I think of times when someone asks what I'm doing when I'm reading something and I respond, I'm working. I get my dad's voice teasing me in my head, Doesn't look like work to me.

Since I was a child I've wanted to be a writer, but the older I get the more ashamed I become that I can't do anything with my hands. Using a computer or a notebook and pen all day to write and translate needs the body, fingers to type, back to sit, eyes to wince and droop at a screen. I mutter and talk to myself. I make my eyes roll from side to side or in an arc when I'm tracking an idea. If you ask me what I do, I'll say it's akin to remaking something or weaving, I'll say that I unpick sentences and rethread them, I untangle them like ropes, wires, nets. I embroider, I layer up paint and scrape it off. I weld. I smash apart and reassemble from the fragments. This is all metaphorical. I'm just a person whose wrists ache, and who produces no physical trace of my effort – someone else makes my marks into a book-object.

I've recently become covetous of jobs that have overalls and aprons, costumes that denote graft. Richard commissioned a maker friend of ours, Lucy, to make me a tabard – a navy apron with deep mintgreen pockets – which I wear when I translate. I'm a bit of an anomaly among our friends – many of them are painters, sculptors, illustrators, potters, set designers, people who don't balk at the prospect of building shelves, making a pair of trousers, handmaking decorations for a wedding reception, as Lucy did for our wedding.

When I put the translation tabard on, I feel like I'm going to work, that I'm going to be doing something active that requires energy and transformation. When I stand in the kitchen and drink a cup of tea, I think of my dad taking a break from fixing a car, sitting on the back step smeared with oil, drinking scalding Nescafé.

When I take off the tabard, the working day is done – I have sustained a period of working, set by the clock of the uniform, as opposed to hours of 'playing' at working in my everyday clothes. But no matter how much I can trick myself into thinking I'm a maker, I'm not wearing an apron to protect me from spatter and spillage. The mess remains in my mind, I carry around the clutter and half-made things wherever I go. The working day is never truly over.