Forth and back

Family and friends: I was in High Wycombe the week before last, helping my son and his partner with the kitchen of their house refurbishment. Good fun. Frequently I heard a sound reminiscent of a shepherd whistling his dogs and looked up to see one of the area’s ever-present red kites – great flyers and such mobile tails! On a local walk Tom pointed out a crater in the woodland floor and said he’d learnt that these were often the remains of old saw pits, where felled timber was converted into planks by two sawyers. The trunk to be sawn rested across the pit. One man stood on top and one below and with a huge, double-handed saw between them they cut lengthways. Sounds like hard and dusty work to me.

Coincidentally the funeral of a former Blue Aeroplanes band-mate of mine was in Bristol on the Friday afternoon, so I returned to Argyll via Bristol. Angelo Bruschini was the only one of us to make a living from his guitar playing (after recording albums ‘Mezzanine’ and ‘100th Window’ with Massive Attack he confined himself to being their live guitarist. It took him round the world several times).

I’m a little concerned that the colder weather, now arrived, will delay my my two crucial tasks – concreting the drain inspection covers in place and fire proofing the oriented strand board (OSB) in the workshop. Three degrees celsius seems to be the minimum temperature for concrete and six degrees the minimum for the intumescent varnish.

The wall of drawers: Patryk bought a small table saw especially for the job and while I was away got busy, manufacturing the plywood drawers and carcasses. At the end of the week he delivered them all.

The carcasses were heavy and bulky and he needed help from his son and Tash to get them up our stairs.

Since my return, this last week’s been dominated by Patryk’s cabinets and drawers. While Patryk fitted the carcassses I made a prototype finger pull for the drawers. I made two but, prompted to keep it simple by Tash, the second was simpler and better – just a cut-out on the top edge of the drawer face.

Each drawer is a plywood box, a base and four sides, then a separate front or face is screwed on. This is crucial as the separate front can be trimmed to keep the space between adjacent drawers even. It looks easy and simple but involves a fair bit of time – lots of fiddling and Patryk’s delicate touch with an electric planer.

Although the plywood I bought was labelled ‘marine grade’, it carries a warning that it’s not suitable for boats. While the individual layers are even and regular, it still has voids and Patryk reported that the overall thickness varies by a couple of millimetres. Birch ply would be good but at least more than twice as expensive. And that’s if you can get it delivered here.

We managed to avoid the worst of the voids when cutting the fronts.

When not helping Patryk, I ordered some bits and pieces, (goggles, Forstener drill bits, two spokeshaves) and worked on organising the workshop – hooks on walls (thanks Steve) to store the bike rack when it’s not on the car, hooks for coils of wire and piping, hooks for rope. Tidying the workshop in order to be able to apply the fire retardant varnish, I discovered the mislaid top shelf for the bathroom shower, made a second, lower shelf and painted both with primer.

Somehow I got to Thursday feeling I’d achieved very little, then went to Patryk’s at nine to help cut the drawer fronts. Cutting the sheets accurately is much easier with two pairs of hands to guide it through the saw, and after two hours we had all the fronts in their various lengths and heights cut, all a little larger than life to allow for trimming to the correct fit. It took us the rest of the day to fashion and fit the all but the top set of fronts and to cut the finger-pulls. I’d cut the original prototype with my jigsaw but a large hole saw produced a more accurate circumference once I’d set up a simple jig.

Once I’d cut the initial finger-pull (over in the workshop), we screwed the front onto the drawer. Patryk routed the inner face to match and then routed the inside edge with the forty five degree bit. While not strictly necessary, the forty five degree bevel made for a more pleasing appearance and improved the comfort of the finger-pull.

We continued at eight the next morning, I went off for my Covid and flu jabs and returned to help for another hour or so. We finished at twelve and I helped him take all his kit back home then came back to sand all the drawer edges and fronts and gave them a coat of matt varnish. We had planned to paint the drawers but like the look of the plywood, despite its imperfections.

So the drawers are done. We’ve been sleeping in the spare bedroom to escape the smell of varnish and tomorrow will start putting clothes away. I can hardly remember what it’s like not to live out of a series of cardboard boxes.

Not counting my time, the wall of drawers took about seventy seven hours to build and install. I should perhaps have asked for a price for the job but, lacking other trusted joiners to give me quotes, it would have been tricky to assess the result. Paying a neighbour to do the work done (well) feels more satisfactory than paying a stranger from further afield.

The result is very pleasing and practical and also a great incentive to improve my skills – working with Patryk (or my son) always teaches me something valuable.

Weekend walk: Saturday was bright and clear and we set out on a walk beside the loch, but the tide was higher than it should have been, forcing us to walk on the uneven foreshore into a low and dazzling sun. We gave up and drove round to Clachan, on the other side of the loch, and walked a familiar circuit in reverse, to avoid the dazzle. Rooks and jackdaws are always evident in Clachan, a pleasant change from the murderous hoodies; after the recent storms I was relieved to see that many of the rookery’s nests had stayed put, high in the tall trees nestled by the river.

The river leads to a beach where the isle of Gigha lies off to the left, Islay to the right of centre and far right the Paps of Jura rising over our peninsular. In the damp sand we found otter prints with their characteristic indent of five toes and, unusually, a couple of scallops washed up, open a crack but full of flesh and sand. They looked fresh but dead and I left them for some other scavenger. Just beyond the rocky end of the beach an otter was fishing, slipping in and out, diving with a final flip of its slender pointy tail, reappearing somewhere else. It clambered onto a rock with something in its teeth and took about five minutes to deal with the catch before slipping back into the sea and weed. We were just too far off to identify what it was eating, perhaps a butterfish?

A few hundred metres further on, through a fringe of leafless birches, Tash spotted another otter, perched on a rock. It groomed a bit, had a scratch, stood up, crouched down and then set off at speed, but not in any way that suggested it could have sensed us.

At the cottage and slipway where historically the ferry ran to and fro across the loch we headed inland and on the final stretch met Jim. “Have you seen the stags up there, just moved here ten days ago, I’ve retired”. He continued like this, an almost compulsive stream of memories and anecdotes, which his dog patiently sat and listened through. and we, not having heard them before, did too. He said he’d been a policeman and had been sent to Pitcairn Island (one mile by one and a half) as part of the investigations into paedophillia and rape, thousands of miles from anywhere. We spent much of the evening researching and trying to work out whether he was a fluent and well versed fantasist, or a real, retired policeman – albeit a self confessed “hairy arsed policeman who teared-up viewing this loch for the first time”.

The night was frosty and we lit our first fire in the house. Woodsmoke, pale in the light of the full moon, curled into the cold black sky.