Green Wood Work

 I’ve just come back from a nine day holiday, my first break from London in fifteen years.

I say holiday, but it was a course in ‘green wood work’. My task was to build a rocking chair under the brilliant tuition from a master craftsman who is Britain’s leading green wood worker – Mick Abbott.

A skill of making chairs using traditional tools – axes, bow saws, froes, drawknives, felling a live ash tree, and using a shaving horse and a pole lathe to work the wood and produce a chair.

What a mouthful of tools. I guess most of them you’ve not heard of before, but they are the tools our ancestors have been using for thousands of years to fashion, create and build the chairs that we have sat on since we moved on from sitting on the ground.

Myself and the seven other enthusiastic apprentices had one thing in common – a passion and love for trees, the woods and nature that surrounded us. Our workshop was in the open air in a secret woods near Bromyard in Worcester.

Our accommodation – sleeping in tents, cooking on open fires and ovens made from bricks and clay. Our compost toilet was fantastic, a hut built from felled trees, wattle and daub walls, where you could sit with a cup of tea and a fag gazing out into the woodlands, with birds singing in the trees and the sound of the hungry bluetit chicks that were nesting in the roof.

No electricity, no radios, no sound of cars, just the sound of wood being chopped and sliced by the drawknife, the rhythmic hum of the pole lathe, and happy banter from all of us as we worked.

Only the clothes people wore gave a clue to the fact that this was 2010, and not 2010 BC.  My nine days in the woods were the happiest break I’ve ever had. I came back to London with a magnificent handmade rocking chair, no nails or glue holding it together, but fine joints and craftsmanship.

I and the others had all experienced something magic, a feeling of profound wellbeing, and both physiologically and psychologically, that we all belong in the woods.

Paul and Scruffy

Published in The Big Issue, June 2010

Gardening Saved My Life

Millions of people will get the tube or bus to work today, in the doldrums because they are unhappy with life. It’s a whole new year, but you’re still returning to that same boring job and nothing has changed.

That’s exactly how I felt this time four years ago. I was living in a hostel for the homeless, down and depressed, when someone said to me ‘remember what used to make you happy, then you will know what you really want’.

My earliest childhood memories are from when I was six. My father had polio and was wheelchair bound. I remember pushing him into the garden, before collecting his pint of homemade beer from mum in the kitchen.

Then my adventure began, he would instruct me from his chair how to cut the privet hedge with dangerous shears, and push the petrol driven mower to cut our lawns. He taught me to dig my first vegetable garden and to respect all the birds, insects and trees so important to our ecosystem.

My dad died when I was twelve, I forgot the garden and went off the rails. I gave my mum hell, I’m so sorry mum. I then travelled the wrong path in life, although colourful and adventurous, my ego wanted all the wrong things. I know this now.

Three decades later, a new year had arrived, and I was desperately unhappy. I lay in bed trying to recall the days when I’d been happy. My thoughts went back to my childhood in the garden with my father.

A tingle went down my spine, I smiled and laughed. I resolved to do something about it.

 That was four years ago, and I now teach gardening at Spitalfields City Farm, and run gardening clubs for school kids, homeless people and recovering addicts. I’m a fulfilled and happy man.

Tonight, think what made you happy as a child, and what you wanted to be – it’s not too late.

Paul and Scruffy

Published in The Big Issue January 2009