I Am the Worst Potter in the Room and I'm Not Sorry

There's a shelf in my kitchen with four objects on it and every single one is a disaster. A mug with a handle that droops like a wilting flower. A dish that was meant to be round. A bowl that looks like a bad Yorkshire pudding, technically functional, spiritually bleak. And one thing that began as a jug and died of exposure to open air, so now it's a paperweight with ambitions.

I made all of them. I paid £96 for ten Thursday evenings at a leisure centre to make them. And I would like to formally argue that this is a good use of time, money and self-esteem.

The first terrible bowl

I'd like to say the first week was liberating. It wasn't. It was grimly tense.

The room smelled of damp clay and instant coffee, there were eleven of us on plastic chairs, and everyone was being extremely polite in that British way where we all pretended we hadn't noticed we were rubbish. When the teacher came round to show me how to pull up the walls of my bowl, it collapsed. Not dramatically, just sort of flopped over sideways, like it had heard some bad news.

I could feel the heat going up my neck. Which is mad, isn't it? Nobody in that room expected me to be good. I'd never done it before. The standard at the start of anything is that you will be terrible, and yet somehow I'd arrived with a private assumption that by nine o'clock I'd have made something worth showing my sister.

By week three I'd stopped apologising to the clay. That's the big progression. Not skill. Just the absence of apologising.

We've quietly decided adults aren't allowed to be bad at things

Here's the pattern I've noticed in myself and basically everyone I know. As children, we did any number of things badly and thought nothing of it. Nobody expects a seven-year-old's recorder playing to be pleasant. Then at some point around sixteen we start protecting our image, and by thirty we've got a firm list of things we've decided we're "not the sort of person who does".

Try something new as an adult and you feel like you need a plausible excuse. "I'm just doing it for the stress relief," I said, before anyone had asked. As if I needed to pre-emptively explain why I hadn't yet produced something gallery-worthy.

And the outcome of that is a huge number of people who would quite like to paint, or sing, or make a lopsided pot, and who never do any of it because they can't face being seen at the bottom of the ladder.

The glow-up economy has a lot to answer for

Scroll for ten minutes and you'll find the same format over and over. First attempt versus attempt one hundred. Six months of progress, edited into forty seconds. The ugly early version shown for a laugh, then discarded in favour of the finished, glossy, sellable thing.

I'm not going to pretend I don't enjoy watching those videos. Some of them are genuinely lovely. But as a way of understanding how to start anything, they're a con, because they skip the entire bit that makes the hobby worth having. They show the beginning as a punchline rather than a stage.

What they teach you, without meaning to, is that being bad is a phase to be got through as quickly as possible and never mentioned again. What they don't show you is the week where you made the same mistake for the fourth time and then, on the fifth, didn't. There's not much of a thumbnail in that.

What the terrible pot actually gives you

Two things, as far as I can work out.

The first is that an hour and a half with your hands in clay turns out to be a proper holiday from your own head. You cannot plan this year's Christmas shopping while centring a lump of clay on a wheel. Well, you can, and then it flies off and hits the wall, which is a lesson in itself.

The second is that being demonstrably rubbish in a room full of people is a surprisingly useful thing to practise. Two of the others in my class are much better than me, and I've made my peace with that. One still can't get a handle to stay on. We have a chat, we compare disasters, we go home. Nobody has ever asked to see my portfolio.

I'm not going to pretend the wonky mug holds tea particularly well. It does not. It's too heavy on one side and my partner has quietly stopped using it. But it's on the shelf, it's mine, and it exists because I spent nine weeks being worse at something than I was the week before and turned up anyway.

If you fancy being bad at something

A few practical bits, based on my own experience.

Book an evening class rather than a one-off workshop. One session is an audition. A term is a habit, and you can't be judged on a habit.

Go in the first week, not the fifth. It's much easier to be the worst in the room when half the room is equally lost and everyone's still learning each other's names.

Don't tell anyone what you're making until you've made it. Not because of shame, but because saying it out loud to an expectant audience turns it into a performance. Tell them after. Or show them, like I have, and let them be kind about it.

And accept that the first four things will be bad. Not "bad for a beginner". Just bad. Mine are bad. I like them enormously and I'd rather have a wonky bowl than another year of thinking about it.

The spring term starts in January. I've already signed up, and I'm fully intending to be the worst in the room again, because I know exactly which bit I want to get wrong this time.