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.
Forty thousand hours is a long time to have dedicated to anything – especially something so seemingly menial as woodwork. Life is fleeting. There are meadows to skip through, kisses to steal and mountains to climb. There are just so many episodes of Grand Designs to watch. The very idea that, to date, I have spent close to 10% of my days on earth diligently chopping and shaping and rubbing dried plants with rough paper is frankly hard to even contemplate. And yet the more I stop and think about it, the more it makes me smile.
I was 19 when it all began for me in earnest; when my father dropped the question over eggs and bacon that would go on to change and forever entwine both our lives. I’d been pulling pints in a country pub for months, watching the world pass me by through the window’s dimpled glass and drinking up my pay before it could get too friendly with my wallet. Sensing I was drifting, even if I could not, my parents threw me the only lifeline they had. Dad had been quietly making a name for himself for a while by then, fashioning wooden trinkets, furniture and even whole kitchens in the low stone garage he romantically referred to as “the workshop”. I’d pitched in plenty of times before. Was I interested in joining him full-time, he asked, that morning over breakfast. His offer carried with it the disagreeable whiff of hard labour, but there was little else on the horizon. I’d let university slip through my fingers, I had no plans or ambitions, no prospects at all really. And though I had no real notion of what working with my father, or with my hands, would really be like on a full-time basis, I had just enough sense to recognise an opportunity.
Try to imagine being penned into a cramped tin-roofed shed (glacial in winter, Saharan in summer), just you and your father for months and then years on end. You’re at the very apex of your teenage worst, while the old man – self-taught, cash-strapped and woefully under equipped – is making it all up more or less as he goes along.
Sparks flew daily, of course, as I’d guess he knew they must. The air around us crackled and fizzed with tension. But the natural teacher in my father loved his subject far too much to ever let my adolescent mood swings ruin his fun for long. It was here that I blundered and grumbled my way through those early days, clubbing and burning and slicing little pieces of my fingertips away. Watching and absorbing. Hoping (mostly in vain) that the work might eventually start to make some sort of sense. And, truthfully, though even with a gun to my head I’d never have admitted it, that I might have finally found a way to make him proud. I know now that all he ever really wanted was for me to love it as much as he did – the freedom and the creativity, the intoxicating smell of sawdust and self-reliance. But you don’t see those kinds of things when you’re young, do you? At least I didn’t.
Using a flexible steel ruler, I grip and tear away six fresh inches of sandpaper, fold and tape it back to itself so that my fingers will find purchase on the gritty surface. Then couching it into the soft meat of my palm, working with the grain and with my whole body, I start in on the final stages. Without the electric thrum of machines all I can hear is my breathing and the rhythmic swish of the paper. And soon wisps of fine sawdust are curling like smoke beneath the skylight, so that I can almost taste it in the air.
Sanding like this is not basic or easy, as one might imagine, though it was one of the first jobs entrusted to me as a clumsy apprentice. Much as you might want to, you cannot put back what you have abraded away. There is care and tenderness, intimacy about it, too. Indeed, the longer I do it, the more I’ve come to realise just how powerfully it connects you with the wood’s distinct characteristics, with the living material beneath your hands – part of a tree that might have stood for a century or more. As one so seldom is these days, when every waking moment seems to be spent neck-deep in a mire of distraction, by necessity, you are present. But unlike so many of the more complicated and even dangerous aspects of fine woodwork, your concentration can and does begin to wander. The sheer mind-numbing repetition often demands it. Physically engaged, almost hypnotically tuned into the rigours of the job, but mentally at times becoming so detached it can almost feel like an out-of-body experience. It gives you a lot of space to think.
By the time I really hit my stride, I was in my mid-20s. My hands had grown harder and they seemed to know where they were supposed to be most of the time. Jobs moved faster, it all felt more assured. I’d started to discover what responsibility looked like – whether I wanted to or not. Learning what it really took to put food on the table every day, no matter the hours or the sacrifices it might take. Despite myself, I’d come to relish the prospect of rolling open the workshop door every morning. Working so closely with my father, I was coming to see a very different side of him as well. All that time spent laughing and struggling and sweating side by side, speaking by then in a shorthand born of old jokes, proximity and the daily promise of pain.
It happened so gradually it barely registered, but little by little we were becoming a team. Evolution doesn’t always move so slowly, though, sometimes something incendiary happens. Something that alters everything that comes after. For me that something was the knee-trembling, life-changing magic of two dimensions becoming three; of inanimate sticks being given life and form. It happened one morning, alone and aghast at my workbench, when all of a sudden it wasn’t a delicate oak framework I was assembling any longer. It was an identity. A calling. Perhaps even a future.
What I would come to discover in time is that woodwork requires far more than just tools and timber, or even a sharp set of skills. Like all creative work, to keep at it through thick and thin, and to actually make a living at it in the modern world, requires patience, forethought, invention and discipline. All qualities I sorely lacked when I was young. Where would I be now, I wonder, if I hadn’t spent the time I have making things with my hands. If all this enforced reflection, something my pathologically impatient mind would never knowingly have sat still for, hadn’t been a crucial part of my working week. Would I have had the self-belief to build a business, and a home, with my wife? Or marshalled the force of will it took to finish writing a book? The reality, I think, is that all the time I’ve spent detached from the noise of the world, listening to the messages pulsing up through the tips of my fingers and the thoughts swirling in my head, has allowed me to work away at things. To carefully shape ideas, and my character, as I have shaped the timber. It has helped me to grow and to find perspective, and to forge a bond with my father that few ever have the chance to experience.
Strange as it sounds, I think that working with wood – even sanding pieces of wood – has made me who I am. And with that happy thought, I pull on my ear defenders and get back to work.
Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman by Callum Robinson is published by Doubleday at £22, or buy a copy from guardianbookshop.com for £18.70
