Callum Robinson, on the look of a shocked customer who, holding the price tag of a hand-crafted table, “fixed me with an expression of such disbelief, such towering contempt, that it takes my breath away”:

What I want to say is this: forget for a moment the weeks it took to handcraft this fine solid elm table, forget the years of experience brought to bear by the maker, the thousands of hours of training and practice, the costly mistakes, the electricity, insurance and overheads, the ream of arborists who brought down the tree, the sawyer who milled and dried the boards, the man in front of you, rooted to the spot, who painstakingly selected each one before handing over many hundreds of pounds for the privilege, and think on this—this table might last a hundred years, it might last four hundred. Your children’s children might still be sitting around it when you are but a memory. A vaguely amphibian headshot gathering dust on the mantel. All this and more I want to say, but of course I don’t. I probably couldn’t. My jaw is clenched so tightly that it might as well be wired shut.