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'

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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. 

Fear of wood

     Many years ago a well known award winning local architect  was tragically killed whilst chainsawing a tree on his land. It fell on top of him and one immediately thought how could this happen to such an intelligent well organised person but it also served as a reminder of the yin and yang of life, that wood is a provider but one could also potentially die from a splinter. 

      For much of my life I was blessed with a wonderful gift of confidence to do anything with wood, I had no fears and nearly twenty years ago when totally re designing and re building the roof of my home I also built timber scaffolding out of two by two which I left up for nearly a decade on the back of my house! 

     In a previous blog I described my near escape from death last November when I clambered onto the roof to do some repairs and found I did not have the strength to pull myself up onto the dormer window roof. Well I found the strength hence I am here to write this but am now faced with the same challenge of sorting the roof out and building a stable platform. The problem is I am terrified of setting foot on the 45 degree roof pitch quite apart from avoiding looking down four storeys. I used to be a rock climber at school and followed the A team up the Derbyshire gritstone Black Rocks in just gym shoes and no ropes. I never experienced this fear before and although I am sketching out designs for a timber scaffolding structure to hook over the ridge I have the fear for the first time in my life that wood will fail me, that however I construct the scaffolding the fibres might tear, the screws might sheer etcetera etcetera. 

     Fear is a dangerous thing! So I am provaricating/procastinating and making extremely slow progress and fearing the very thing that has given me joy and confidence since I was sixteen - wood. So as you go through life, not knowing why you are here or how long you will be here for and stepping outside the social conditioning of leaving the nest and creating your own little nest and following the conveyor belt of life, drinking beer and following football teams on the way what else is there?!

    Some might stop to ponder at how life seems to deal out certain cards at different times and that some of those cards maybe interpreted as lessons. Is it merely a game of Monopoly at the rolling of dice? 'Go to gaol', 'collect a wife' or 'collect diabetes as you pass'? Of course one of the lessons taught is you can't take it with you but obviously not a lesson learned as money is seemingly even more of a God today. The late Paul Getty, richest oilman on the planet in the 70's (whose art foundation once purchased one of my furniture designs) had a deep fear of poverty and brought himself up from the gutter, so fear can be a great motivator as well as energy seeper. Certainly thinking too much can be a serious damper. 

    On my observations even the most clever people appear to think very little about major life events in the sense of cause and effect and just as the 'nature versus nurture' argument persists I also wonder if being master of your destiny or victim of fate is a similar puzzle? Certainly no one I know is in control of their lives but it keeps you sane to think you are. Now, lets get over this silly fear of wood and start thinking positive again. In fact, better than that - get back to the doing.        

Every dog has its day

     I suspect my late sister Jill was right when she once said to me 'every dog has its day'. Certainly in my own field as a furniture designer maker the traditional modesty that goes alongside being talented with your hands is blown apart today by those who are masters at self promotion and become legends in their own lifetime (and curiously behind a personna of enormous modesty!) But will history quickly forget them and who indeed will the future historians write about in a hundred years time? Does it matter to us now and who, then, is the judge, especially as successive historians fall into the journalism trap and make scoops to get noticed?

    Of course, first and foremost you have to be true to yourself and have the inner strength or quiet confidence of commitment that  the path you believe in, and in my own case I guess it is the 'small is beautiful' road, you follow, irrespective of popular fashion or whatever the dominant trend is. The trend  in England is for very expensive exclusive prestigious furniture which for years I have argued has a direct correlation to our antiquated class system. IKEA could not have been born in England and yet paradoxically the north London IKEA store became one of its most successful! When the eighth in line to the British throne visited me circa 1985 with a view to my making his designs that would carry his Royal stamp. I could (should?) have done the intelligent thing and put the price of my own unique work up extraordinarily. I was, after all, earmarked as one of the top 40 makers in the country on this occasion and since then, young makers have appeared from nowhere asking forty five grand for a piece of bespoke furniture.

   I can confidentially and not boastfully say there is nothing in wood I could not make.  After all, at the age of 17 I gained and A grade at A level woodwork and have used my hands ever since. With my training and vast experience working wood and keen eye for precision I could have followed the trend  (in the field I once was a pioneer in) and focussed on extremely expensive woods, gold inlays, immaculate workmanship, prestigious clients, prestigious Guild marks, etc etc, .... but I chose not to. The price I paid was being so quickly forgotten. The lesson I learned was that the media will make and break, create and forget and the questions I continue to ask are how does one deal with ego and is it just ego? In my case it was slightly different. It was the need to overcome seventeen years of abuse and negation from a cruel father. To be noticed and acknowledged is probably every child's right, so it may not be just a question of ego, but a basic human need.

   Wimbledon champions come and go and those who want it badly enough will eventually win the crown. Ageism is certainly rampant in Britain and what is worse is most 'senior citizens' themselves feel on the scrap heap with little to offer. What a dreadful term a senior citizen! As far as I am concerned I'm still on my gap year (another curious commercial construct) and it may continue into my nineties. I haven't started living yet and have a lot of catching up to become even  'normal' if it is ever possible my life could follow a conventional path! But whilst every dog has its day there is also still fight in the dog. Without fight there is no point but the day may yet come to pass.

