Happy New Year!

Well, here it is, a brand new untouched canvass. Are we ready for another year? The world I have lived in for 70 years is still filled full with wonder, wonder enough to show much of its painful past to help show us that we need at best to consume less and give more. That seems to me a doable thing.

Two grey squirrels chased one another across the empty garden boxes, up onto the garage roof and stopped to stare at me through the window. A wood pigeon foraged where they’d just been disturbing the leaves and an exchange between him and two pied magpies joined in the search for food before hopping at one another over scrap. It’s a mild, overcast morning I feel is filling all the more with new hope as as the sun starts to break through. We hopefully, not the questioning ‘hopefully‘ that more denies possibility than expects, the one less greedy, filled with hope and direction with plans and aspirations, one to take our new awareness of conflict to do anything we can to be a solution to it. I am planning on two main fronts, woodworking with hand tools for the house we plan to fill with furniture and woodworking (of course), and then growing food again but on a larger scale with a broader range than last year. Now that the land is there and no longer depends on rented space, it means I am unlikely to lose my hard work. Hence my last garden shed below and the new one I am about to build.

My hope is that we can reverse those trends towards to creating or buying into furniture that’s created as more a fashionable and thereby a disposable commodity so that what we make might span a century and more without the designs itself growing dated purely by fashion. I have pieces I made that remain so even though I may never see them again. Those I designed and made for wanted both good design coupled with longevity. This means that the design is attractive enough not to date in appearance and then to in the design of how it is made. To me, they are still quite lovely. But then what’s all the more lovely is the realisation that I made them with only my hands and ten or fifteen hand tools and that I can remember the actual work itself because I did so make them that way. If 2020 can be filled with hundreds of thousands of such memories in the lives others then I will have succeeded all the more in laying the foundation stones for woodworkers worldwide. And then too, all the more, how would I feel knowing that I had had some small part to play in conserving my craft as a legacy in the hands of those starting out as an audience and then taking up the mantle by beginning to make their own future the same way I had? That’s you of course, and those yet to come! How does that grab you?

With our break over Christmas now taken and exhausted, tomorrow holds our all getting back together to start 2020 year. Yesteryear, that’s a pleasant word not used much now, was filled with so much goodness and intent by consumers to make changes in their own lives that matter.

Undergirding 2020 with goals and ambitions for a new and fruitful lifestyle of care is to stand on the shoulders of those who opened new doors for us to walk through. For me it’s quite the simple thing. I think, I design, I make and it comes together in videos by the hands of the friends I work with. The work will embrace the future and hopefully everyone will help me to understand why my working with hand tools is so critically important.

If we can deforest a whole continent of multi-millions of acres of trees in less than a century using little more than axes and two-man saws, think of the damage we can and have done throughout an unchecked era when chainsawing replaced the hard work of axing and sawing and sped up the process a thousandfold. When I work the wood with my hands it costs me more than when I use only or even partially so called power tools. My mortise hole cost me the time and effort I volunteered into it as did the tenon I cut and fitted to it with my man-powered router plane, my tenon saw and my chisel with a mallet. Herein I sense a correlation paralleling the forests mindlessly destroyed by conglomerate empires of both past and present and the added work it takes me to create something that truly costs me. In the coming years even greater changes will deindustrialise our woodworking world to take a new breath of fresh air both in what we make and how. Taking our work out of the realms of mass manufacturing means discovering ourselves and who we are all the more. How would that be to you?