Alone with my thoughts at the workbench, with the sanding machine’s insistently buzzing bass note singing up through my palm, I find myself trying to figure out just how long I have actually spent sanding pieces of wood. Softening their edges, making their surfaces gleam like polished marble. Carefully climbing through the grades – from the brutally coarse “low-grit” stuff to such improbably fine “high-grit” paper that the business side feels smoother than the backing. Or just how long I have spent working with wood all told, come to that.
Professionally, I’ve been at it in some form or another for more than two decades now; and, before that, from almost the moment I was old enough to sweep up the shavings, I’ve been helping my father. The man who taught me the trick of folding and sticking the sandpaper together the better to grip it; of dampening the timber to bring up those last few stubbornly crushed fibres like blades of grass after rain. Sums on this scale are rather too grand for my sawdust-and-whisky-addled brain to compute, though, so, pulling off my ear defenders, I ferret out a calculator – and rather wish I hadn’t.