A good O Level man

           I heard in the news that the Education minister wants to take us is back to Fifties Britain and somebody mentioned that GCE O levels are for clever children. Oh no, not what I recall. When I was at school I scraped five O levels on the first hit and another two on the resit. I actually failed O level Woodwork but got 85% a term later and two terms later grade A at A level (normally a two year course). I put that down to the woodwork teacher being sacked and an excellent completely eccentric but inspiring woodwork teacher taking over. However, sport and woodwork were what I excelled at. I felt pretty stupid generally and my sixth form classmates went on to University. I think you needed five O levels to get into Sixth form. Nowadays you will more likely get into university if you played with Transformers (killing machines) in your childhood.  It does seem that anybody can get to university so I am inclined to believe that standards were much higher in my youth. But more than that, there was a sense of history that was part of general knowledge that has been lost today. Churchill is an insurance company and the colour of Cheryl Cole's knickers is general knowledge.

         Curiously the words GCE O level triggered a memory - a few years (decades) ago I applied to be a part-time tutor at a prestigious furniture college in Dorset, made famous because one of its students was a nephew to the Queen. At the interview a psychologist had been hired! I remember during my written examination (!) him jangling with coins in his pocket which was making me feel nervous. He came over and criticised the way I held my pen in my left hand. I am left-handed as many creative people are! Later at what I can only describe as an intimidating interview he suddenly announced 'I see you haven't stated your grades at O level on your application form'. I was completely stunned by this and being the gentleman I am, I refrained from saying 'Oh I'm sorry I didn't realise you were looking for a good O level man' and promptly getting up and walking out. My highly accomplished artist sister (Barbara Broun) later suggested that is exactly what I should have done. The fact that I had won numerous regional and national awards since school seemed to slip the psychologist's attention! 

     When you look at the careers of people such as the late Paul Ghetty (once the richest man in the world), Lord Stokes (who was tea boy but became SEO of British Leyland) and Alan Sugar, one is reminded of the saying:

'Examinations are for failures'.
    
   

Which Commandment?

    Busking with my guitar late last evening I clashed with another street performer who does a 'Funny Walk' act in my home city reigning in a lot of people and also a lot of money every evening. When I say 'clash' I mean I had to stop playing my guitar to tourists sitting outside a cafe as this guy suddenly appeared to do his ten minute hilarious(?) jokes expecting to me to be brushed aside. I was actually there first! Dancing to my music was a Columbian guy I know who happens to be a devout Christian. He thought this other street entertainer was extremely rude (a view echoed later on by some of the cafe punters who spoke with us) to expect me to suddenly stop my guitar playing that they were enjoying.

     My friend then listened to the funny guy's jokes around the Abbey poking fun at the carved figure of Jesus Christ as being gay to which my friend was extremely offended and went up to the entertainer and told him he was being blasphemous and anti the Bible etcetera. I may not share my friend's fundamentalist views but I do respect his right to object to some cheap laugh a second offending his religion. This religion, actually, that is called Christianity has been the core religion of our nation historically and offers a humanistic code of behaviour that arguably, because it is now so fashionable to attack Christianity, is in demise and I believe is part of the breakdown in British society and certainly the abandonment of many decent values. As yet we have nothing better to replace it. No wonder the East call us decadent.  

    Curiously had this entertainer delivered his jokes in many Arab countries he would have been publicly stoned rather than rewarded. I don't go to Church anymore and have my own private views/uncertainties about whether there is a God or not but it is sad there is a lack of respect which clearly this street entertainer failed to have for a fellow street entertainer. I didn't actually mind stopping playing for ten minutes. The guy might have slipped me a fiver as a tip for the inconvenience but I guess the word 'greed' would have no currency with someone who mocks Christianity!  

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Krays had a mum

     Yes, Britain's legendary gangsters had a mum and anyone watching the film on television this evening would see the power of a mum. Without a mum you face a world blindfolded; a long and silent journey where you find your own path and hear just your own screams when you lose your way.

     Paradoxically in the film the mum teaches her boys not to fight each other but to stick together and fight 'them' out there. Without their mum reprimanding them for knocking the shit out of each other in a boxing ring - I mean without a mum at all, how would life have panned out for them? Why is the mum (played by Billie Whitelaw) actually the central character in the film? Perhaps it is neither here nor there that the mum of the Krays' is so powerful and that only I perceive it as such because I had no mum and I fought the world with bare knuckles on my own. I took some bruisings but cannot ever recall losing a fight. The number of times I would plead with an aggressor who was provoking me and presumably thought I was easy meat, to back off, not because I was scared of them but scared of my own strength fuelled by a deep rage that they had a mum and I didn't.  

    Only once did I ever walk away from a fight when two thugs picked on me and a mate when we were about 30 years old because we were 'posh'. My mate, who grew up in Hong Kong with knives on the street, raised his fists but I grabbed him and yelled 'run'. I knew in a split second by the look in these guys' eyes they would have killed us. It is all in the eyes and nothing to do with size. Some times in life you perservere and fight (other people's battles as well) and other times you just walk away.  

