From a sense of outrage comes great art

   It seems balmy that only a few weeks ago I was hanging on to the roof of my dormer window by the strength of my fingers whilst confronting likely death when on many occasion previously in my life I was considering jumping off that same roof. Whilst I composed myself to gather all my strength at 67 years of age to pull myself up to safety the thought had crossed my mind it might not be a clean death as I could land up a cabbage in a wheelchair or on a life support system with no next of kin to pull the plug.  

   Yesterday I could have jumped off that roof as I had potentially burned my boats with the editor of the only woodworking magazine I haven't fallen out with over what I feel is a lack of respect and I have no comeback as the plug can be instantly pulled. I am also under immense pressure working 14 hours a day currently to complete a film about furniture makers that is not just a thankless unfunded task but has moments of insult added to it. I had just returned from filming a very 'important' fellow furniture maker whose work I have always greatly admired with the casual comment stuck in my head 'I don't mind being in your home movie'.

    My 'home movie' is using equipment I sold a house for to invest in when six film schools turned me down as being too old at the age of 43 and skills I had to teach myself!  I now have to spend several days editing through hours of largely irrelevant banter (that is - to my intended film audience) to create a coherent flowing short story that is both relevant and fascinating and will probably knock spots off anything on television and I am doing this whilst battling daily with herrendous depression that I have suffered probably since the day my father rubbed my nose in my own shit at the age of three, but died before I was man enough to stand up to him. And here I am surrounded by all these priviliged and indulged people in the field of my passion, so full of themselves.

   Doesn't anybody realize film making is a highly skilled team game and yet I am doing it all single handed and just need a little help occasionally! There is no justice and there is one hell of a lot of wilful misunderstanding in the world because so many people choose to exist in just their cocoon. I never had anybody who believed in me as a child, no mum to say 'it will be okay' but a dad (who I had to call 'father' because only working class people use the word 'dad') who beat the shit out of me physically and mentally. 'From a sense of outrage comes great art'* and my film will be great art despite the fact nobody supported me, I had to bully some to be in it, and all the usual funding suspects wilfully rejected me in preference of more worthy projects! Great!

   While many are taking their kids to football matches this sunny Sunday or going for walks with loved ones or whatever is "conventional" I must be mad spending another hugely time consuming lonely day editing my 'home movie' trying to make it up to BBC standard, yet this film will be better than anything on the BBC and once I start a project I have to finish it and when you are weighed down by the heavy lead of depression that saps the energy (and is a solitary prison because no one understands it), it is all the more daunting. But hey ho - who cares a shit!

*quote from the actress Glenn Close.

Woman power

   Had my mother lived I wonder what lessons or wisdom she would have passed on to me. All I know is that she was gentle but also a bit of a tomboy, catching large trout on the family loch. But what opinion would she cast on the young and not so young women of today? I belong to a furniture makers' forum and am already too opinionated on it so I confine these views to my blog which only a few people read (and probably few furniture makers)! 

   Recently a woman member announced an all woman exhibition, inviting everyone to attend. A couple of comments followed, something about dressing up in a nightie to attend and then a bit of a row broke out as one young pc male accused the forum of harbouring what he called 'sexist pigs'. A bit strong! Strictly speaking the exhibition is sexist in being gender specific and receiving funding for it. 

  I felt saddened as I thought all that had past. I have certainly always treated women as equals at woodworking and observed they are more careful and if anything slightly better than men at learning design skills but this is also respecting and wanting to celebrate differences between the sexes. The woman organizing the exhibition (and someone who made it clear to me a few years ago she didn't want her sophisticated green woodwork next to 'rustic' work in my 'Furniture Today' DVD) then posted onto the forum the exhibition manifesto which was clearly feminist and aimed to draw more women into furniture making. This is surely badly needed as it is a male dominated craft, but why not draw them onto the forum as new members instead of create a feminist camp of furniture makers? We men are inclusive. It seems a shame to me but I've probably got it all wrong so I'm going to go off and organize an exhibition of 'Forgotten young-old-men in sheds'.

    

Private Eye

I couldn't believe this photograph was published in the newspaper without an appropriate caption so I added one of my own before Private Eye gets hold of it:

'Come on Sarko, you know Smerkels up for a threesome'

Far from the madding crowd

   Yesterday I drove through the early morning November mist into the heart of rural England to visit a fellow furniture maker to film his work for a documentary DVD I am making. Not the kind of documentary you are likely to see on British television!  It was an uplifting experience to witness and indeed be part of a valuable yet largely unseen aspect of British cultural life and heritage. Far from the madding crowd of endless television celebrity garbage, late night gambling channels, Babestations and kiss and tell tabloid sensations that have aeons ago dulled our senses. Even our Royal 'lad' has been asked to keep it in his pants during his military training visit to a devoutly religious North American town.
   I am not devoutly religious but I am passionate about beauty and good workmanship in wood. What made my intensive day particularly worth getting out of bed for (intensive because armed with a tiny HD camcorder I handled all the skills of a television production team single-handed) - was the quiet modesty of the maker I interviewed, whose work clearly is amongst the very best in Britain today. Some shout from the rooftops about how great or prominent they are in my chosen field and one realises that the Grayson Perry's of this world by crossdressing and cleverly denouncing their own work ('oh please don't take my work seriously darling, its crap really') are the ones who get noticed and are shaping the values and aspirations of innocent young minds, although today I guess the age of innocence is out of the window by the age of five.
    I once shared a flat in London with someone who bought a sports car belonging to Julie Christie, the star of "Far from the madding crowd". Oh such beauty - Julie Christie! We used to hang out at The Troubador in Old Brompton Road, saw Samantha Eggar bomb around Chelsea in her mini Moke and visited some late night basement dive I think was called Cafe de Paris?  But as they say 'if you can remember the Sixties you weren't really there'!
   







