The end of rosewood

Paul’s to blame, basically, for the carnage. The logging that uproots not only the valuable, majestic trees for their timber, but also communities of indigenous people, and with it their crafts and lore, and the myriad plants and animals that depend on the tree for its shade, its fruits, its shelter, its oxygen… the whole organic, symbiotic network of nature’s bounty breaks down, withers and dies, as the tree is torn from the earth and rendered into stuff.

I say Paul, mainly because it suits me to blame Paul, and because Paul’s a lovely man and shouldering the blame for decimation of the world’s natural resources is all in a day’s work for Paul. Paul runs Hank’s, in Denmark Street, a long store chock full of the stuff into which the rainforests are rendered. Korean, American, Chinese, Japanese, Canadian, Spanish and British people slice it up into thin sheets, bend it in steam, peg it into moulds, glue it together, varnish it and stretch wires over it. It becomes guitars.

I had taken the bus into town on a Saturday to deliver the end of term paperwork to the City Lit that had been sitting on my desk for a month and which was now bringing the whole course assessment process to its knees and, according to the increasing desperate emails I was receiving from the music department, threatened the funding for adult education globally. I’m bad at this stuff. Bad at joining up the dots. My paperwork was in perfect order. A glowing report for my recent in-house observation, for which my paperwork had been immaculately prepared, lured me into a dangerous sense of impervious administrative nirvana. And suddenly, of course, it’s all overdue. So I left my little family all snug in its duvets and sat on the 38 to Holborn, and had compiled a list of errands. I left my red folders of paperwork on Julia’s desk, attaching a post-it note’s-worth of apologies and headed on foot into Soho for a trumpet mute at Chappell’s on Wardour Street, and then on to Dean Street to ask about colour matching at PEC, where my cameras are leased.

Naturally, the most civilised route from the City Lit to Soho is through Denmark Street and the fact that Denmark Street only has shops full of guitars is entirely incidental. With a large latte in one hand, and nothing better to do in the other, I washed into Hanks on a tide of slight distraction and was greeted by Paul, hands atop the glass counter. We fell into chat. The shop was still. A couple of teens in black t-shirts were perusing unlikely-shaped electrics somewhere in the back. The postman darted in and dumped the mail on the counter. We spoke about DVDs, about SpongeBob ukuleles, about distribution. Just by the door there’s always a pile of Things. A cardboard box of old necks, cases in odd sizes, incomplete packets of strings… the Things is always worth a look. This time, lounging on a miniature easel, was the naked body of a ukulele. Too big for a soprano, too fat, too deep to be a concert. Some sort of in-between size, an experiment, an anomaly. A sad orphan of manufacture.

I picked it up. Someone had written a pound sign on it with the number thirty next to it in pencil. Paul explained it had come in a big box of stuff from the Hofner factory in the 1950s that had somehow ended up at Hanks. The necks — he nodded to the box on the floor — were in the same lot. I turned this little curved carcas over in my hands, peered in through the sound hole, gave it a knock with my knuckles, and then Paul did it.

‘You can have it if you like’.

I own four ukuleles, one of which actually works properly. In fact it’s beautiful, and I play it all the time. It sounds like raindrops and little bells. One is bright yellow, the yellow of the Sponge, and it’s okay. I keep it more as a souvenir of the oddest project I’ve ever worked on. It plays fine, but sounds like a toy. One is an antique, and came from a flea market I think. It had a big split in the side that I glued up best I could. I made a new bridge for it out of a precious scrap of rosewood I had, and glued it carefully on in just slightly the wrong place, so the intonation’s shot and the uke has all the musical character of rubber bands stretched over the back of a chair. And there’s a plywood & beech thing that I bought on eBay, because it came with a book. The book was from the 1920s, with line drawings of smart men with lacquered hair and turn-ups, playing ukes to entertain impossibly cute and vapid maidens. I only wanted the book, and when it all arrived I took the neck off the uke ‘just to see’, so it’s all in a bag in the shed, which is where it will stay for ever and ever.