Class War

     I heard on Radio Four this morning about a rapper songwriter called Plan B, announcing that if Sexism and Racism is not accepted publicly why not Classism also? Interesting question. When I was a kid I got a beating from my father for speaking with a West country accent that I acquired to avoid a beating from the kids on the street! Indeed a few years ago I found I was victim to blatant classism in a technical college where I was teaching that ultimately cost me my job (I swore at a student when the culture amongst the staff was to use four letter language!) and I was informed there was no CURRENT legislation in place to argue a case. I was teaching carpentry part-time and both students and staff clearly discriminated against me because I was 'posh' and stood out like a sore thumb in the building site arena. 

    After all I must be posh to listen to Radio Four but actualy I have argued for years that classism is rampant in Britain and just because it is subtle does not mean it is not still very powerful and it also works both ways. 

   I would suggest that actually it can be an advantage to have a strong working class accent (television is full of it) and the one thing the British Working Class has in common with the Aristocracy is a strong and proud sense of social identity. On that basis one could almost argue that class is a good thing! The more 'mobile' middle class is the victim of consumersim as it trades on insecurity and dissatisfaction! However, the radio discussion prompted me to dig out a chapter from my book 'Missing Jean' (originally titled 'Glass Wall') and a chapter called 'Class War' going back to when I was about nine years old: 

   

    Trevor Lang lived in a terraced council house a few streets away from our big house in Marlborough. He was small, mean and tough. He was both my best friend and worst enemy. It was class war really. I was the ‘posh’ upper middle class kid who spoke proper and he was the working class tyke who was leader of the pack.  His right hand man Mervyn cycled past me one day and shouted that Trevor was going to beat me up. I told Mervyn to tell Trevor I would take him on any day of the week. Well, Trevor chose a good day as I returned from Scouts dressed in my short trousers and tassels on my socks as he confronted me with his gang all dressed in long trousers. Funny how important trousers were in my youth. Long trousers were so grown up and streetwise but father insisted I wore short trousers even when I went to Grammar School and the other boys wore long trousers.

  Trevor jumped out of the bushes with his gang and said “What's this Mervyn tells me you're going to do to me?”  I  managed to stall him by agreeing that Mervyn had got it right as I walked nearer the side gate to our house. I knew the latch of the gate was on the inside and the gate was high so I would need to time things perfectly and make a jump for it. But the talking was running out and Trevor was getting impatient. Curiously there must have been a gentlemanly side to Trevor's character as he refrained from delivering the first blow. He had every opportunity but maybe he would have lost face in front of his gang if he hit me first. He would be a bigger hero if I hit him and then he could finish me off to their cheers.  After all, he was challenging me to stand to my word. 

    I wasn't afraid of the gang as Trevor was tough enough to settle matters one to one, the gang were hangers-on really.  He was itching to engage and my heart was racing faster and faster as we got nearer the side gate of our house. The green painted gate was high and sturdily built and my attention was on the hidden latch behind it and how to get to it quickly.  “Right Trevor” and in a flash I turned round and caught him on the jaw. It knocked him off his feet, it was so sudden. I then scrambled up over the gate as Trevor groaned, got up and lunged at me grabbing my Boy Scout legs with the stupid tassels on my socks. I managed to kick him off. I rushed over to the house where the coal shed was and began hurling large chunks of coal at the gate as he tried to climb over. I probably emptied the entire coal bin in a matter of seconds. My hands were oily, black and sore.

     Amidst all the rumpus the back door was suddenly thrown open and father stood sternly on the doorstep powering over me, silhouetted by the bare dangling electric kitchen lamp behind. The smell of Dana's cooking scones for tomorrow’s high tea wafted out. “What the hell's going on?” I immediately burst into tears at the relief of refuge but instead my father roared “Fight him like a man” and slammed the door on me. I hid crouching in the coal shed interrniitedly slinging last chunks of coal towards the green gate fearing Trevor would climb over. I probably got the beating from Trevor on another day but strangely time would pass and Trevor and I would be mates again.

   One day Trevor was pushing me in a pram up the high street while I was firing my cap gun. “Blimey, that's my stepmother coming” I said to Trevor. He quickly pulled a mackintosh over me as Dana approached on the same pavement. “Hello Trevor, what are you doing out of school at this time of day?”  I had blown my school dinner money on caps for my cap gun. Had Dana spotted me under the raincoat and this matter been reported back to my father a few more garden canes would have been broken for sure.  I invited Trevor to my ninth birthday party. While the washing up was being done after tea he was busy beating me up in the garden because I had not given him a big slice of the cake. Veronica (my older sister) hurled open an upstairs window and screamed “Get off him Trevor” in a deliberate West country accent.

   So there it was, ducking and diving between beatings from my father and kids on the street, when I eventually got an all important place at the grammar school - we wore green uniform and were called 'the grammar grubs' by the blue uniformed secondary Modern school kids who waited at the school gates to engage in fights with us. British Class war at its finest! 

