I am married to a wood snob. When we bought our house in 1999, my husband insisted that all the shelves (he is an antiquarian book dealer, so there are miles of them) should be made of ‘real’ wood, with not an inch of Medium Density Fibreboard. The price made me squeal. But a quarter of a century on, while friends’ MDF shelving droops like cables between telegraph poles, ours remains beautifully strong and straight.
Callum Robinson would understand why this matters. A master woodcarver and cabinetmaker, plying his trade from a workshop in Scotland (location vague – ‘in a forest beside a loch nestled in the Scottish hills’), he is such a perfectionist that if one of his team used the wrong screw on the back of a bedside table, where nobody would ever see it, he would whip it straight out.
But he welcomes imperfection in wood. A great knobbly lump bulging from the side of a tree might look to most of us like an ugly mutation, but very often, beneath the surface, ‘a myriad of swirling, almost impossibly beautiful clusters is hiding’. Elm shot through with ‘the tracery of spectral green streaks… like the northern lights’, or the ‘shadows of a woodworm’s pinhole excavations’ are, for Robinson, bursting with creative possibility. If you want to see his genius at going with the grain, look at his website – callumrobinson.org – and the top of an astonishing dining-room table from which two swimming otters nose their way through the ripples of the wood.
His feeling for wood is rooted in a childhood surrounded by trees. At Christmas, his father made him wooden weaponry: catapults, crossbows and longbows with which he’d aim arrows at the angel on top of the tree. In summer, he’d stare out through the branches supporting his tree house. When he rolls out the names of trees – ash, elm, holly, maple, sycamore, ‘smooth grey elephantine beech’ and ‘rich, golden oak, dense and heavy as bullion’ – it’s as mesmeric as Edward Thomas listing wildflowers. Which is apt, because Robinson is a fine writer, sometimes poetic: heavy steel cleaves through wet lumber with a ‘fresh-apple-crunch’; freshly milled cedar has a ‘barley-sugar sweetness’.
Removed from his workshop and his forest, Robinson is filled with yearning, not just for trees growing now, but for the trees of long ago that provided furniture for Tutankhamun’s tomb, and the trees of the future. He quotes Robert Macfarlane staring at an acorn: ‘I hold in my hand not a single tree, but a community to be, a world in waiting.’ Bland western living has broken our bond with wood, Robinson says; but miners used to prefer wooden pit props to iron or steel, because they creaked and moaned in warning when a load became too great. And ‘by the time the sun goes down tonight, more than half the world will have cooked over a wood fire’.
But, like James Rebanks writing about being a shepherd, Robinson’s aim is not simply to convey his love of working in his chosen way, but to evoke his craft warts and all. His working life is not idyllic – or not necessarily so. In the bitter Scottish winters, ice rimed thick on the glue buckets, hands are frozen and trees struggle to grow. The skin from the tops of fingers is stripped off by the sanding machine or bonded together with Superglue. And Robinson and his team are afflicted with what they call Machine Tool Vertigo: a terrible impulse to hurl themselves into a running bandsaw, to leap headfirst to meet the blade fully horizontal, and split themselves ‘right down the middle’.
And then there are the finances. On bespoke furniture, the margins are ‘razor thin’. Nobody needs what Robinson makes, and commissions can suddenly fall away. After one big job is cancelled, he describes a nail-biting, sleep-deprived descent into bankruptcy. There’s no money for bills or wages; the Land Rover is stuttering towards its death, and even Robinson’s cool-under-fire wife Marisa wonders whether they can afford to keep feeding their dog.
But Robinson’s upbringing stands him in good stead. As a child, when he was given a tough job, his dad would tell him: ‘Don’t bring me your excuses, just tell me when it’s done.’ Though he hints at having a bit of a temper, and occasional dark moods, he’s staunch and dogged. He and Marisa rent a shop in Linlithgow and, bit by bit, chopping board by wooden bowl, they claw their way back to solvency.
If ever tempted to question whether he took the wrong path in life, Robinson doesn’t ponder for long:
I think to myself: all over Britain today, people are dragging themselves to jobs they hate, being crammed into trains and buses, stewing in traffic, watching the clock and seeing their days tick slowly away. And here I am, on a farm in the sunshine, panning for gold.
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