A bit of bodgery…

Solid Fuel Kettle - Jason Lane

I have to admit to being a bit of a bodger - not, of course, that this is a wholly negative thing. The original bodgers were very fine wood turners who made furniture from the green woods around High Wycombe. Unfortunately, I’m not writing about them today, I’m writing about that other sort of bodger, the ones that are often confused with ‘botchers’ but aren’t and who are nothing to do with butchers by the way.

Butchers prepare and sell meat, whilst bodgers (who may have been named after badgers as they tended to live in rough shelters in the woods) mend stuff in unexpected and imaginative ways.

Are you following this? I don’t want to botch it up.

Bodging, at its purest, is an art form. It’s almost Heath Robinson - not quite, but it does require the same thought processes and the same kind of inventive, imaginative approach.

Anyone can repair anything if they have the right tools, skills, knowledge, the right parts, an instruction manual and patience. But bodging is more difficult, more cerebral by necessity. After all, it isn’t easy to get a job done using whatever tools and materials come to hand and which, whilst not necessarily elegant, is nevertheless successful in being more than serviceable.

Raw plugs, who needs them? I once fixed a heavy mirror to a wall using some kindling, a penknife, two rusty screws I found in the road, and a large stone. It’s still hanging today without a wobble. I have a door frame that’s kept together with superglue and dressmaking pins, a stool upholstered with an old scarf and thumb tacks, a kitchen cabinet cornice held in place with Wrigley’s chewing gum, a curtain rail made from a bamboo garden cane, I once splinted a broken arm with two wooden spoons and some parcel tape... the list goes on and on.

String, coat-hangers, candle wax, clothes pegs, those useful bits and pieces of no apparent use that you find at the back of drawers. This is the stuff of bodging. Why fetch the saw when you have a bread knife to hand? So we’ve lost that allan key but we do have a spoon! I’m not paying for that when I can make it from a bit of old rubber from a Wellington boot. Yeah, who needs a bloody screwdriver when you’ve got a brick?

Of course, a bodged job should never be confused with a ‘botched’ job. A botched job is a poor, incompetent, shoddy, unworkable, incomplete example of work at its very worst. The word ‘botch’ itself is derived from the mediaeval word for a bruise or carbuncle – as in ‘that am a nastye botch youst haffe on thou heade Baldric’.

There’s something very, very, worthy of merit in a ‘bodge’, like its close kin the ‘fudge’, it’s serviceable, it works and it’s worthy of self-congratulation. Well done me! A ‘botched’ job, on the other hand, most certainly isn’t – a botch is a total failure and only worth a boo… BOOOOOOOOOOO!

Of course a ‘bodge’ can become a ‘botch’ when it doesn’t work, and a botch can be a bitch. I’ve had my fair share of those (botches and bitches), like the time I tried to fix a leak in the bathroom with electrical tape (don’t ask). Yes, I’ve had my ‘bodging’ experiences and it’s not that I don’t have the tools to do the job, I do. Of course finding them is a different matter and even bothering to look a little bit too much trouble as I know that I’m not going to find them anyway. Besides, there’s something so satisfying in taking a few random bits that shouldn’t do the job and making them do it anyway. It’s a challenge, a test of intellect, invention at its very best… it’s what made the British Empire great

Well, that and cricket.

Two words: 'survival skills'. Ray Mears is an expert bodger, as are monkeys and Kevin McCloud.

So, vive la ‘bodge’, up to the art of ‘bodgery’ and long live ‘bodgers’ everywhere!