The Wrong Trousers

I’ve discovered that learning to be a carpenter makes me part of a tribe. The college where I’m learning the basics of carpentry (Try not to cut your finger off, etc) teaches other skills as well, so when we emerge from our workshop pulling sawdust out of our ears, we’re suddenly surrounded by people learning interior decoration, housebuilding, car repair, and half a dozen other things, all standing in little tribal groups.

You can tell what everyone is learning because every tribe has a different colour of trousers. The decorators have white, or a base of white at least, with all manner of colours on top, The car mechanics wear blue, the electricians have grey; and the very strange people learning house building favour traditional black corduroy. We all lurk in ‘our’ part of the campus every day as if someone had marked out territory boundaries with paint.

We don’t have this in the UK: probably because people change career much more frequently, and because courses in most trades last a matter of months rather than years. In Germany I’m not permitted to call myself a ‘carpenter’ until 2015 when I (hopefully) pass the exam and I’m entered on the register of craft persons. The same applies to the people learning to fix cars or paint houses: everyone has to have an apprenticeship lasting a minimum of two years, and the expectation is that they will keep working in their trade for their entire career, and in some cases for the same employer.

Most carpenters here wear khaki, the better for hiding sawdust, except for the occasional rebels and one Brit who failed to appreciate the significance of this and turned up wearing grey.

Not that that’s important of course: I certainly did not just order a pair of Khaki trousers because I want it to be obvious that I’m learning to be a carpenter and not an electrician.

I needed a new pair of trousers anyway.

I hope that is understood.