   Has much changed actually in Britain since my childhood? I chose to design and make really innovative modern wood furniture as an adult trying over decades to make my furniture accessible to anybody interested in good modern design only to find I have been engulfed in a class/social game for all these years where high expense and exclusivity defines the field! Not my choosing and not my philosophy and it is probably because of classism that my furniture designs are not really acknowledged in the way they were in the Seventies when for a brief period cash flowed more easily across the social class system! Now if your work is too cheap it is looked down upon! 

Caesar's orgy

    Oh come on, don't be so prudish: 'Families were horrified to see more than 2000 (?) drunken Cambridge University students stripping off, vomitting and drinking themselves unconscious at a riotous (Caesarian Sunday) summer party in a public park. Some were seen acting out sexual positions, while male students chanted and ran around with their trousers round their ankles. Girls seen drinking port through condoms'. All in view of middle England families walking their innocent children in the park. 

   Yes, I recall my own student days at Shoreditch College in the Sixties and our inititation ceremonies - pelting freshers with flour bombs whilst they sat smartly dressed innocently posing for a college photograph and a handful of third year students dressing up as medics and staging a fake health check where freshers joined two queues with signs saying 'pass' and 'fail'. Fortunately I passed!

   Well that shocked you didn't it? I mean our sense of fun back in the Sixties was so tame and clean but for us as students at the time it was very funny to watch and even reminisce on now. Turn the clock forward fifty years and we have become so insensitised that we glorify these young cream of the crop intellectuals yet many of them will land up as lawyers and judges - the kind who sentence a young footballer to five years gaol for committing 'rape' on a drunken young woman. 

   Okay so I am the prude but don't listen to me, I am now an invisible citizen past his sell by date in this youth and sex obsessed hedonistic culture. But the fact is that only a week or two ago a very talented rising star young Welsh footballer was very severely dealt with over an issue that is becoming increasingly blurred and that is consential sex. Nobody in the press mention the responsibility of the rape victim and millions of other young women who parade with their knickers in full view totally drunken on our streets every Friday and Saturday night. Yet this footballer got five years in gaol totally wrecking his career. 

   There is something wrong somewhere not just the obvious fact that a female holds enormous power to accuse a man of sexual misconduct. I'm not saying he should not have gone to gaol, I wasn't in court to hear the facts but my gut instinct tells me perhaps a year would have taught him a lesson. His mates walked free yet they apparantly looked on and the girl wakes up in the morning not knowing where she was. Half the kids born in Britain in the Seventies were to young women who woke up at pop festivals in the morning, not knowing where they were after revelling the night away on cannabis! 

  We have lost the plot and I am concerned that even when these young often over indulged Cambridge undergraduates have settled down into conventional married life in a few years time and they are walking their children in the park they in turn may be shocked to see the latest Caesar's Summer initiation commiting acts of bestiality and probably worse. But who cares, it sells newspapers and is good material for the soaps! 

Murphy's Radio

       Many will know the colour and style of Cheryl Cole's hair, few will know who Cheryl Cole is and everybody knows who Simon Cowell is. Few will know that in 1934 Gordon Russell made Murphy radios and few will know who Gordon Russell was.

       It was on BBC 4's Today programme that I woke up today to the words  'Gordon Russell was one of the greatest designers of the Twentieth Century'. Not only one of the greatest designers, I have chosen to refer to Sir Gordon Russell as 'The Father of 20th Century British Furniture Design' in my film documentary 'Furniture today 3' (available at www.furnituretodayuk.com). 

       Gordon Russell was a hugely important figure having been involved with The Festival of Britain, The Design Council and Utility Furniture. It is perhaps Utility Furniture that strikes the main chord with me; functional simple furniture designs born out of necessity when there were material shortages during the Second World War and made in modest workshops around the country. A lesson indeed for furniture students to toughen up and design to a disciplined brief but above all making furniture accessible. 

      Gordon Russell although inspired by the Arts & Crafts and in particular the understated forms of Ernest Gimson, differed with that movement in his total acceptance of the machine embracing it with hand skill. Such snobbery or indeed ignorance still exists today not least in the minds of a small section of the public who expect a crafted object to be totally made by hand.  Even in the sweat shops of India and China the machine is fast replacing handskill. Curiously, William Morris a pioneer of the English Arts & Crafts movement cried 'Let us be masters of machines not their slaves', but his work was predominantly taken up by the Bloomsbury Set and still assumes a whiff of exclusivity today.

     The BBC Radio Four design competition for amateurs to design a radio sounds a great inititiative. Let's hope some innovative wooden radios will persuade the judges. For many years I have listened to a Roberts radio in my workshop, a plywood chassis housed in solid Teak. Today Roberts Radio fill the shelves of Currys stores shining in their glossy plastic. Arguably modern technology transcends the superiority of wood as a sound baffle although I still have some massive "Class A" KEF speakers I built in 1970 using chipboard.

    One of the features of Gordon Russell Utility furniture was the use of thin plywood for door panels. Plywood for much of my furniture making career was looked down upon. A local furniture shop declined my plywood rocking chairs saying 'the public don't like plywood'. Russell, of course, was building airplanes for the War Effort and plywood was clearly a superior material then. 
       Unlike Murphy's Law, Murphy radios seldom went wrong!

