I’ve spent the last hour looking for a cobbler after going to my usual guy and finding the doors of his workshop tightly and, I suspect, permanently closed.
The last time I went to pick up my repaired shoes, he told me that he felt too old and tired to go on working for much longer. He sadly said to me that fewer and fewer people were visiting his shop and that his children weren’t interested in continuing what he had started.
The shop was a sad, dusty shell that hinted heavily at better days and left me feeling more than a bit haunted; however, I still didn’t feel as bad as I did when I visited the haberdashery shop of my old seamstress a couple of weeks ago only to find the whole place deserted.
For too long, our authorities have ignored the gaping hole in our trade career market, and the situation has become critical. The focus has been on pushing more and more people into university for decades now, and no allowances have been made for any of our fast-vanishing trades.
In a country of sometimes third-rate professionals, we have lost a place for the very people who once formed the foundation of society. Even village bakeries are fast disappearing, swallowed up by ubiquitous convenience stores that are clones of each other and sell the same products.
While our authorities continue to present trade careers as somehow inferior to their university counterparts, the service gaps are only going to continue to increase in our society. We need to start sending a new message to our fellow countrypeople that a country that cannot offer its people essential services is truly poor and not one where every second person has a degree.
No academic achievement is going to be of any help if our toilets don’t work, and we have to throw out our shoes every time we wear them out a little because we have no one to fix them.
I can’t believe that I have to say this in 2024, but every job is useful, needed and has an inherent dignity, and it’s time our policies started to reflect that.
Does no one think that it’s time to re-open trade schools and force open the door to new jobs and a fresh way of looking at manual labour? As the famous quote goes: “There are no menial jobs, only menial attitudes.”
