[soundtrack : ‘Watermelon In Easter Hay’ — by Frank Zappa]
I was probably born like this.
The first thing I can remember ‘building’ was a small ‘house’ for the small animals in the forest. I was perhaps 5 or 6 years old and with my parents on a sunday walk in the woods. While they had a breather and a coffee I busied myself building a little shelter in a nook between the roots of a tree using twigs and stones, and with leaves and moss for a roof. When my father came over and asked me what I was making I explained that it was a house where the small forest animals; caterpillars, spiders, beetles and such, could live during winter, and that it was called ‘vinterbo’ (‘winter-home’). I was always most content when playing games of my own devising.
The first thing I can remember making out of wood was a little toy toboggan. I carved it out of a scrap of fir with my boy's knife and sanded it with garnet paper. It could've measured about 2,5 x 7,5 X 12,5 cm (1" x 3" x 5"). I rounded up the front underside so it would ride on top of the snow, and made sleek cut-outs at the top back end, leaving a couple of 'fins', like a fifties Cadillac, for aerodynamic stability, you see ... To make it waterproof and slippery I lacquered it with my mother's nail varnish. Very handy bottle — it even had a brush ready inside of it and the scarlet colour looked rather raffish against the snow. Thankfully my mother was a patient and not very vain woman. I would make miniature toboggan race-courses down the snow-heaps, with banked curves and jumps. Strangely, I do not remember ever being cold.
Via Lego, Meccano and Airfix models I soon graduated to balsa-wood model airplanes; first freeflight, later radio controlled. Some of the RC-planes had a small 2-stroke glow plug petrol engine in the nose, but I always liked the sailplanes best.
For our radio-controlled petrol-powered planes we needed to cart quite a bit of kit to whatever field we were trespassing on, strapped to or balanced on our bikes. This prompted me to build my first piece of ‘cabinetry’ — a box with a handle on top and a hinged drop-down front that would hold the transmitter, starter-battery, a can of petrol and sundry bits & bobs in small drawers. I got my best friend and flying buddy Bent in on it (he later grew up to become a military helicopter pilot) and we went to work on some 12mm chip board and some scraps of thin plywood. We already knew how to mix epoxy. Here’s a picture my mother took of us through the kitchen window while we were painting our ‘flight cases’ (and the umbrella stand while we were at it).
How long was Adam in Paradise?
Until puberty.
One gets distracted — but still, life marches on: schoolboy, soldier, student
… angry, young man.
Like my late father I’ve always loved reading. I grew up in a home full of books. A good book contains a whole world you can inhabit with your mind. You can travel in time, be someone else, think new thoughts, gain knowledge, insights and experiences with mankind through the ages. You can even escape the boredom of a conformist social-democratic society. If you read books, you might live a thousand lives before your death. If not, only one.
I clearly remember listening to a radio programme in my childhood boy’s room (with headphones, very late, while quietly painting some Airfix model instead of sleeping). This was at the end of the year 1983, and it was a ‘literary’ programme with an author giving a talk about the looming year 1984. Unsurprisingly he talked about the authoritarian threat depicted in Orwell’s novel, but his main point was that perhaps Huxley’s dystopian ‘Brave New World’ was closer to the mark … how the years have borne him out. A precocious 13 year old on the northern outskirts of nowhere had learned some new old Greek words - utopia / dystopia - and soon set about reading his first grown-up books.
I found both novels in my father’s shelves — and so much more besides. The man had, just for instance and malapropos, a first edition of Huxley’s ‘Doors of Perception’ … “from his London years” in the fifties. He later let slip that he and some ‘student friends’ had been “conducting some experiments regarding the psychoactive properties of certain newly developed chemical compounds” but was quick to mention that he had merely taken part as an observer, a secretary, so to speak, taking notes of the proceedings. But I digress …
As I said, I’ve always loved reading and live in a flat filled with more books than I will have time to read in the rest of my life. That is perhaps paradoxically why I found university life so tedious. I found the university full of people who did not like to read, let alone discuss ideas. They simply wanted to pass their exams with a minimum of effort and get some sort of office job. To borrow from Michael Oakeshott’s ‘The Idea of a University’:
“ … they wish only to be provided with a serviceable moral and intellectual outfit … they come with no understanding of the manners of conversation but desire only a qualification for earning a living or a certificate to let them in on the exploitation of the world.”
I did not fit in, I seldom do. So I continued reading on my own time and applied for a place in the vocational school, together with the 16-year olds. That was in 1993/94. That’s when I began woodworking in earnest. And I’ve never stopped reading.