James May

May on motoring DIY

I drove past a thatched cottage in the countryside the other day. Amazing, it was. I've no real idea of how thatching is done, but I know it involves making a whole roof, and a waterproof one at that, out of nothing more than a load of old twigs. Centuries ago, I suppose there must have been hundreds, if not thousands, of people who knew how to thatch roofs, which is why we have ‘Thatcher' as a surname.

These days, there are probably only a handful. Mind you, there are only a handful of thatched houses in 2011, and that's probably just as well. My house has proper tiles on the roof, and to be honest, I wouldn't want to go to bed under a bonfire constructed by Baden-Powell himself.

Still: as long as the thatched cottage survives, there will be people around who can mend its roof. The skill will become highly specialised, but I can't see it dying out.

Many people are worried about this sort of thing. Only the other day, I heard some campanologists on the radio complaining that the art of bell-ringing would soon disappear, because no young people were interested in it.

I doubt it, really, because there will always be a few medievalists drawn to the risk of hanging themselves as a Sunday morning pastime, and, as long as there are, bells will be swungen. But let's just say that absolutely no youths develop an interest in bell-ringing. In another 50 years' time, the skill could indeed vanish. That's a terrible thing, isn't it?

Not really. It will only vanish if no one is interested, and if no one is interested in bell-ringing, no one will care that it's gone. I'm assuming that nobody these days knows how to bait a bear or behead someone with a pikestaff, and perhaps someone lamented the decline of these traditional crafts on ye Today programme in the 18th century, but it hardly matters now.

When I was a boy, I could operate the school's spirit duplicator, or ‘Ditto Machine'. If you don't know what one of these is, it's a primitive form of photocopier that reproduced a master document, from a drum, using special inks dissolved in meths.

I bet nobody from the generation below mine can still work one of these. Good. They were rubbish, and the meths made all the kids a bit high. So it doesn't matter that the ancient skill of operating the Ditto has died out, because we now have the Hewlett-Packard C4200-series combined digital scanner and photocopier, and I bet nobody in 1973 could have got that going.

Other skills that have largely died out but that we're not missing include pargeting, curing lunacy with leeches, reading the colour-coding on transistors, playing the hurdy-gurdy, tuning a crystal radio set, digging canals and hand-carving gargoyles for new cathedrals. These have largely been forgotten, because we don't need them.

Does it matter, then - and I keep being told that it does - that no one can mend their own car these days? Fifty years ago, any self-respecting bloke knew how to set the contact breakers on an Austin A35 blah blah blah and regrind the valves blah blah blah carburettor idle adjustment blah blah grease nipple.

But I'm getting slightly bored with old giffers saying things like: "Well, of course, in my day, when your car went wrong, you knew how to fix it yourself." What they forget is that in their day, the car went wrong every 15 minutes.

The fact that no one can do this sort of thing any more is great news, because it shows how much better the car has become. People didn't spend all that time under the bonnet for the purposes of self-improvement. They did it because their cars were crap. Now they're better, and we can move on from the misery of the distributor cap.

Look - I like mucking about with old stuff and trying to mend it. I find it engaging, and I think it's good for the soul. But I'm a pervert. There are enough other perverts around to keep a few special old things in order, but the rest of you needn't worry about it. What was once part of the yoke of the human conscience is now just a hobby for those who want it.

Many of the old skills of car ownership have disappeared in my motoring lifetime, but new and more relevant skills have emerged to replace them, such as configuring the seats in an MPV or fitting a bangin' stereo.

And I'll tell you what's even more amazing than the thatching job. Last week, I met a man who could operate the satnav in a Maserati.