He simply loved working with wood.
He often found that he had difficulty describing the sheer joy he experienced when working with wood. He would spend hours in his well-appointed workshop out the back. When it came to top quality carpentry tools it had to be a tradesman’s utopia. Whatever he was making, he delighted in the beauty of the grain, with its never-ending variety of patterns, the streaks and the swirls of darker veins that ran through each piece of timber and how this changed with every cut of his saw or slice of his chisel. He would often be completely mesmerised by the way that shavings peeled away beneath his chisel.
He loved the way sawdust would accumulate across his bench. He would sweep it up carefully each time and keep it in tiny jars. Each one having its own quality and colour from each of his woodwork projects. He adored the way the aroma of it all filled his nostrils. He would often become quite heady with it.
Most important of all… the fact that he could never make a decent job of anything he made, never bothered him… not once.