A Handmade Contingency Plan

Anyone who was foolish enough to note that I have a Tumblr feed down the side of this blog might have noticed the following phrase has been sitting there for a few months:

Ich möchte (und werde) eine Spielzeugmacherin sein!

(And, no, I don't update my Tumblr page often, so there's almost no need to keep track of that feed...)

Anyway, if you had a familiarity with German (or could use Google Translator) you would have noticed that this is my best attempt to say the following:

"I would like to (and shall) be a toymaker."

In other blogs in other places I've been rambling about wanting to own a toy shop and wanting to make toys.  I know, as a librarian, I should have a strong hankering to own a book shop and write novels.  I want to do that, too.  But - even more than being someone who owns a book shop and writes novels - I want to own a toyshop and make toys.

Part of the reason for this is I have a desire to make something people can hold.  Okay, people can hold books, so that's probably not the best way to phrase this.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I want to be able to make things with my hands - not just my brain - that require no translation.  A teddy bear is a teddy bear, no matter where you are in the world.

I like the idea that I could up-stumps and move to a place where I barely speak the language - but still be able to make a living by creating something that people will love.  I could even be itinerant, for a while, and sell hand-made toys in markets all over the globe.  Doesn't that sound perfectly marvellous?

And I think teddy bears will still be relevant after the Great Wipe.

The Great Wipe is always a possibility.  A good solar flair (or an errant nuclear reactor in the wrong place) is all it will take for our eSociety to lose everything electronic.  Then what will we have to show for ourselves?  I do almost all of my writing on a computer, and rarely (if ever) print any of it out as a hard copy.  When the solar flair wipes the memory on all my electronic devices (it can, and one day it will), all of my pointless scribblings really will be pointless.

And non-existent.

And what good will it do me to be a librarian in this heavily digitised age if everything digital is gone?

My job (as it is) becomes completely irrelevant if a possum dies in an inconvenient location and takes out the power supply.  You can scoff if you will, but it has already happened twice.  Twice.

Not the same possum, obviously.  And, granted, the second time it happened it only took out a couple of buildings and the library still had power, so I have only been rendered completely superfluous by a possum dying once - but it could have happened again.

It could still happen again.  Anything is possible.

So, what I want is to develop a set of skills that are not dependant on a power supply.

If I can sew and perform feats of basic woodwork using nothing but my own hands and some human-powered tools, then I'll be able to do something useful regardless of what manner of decay and disarray society finds itself in after it can no longer turn on electricity with a flick of the switch.

It will also be useful should I find myself accidentally sent back in time.  A teddy bear is a teddy bear no matter when you are in the world.*

Some people may think it is unnecessary to create a contingency plan for time travel or surviving the electronic apocalypse - but, hey, at least my crazy survivalist plan involves hand-stitching plush toys and whittling trains out of found wood.  I think that's much better than building an underground bunker and filling it with automatic rifles, don't you?

*Prior to the early 20th Century most people won't know it's a teddy bear - but teddy bears are inherently lovely, so I don't see why I wouldn't be able to introduce them anachronistically early.  I'll be creating a new alternate time-stream simply by existing in the past, so I may as well have fun with it.