The board with the uneven star

In Khan el-Khalili, a backgammon board inlaid by hand never quite matches its neighbour. One star on the lid has a point slightly shorter than the rest. A strip of shell sits a hair off line. Turn two boards over and the joints are finished differently, because two different afternoons went into them.

A few streets away, moulded boards come stacked in plastic, every one exactly like the last. They are perfectly fine. Nobody has ever picked one up and asked who made it.

That is the trade. The more completely a thing is mechanised, measured and corrected, the less there is to say about it. Two boards from the same mould are the same board. There is no story in which one is better, because neither is anything in particular.

The inlaid board invites the question. Someone sat with it. They made choices you can see, and some of those choices were not the best ones.

This is what people are really asking for when they ask for something made by hand. Not a promise that it will be better. A willingness to accept that it might be worse, in exchange for the chance that it will be particular. You cannot have one without the other. A handmade object with every risk removed has simply become a factory product with a story attached.

And the better the factories get, the more interesting the unevenness becomes. When everything around us is flawless and identical, a short point on a star starts to look like a signature.

The craftsmen who still do this work are not apologising for the flaw. It is why the buyer chose that board over the one beside it.