Yet it outlives everything.
‘‘Ah ha,’’ exclaims the pottery nerd on the archaeology show as he applies his magnifying monocle to what appears to be a bit of dirty biscuit, ‘‘unless I’m very much mistaken, a shard of seventh-century West Saxon’’.
Now, I am confident the West Saxons of the seventh century lived lives of vigour and adventure, but all that’s left of them today is bits of pot.
For each I carved the name of the dog, the years of birth and death and the letters RIP into a slab of potter’s clay which a friend then fired in her kiln.
I framed each slab in tanalised timber and mounted it on a tanalised post beside the cairn of rocks that marked the grave.
All four memorials still stand and I visit them.
But the metal screws that hold the frames together, however galvanised and proofed against the forces of entropy, will one day rust and fail.
The cairns of stones will bit by bit disperse and even a tanalised post will eventually topple and rot.
So the passage of time will see to it that the only thing left to record that my dogs ever breathed and ran and barked at passing poodles and were loved will be a slab of fired clay.
We are all West Saxons.
When JK Rowling sought a name for her implausible little wizard, a name that would hint at both royal lineage and deep suburban ordinariness, she chose Harry for the former and Potter for the latter.
Pottery goes back.
It is not special.
As hunter-gatherers we made pots to cook what was hunted and to keep what was gathered.
Stuff kept in pots meant you didn’t have to hunt and gather every day of your life.
Pots gave rise to the day off.
Who first fired clay I do not know, but it is easy to imagine how it came about: the mud, the fire, the observation, the experiments and the birth of an industry.
As with most industries, the Chinese led the way.
The oldest pots yet found came from a cave in Jianxi province and were made around 18,000BC.
And 20,000 years later I had to choose between woodwork and pottery at school.
It was no choice at all.
Woodwork came with tools and was manly.
Pottery came with aprons and was womanly.
Of course I proved spectacularly bad at woodwork.
My mother praised my chopping board but when she cut up onions it rattled out the morse code for ‘‘your son is a klutz’’.
I would have been no good at pottery either.
When out for a walk on that ever-popular occasion the other day I passed an open garage and there inside was a man I knew as a local barman.
He was seated at a pottery wheel. I’d had no idea he potted.
‘‘I had no idea you potted,’’ I said.
He told me he’d potted for years.
He sold his stuff through a gift shop and his candlesticks sold quite well but there wasn’t a living in them.
I watched him turn a blob of clay into a base and stem and twiddly decorative bit and then the candle holder and I thought that must be good to do but knew better than to ask to have a go.
I taught a writing class last week and at the end of it one of the students gave me a pottery mug that she had made and it was a lovely thing, both pretty and practical, and even as I type it sits on my desk with a tea bag in it.
But the moment she handed it to me I remembered another cup.
The summer of 1976 I was between school and university and got a job as groundsman and cricket coach at a prep school.
And there was a mildly wayward 9-year-old called James who was good at cricket but often in trouble and he latched on to me as a sort of surrogate father.
At 19 years old, I felt flattered by discipleship and favoured him terribly.
At the end of the term he came to my little triangular room above the school entrance.
‘‘I made this for you in pottery, sir,’’ and he handed me a
chunky coffee cup the colour of creosote.
‘‘Only it sort of collapsed in the kiln.’’
The thing was recognisably a cup but hopelessly misshapen.
When he put out a hand to shake mine, I had to turn away so he wouldn’t see me cry.
Pottery.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
