What is wrong with fairness?

            Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg says the very rich should help a bit more in dipping into their pockets to help the country during these dark times. He is referring to those with 'very considerable' wealth and for a limited period. The opposition says he is 'taking British people for fools'.  

           Who are the 'British people' today ? I see an increasing divide between the considerably wealthy and the considerably struggling to the point of obscenity. The opposition blow the conservative trumpet claiming that raising tax will drive the very rich abroad, but hang on, aren't they aware that there is nowhere to go! There is a global recession with even China struggling right now! And isn't the labour party about fairness for all?
         When Nick Clegg made this statement I immediately thought of Hitachi Power Tools. I am, after all, a carpenter not a politician. During the last deep recession in Japan, all the global Hitachi partners ploughed back every penny of profit into their head office to help Japan get back on its feet. I know this because at the time I had close liaisons with Hitachi Power Tools UK as they had generously supplied me with tools for the writing of my books and production of videos. Suffice to say the cordless drills and stout jigsaws I still use today. As a result of tightening their belt Hitachi fell slightly behind regarding brand promotion in the UK but the proof is in the durability of their products.

A Hitachi jigsaw given to Jeremy Broun in 1989 and still in use in 2012

         I think the stupidity is in this continued blind self-interest in Britain and blatant greed and justification of each faction (political) when the country is in a very serious mess indeed and tightening the belt is what a generation who remember the last war will relate to.  What is wrong with fairness?

Damaged goods

        Watching the Paralympics adverts makes me a little angry. It is not just that in almost every other field Health & safety would have something to say about two people wilfully colliding into each other in a potentially dangerous wheeled device,  but that to lose a limb and fight against all odds is considered highly admirable and commendable and yet  to be 'wheel bound' with depression is a taboo. Strong words to compare the state of depression to a physical paralysis but actually its true. I pick up on the anger that some physically disabled people have and perhaps I am guessing to suggest that anger is a motivating force for some of these athletes. 

        I was very fortunate to be born a healthy physical specimen. I have even escaped broken bones from a high speed motorcycle spill and today I limp with an Achilles heel (badminton) injury trying to walk my dog. But the greatest Achilles heel injury is the lack of motivation to start another Monday, another week. I am trying to complete a dormer window repair on my roof and put the last few pieces of timber cladding up. There was a time in my younger days when I was at least three times quicker than the average woodworker. Today it is taking me hours to just cut with a saw two pieces of softwood.

Who is going to repair your roof when you get old? 

        Imagine not being able to tie up your shoe laces. That is how depression can affect the mind, an otherwise agile and capable mind. I am not saying that today I cannot tie up my boot laces to walk my dog but the ritual has reminded me that actually at the depth of paralysing depression I don't know how to tie up my shoe laces. No doctor has ever asked me to perform the task. It would not enter their heads that this seemingly automatic ritual is a highly complex motor skill and quite relevant to some forms of depression. Instead the question is what medication worked for you before. The greatest act of will is to keep off damaging medication. 

A shoe rack designed by Jeremy Broun for Good Woodworking magazine readers to make (1990's)

      Healthy normal people take so many things for granted - that they are loveable and can love and have a right and expect to be loved. Some go through life never knowing what it is like not to be loved. Of course everyone is damaged in some way but if you never had a mother to show you what love is and a father who beat the shit out of you, how on earth can you learn it? In the playground? I don't think so.

       I am angry also today because I tried hard to follow the Christian doctrine throughout my life and for many years was encouraged to believe in God, the creator. Am I allowed to ask a childlike question: 'Well, who created God?' So we go through the ritual of counting blessings and cognitive therapy (that is so f..ing impossible to do) and going through a list of positive affirmations we arrive at the simple conclusion - to take each moment as it comes. 

       Perhaps wood is a gift from God to channel creative energy into or is it a chance material there for its own purpose but we got our hands on it? I am at least confident that I can build anything in wood (albeit on  a good day) and I may be forgotten as a craftsman but I have not finished making yet. Perhaps one has to endure the bad days (years) to look forward to the better ones.

