Real Working

In the realness of hand work I find the greatest peace that I cannot usually describe and that’s because words seem always to be inadequate. It’s hard to explain what entering my workspace does to my senses but the closest I get to describing it is to say a protective covering more like a soft film somehow covers my environment and blocks out all of the extraneous things that vie for my attention. Is it in some way a form of burying my head, ignoring the pitfalls of life, something like that? Well, no, it isn’t. Not at all. More that, within this sphere of life, making and creating something equips me to cope. Somehow, for decades to date, the problems shrink to their right size. Problems must always come and must always be faced head-on without jeopardising the work and when they are dealt with within my working I can always work as well as resolve the seemingly insoluble as I make. Work is never a problem and never in the way. It’s my life, and rightfully so. I like working any day of the week and all days, every day, all day if I want and need to. I do not work because of some external compulsion, paying bills, buying consumerism, societal expectations, but because of an internal dynamic that fulfils my nature as a creative maker. Issues of life become subsumed in my working, in the process of it, the doing of it, do you see? The wonderful thing about hand-tool woodworking is that you can do two things well at once. Because I am so very confident in my working, my mind is often thereby freed to work on other things as I create. I no longer worry as to whether this or that will work, I know before the work at the bench even gets that far. Knots, wiry grain, plane and saw work always work because I know how to subdue them one by one in the course of the day.

Making different pieces through the years, the design of pieces from scratch, raw wood even still in the log and in need of reductive slabbing, a tree standing still in the midst of many a million of its kind, stood to challenge me as defiant opposition in awkward places beyond rivers in deserts and weeks, months and years later became fine pieces despite the gnarly awkward grains in swirling hardness within. Imagination somehow defies opposition to become possibility and possibility becomes probability with the right mindset. Needing raw wood elevates the maker and a once council house (social housing) dweller from Stockport, England finds himself against all odds in the midst of a million acres searching for exactly the right trees to cut from their hundred-and-fifty-year roots in the Hill Country of Texas just north of Uvalde. He doesn’t just slash, cut and drop without thought though. No, he considers the consequences before he begins, knowing that what he takes must not waste the smallest amount. He understands what it took to grow, dwells on it before any cut begins, and knows that once cut, the work done can never be reversed. There is a mix of sadness and elation when the tree falls where it best should amidst its kind. Peace settles in the separation and the knowing. And the peace of the past unites with the present of the workshop three decades on. The same peace of confidence that the right thing was done then as it is now. Harvesting as an isolated task in wild places seems a long way from social housing in Stockport where I learned working from my father who did the insane in a Second World War jumping in a red beret from aircraft into European parts he’d never seen or known much of. I think twice of the man who met my mother in Belgium through that war and married her a year later.

And I see that I am a fortunate man through the guidance of my working parents insisting that my trade would always provide for me and now knowing at 73 that I have never known a single day of being unemployed but known every day of being gainfully employed in the provision as a father as my father did and his before him but in my case, I found my vocational calling. Making and then passing on my skills to hundreds of thousands has been the most fulfilling of times for me. How could I have known at age 14 that my life as a maker would give me such peace to counter the invasive and settle every issue in my life?

This is my hope for all I come to know and teach and train and then too those I only know from a distance through the work I do.