The Wingback Chair a Stranger Found Before Any of My Regulars Could

I have been pulling old chairs apart and putting them back together for most of my life. My father did it before me, in the same narrow workshop off a side street in Gqeberha, close enough to the sea that on a bad day the salt gets into everything, the tools, the tacks, the little tins of upholstery nails I keep sorted by size. When I was small I used to sit under his bench and hand him things. Now the bench is mine, the light comes through the same dusty window, and my knees complain when I kneel to staple a base.

I am telling you this so you understand that I never once thought of myself as a person who would need to worry about the internet. I reupholster furniture. It is a slow, physical trade. You cannot download a wingback chair. You cannot email someone a properly sprung seat. For decades the work came the way it always came, by word of mouth, one satisfied woman telling another over tea that the man who fixed her mother's riempie chairs did honest work and did not overcharge.

The chair that started me thinking

It was a Tuesday in autumn when a young woman I had never met walked in carrying a photograph of a green wingback chair. She wanted it recovered in a dark mustard fabric she had already chosen. Ordinary enough. What was not ordinary was how she had found me.

I asked, the way I always ask, who had sent her. I was expecting a name, one of my regulars, one of the interior people I have worked with for years. Instead she looked at me a little strangely and said she had simply searched for someone near her who reupholsters furniture, and that most of what came up was a couple of bigger places across town, but a photo of one of my chairs had turned up on a website I did not even know existed. Someone, years ago, had photographed a chaise I restored and posted it, and that single picture had done more for me than a hundred conversations over tea.

I thanked her, took the deposit, and started stripping the old fabric off her chair that same afternoon. But the thing she had said sat with me the way a splinter sits under a nail. Most of what came up was other people. Not me. I had been in this trade for forty years and I was, as far as a phone screen was concerned, more or less invisible.

A wind, a window, and a long quiet week

That week the wind came in off the bay the way it does in Gqeberha, that relentless southeaster that rattles the workshop window and makes the whole street feel like it is holding its breath. I sat inside with the mustard chair and I had time to think, because the phone did not ring once. Not once, for six days.

Now, a quiet week is not unusual in my trade. Work comes in waves. But paired with what that young woman had said, the silence felt different. It felt like a room full of people talking on the other side of a wall I could not see through. My regulars are getting older, the same as I am. Some have moved to be near their children. Some have passed on. The tea-and-word-of-mouth network that carried my father and then carried me was thinning out, one funeral at a time, and I had never once thought about what would replace it.

My daughter came for supper on the Friday. She works in an office, she is clever with these things, and when I told her about the mustard chair and the young woman and the six silent days, she did not laugh at me the way I half expected. She took my phone, typed in the sort of thing a customer would type, and turned the screen around so I could see. She was right. Two big competitors, an advert or two at the top, and then pages and pages before my name appeared at all, if it appeared. She told me those adverts at the top were run through Google by companies who knew exactly what they were doing, and that some of them were handled by a Google Premier partner, which she explained was a particular sort of agency that Google itself trusts to place that kind of thing well. I nodded as if I understood. Mostly I understood that I did not.

What my nephew showed me on a Sunday

I might have left it there, an old man grumbling about a changed world, if my nephew had not come round that Sunday. He is at university, studying something with computers I cannot pronounce, and he is the sort of boy who cannot sit still without a screen in his hand.

He asked one of those talking assistant things, out loud, right there at my kitchen table, where a person in Gqeberha should go to have an old chair reupholstered. A little answer came back, tidy and confident, listing three places. I was not one of them. My nephew found this hilarious. He said the machines only know what they can read about you, and if nobody has written anything about your work in the places these machines look, then as far as they are concerned you simply do not exist. He said there were even people now who called themselves an AI Search Optimisation Agency, whose whole job was making sure a business showed up in exactly these new kinds of answers, and he said it the way young people say things they assume everyone already knows.

I sat there with my tea going cold and I felt something I had not felt in a long time, which was behind. Not behind on my work. My work is as good as it has ever been, better maybe, because forty years teaches your hands things your head cannot explain. Behind on the world. Behind on being findable.

Choosing, slowly, the way I choose fabric

I am a careful man. I do not rush into things. When a customer brings me a fabric I turn it over, I check the weave, I rub it between my fingers, I ask how the chair will be used and by whom before I cut a single length. So I approached this the same way. I did not want to be sold to. I did not want clever talk. I wanted to understand what was actually happening and what, if anything, an old upholsterer could sensibly do about it.

My daughter helped me look properly. We read about what these firms actually do, the ones that call themselves a Digital Marketing Agency in South Africa, and I made her explain each thing in plain words until it made sense to me. Some of it, honestly, is not for me. I am not going to start filming little videos of myself stretching hessian. But some of it is simply the modern version of the tea-and-word-of-mouth network I already trusted, just carried over wires instead of over garden fences. Making sure my name, my street, my photographs, and a few honest words about what I do are sitting in the places where people, and now machines, go looking.

The mustard chair, finished

I finished the young woman's wingback chair on a Thursday. The mustard fabric sat beautifully over the new webbing and the reworked springs, and when she came to collect it she ran her hand along the arm the way people do when a thing has come out better than they hoped. She took a photograph of it in the last of the afternoon light before she carried it out to her car.

I asked her, half joking, to please tell people. She smiled and said she already had, that she had posted the picture the moment she got home. And I thought, standing in my father's workshop with the wind finally dropped and the salt still on the window, that this is how it works now. A stranger found me through a photograph. A stranger will keep me alive through another one.

I am too old to pretend the world has not changed. But I am not too old to learn where the tea gets poured these days. The chairs still need me. I just have to make sure the people who need the chairs can find their way to my narrow little street.