A Murphy radio built at the Gordon Russell factory in Broadway in1934

Veneered plywood would have been used in the construction.

Aunt Betty

      Aunt Betty died on 19 March 2012. 'A long life lived'. Betty was my father's brother's wife and had lost a newborn child at the same time as my mother Jean died having me. She became a kind of foster mother to me until I was 18 months old, when apparantly my father suddenly arrived on her doorstep and dragged me away with me apparantly screaming 'mummy'. Christmas cards were exchanged throughout my childhood and then I lost contact with her until I looked her up 50 years later, visiting her in Dollar in Scotland. She told me that my father had severely reprimanded her for teaching me the word 'mummy' but she had told him she didn't teach me, I simply copied her own children Francis and Elizabeth!  

      Silly daddy for  not understanding how the young infant's mind works, especially as he was a schoolmaster. Sadly he constantly compared me to his favourite ultra bright nephew (her son) Francis who could put no foot wrong and throughout my youth and despite my passing the Eleven Plus and attending one of the best grammar schools in Wiltshire, I felt completely stupid and a failure in contrast to this academically bright first cousin, who my father constantly banged on about.   

      I guess  this is a rather poor excuse for my not keeping more in touch with dear Aunt Betty who in fulfilling her need in her hour of grief, met my need as a vulnerable motherless infant. Her daughter Lizzie, sadly a heroin addict and close friend of my late sister Veronica Jill, died many years ago. May Aunt Betty rest in peace.

Hello

     One of the most priceless gifts is a smile and although I am privileged to live in one of the most beautiful cities in England it is not that common to be greeted by a hello or a smile on the street, except by tourists when I busk with my guitar.

    A feature of the 'special' (or is it 'essential') relationship with the USA is the common term 'enjoy' when you have been served a meal in a restaurant which is just too often insincere and I cannot help but notice when I walk off the street in my home city (which is one of Britain's foremost upmarket consumer meccas), and go into a clothes boutique as I rarely do but did yesterday, I was greeted by an enthusiastic 'hello' and 'are you having a good day today?'

  It is a sad fact that sales staff up and down the land are trained to be nice in order to grab your money and that the more affluence and material wealth that abounds, the less humanity of a simple smile or hello exists.

    A few Christmases ago I was spending it alone and decided to wash my car outside my house. Someone passed silently and as he walked by I called 'Happy Christmas'!

    When somebody smiles and makes eye contact in that brief moment you glow for the rest of the day and it costs nothing to give.   

Backing down and coming out

    It was heartening to read that the world's most famous atheist professor Richard Dawkins is only 6.9 out of 7 sure there is no God and denies he is atheistic. Billions of people worldwide have believed in the existence of God and billions probably will after him, yet here we had two academics 'battling' it out (Rowan Williams) in tv debate where no new punches were pulled and I suspect it was mainly intellectual one-upmanship.

     Then I learn that Lord Melvyn Bragg has come out about his depression. I first wrote about my own autobiographical novel 'Glass Wall' (now 'Missing Jean') over fifteen years ago and depression has largely sapped my energy to get it published! Macmillan publishing was interested but then said it wasn't quite their bag. I have come to the conclusion that only those who have suffered the terrifying depths can understand it and many fear it is a plague that could knock on heir own front door so shun its existence. It is not something one would wish on one's worst enemy and is sure to chase away all but your very closest friends. 

    As Bragg says it is an elastic term and for some an excuse not to go into work and a form of negative self pity. What is important is trying to cope with it and hang on to the extremely fine straw of hope that things will ever change and improve. One strategy I have tried that works to a degree is to make a friend of my enemy depression on the basis that if I can't fight or change it I can try to accept it. Going to bed and surrendering to it is in a way, for me at least, a way of letting nature heal as the worst of the storm can pass by sleeping it off but at other times it makes it worse. Nutrients, exercise and laughter can help and watching a Charlie Chaplin movie can take the sting out of the terrifying silence of isolation which is a major cause of depression.

      I read today Esther Rantzen's soul-bearing piece about prolonged isolation after the loss of a loved one on the MailOnline and she is particularly brave because if you are famous you meet even more hostility if you challenge our odd taboos. But we are still living in the Dark Ages and the problem ain't goin away. If you've got a broken leg you get it fixed and everybody signs the plastercast but if you have a broken mind (which probably mean a broken heart as well) then you walk alone!  

Ankle Deep in humanity

    Many many years ago a friend told me there is no place in this world for sensitive people. Indeed the sensitive particularly suffer in this involuntary confusing journey. The problem is that in an insensitive world compassion, the very thing that surely binds the human race together, disappears. Compassion is bound up in 'doing the right thing' and sometimes in the flash of a second, anybody would do the right thing, when for instance a man is drowning?

