A Tale of Two Butterdishes

More than a decade ago we bought a handpainted terracotta butter dish at a market in Hungary. A few years after that something fell from a high shelf onto the dish part of it, shattering it. 

I went back to the market where we'd bought the dish, to see if I could find a pretty new one. There was nothing anywhere near as nice for sale. I pieced the broken bits of the dish together and saw that there was the name of the maker on the bottom. I looked online and discovered the maker had gone mad and decided to make things that looked as if they were part of a Disney franchise. 

I glued the dish together and we went on using it, even though it looked almost as bad as the many things in my grandmother's house that at some point had been broken and then not only glued but stapled together with exposed rivets. At least our mended butter dish didn't have visible rivets - but it was (is) still a bit of a mess, except when photographed from flattering angles.

Yesterday I decided to go to a folkloric shop I often pass, to see if I could find a replacement for our butter dish. I did - sort of. 

It is a butter dish made by the same company that made the original one. They have reverted to their earlier designs. 

This new butter dish cost a fantastic amount and, while I will use it, I will also go on using the old one until it has completely disintegrated. This is because, even in its broken state, it is so much nicer than its modern cousin. 

And the reason it is so much nicer is because someone took greater care in making the original butter dish. Someone decided not to cut corners. 

For instance, this is the handle of the lid on the old one:

And this is the handle of the lid on the new one:

At some point, someone thought: "Why bother with that ten minutes extra, painting the lines on the handle. Just leave it. It's not worth it."

The same decision was made when it came to the rest of the decoration. Several lines and quite a bit of painstaking dotted decoration have been eliminated. The new dish cost a great deal more than the old one and yet half has much effort went into it. 

For years, I've thought this article by James Meek was the best exposition of the way in which greed has made things worse in daily life and become the thing that creates change but no positive progress. But now I wonder if our two butter dishes demonstrate the story better. 

Although perhaps they are a symptom of something that may be even more dangerous for a civilisation: the waning of craftsmanship - and tangible evidence that fewer and fewer people take pleasure in taking pains.