Plastics? Many would be surprised that a maker of traditional walking sticks would even consider the use of modern plastic materials in a craft firmly grounded in the use of natural materials.

However, some synthetic materials do have their uses today in the construction of almost every stick. For example, practically every stickmaker relies heavily upon the use of epoxy and polyester resins for glueing parts together, filling holes and embedding decorative items. These plastic resins are used simply because, traditional or not, they are the best available materials for the job. A stickmaker who accepts the use of such synthetic materials yet rejects other modern materials as non-traditional does not have logic on his side.

To my mind the stickmaker's craft has always encompassed the art of finding uses for whatever materials readily fall to hand. A gamekeeper picks up a discarded deer antler and realises part of it would make a nice thumbstick top. A shepherd searching for something to make a handle for a crook has a pair of ram's horns to hand. And so it goes: today we are surrounded by discarded plastic. What could more natural or environmentally sound than to turn such waste materials into something useful and good to look at?

In fact there is nothing new about using plastic materials in stick-making - it's only the source that has changed. Let me tell you something I learned when I was a lad. For many years I have played fiddle and mandolin in a folk dance band. Back then, I was looking at an old mandolin in a music shop and thinking it might be fun to try playing one as light relief from my classical violin training. Looking this instrument over, I picked up the plectrum that came with it and asked the shopkeeper whether it was plastic or tortoiseshell. He replied enigmatically - "It's natural plastic". Nowadays the use of synthetic plastic for plectra is universal, for both practical and environmental reasons. Nylon or PVC doesn't split or break like tortoiseshell.

So it is with stickmaking materials. At one time an elegant cane might have been topped with an intricately carved ivory knob: today it would have a knob of cast synthetic resin. Other natural plastics like good-quality ram or buffalo horn are becoming scarce and we must of necessity consider what alternatives are available. Myself, I am not keen on using cast resin for knobs or handles. This takes a good deal of the "craft" out of the stickmaker's work, and there are many inferior carvings replicated ad nauseum in poor-quality castings when they should have been allowed to sink into the obscurity they deserve. It must be said, however, that some of the best commercial makers are capable of producing very fine work indeed in cast resin.

Another aspect is the use of moulded plastics like acrylics for making more utilitarian handles. Again there are many bad examples, but there are some good ones too. Such materials allow some quite extraordinary combinations of swirling colours and if well designed and finished can be considered perfectly valid examples of the stickmaker's craft. This is, however, what I would call an industrial craft, and the products lack that element of unique individuality inherent in working a raw chunk of material into its finished shape by hand.

Now in this case I have no problem accepting these as fine examples of the stickmaker's craft (and neither do the judges!). There is just as much skill in shaping such a plastic handle by hand as there is in making the handle from wood or horn. In fact, the plastic has its own characteristics and is very difficult to work, as it does not cut readily with our traditional chisels, files or rasps. John ended up laboriously shaping the plastic almost entirely with scrapers - quite a daunting task. To me, his work represents the acceptable face of modern synthetic materials. One day we will have no choice but to follow his lead.

Some other stickmakers have used blocks of Tufnol, an earlier synthetic material produced by impregnating fabric scrim with a phenolic resin. Vulcanised rubber in the form of Ebonite or Vulcanite might be another candidate for this sort of work. After all, such materials are perfectly acceptable to the most highly-regarded pipe-makers (said he, puffing on his Butz-Choquin Carmargue with its vulcanite stem and acrylic ferrule!).

This is one of my favourite sticks, which I keep for my own personal use. I was chatting with a craftsman at a craft fair one day while leaning on this stick (an excellent use for a market stick, incidentally!), and he asked me why I had used such an un-traditional material for the spacer. "What material would that be, then?" I asked. "Why", he said, "that thick black plastic bit". Now, had he been a stickmaker and not a furniture maker, he would have known from the faint but characteristic grain that this was in fact buffalo horn - a perfectly valid, and nowadays traditional, natural material. What he had not objected to were the thinner white layers, which are in fact made from discarded plastic!

This illustrates the point that in some applications it really doesn't matter what the material is; what does matter is the overall visual impact. In this case my critic may have a valid point in that the black band is maybe a bit visually overpowering. Fair comment. But the material is really irrelevant provided it has the right mechanical characteristics and a pleasing appearance. I feel that many objections to the use of synthetic plastics are not based upon the suitability or appearance of the material, but upon the unfounded assumption that any modern influence is necessarily bad. Had I wanted to use a thinner spacer I would probably have made it of reclaimed black plastic, because at that scale even an expert would be hard pressed to tell whether it was plastic or buffalo horn.