More to Work For

In the closing of yet another work week, and I have closed 3,120 of them to date, that's 18,720 working days, I find myself filled with gratitude. I doubt that out of all of those days, I have had 100 sick days or any of those other kinds of days when I did not want to go to work. Imagine making things with your hands for 19,000 hours and they still function every single day. What a gift to a man who does such things. Not everyone is as fortunate as me. Such a gift will not be taken for granted. Work is a treasure when it relates to body movement throughout the day, and then the mental acuity of the kind of work you do needs to fully function. But, no matter the kind of work, work is a respectful walk through life, not a park. Indeed, and that means in deed, the deeds that we do day to day, we often find the rarest of things; it's that needle in the haystack often spoken of, our vocation. I do realise that I am the most fortunate of men. Picking out your future job aged 14 might well be the rarity and the scarcity rather than the norm, but I did, and I'm thankful for many things surrounding this.

For some reason, this week has been all the more special for me. Several things came to conclusion, not the least of which will be that in just a few more days I will be closing out the 75th year of my life, with 60 of those years spent making thousands of the most remarkable things wood. Our Sellers' home offering these last five years or so gave me a blank page to design for. An Instagram commenter said, "Your pieces always have a very mature and independent look." Whether that relates to my skill or my age, I am not sure, but I'll take it as a complement. I've never copied the work of another when it comes to my furniture designs, but then my other woodworking too. Moreover, many practices and some tools used are mine too. People take many for granted, they assume they were always there, much as anyone might, when they were not.

I have a small space next to my studio that I enjoy. It has a recliner I sit and write in my journals or sketch in when I feel need of a short rest or some quiet space to think in. I have shelves that hold my various box designs, some filled with pencils or small drawing tools and then two backdrop walls with shelves filled with moulding planes, plough planes, bench planes and then oddly shaped tools that matter to me. Pieces that were once no more than mere ideas lean against walls or hang as pictures framed by my hands. Drawing pads large and small are important for sketches, and a small pile of drawings from my granddaughter through more recent years have their special place too. Terms given to a man's work area are quite commonly intended to be derisive––they usually trivialise the significance of such important places––some do the same, all too often now, with the tools he uses in the day to day. I won't give them voice here, they deserve no such space, demeaning terms some consider funny, are of no worth. My workbench and all of my life's hand tools, the ones I started with and the ones I've owned through six decades, lie still within a three or four-metre distance from me as the crow flies.

Here is an extract from my journal that's headed, Friday, 13th December 2024. I start every day this way. I write only with a fine fountain pen, but I mostly use pencils for sketches, mostly.

Friday, 13th December 2024

The close of another week. A gift of time given to me to fill with as much goodness as I can. It's been partly unsettled with events that should be unsettling, but one that then settled in steadiness as one issue after another seemed to simply dissolve. I finished all parts to my three-part dressing table as I closed my week and a Friday in neat contentment. It's a satisfying outcome to see and feel difficult and complex issues resolve unexpectedly

I enjoyed Rosie twice too. She came into the shop for the day twice this week. She's the loveliest dog of any I've ever known. I doubt now that I would have a dog to own, but she makes me happy. There's an open space of green behind the shop that leads to a lake. I'm happy to throw her ball and see her willingness to retrieve it, no matter where it goes or how far. She never fails to find it. It seems to me that happiness mostly comes in pockets, where isolated events combine one by one to make a day or a week or a year happy.

I review all of the videos we create before they get finalised. Natalie videos and then edits the content we contribute too from both our respective crafts. I sometimes use a wrong term that might cause confusion or do something that might be safe for me but not for another. I did three episodes this week, but what I enjoy the most about them are three things. One is seeing the movements from another perspective, an angle I would never see in a lifetime if the hands were mine. The second thing is the skill and craft of the videography. The way the camera catches movement, angles of presentation, the close-ups on the one hand and then the wides on the other. I look for the shoulder alignment when I am sawing and planing, chiselling and so on.

I love my work. I'm so grateful for the fulfilment it's given to me, and especially these latter fifteen or so years. At the ends of the days, when I make, I always feel such indescribable peace. I am more tired now, that's to be expected, but my days are still quite long. Rarely do I work for less than ten hours before I put my hands to rest for the night. Here I am writing at five after midnight in my journal. Am I not thinking of my next work now that I have just finished the dressing table medley of table, lift up storage unit and mirror? Of course, I am. Large or small, complex or simple, I have some lovely dark-streaked poplar in for the job. What will it be? Am I not thinking to myself that over the Christmas period, on my days off, that will reorder my workspace again? Not too much.

I know that we have a family and friends we can spend limited time with. Not usually very much. We all lead busy lives and would get nothing done if we spent days just being together. No, that wouldn't do. And that is why work is far more critical to our lives than we care to accept. Is not work the most valuable element of a person's life? I can only speak as a man for a man. Work is the strongest of the emotional expressions of a man's life. Through this, he grounds himself to life itself, provides sustenance for those attached to him, nurtures them and thinks always of them. Does he not surround himself with the tools of his craft? The ancient tools and those he's made from steel and wood, leather and cloth. He keeps those things by which he earned and turned the roughness of the raw into the beauty of future to sit on, sit in, sit at and sit by. He shares such things that came from his hands with others for their comfort. That contour of bent and shaped wood became the chair and the table leg, the apron and the stretcher to the table Thanksgiving dinner was served on.

These lovely things fulfil a maker's life as seasons come and go and then these are the people he cares about, Those who came into the place where lovely things are worked, where tools hang and wood leaned at rest against brick walls had depth and warmth to them. They carried meaning and meaningful things to be translated into life between conversations people had as the working progressed. The warmth of a few minutes when talk echoes across time, trickled in and out as memories were made with a son, a granddaughter, a daughter-in-law and a precious friend called `Hannah.

The sharings of spokenness gather as recorded memory in wooden planks, beams, billets and panels, and then too cannot the silent tools themselves record such moments? What of the shavings taken in strokes that rest in whorls, wisps and curved plumes twisted out beneath a spokeshave of bright bronze your son cast in sand from molten metal. Was that fifteen years ago now? No, maybe more.

Shavings too are rich in life you made with two hands. They're not vacuum gathered as chips through tubes of noise sucking life from the day but swept with a broom and lifted with a dustpan to a burlap sack. Today, my shavings spun out in curves from my planes and my spokeshaved wood. The joy was inconceivable by the human mind, defied words, even, but the exhalation to take in more breaths of joy on joy on joy came to me in waves. The joints lay seated and closed at the shoulder lines one after another, six joints in all but perhaps a hundred meeting edges. Six hours settled them in place with the precision I had hoped for, and inside the glue swelled the fibres and locked together where no one would ever see again. The last moments of my day came, right before the light switch clicked at my pressing and I closed off my benchwork and the shavings at my feet settled down for the night in the corner.