     Many years ago I was in Australia swimming off the famous Bondi beach. I am not a strong swimmer and was being pulled under by dangerous rip currents only a few metres from the beach. Just as I was struggling to swim ashore I became aware of a man on his back fully clothed bobbing up and down in the water and purple looking (I am colour blind so thats what he looked like to me). He was basically drowning. Another swimmer and myself immediately went to his rescue. The other man, much younger and fitter than me (I was 43) attended to the drowning man in this dangerous water and yelled to me to get help so I swam using all my reserves to the beach, bobbing under as I did so. 

    Exhausted I managed to scream 'help, man drowning' and was just stared at by motionless beautiful people in the prime of their youth, beautifully tanned just sitting there in their vanity and doing absolutely nothing (this shock haunted me for years afterwards). However, quite quickly the rescue guys came in their red motorised rubber dinghy (or was it orange) and in the meantime the hero in this story had pulled the man on shore and gave him mouth-to-mouth. As the lifeguards took over and applied an oxygen mask to the nearly drowned man, his rescuer just quietly walked away, through the beautiful people just sitting there unaffected. I followed him and grabbed his arm  'Hey, you just saved that man's life - well done mate'.

    Back in Britain, in fact yesterday, I read in the newspaper a man had drowned in a boating pond as fire rescue officers stood and watched. They were not authorised to go into water more than ankle deep. A police officer was about to wade in but his superior fiercely reprimanded him apparantly. So the man drowned while our rescue services just stood and watched. He was trying to rescue a capsised model boat I think.  

Great - Britain!

Marathon

     About five years ago I met a talented harmonica player in Dordogne on a working holiday with some woodworking friends from Bristol. His name is Kristof and he invited me to participate in a 1500km canoe trip through Mongolia the following year, to film it and then play guitar to his harmonica around the campfire in the evenings. 

    He organized these survival marathons drawing globally for his victims. I thought hard and not so much about my age but more my lack of physical fitness as at the time I was in very slow recovery from a serious bout of paralysing depression. Two years earlier I was doing well to spend two hours per day out of bed as I had lost the will to live and there were no hospital beds when I 'fell down' so it took many many years to stand up again. I also feared I would get bored canoeing over such a long stretch.

      I have just completed a similar marathon of primarily mental endurance (the complete opposite of the deeply depressive state) and also physical endurance in that since October I have been working mostly on average fourteen hours per days on a film project called 'Furniture Today Part Three'. It took a long time getting started, had no support of funding, nor did anybody ask me to do it, most people in Britain are tuned into furniture yesterday and I had no proper 'business plan' or strategy to sell the film other than a confidence that the story I was telling would one day be heard (seen). 

       Curiously at school, whilst not much good at academic stuff I always came first or a close second at cross country running and the distance was something like 20 miles as it was an outward bound type progressive school. The film has been made single handed breaking all the rules as it is a team based profession. I'm also self-taught as six UK film schools turned me down as being too old at the age of 43.

        Computer software crashes, glitches, etc meant I probably spent at least five days on every running minute of the film. The documentary is 70 minutes long and will have its premiere screening at the University of Bath on the evening of Thursday 15 March 2012. A 200-seater lecture theatre has been booked and improvised jazz music will be played by a legendary rock guitarist to welcome people as they sit down. I am pleased with the film. It is my best shot. 

        I therefore extend my invitation to you, my reader as there might be one seat left. Visit my website www.furnituretodayuk.com for details. My You Tube channel WOODOMAIN includes videos of the film trailer, how it was made and also a short one including the harmonica player Kristof.

Mother - Hell hath no fury

    Hell hath no fury like a .....mother's love. Slightly unusual that someone who never had a mother watches a two-hour South Korean film called 'Mother' by Bong Joon-ho. An alternative film deserves an alternative review surely! I accompanied a friend who wanted to see the film at the last minute and I had no idea what it was about. Bradford on Avon Film Society is arguably one of the best in the country and its mainly middle class late middle aged audience was full capacity at the screening of this tense psychological thriller. 

   The film is certainly shocking and disturbing not least in exposing taboos such as a retarded man in his early twenties sleeping with his mother, although clearly it emphasised the point he was still a child. The sub titles use the word 'retard' but this is a taboo in Britain so I use the adjective for want of a better description for someone of a simple-minded disposition (I think we call it 'learning difficulties'). In contrast the mother has a powerful mind and a relentless determination to prove the innocence of her somewhat rebellious son accused of murdering a young woman, making Agatha Christie's Poirot look tamely bourgeois in the search for who dunnit. 

  The film is also about justice (coming from unexpected quarters) and as a piece of film making I think is a work of art with very powerful imagery and an Oscar deserving performance by its 59 year old star Kim Hye-ja. There is a powerful surrealistic opening scene of her dancing in a field and as the cameras slowly zoomed in I thought this was a 45 year old woman with the trim and lithe body of a 30 year old. The only part I found predictable in the film was the return to this scene near the end of the story as part of the film genre was flashback and as a film maker myself I could see it coming. 

   To articulate the story and give a clever conventional opinion its best to read the Guardian review by Peter Bradshaw and there is a very high probability he had a mum so I will try to keep this review relevant to my unusual perspective that I watched it through the eyes of someone not having a mum and relying on a fair bit of guess work about what exactly the emotions flying around are all about. Perhaps I am writing this in the hope that somebody else of my disposition might read this!      

