Old men, wrote TS Eliot, ought to be explorers. But you don’t have to cross oceans or conquer the highest peaks to be an adventurer. You can create a world of the imagination without leaving home.
Never mind Hobbits. We are a nation of hobbyists. Whether growing carrots in an allotment (just try getting a shed!), mending clocks, or casting a rod upon the water of an unpromising canal, men of all ages are busy. Some women, too, but it is men who do most of the tinkering, sawing, and general messing about.
Hobbies do not belong exclusively to the British. Antonin Dvořák, the great Bohemian composer, took a child-like delight in spotting trains. On his visits to this country he could be found in railway stations, wreathed in smoke, happy as a lark.
Stephen Sondheim, the Master of Broadway, kept hundreds of puzzle books in his Manhattan townhouse. Rossini, in his non-operatic moments, was a talented cook.
But the island race is a breed apart. Collecting stamps, repairing vintage cars, grooming dogs, growing roses, bell-ringing – there is hardly anything the British do not do, singly or in companionable groups.
And it does us good. Three social activities, we are told, help to keep us happy, or at least dispel the blues of solitude. Not that you need a think tank or self-help guru to remind us of what makes for a healthy life.
Michael Gambon, who lit up so many stages, was one of the supreme domestic enthusiasts. There wasn’t a car he could not strip down to its component parts, and put back together. He handled clocks with the assurance of an auctioneer, owned more than 800 guns, played chess, and qualified as a pilot.
Daniel Harding, the Oxonian who will soon be principal conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, flies planes for Air France when he is not on the podium. Last year he flew members of his Santa Cecilia orchestra from Rome to Paris!
In sheds across the kingdom men who will never see 60 again keep themselves busy, making things that may be practical, or may serve no purpose at all other than to give pleasure to the maker.
The Monty Python team may have mocked Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson for his obsession. But their humour, as so often, failed to disguise an affection for those habits that make the British British. We have always been a nation of gifted amateurs.
Rolling wheels of cheese down a hill in Gloucestershire. Dressing wells in Derbyshire. Hurling Black Puddings in Ramsbottom. Dressing up as Pearly Kings and Queens in London. Well, it takes all sorts.
Each Sunday you can see them in their cars, the hobbyists and tinkerers, returning from a weekend dedicated to the pursuit of simple pleasures. The beach-combers, the mushroom-pickers, the hang-gliders, or just the faintly curious, looking for something they cannot define.
Then there are those who remain at home, like Larkin’s Mr Bleaney, “plugging at the four aways”. Human life never lacks interest. In thousands of unconsidered houses, far from Knightsbridge or Camden Town, people are getting on with the business of living.
Larkin visited country churches, though he was not a believer. For others it may be a fair, where you can pick up a cow-creamer or a piece of Wedgwood. Explorers all, in their way. And as Eliot also wrote, we shall not cease from exploration.