still exists: cringing mainly because it was consigned to the WordPress graveyard in November 2010(!) but relieved as it is almost as if it has been waiting to be resurrected (mostly, the relief comes from remembering my WordPress login).

After several years and a good few twists and turns – degrees completed and abandoned, relationships forged and broken, bank balances shaded black and red, a dozen house moves, many selves tried and cast off – I find myself back in York making a life by myself.

I’ve found it interesting, perhaps even comforting, that I feel as much of a “right shambles” at 34 as I did at 20. Ironically, it’s the one thing that has remained consistent, probably because it’s not really that unusual for anybody. But I also think there’s magic in it, and that’s something I am still trying my best to understand and embrace – that’s what this blog is for really.

I haven’t written anything seriously in rather a long time (that will become apparent very quickly if it hasn’t already) but it’s a part of myself that will not leave me and which I’m not ready to put aside just yet. So this blog is a bit of a writing practice in its own right (read: will probably be a bit shit in places) and I wanted to take a minute to thank you in advance for bearing with me while I figure this out. That, and the offensively long sentences.

Yours shambolically,

Hannah

P.s. general “zhuzhing up” to come once I’ve made friends with WordPress again