   The most powerful scene for me was when the mother discovers her son really did kill the girl (albeit accidentally) and she batters to death the person who witnessed it as he is about to phone the police. She uses a King Dick and although this film has mildly pornographic content a 'King Dick' to the technically unititiated is a giant adjustable spanner used for farm machinery. This scene is more graphic than the nubile sex scene which is sparing to the largely senior audience - graphic in its shocking sound effects - you almost feel the blows. This scene is so ferocious and the subsequent act of the mother setting fire to the house and burning all evidence of the witness illustrates the power of a mother. Perhaps power is a limited word as it gets mixed up with control and a whole gammit of roles and emotions a mother has. Paradoxically whilst in Western culture the mother has more legal rights to underpin her power, this Korean woman was up against corruption in the legal system and public ridicule in her endless pursuit to protect her boy at any cost. No wonder many western women accuse their men of having limited emotional intelligence when the mother, like a hand being cut off, retains the power of the umbilical cord throughout her life?      

   Back to the plot, the son in his simplicity roams around the burned ruins of the house his mother has set alight to remove all evidence of her crime and he finds her metal box containing her accupunture needles (she is an unlicenced practitioner) and right at the end of the film my only confusion is when she can bear the emotions no more she gets on a bus full of dancing parents of sons like her own and uses a needle on her amazingly nubile thigh (for a 59 year old woman!) and I thought she was going to commit suicide but instead she triggered a happiness nerve in  the brain and the film ends with her dancing with the others. 

  From the perspective of my own youth-dominated culture I questioned why the leading character was a woman of 59 with a son of around 21 (I thought having children later in life was a luxury of First World countries?), but perhaps the lines on her face and the experience an older woman carried added to the poignancy. Certainly the face of Kim Hye-ja was amazingly expressive. I like a film that has a really strong central character (such as Gene Hackman in The French Connection) and although my cinema companion (a mother herself) thought the film was ghastly I can say I would uncomfortably watch it again.  
   Although the film was about a mother's protection of her son, the lengths she would go to, and paradoxically the ultimate powerlessness she had. If the film has any message it is always carry your acupunture kit with you if the pain, guilt and anguish gets too much.  

   
The guardian Review of 'Mother' by Peter Bradshaw can be found at:

www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/aug/19/mother-review

Life ends at 45

   Okay so now we've been told. Its official. And I have a sneaking suspicion only people over 45 read my blog. According to the latest News your brain cells are dying earlier than we thought and if the word 'retirement' isn't enough to make any 65 year old feel on the crap heap, being told you are brain dead after 45 is going to really do the trick.

   Well let me tell you I have hardly started living yet and I'm a good few years over 45. I haven't even been married let lone divorced three times and I haven't reached the pinnacle of my creative work yet so there's still a lot to pack in. I did the online mental agility test included in the news item and wondered whether it was an error and intended for twelve year olds. I play at least one game of chess every day and am more in touch with the news than ever before, using an iPad as a very handy device to gather information. I also play and compose music at least twice a week. 

   Although I was deemed "thick" at school in the days when getting into university was actually very difficult I reckon I would leave many young graduates standing if brain/reasoning power was tested today and not least in stamina as my current video project am working roughly fourteen hours a day.

  So, please forgive the lack of modesty here but spurred by increasing irritation that generalisations, frequently contradictory are thrust upon us.  I refuse to succumb to being a victim of Ageism. My uncle who was my guardian in his fifties, when I was seventeen, was a highly capable and distinguished man, being the chairman of the largest Timber Sawmills in Scotland and the Dean of Guild of Glasgow, said to me that a man reaches his prime in his late fifties. Today we are told that the new twenty is the old thirty, that the new forty is the old sixty so this is another piece of unconnected 'official' thinking.

   Whereas I am supposed to be well into an era of 'managed decline' I would prefer to say I am in an era of 'managed time' - with luck another thirty years of active service. One of my heros and someone I once met is the broadcaster John Humphries and who out-speeds and outwits our youthful politicians.

Loss and Integrity

    It was only in August last year (2011) I bumped into an old friend Alan Mitchell who was the kingpin of woodworking magazine editors in the Seventies and Eighties. Out of respect I captured him on film to include in 'Furniture Today Part Three'. 

   With sadness I learned today that Alan had died in early December. I discovered this while Googling for some dates of his editorial office. Alan was a legendary 'fixture' in the woodworking media for many years, in fact a kingpin. Not just that he was a truly democratic and friendly person who went out of his way to scoop interesting stories and even landed up unnannounced at my small furniture gallery in Bath in the mid 1980's, having climbed a very steep hill, to run a feature. 

   It was heartening to see him at the Cheltenham 'Celebration of Craftsmanship and Design' exhibition Private View and he was immediately friendly and thanks to the organizer Jason Heap for having a 'flexible approach' regarding who is invited to Private Views that the impromptu opportunity arose for me to pay my respect to Alan on film. The policy at this major UK annual furniture show before Jason took over was to limit the Private view to clients and exhibitors only, breaking with the great tradition that Private Views are also social events and to use modern media language are the equivalent of Facebook to do business in a social networking environment! 

