The red gum veneers for the fireplace surround are glued to their MDF ground now, and the job for the week has been filling holes. Every piece is a galaxy of them — borer tracks, gum veins, collapsed voids and pin holes. If one is dumb enough to work in red gum, one is forced to go over each one with a combination of CA glue, tinted epoxy, putty or shellac-wax with a palette knife and a bangin' murder mystery podcast booming out of the speakers. It isn't skilled work, but it does take an off-kilter disposition. It's the sort of thing you'd hand to a machine if you could, but no machine can be bothered because there's no money in caring about a hole the size of a pin head.

No even close to complete.

The desk got the same misery: sanded, grain-filled, sanded again; the frame-and-panel top is glued up and sitting in clamps which is the one thing this week I've allowed myself to feel good about. The rest was sanding. Sanding, then some more sanding. And just for fun, some more sanding.

So naturally this is the week someone asked me to give a talk on the meaning of craft in the age of AI.

I've been dwelling on it between whodunnits and I can't land it. One minute I feel completely safe: you can't take a living from a man who barely has one, and the robots are welcome to my tax return. The machine already came for me once and it had me tied to a desk, well fed and well paid, before I fled to the shed. It's welcome to whatever is left of that career.

Then I go quietly hopeful, because "human made" has already become a thing people go looking for the way everyone went bananas for sourdough after 50 years of sliced white. The more the world fills with robot slop, the more a certain sort of person wants the thing with fingerprints all over it. Maybe the robots will do me a favour.

And then the cantankerous, miserable third voice — my default — growls that pontificating on the meaning of craft is a pursuit for people who don't do any work: people with an artist's statement and clean hands, who describe a shelf as an exploration in horizontality and survive on grants. I have a desk in clamps and a hundred and one holes to fill. In short, I have work to get on with so if you don't mind leaving me alone to do it that'd be great.

I haven't worked out which of the three, or which combination of the three, is right. Maybe I'm not meant to.

Anyways, Monday promises more sanding. At least it's the weekend between here and there.