Aalone with my thoughts at the workbench, with the sander’s constantly humming bass note singing through my palm, I find myself figuring out how long I actually spent sanding pieces of wood. Soften their edges, make their surfaces shine like polished marble. Carefully climb through the grades – from the brutally rough “low-grit” stuff to such impossibly fine “high-grit” paper that the business side feels smoother than the back. Or just how long I’ve been working with wood, for that matter.
Professionally, I have been involved in it in one form or another for over two decades now; and before that, from almost the moment I was old enough to sweep up the shavings, I helped my father. The man who taught me the trick of folding and gluing the sandpaper together, the better to grasp it; to dampen the wood to bring up those last few stubborn broken fibers like blades of grass after rain. Amounts on this scale are rather too large for my sawdust and whiskey brain to calculate, although, so, pulling off my ear defenders, I whip out a calculator – and rather wish I didn’t.
Forty thousand hours is a long time to devote to anything – especially something as seemingly minor as woodworking. Life is fleeting. There are meadows to jump through, kisses to steal and mountains to climb. There are only so many episodes of it Great designs to look The very idea that I have spent close to 10% of my days on earth to date diligently chopping and shaping and rubbing dried plants with rough paper is frankly hard to even consider. And yet the more I stop and think about it, the more it makes me smile.
I was 19 when it all started in earnest for me; when my father dropped the question about eggs and bacon that would change and forever entwine both of our lives. I spent months pulling pints in a country pub, watching the world pass me by through the dimpled glass of the window and drinking my salary before it could get too kind to my wallet. When I felt like I was floating, even though I couldn’t, my parents threw me the only lifeline they had. Dad had been quietly making a name for himself for a while by then, making wooden trinkets, furniture and even entire kitchens in the low stone garage he romantically referred to as “the workshop”. I have pitched in many times before. Was I interested in joining him full time, he asked over breakfast that morning. His offer carried with it the unpleasant odor of hard labor, but there was little else on the horizon. I let university slip through my fingers, I had no plans or ambitions, no prospects. And while I had no real idea of what being with my father, or with my hands, would really be like on a full-time basis, I just had enough sense to recognize an opportunity.
Try to imagine being cooped up in a cramped tin-roof shed (glacial in winter, Sahara in summer) for months and then years on end. You’re at the very peak of your teenage worst, while the old man – self-taught, cash-strapped and woefully under-equipped – is more or less making it up as he goes along.
Sparks of course flew daily, as I would guess he knew they should. The air around us crackled and fizzed with tension. But the natural teacher in my father loved his subject far too much to ever allow my adolescent mood swings to spoil his fun for long. It was here that I grumbled and grumbled my way through those early days, squirming and burning and chipping away at tiny bits of my fingertips. Watch and absorb. Hoping (mostly in vain) that the work might finally start to make some sense. And truth be told, though I would never have admitted it even with a gun to my head, 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 confidence. 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 grab and tear away six fresh inches of sandpaper, folding and taping it back to itself so my fingers will find purchase on the gray surface. By then laying it in the soft flesh of my palm, working with the grain and with my whole body, I begin the final stages. Without the electric hum of machines, I can only hear my breathing and the rhythmic swing of the paper. And soon bits of fine sawdust curl like smoke under the skylight, so that I can almost taste it in the air.
Sanding like this is neither basic nor easy, as one might imagine, even though it was one of the first jobs entrusted to me as a clumsy apprentice. As much as you might want to, you can’t put back what you’ve torn off. There is care and tenderness, intimacy about it too. Indeed, the longer I do it, the more I realize how powerfully it connects you with the wood’s distinctive qualities, with the living material under your hands – part of a tree that may have stood for a century or more. As one so rarely is these days, when every waking moment seems to be spent neck-deep in a mire of distraction, you are necessarily present. But unlike so many of the more complicated and even dangerous aspects of fine woodworking, your concentration can and does start to wander. The sheer mind-numbing repetition often requires it. Physically engaged, almost hypnotically attuned to the rigors of the job, but mentally sometimes so detached it can almost feel like an out-of-body experience. It gives you a lot of room to think.
By the time I really hit my stride, I was in my mid-20s. My hands grew harder and seemed to know where they were supposed to be most of the time. Jobs moved faster, it all felt more assured. I began to discover what responsibility looked like – whether I wanted to or not. Learn what it really took to put food on the table every day, regardless of the hours or the sacrifices it may take. Despite myself, I relished the prospect of rolling open the workshop door every morning. By working so closely with my father, I also came to see a completely different side of him. All that time laughed and struggled and sweated side by side, and by then spoke in a shorthand born of old jokes, closeness, and the daily promise of pain.
It happened so gradually that it barely registered, but little by little we were becoming a team. However, evolution does not always move so slowly, but sometimes something contagious happens. Something that changes everything that comes after. For me, that something was the knee-shaking, life-changing magic of two dimensions becoming three; of lifeless sticks given life and form. It happened one morning alone and horrified at my workbench, when suddenly it was no longer a delicate oak frame that I was busy putting together. It was an identity. A vocation. Maybe even a future.
What I would discover over time is that woodworking requires much more than just tools and wood, or even a sharp set of skills. Like all creative work, sticking with it through thick and thin, and actually making a living out of it in the modern world, requires patience, thought, 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 forced reflection, something my pathologically impatient mind would never knowingly sit still for, wasn’t a crucial part of my work week. Would I have had the confidence to build a business and a home with my wife? Or mustered the willpower it took to finish writing a book? The reality, I think, is that all the time I’ve spent away from the noise of the world, listening to the messages tapping through my fingertips and the thoughts swirling in my head, has allowed me to working away at things. To carefully shape ideas and my character as I shaped the wood. It helped me grow and gain perspective, and forge a bond with my father that few ever have the chance to experience.
As strange as it sounds, I think working with wood – even sanding pieces of wood – made me who I am. And with that happy thought, I put on my ear defenders and get back to work.
Ingegrain: The Making of a Craftsman by Callum Robinson is published by Doubleday at £22, or buy a copy from guardianbookshop.com for £18.70