   Anybody who is in the tough business of sustained economic survival surely knows that you have to think outside the box and consider all sorts of ways to find customers and often the best results come from indirect means. Alan Mitchell was neither a prospective client nor a current craft journalist at this exhibition Private View so under the old regime he would not have been invited but clearly he was a man who gave his life and passion to woodworking and was not one for cultivating favourites or enemies but just did his job fair and square and genuinely liked the people. 

    Magazine editors and the craft media have great power and 'make and break' names. It was unusual to come across a magazine editor with the integrity Alan Mitchell had, but perhaps that was an age when the term might be more frequently used.

    It has been a challenging couple of years for me  - the great furniture maker Alan Peters died in 2009. He was my schoolboy hero and later a good professional acquaintance, someone of great integrity in his work, then a good male friend of mine who seemed to have everything, took his own life in the same year. Then in 2010 my charasmatic and colourful older sister Jill (who once turned down a date with Jimmi Hendrix) died of cancer within about three months, and then my half-sister Barbara died of a brain tumour, having suffered dementia at a shockingly young age. Now in 2012 my aunt who was my guardian and offered me a home when I was 17, is on her deathbed and probably has weeks to live.

Life is strong yet fragile. We know it all, yet we know nothing. We are here today and gone tomorrow, but the show goes on with new kids on the block re-inventing wheels and who one day will follow the same destiny!!

The buzzword is Making Things

    The great thing about a blog is that you can say what you want without a magazine editor changing or messing up what you have written. The downside is that hardly anyone reads a blog unless you are a celeb. 

    Today's blog is about a true celeb in my life and that is my woodwork teacher. He more than anyone else has influenced my life - a true genius of a teacher and such is this man's modesty I could only find one Google result (below) about a Telegraph article about him riding a Royal Enfield Bullet in 2001. Curiously I owned one of those motorcycles as well as follow Howard in his footsteps and train at the legendary Shoreditch College as a Handicrafts teacher on leaving school. We were well ahead of the game teaching youngsters how to think creatively as well as use their hands. We were teaching design as an integrated part of Handicraft years before Design took over and eventually became embedded in Technology. The buzzword now is 'Making Things'. A bit late when the subject has been systemmatically dismantled over decades! 

    Howard Orme became woodwork master at Abbotsholme school as I entered the Lower Sixth form having failed Woodwork O level with the rest of the class under the previous uninspiring teacher who swiftly vanished. In the December resits I got 85% and two terms later Grade A at GCE A level (normally a two year course)! The thing about Howard, apart from him having a very glamourous young wife at this all boys' boarding school was that he was mildly eccentric and a damned good cabinetmaker as well as an inspiring teacher. Enthusiasm is what comes to mind and this certainly rubbed off, but he must have liked me and for someone who spent much of his school life in trouble that was quite something. 

    My father died when I was 17 and the headmaster gave me the day off lessons to be quiet and on my own. I took the day off fly fishing on the River Dove and feel no remorse in saying it was the first day of my freedom and so I guess Howard would have become a role model. He made learning woodwork fun and even gave me the keys to the woodwork shop one Friday night to make my first guitar. I worked throughout Friday and Saturday night and slumped over the bench around 4pm on the Sunday with one completed acoustic guitar. We had run out of French polish so I used shoe polish.  It was an exciting moment of truth to string the guitar and it sounded good. 

   Above all Howard was a superb craftsman and he would invite me to his flat to inspect his cabinets while his lovely young wife made coffee! Howard had just left the RAF and I guess he was about 23 years old when he joined the Abbotsholme teaching staff.

   On one occasion the headmaster brought some parents of a prospective new boy into the workshop. Howard and I were competing on mini crossbows we had made aiming at a poster of Edward Barnsley at the far end of the workshop. The headmaster was speechless but this was an independent progressive school and I was Howard's star pupil. 

    I dedicated one of my woodworking books to Howard Orme and later met up with him at Eton College where he took up a post in what he described as the Department of Maniacs (Mechanics).  I don't think Howard ever really knew how much he had influenced me and not just in a selfish way of my becoming a renowned designer maker but more importantly to hand on the gift of education and in particular the undervalued Practical Arts that was my particular vehicle for personal development and expression. The greatest reward and one more lasting than the acclaim of (transient) fame as performer is when out of the blue ten, twenty or thirty years on an ex pupil or student appears out of nowhere and says you helped them find their direction in life. Especially in the field of teaching when at the time you have no real measure of whether you are any good at all.

However, one thing for sure is that anybody in the business of education - a teacher, has no business there unless they have not just enthusiasm but a passion for what they are teaching. A university degree proving you are clever is not enough. 

Jeremy Broun with teacher Howard Orme at Abbotsholme School

Howard Orme and Jeremy Broun at Eton College where Howard taught

Howard Orme's Telegraph article:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/4753067/Typical-biker-Howard-Orme.html