Cobbler, Stick To Your Last

Yesterday I came across the saying, ‘Cobbler, stick to your last’. Apparently it has ancient Greek and Latin origins involving shoe-making on lasts.

It means that you should do the work that you’re skilled at, and not try to interfere with, or do the work of, others experts who have their skills and abilities…

So when politicians interfered in education, pretending they knew how to teach and run a school I could have said ‘Cobbler, stick to your last’. Generally, they were talking cobblers…

Harleston House Dementia Care Home in Lowestoft launched a campaign to help a local shelter by donating warm items for adults and babies.

Folk from church heard about it. Our ‘Knit and Natter’ group, at our Whitton Life Community Hub, agreed to help. Leaders Angie and Paula challenged the group to make 50 hats. They exceeded expectations by making 186 – and were pictured in the local paper.

Cobblers and lasts? Here expert knitters stuck to their needles!

Last night we watched the stage adaptation of ‘The Girl on the Train’…

…Rachel Watson watches a couple through the train window every day… They appears to be happy and in love. … The woman she’s been secretly watching suddenly disappears… She finds herself as a witness and even a suspect…

It’s a thrilling mystery, beautifully produced… Rachel Watson’s a vulnerable woman with faults and failings, she’s not a detective, no cobbler with a last to stick to, but somehow, she discovers truth and the mystery’s solved.

Yesterday, I was listening to the Coldplay version of The Proclaimers’ beautiful song ‘Sunshine On Leith’:

My heart was broken
My heart was broken
You saw it, you claimed it
You touched it, you saved it…

I wondered if mending broken hearts was a ‘cobbler-and-last’ job – just for experts, or whether it’s something we all can do.

I remembered the words describing Jesus’ mission as being ‘to bind up the broken hearted’. As a Jesus-follower perhaps that should be my cobbler’s last that I should stick to…