    Depression may be a taboo but my observation is that people who suffer mental anguish often have an unusual awareness that makes their condition even more isolating. I came across a startling piece of furniture design on a website - a sculptural chair in stainless steel and was staggered to learn it sells for around £70,000. No wonder I am a forgotten craftsman! But I won't forget my ideals.

     An acquaintance knocked on my door last week asking to stay overnight in order to see his young children the next day. He had been kicked out of his nest by his partner and was in a terrible state. I had performed guitar gigs with him and his creative career is now on the verge of blossoming. I encouraged him to hold onto his creativity but his reliance on a 'relationship' was very apparent. It took me many many years to learn the lesson that I did not need another half to make me feel a whole person.  A very painful lesson and even more painful in the realisation this 'whole' person is full of holes! But my friend's creativity (like mine) is a precious gift and all I can do is encourage him in whatever small way I can that creativity pulls you through. 

       So, my dear reader, whoever you are, I feel a little better getting this off my chest. One of my tasks today is to process a substantial order of my woodworking/furniture making DVDs to send to the USA. There is no logical explanation that I cannot be motivated to respond instantly to somebody who values my work and says in an email 'I look forward to learning from you'. Lets hope my DVDs will not arrive as 'damaged goods'

.

A unique collection of instructional and documentary style DVDs

Furniture Today 3 - showing the best of British contemporary furniture

against a historical backcloth. (2012)

Andrew Varah

        Andrew Varah died in July 2012, delivering something of a shock to the British bespoke furniture making community where he had become a distinguished figure; the bloke I recall from my student days, who always sat at the top table, and where after a late start in the furniture making world, he arrived. It was little surprise he was ambitious as he was the son of Chad Varah, the founder of the Samaritans suicide telephone line, member of MENSA and his mother, head of the Mothers Union Europe. Andy was a triplet and identical twin.

        I first met Andrew in 1963 as a fellow student at the legendary Shoreditch Teacher Training College in Surrey. In our second year Andrew got me a room in the sought after old college building alongside his close mates Geoff Buckland, John Eustace and Max Carter. I suppose the obvious thing we all had in common was that we spoke without an accent and so it was probably a class thing. I guess in retrospect we were an elite group although I saw ourselves as different rather than better than the main core of trainee handicraft teachers. We tended to be more independent minded.
           Shoreditch College was a fantastic training not just in woodworking skills but in other craft disciplines such as metalworking, basketmaking, pottery and bookbinding and we had the very best practitioners in the country as tutors. My God those were the days and I shed a tear on the very last day of my training looking over Runnymede from the college campus, thinking it will never be as good as this again. Shoreditch was renowned for supplying not only the best teachers but the pranks that went on at the college were legendary.
         From one of the towers in our residential building I recall being roped in by an errant third year student to spray one of the college tutors on duty with a fire water hose and later hiding in Andrew's wardrobe while the search party sifted through the study bedrooms. Andrew was sitting in bed wearing a nightcap, reading a book, innocently pointing to the open window which happened to be four storeys up and telling the tutor 'maybe they went that way'. I was nearly kicked out as an example to other students but I went on to gain a Distinction on the Advanced Woodwork course while Andrew became social secretary and was out with the girls rather than pushing his cabinetmaking skills. 
      Andy helped me buy my first Morgan three-wheeler and we drove out to secluded pubs in Virginia Water in it and even attended a party in Surrey held by John Gregson the actor. The three-wheeler had no reverse gear and on one occasion we plunged through somebody's garden fence in Bagshot. We shared many fun experiences lasting into our thirties. 

The first 1933 Morgan three-wheeler arrives on the Shoreditch College campus
in 1962, causing a sensation amongst students and staff. 

I took Andy salmon poaching on wild Scottish rivers (my home was in Scotland) and on our last day of the trip I said  'I can't send you back to London empty handed'. While my older sister stood lookout for the bailiff, I hooked the salmon and Andrew landed it. 
     

