It was wonderful to hear the buzz and chatter of staff in our office last week, as we relaxed into level one lockdown.
What I really hated about the working from home schtick is that the office was like a morgue.
I believe that people need stimulation and they spark off each other, for the overall health of the business.
I really don’t want to hear doom and gloom predictions of third waves and virus mutations – all too ghastly to contemplate.
If there’s one thing this whole virus has taught us, its surely that we must savour and enjoy our freedom while we can.
* * *
Up in the hills above Ixopo is the hamlet of Donnybrook where my wife grew up, and nearby is the forest named Xumeni.
My Zulu linguist friend says it means “to pass through quickly” or possibly a respectful request for a person to leap over something, for example a cliff, if they had been sentenced to death.
Imagine that, being asked to leap to your death! I’d definitely have to be pushed.
Anyhow, about 100 years ago some farmers from that district visited America, returning with a pocketful of seeds of the giant Redwood trees that grow in California.
They planted the seeds in the Xumeni forest and forgot all about them.
A century on, they had grown into very big and magnificent trees, but some crafty bugger had his eye on them.
My brother-in-law chanced on a pile of logs in the forest and realised the Redwoods had been felled and were about to be carted away.
Outraged at the theft of these beautiful giants of the forest, Charlie had no hesitation in, ahem, diverting them onto his truck and to his own sawmill.
Possession is nine tenths of what passes for the law, up there in the hills of KZN.
In time he milled them into nice thick planks and very kindly presented some to me.
As the name suggests, they are a light red colour, with a lovely grain and free of knots.
Unfortunately, Redwood is a little soft and marks easily, so to harden it I had to learn a new skill.
I love working with wood, but never have time for it. Lockdown changed that.
I come from a family of keen woodworkers, which is what men did – along with fixing cars – before social media ruined everything.
My father was a great carpenter who really loved shaping and finishing a piece of good wood.
He had ambitious projects, but they didn’t always get finished.
I used to be critical of that, then I look around my own workshop and count how many projects are tucked away in dusty corners, because there is “just one thing missing” that stops me from finishing the job.
My father’s most ambitious project was building an ocean-going yacht, with great ambitions of sailing to the Paradise Islands off Mozambique, despite never having been any closer to a boat than a cruise liner.
Why there, I don’t know, but they had fired his imagination.
I think the job took about 5 years. The boat was built entirely of meranti and marine ply with some other hardwood for rails, and I could earn pocket money by sanding, sanding, sanding.
This was the early 60s, so there weren’t many power tools around, not in our house anyway.
He might have had a bandsaw, but the rest was all done by hand – sawing, planing and sanding – and there was a curious device called a Northumbrian spokeshaver, a little plane for shaping round edges. I still have it, in the back of a cupboard.
Somewhere along the line the dream faltered, sailing the ocean blue drifted to a watery death and the yacht was converted into a cabin cruiser motor boat which we sailed around Midmar dam, much to my mother’s relief.
My older brother and his son are both good woodworkers (I am nowhere in their league) but the most meticulous carpenter in the family was Uncle Fred.
Fred was an accountant by day and a workshop man by weekend.
He was also a perfectionist, which meant kids weren’t welcome in the immaculate mancave at the back of his Westville garage.
Or maybe it was just me. I wasn’t allowed to set foot in the place, for fear of messing up his rows of gleaming chisels and saws and whatnot, all perfectly in their place.
At least my father, who was no slouch when it came to strictness, allowed, even encouraged, us to mess about and help according to our ability.
Fred presented us with two meticulously made tea trays for our wedding.
They were so well made they are still in daily use 45 years later, as good as ever.
I gather Fred didn’t have much imagination though. I once remarked to his daughter, my cousin, that he had made us trays for our wedding, and she rolled her eyes and said “We all got trays!”
But I digress.
Lockdown presented a perfect opportunity to search for solutions to what needed to be done in preparing the Redwood gift to best effect.
I want to make some natural wood bathroom countertops that would be waterproof and resilient, and YouTube has hours and hours of instructional videos on how to pour epoxy resin to make exactly the surfaces I want.
Resin has the double benefit of making a very hard, mirror-smooth surface and enhancing the natural colour and grain of the wood.
So, thanks to lockdown, I learned a new skill and completed three countertops that look great and are as hard (hopefully) as nails.
I am so excited by this discovery that I’m now looking for more projects. Maybe the next wedding present we give will be a set of epoxy-coated tea trays . . .
