Do you remember 2020? That year that Nothing Happened?

I can remember, quite clearly, the weekend lockdown started in the UK. I did the local ParkRun with two friends. There is a photo somebody took of the three of us standing there looking as athletic as we possibly could for blokes in their mid-40s, a fairly low bar to hurdle (though unlikely, with my knees). That evening, one of the friends had his birthday, so we went into Farnham and laughed and joked and drank until it was time to stumble forth into the good night. As we walked the several miles home, we talked and stopped for a kebab and then stumbled some more. As we eventually reached our parting point, we hugged and laughed and said – and I can remember this quite vividly – “see you in two weeks lads”. And then didn’t see them in person for about three months.

It turned out, that the period over the first half of 2020 and then into 2021 was the perfect time to have a Midlife Crisis! Sure, we all did what everyone else did – banana bread, cupcakes, sweating our bits off trying to keep up with Joe Wicks on the telly. We went all out on the “Taking Our Daily Walk” bit. I actually started running MORE than pre-lockdown once we were allowed out in public a bit. I did all this and more. I rediscovered a love of Subbuteo, if not any aptitude for playing it, so much so that I purchased a fair quantity of blank teams just so that I could paint slightly more obscure kits onto their plastic bodies. Thus, I have one completed Wellington Phoenix kit, and half a Hendon kit (top only) in a box that hasn’t been touched since we were let outside again.

I grew my hair. Partly as I didn’t need to get it cut as I wasn’t in public. And by the time we were allowed to play with our friends again, I was so used to having longish hair that I just kept growing it. Two years later it was halfway down my back and I looked cool (my memory of it) / absolutely horrific (every other member of my families take). It was good for the one Heavy Metal gig that I went to over that period, though Slay Duggee didn’t really have need for middle-aged blokes in the mosh-pit, seen as they were entirely aimed at infant-aged metallers (an aside, I did also get my hair cut just before lockdown started, and somehow had my ear burnt by the barber. I was in that much pain, my wife was close to bringing me to hospital. It’s put me off barbers ever since).

Another thing that we did was the online weekly catch-up with friends. This was the only thing that needed planning. Could everyone do Wednesday night, about 7.30? Of course they could, not like there was anything else to do! After a few weeks of “what you been up to?” conversations drawing the exact same answers (“nothing much, you?”), our group decided to spice things up a bit by having a quiz night. About eight of us, on Zoom, with the role of quizmaster on rotation. Everyone tried to make their answers as answerable as possible, but it was only natural for people’s favourite subjects to take over, giving some of the group absolutely no chance of answering any of the questions (I really struggled on the Disney round, but I’m sure a lot of the group had issues with my Britpop round, especially the two who hadn’t lived in the UK until this century, and the other girl who hadn’t been born by that stage).

After one particularly long quiz night (I was in the Henry Kelly role that week, my favourite question being to ask them what the average Parkrun time was for our entire group – nobody got within five minutes of the correct answer), a few of us stayed on the video to have some beers and talk about football. It was long and rambling and from my end, several rather enjoyable cans of Red Stripe were sunk. The conversation moved onto classic football shirts, and we also started online searches for our best kits (Denmark’s kit from Mexico 86 is obviously the correct answer here). At some stage it morphed into a chat about music, but by this stage the Red Stripe was starting to tire me out after such a long and productive evening. I think I made my excuses and tottered off to bed.

Three weeks later, an unmarked cardboard box arrived. From China.

I assumed that it must have been for one of our neighbours, so left it for a bit. Only when my wife asked me what I had ordered did I bother to read the delivery label. It was addressed to me. No markings on the box, which looked a little bashed about. I shook the box. It rattled. I couldn’t tell if this was a good thing or a bad thing. I hadn’t ordered anything for a while, so I tried to guess what was inside, rather than do the obvious thing and actually open the box. By this time, my daughter had wandered over to see what I was doing. After a while, and with still no idea of the contents of the box, I gave in and opened the mystery package. So flimsy was the cardboard that once I pulled the cellotape off the side of the box, it fell apart and the items inside spilled onto the floor.

It appears that I had purchased a ukulele. Well, sort of.

All the pieces of the ukulele were on the floor. Just that none of them were attached to each other. Ah, it was a kit. I had to assemble it. Right. Ah yes, a question from the lady on the sofa over there. Why had I bought a build-your-own-ukulele kit you say? Um, absolutely no idea. I went through my bank transactions to see firstly when I had purchased this and secondly how much it had cost me, when it became clear why I had purchased it: alcohol. The transaction on my credit card was from the quiz night after party. I must have semi-coherently decided that I should buy a ukulele. Naturally.

Our daughter was delighted with something to make, even though she had zero idea what it was. To be fair, this was only a few percentage points lower than her father. I knew it was a smaller version of a guitar and George Formby used to play one. Beyond that, nothing. But our offspring decided this was something that must be tackled immediately, especially when she seen the little paint set lying next to the body of the ukulele. Fortunately, my wife is more craft-oriented that me, and said it would probably be best to research what to do first rather than rushing headfirst into a gluey, paint-covered disaster.