I hooked the salmon and Andy landed it

 - an apt description of our furniture making careers. (1968)

On a furniture travel scholarship abroad my car was stolen and he offered to drive over to Holland to pick me up. I managed to get an old banger and arrived back from a 24-hour drive straight from Italy to his barn workshops near Rugby and he was the first to see all the exciting items of innovative furniture I had been given.

The old banger loaded with gifts from Artek, Cassina Artemide etc 

- first port of call Andrew Varah's pad 1979

     At the beginning of our careers Andrew and I taught in tough London schools and met up in our respective school workshops after school hours to brainstorm designs for school projects. We were pioneers of design in schools a decade before Design Craft Technology became officially part of the curriculum. We both left teaching after two years and Andy went to work in Zambia running a furniture factory. He invited me over to be his designer but my phobia for injections stopped that. He returned around 1974 but in preceding years had written to me many times asking what it was like to be a 'designer maker' and saying he wanted to do what I was doing back in England. 
    He set up as a solo maker and so our contact was much closer. I visited him many times at Little Walton, mucking into the renovations of his barn workshop. He had a fantastic pad while I was working in a tiny underground city workshop without natural light. A strange contrast as at the time he was an unknown and I was well acknowledged in the field by galleries and magazines. Around 1979
I introduced him to the Prestcote Gallery and remember his very first exhibit there, an inlaid table in ash. It was a electric time as the new boys exhibited alongside the old boys; A Fred Baier chair sitting next to an Edward Barnsley table.

An ash table by Andrew Varah circa 1976

Perhaps ashamed of my own somewhat modest workshop I turned down an opportunity in 1989 to be filmed for a regional television craft documentary and introduced the film director Trevor Hill to Andrew Varah who at that time had just taken on the genius woodworker Andrew Whately from John Makepeace's workshop. I think it was Andrew's first television exposure and at that time a rare insight into the work of furniture designer makers. Jan Leeming, ex News reader was the presenter. 

A chair by Andrew Varah around the time of the first television feature 

     Andrew delighted in pleasing his clients and working to their needs, often adding whims drawn from different architectural periods making his actual designs somewhat derivative and overplayed in clever craftsmanship in my opinion. I felt he became a bit of an 'untouchable' in terms of design critique but then there are no critics of bespoke modern furniture! If it were a West End play the performances would be torn apart by ruthless critics (Kiera Knightly playing Anna Karenina)! But design apart, Andrew Varah became a formidable maker and guiding light to a new blossoming generation of furniture designer makers. It was the late Alan Peters (who also trained at Shoreditch College) who said in 1974 this is surely the most difficult craft to sustain.  
        I still have some prime quality flitch cut English oak Andrew sold me at cost price in the year of the drought in 1976 and some Rio rosewood veneer he gave me on the same occasion. In our halcyon days Andy would often get to meet the girls I dated and would say 'I can't believe how you can pull the most beautiful birds' yet he could pull the most prestigious clients and was really in a different league running a furniture business and employing talented young craftsmen, many of whom stayed for decades.
 There was obviously rivalry between Andrew nyself. Even as students he once told me he could run as fast without training as his identical twin brother Mike who was running 800 yards for Britain. I told him he was arrogant and challenged him to run around the college track. He beat me after 26 laps and I was in the college athletics team and he wasn't! Curiously as my furniture 'career' suffered because of depression in my life I once admitted to Andy I had often phoned up his old man's outfit the Samaritans. I got the impression Andy did not get to see much of his father in his youth. Despite our more recent fall outs, we exchanged an amicable conversation at our last chance meeting at an exhibition in Cheltenham where we were both judges for different awards. 
      I made a film including him called 'Five Ways to Fashion Wood' in 1989 and a light-hearted clip called 'Three wise men' in 2005:  

   

Inevitably Andy and I followed different paths, but nothing can take away our early formative and fun years.  Varah RIP.