Rosie Gilligan meets an English teacher who is enjoying a new lease of life behind a potter’s wheel in Derbyshire.
I’VE COME TO SEE John Rivers at Riddings Pottery and he’s showing me how to throw a pot. He weighs out a two-and-a-half pound lump of clay which he kneads, then forcefully throws onto the potter’s wheel with the confidence that comes from years of practice: “You have to be assertive,” he says. He then sets the wheel spinning and seals the bond between clay and metal with his finger. “It has to stick firmly to the wheel so no water or air gets underneath.”…