If it was a hobby horse - it'd be shot.

As I watched my batch of homemade lemonade [as part of a controlled come down from a previous Lemsip… lets' call it... habit] simmer, I came to the conclusion that I haven’t ever had much of a talent for choosing hobbies.

When I was younger I had a subscription to the Weekly World News and I would video record late night old sci-fi movies to watch the next day and take notes on how I would have improved the screenplay. Neither, I felt, was essentially great in the hobby stakes. So, back then, I concluded that if I could not successfully come up with a hobby I would do someone else’s hobby. It transpired that I didn’t have much of a talent for choosing the hobbies of other people either.

“You can come and do my hobby after school on Fridays, if you want?” a friend said, after I explained my situation. Excellent, I thought, count me in. Wow: it could be model boat sailing, computer game playing, sports – there are a lot of choices for a Friday styled hobby when you think about it.

Right. So the hobby is to replicate actual geology.
Using spool containers.
Right.

There we found ourselves, at the top of the staircase of my friend’s home on Friday, on our knees with plastic containers for storing camera spools, in our hands.

In these containers, my friend told me, was placed a few shards of glass, a pinch of rough sand and filled with sea-water. We had to shake up the containers in order to smooth the glass.

As such, as far as a hobby went, I was not particularly sold. You see, the thing about the geological process of smoothing glass shards and making sand is that, I believe, it doesn’t especially need any hobbyist intervention. In fact – speaking in geological time – spending 40 minutes on most Fridays (sometimes, if my paper had been delivered with a particularly worrying headline of Elvis being sighted working in a downtown hardware store, I couldn’t make it) shaking spool containers with a couple of bits of a lager bottle and some sea in isn’t quite going to [pardon the pun] cut it.

It turned out, as I got older, it wasn’t ever going to be the best when trying to woo a girl either: “What about after work? What are you into?” I am really quite sorry you asked me that… I kneel down and shake small containers with glass in on most Fridays. Sometimes though, when I do it, I daydream of being cooler.

Prologue:
The glass shards never did get as smooth or as interesting as those which could have been simply found at the beach [well you win again, Nature!], which incidentally, might have qualified as half a proper hobby? The friend went on to become a war hero. Greville Tombs ended up writing about this sorry passage of Friday afternoon spool container shaking in life in a blog.