  

The human condition

   Many years ago I attended the funeral of a 19 year old youth who had been making furniture with me on a government funded work experience scheme. His mum called him 'the gentle giant' and I remember he was indeed a lovely young man.  She broke the news to me that he had overturned his landrover into a ditch one evening. 

   The family invited me to the funeral and whilst a thick plate glass screen silenced their crying anguish in the back of the funeral car I was in the front of the car next to the driver and all was eerily quiet except for the whine of the engine. In a desperate bid to make conversation I found myself blurting out 'how's business' and the undertaker replied 'really good this month, we've been rushed off our feet'. I not only realised my clumsy attempt at making conversation but that most of us are caught in a mindset and despite two thousand years of civilization are limited by our own experience and see the world through just our own particular window.

   Economists are blinkered by the word 'growth' and yet in nature uncontrolled growth is a cancer. There are ultimately finite resources on this planet.  Recent news of motorway carnage that cannot agree on whether it was white fog or black smoke is very quick to put the blame on an expensive firework display emitting dense smoke, using the health and safety trump card again, when on motorway sections nationwide, marked by chevrons (keep two visible in front of you) very few drivers distance themselves safely enough to stop in an emergency.  Lorry drivers bunch together on most motorways daily and it takes a lot to stop a lorry. Meanwhile the road safety lobbysists have more fuel to attack the proposed raising of the speed limit to 80 yet the focus of blame is on one risk assessment officer at a fireworks event. 

  The media is very quick to blame and judge and the Police are now focussing on a criminal investigation whilst macho rugby players protest they are being used as a scapegoat. Solicitors will be rolling their sleeves up as more lolly comes their way. Meanwhile regulation will increase. I must say it does seems odd that such potentially serious road safety hazard as dense smoke is entertained anywhere close to a motorway and that according to one newspaper the winds were not forecast to blow that way on that evening. 

   Perhaps we should blame the meteorologists and dig up all the records of accident resulting from the London 'Pea Soup' smogs in the 1960's caused by industrialization and then we might take the argument further and consider which way the wind is blowing when there is a nuclear reactor disaster... perhaps we should blame God. It seems to be the human condition.

     

     

Mortality

   Whilst the issue of Health & Safety is topical regarding the protest camp outside St Pauls Cathedral and the astonishing resignation of senior clerics,  I got a taste of reality today (for the first time) as I clambered onto my roof to do some essential repairs. I am no longer a young man, and actually got stuck and was aware I was about to slide down the steep roof and to a probable death, from some four stories up. I thought I would just pull myself up onto the top of the dormer window I built in 1995 and view my plan of action as to what scaffolding I needed to construct in order to carry out my repairs (which was more a matter of completing some cladding on the original build of the dormer window). I struggled whilst fear kicked in.

   In 1995 I totally redesigned and rebuilt the roof, constructing a polythene and batten tent over the house and constructed my own scaffolding using a hefty timber framework. After all the majority of scaffolding globally is made of wood (bamboo). What I overlooked then, because I was young, fit and an ex rock climber, was the erection of safety barriers and harnesses. Although my intention today was not to walk too far  unsupported on a 42 degree tiled incline with gym shoes I was shocked at how I lacked the strength to straddle a mere metre of roof and pull myself up onto the roof of the dormer window, which I eventually completed gripped by fear!  This had never happened to me before and I had defied in my head getting older. A man half my age would have struggled to do this.  So the realization of one's mortality hit home as I sit here and sketch out the improvised scaffolding platform I will build, including safety harness and anchor points should I slip. All common sense stuff of course. The preparation for a few hours work will take a good day and the biggest issue I now realize I have to deal with is the fear of walking the plank so high up. 

   As a young man I was a gymnast and even as recent as 2006 (when I was 62 years old!) I was teaching guys in their twenties how to do back somersaults into a pool in Dordogne. I had been invited to join a working party of young woodworking friends from Bristol. The fear was not so much to do with physical agility (as indeed I was very unfit in 2006) but was about mental attitude and much of tumbling gymnastics is about mindset, without it you break your neck easily. 

   My realization today is that I am not as strong physically as I thought I was and I somehow kidded myself I would be.  There is no moral to this impromptu blog other than to suggest you don't know your limitations until you push them, but that we have to adapt, hopefully gradually but it was for a good reason I thought I was Peter Pan - who wants to get old!  Now I have to change my mindset and plan at some time in the future my wooden stairlift while I am still fit enough to build it. What an exciting challenge. Now, possibly it will be solar powered because were going to run out of energy soon ..... 

Unguarded improvised timber scaffolding four stories up

The roof canopy constructed from timber and covered with polythene

working at a slightly safer height

The fixer

This Entry about  Jimmy Saville removed