I have not been the most practical person ever to pick up a glue-stick, so even I was aware that I would need to properly investigate how to put the various bits of wood together. Youtube videos were watched. Forums were joined, as were Facebook groups, trying to gather tips and knowledge. A lot of them were of no practical use, as they were for people who were building proper ukulele’s entirely from scratch – sourcing and moulding the wood, choosing the right type of paints to get the best sounds, the best way to align the neck – and not for those people who’d drunkenly purchased some cheap kids toy from China. These weren’t my people.

Eventually, I found one page that managed to provide step-by-step idiot guides to putting it all together. I would, it turned out, require quite a number of additional items – some of which were included in the box, but were of such cheap quality that using them would have been entirely detrimental to the ukulele’s welfare. The glue came in a tube that oozed out half it’s contents the moment you opened it. The strings provided were all exactly the same. The tuners were the best part – they were all for the same side of the ukulele. All four of them. And their design meant that they couldn’t just be turned around. And the paint pots provided, well our daughter used them to paint me a nice picture. So at least they were of some practical use.

This £8.87 ukulele was starting to get more expensive. Fortunately, we had nothing else to spend our money on, so our first daily trip was spent at B&Q in Farnborough. I tried to look as manly as possible in a place were I was wildly out of my depth. I put on my best “geezer at B&Q” face, and was undone immediately by my daughter giving my some pink paint. The ukulele was going to be pink. Obviously. We purchased some industrial strength glue – the kind of stuff that did for Judge Doom at the end of Who Framed Roger Rabbit – and various grades of sandpaper. Until this point in my life, I wasn’t even aware there were different types of sandpaper, I had just assumed they were different colours in the same way that paper is different colours – it was just which one you liked the most. As I say, totally out of my depth.

So the first thing we did when we got home was to take our chairs, and my phone to blast some tunes out, and sat in the car-park, me and my daughter sand-papering our little pieces of wood. And it was….lovely. It was therapeutic for us, and was just nice to sit and do something chilled with the three year-old. And once we’d finished sand-papering for the day, we’d pack our stuff up, and head back upstairs, and she’d talk about the ukulele, and what she wanted it to look like, and my heartstrings sung like the rather expensive new strings that I had ordered online for our little musical instrument. I was loving spending those moments with her, both of us lost in our little worlds away from all the Other Stuff in the world.

A few days later, we went down to paint our bits of wood – me in charge of the body, her painting the neck and headstock (I now knew all the correct terminology). We started with a primer, plain white, and let that dry overnight in the bath. The next day, we decided that it needed another coat (I say we: I decided and she nodded knowledgably in agreement), so we carried our chairs, music and snacks down to the car-park and added another layer of whiteness to the parts. Then it was back upstairs for more bath-drying, where it sat for a few days. From there, it was time to add colour and glamour to it. The pink chosen was fairly vibrant, but also needed a few coats to really dazzle. It came out alright in the end. We were both delighted with how the parts were coming along. So far.

From here on, I was pretty much on my own. The next part – attaching the neck to the body – was the bit I didn’t want to mess up. I watch more video demonstrations online, and did a few dry-runs without any glue to make sure I knew what I was doing (I didn’t). This is where I noticed something – the neck didn’t sit flush on the top of the body. In my early eagerness with the sandpaper, I have over-sanded one corner of the neck. Only a few millimetres, but enough that there was a small gap. There was nothing I could do about it, apart from try and sand it down all around. In the end, I decided there was only one way of sorting it – hope that the super-glue/cement that I had purchased was strong enough to hold the neck in place, even with one of the corners missing (spoiler alert: it did). After another day of drying, and poking it gently like a hibernating teddy, the last connecting item, the fret-board, was attached, using the same wonder-glue and four clamps, taken from various draws and boxes of Stuff that were in the spare room. Another few days of not daring to go too close in case it all fell apart under a particularly strong gaze, and it was time to pick it up and play pretend guitar with.

It worked. Everything held together, even under our daughter’s not-quite-so-gentle “playing”. There was now the task of attaching the newly-purchased-and-correctly-oriented tuners. A few small screws were hammered in (once it was clear that trying to screw them in wasn’t working for reasons that are still entirely unclear to me), and we now had something resembling an actual ukulele – bearing in mind our daughter’s size, it also looked like a real guitar. Now it was just (ha!) a matter of attaching the shiny new strings to it. More video analysis, and more test runs were performed before I took the final plunge and wound them into place. Finally, it was time to cut the excess strings at the top, and like a dad cutting the umbilical cord of life, I was able to proudly hand the lovely pink ukulele over to my daughter.

She played it for a few seconds then went off to watch Paw Patrol.

Despite paying about 400% extra in materials, I was immensely proud of our creation. We still have it now, in its own ukulele bag, which holds a few tuners and some picks that we’ve purchased over the years. Some band stickers that I’ve accumulated from various music magazines since the 1990s now adorn it in places, though she has now idea who Suede or Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine are. It’s appeared in the artwork for a chart-bothering album. One of my favourite artists, Penfriend (the artist also known as Laura Kidd, and previously She Makes War) crowd-funded her last album “House Of Stories”. She asked for personal items and stories to be sent in to feature in the artwork and also in the book to accompany the album. I sent in the ukulele, wrote some blurb to go with it, and it is now proudly part of another self-funded album from Laura that has charted, a legacy that will be around likely longer than the ukulele ultimately will.

It’s worth noting also that neither of us can play it properly.