So, fifteen years trading this week. Fifteen years since I was made redundant from my yurt-making job. The road has been bumpy at times, there has been much handtool (and machine tool) use, and many opportunities for patience.
I loved making the yurts; the steambending, the wheel-making, the tying of the trellis, the assembly into a living space. Although to be honest, losing my job, a month after my daughter being born, was the best thing that ever happened to me!
Self-employment is not for everyone. Luckily, I come from a long line of Yorkshire farmers....
used to turning their hands to 'owt' (anything) and doing it 'thissen' (yourself). They worked the land with horses and resisted mechanisation. Something which may have been their undoing; the farm had gone by the time I was born.
My great-grandfather John Bayes; outstanding in his field!
It's my grandfather Arthur, that gave me my love of hand tools (that's him laying the hedge above). A gentle man whose hands were never still; when not doing things agricultural he could be found in his workshop, carving toys, making rocking horses, weaving corn dollies, making rag rugs. His shed was an aladdin's cave of chisels, rounding planes, drills, all manner of tools that I would gaze on in wonder.
My father too (the first to not be a farmer, he was a photographer) was always building or making something; darkrooms after darkrooms for silver iodide shenanigans. It was he who first taught me to use a saw and an axe safely, when I was knee high to a grasshopper.
We've made a few things since then!
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And used a few power tools when expedient. I love hand tools, but sometimes it just makes no sense not to 'mechanize'.
And with occasional help from the next generation, my son Arthur (my grandfeather's namesake).
And who knows, maybe Bethany, in a few years.......her middle name is River, after all. Here's to another fifteen years of trading!
