TABLE TALK #163
There’s a particular kind of day that feels increasingly rare in adult life.
The sort where you start doing something at 9am - gardening, sanding, baking - and when you next look up it’s somehow mid-afternoon. Hours have vanished, your back aches, your hands are filthy, and your mind has been blissfully empty.
Somewhere along the way many of us stopped having hobbies and started having productivity. Leisure became optimisation, and those absorbing activities that once filled weekends, gently slipped away.
🍝 MAIN COURSE 🍝
The funny thing about hobbies is that they can feel a little indulgent.
Spending hours tending a vegetable patch. Restoring an old bicycle. Learning to throw clay pots that resemble slightly drunk cereal bowls. Devoting entire afternoons to fly fishing, leaf blowing, lime pickling.
None of it is strictly necessary, but the moment you’re knee-deep in it, the benefit becomes obvious.
A good hobby has a strange ability to clear mental clutter. Repetition helps. Physical movement helps. Digging, kneading, sawing - the sort of small mechanical acts that give your brain permission to wander or, better still, switch off entirely.
Psychologists sometimes call this “flow state”. Most hobbyists would probably just call it “losing track of time”. Either way, the effect is the same: you finish tired, slightly grubby, and oddly restored.
Perhaps the real reason hobbies matter, though, is that they return us to the world outside our phones.
The modern default when boredom strikes is to reach for the nearest screen. Five minutes of scrolling quietly becomes forty. You emerge with a vague sense of agitation and absolutely nothing to show for it.
A hobby interrupts that loop.
Instead of watching other people do things, you start doing something yourself. Often badly at first. Often with a mild sense of embarrassment. But that’s part of the appeal. Hobbies allow you to be a beginner again - an underrated pleasure once adult life convinces you you’re meant to be competent at everything.
And they do something else too: they introduce you to people you would otherwise never meet.
People who gather to discuss antique radios, fermentation techniques, miniature railways, cold-water swimming, historical sword-fighting, competitive cabbage growing, or the careful cultivation of dahlias.
Photo Credit: PA Media
🍮 SWEET ENDINGS 🍮
The good news is that hobbies rarely require the elaborate infrastructure we imagine. You don’t need a studio, a workshop, or a shed filled with gleaming equipment. Often you just need time and a willingness to be terrible at something.
A surprising number of hobbies are practically free. Old instruments appear endlessly on Facebook Marketplace. Gardening requires little more than dirt and stubbornness. The internet is now full of people enthusiastically explaining how to mend chairs, carve spoons, pickle vegetables, repair watches or grow mushrooms in a cupboard.
None of which needs to be monetised. Or turned into a “side hustle”. Or justified on LinkedIn. A hobby’s only real job is to absorb you for a while - and leave you better for it.
🍷 WHAT'S NEW
FROM
WEDNESDAY'S DOMAINE? 🍷
One of my more reliable hobbies is what can only really be described as grocery tourism.
Drop me into any new town or city and if there’s a deli, grocer or bottle shop in sight, I’m in. Having a proper nose around. Always convinced there’s something new to discover. A magpie for interesting shelves.
Which is why, even before launching the brand, I spent a fair bit of time hovering around the No&Low sections. There’s been real progress, but I often come away thinking there’s more to be done.
It’s a thought I haven’t quite been able to shake - and the reason we’ve been working on a few new things of our own.
More very, very soon.
Until then,
Luke x