And now this oversized torso. Untrimmed, unfinished, unvarnished and, crucially, missing a neck. I need it though, because what it does have, and in spades, is potential. Not just to become a full instrument, a big, loud, fun über-uke. Oh, no, that’s not the half of it. The real potential lies in the route to this completion. Why, someone has to make a neck.

In a previous life, a time before fatherhood, a time before I worked for a living, a time before cable tv and facebook, I spent a lot of time in the shed. It was a little, empty shed of calm, and then it filled with wood and clutter and dust. In 2002, we held a shed turning. We lifted it up and span it through ninety degrees. David Aaronson engineered the rotation with a single piece of scaffolding. Gavin, and Andy W, and George, Stu, Adam, Steve M, Steve W and I put it in place and over the course of a muggy, late spring afternoon extended it to the full width of the garden. George donated the window and roof of his conservatory, and when it was done it looked like a summer house, light and airy.

I put a little armchair in, and a big white roller blind across the window, and a Head of Music sign from the old City Lit building at Keeley Street, and my cacti on the window sill, and a shelf for my hand planes, and under the workbench, which had been a butcher’s block I found on Ridley Road market and was mounted on some second-hand shelving struts, I put a little chest of drawers. Small hand tools, tape measures, Stanley blades and glass cutters in the top drawer; handsaws, knives and mortice gauge in the middle; and wrenches, hammers and big things in the bottom. Chisels in the fine old red timber chest, oilstones by the planes, long odd drawers from sewing machines holding the measured rows of tobacco tins, each containing codified contents – rawlplugs, felt tacks, catches, brass screws, domed screws, mirror screws, brads, dyes, bolts, washers…

I recorded woodworking sounds for an installation, I scoured car-boot sales for remnants of other shedworkings, other men’s stuff, and it grew. It took on the aroma of a shed, it started to function as a shed. I would go to the shed. I would order things, plane things, measure things, there’s even a shelf of books about wood. Sometimes I made things, actual finished things, but mostly I just went there. I became a feeder – a devoted fan of my own queen of sheds. I would bring home pieces of wood, handy things, bits of things. I kept a shed diary, I had conversations with the shed, and a visitor’s book.

I ran a tight shed. And when I suddenly found myself working full time in town, I still went to the shed, but to find the glue, or the deckchairs, or maybe to store the paint pots or to hide birthday presents for Dex. And, after five years, it was a graveyard of broken things, nearly-mended things, and old things. But, with supreme effort and willpower, I’ve started in on the tangle of junk and mess. I’ve pulled out the ivy that had its clutch on my books, I’ve triaged the cacti, I’ve thrown a big pile of stuff out, and I’ve finally mended things. This is the true measure of a shed. I can go in there with a broken thing, lay my hands on the tools I need, and make it a mended thing. Air is circulating in my shed again, and I’ve sharpened my plane irons.

General Woodwork Supplies, on Stoke Newington High Street, is a cavernous stretch of split-level, dust-filled wonder. Entirely populated by old men, none of whom have quite the full complement of fingertips, it is, at its core, a perfectly reasonable hardware store. Sniff a little below the surface, and the magic starts to sparkle. There’s a little cardboard box of boxwood off-cuts with waxed ends nestling right by the veneers. It has ‘chess piece blanks’ written on it. Through the dingy corridor between the door blanks and flooring boards, right at the end, is a shelf of fruitwoods. Immeasurably precious cuts with words written on the end-grain. Pear. Apple. Cherry. Wipe the greasy dust away and you’ll read Larch, Cedar, Chestnut, Elm, White Oak, Beech, and, further, the exotics. Bubinga, Teak, Cocobolo. I had already sorted something for the neck — a good, stubbornly straight piece of mahogany that I’d originally purloined from the barn next door to Ed’s shortly before it was torn down — but I had nothing at all for the fingerboard. And it would require something a bit un-PC. It really had to be ebony or rosewood. I wasn’t even going to ask for ebony. I sought out the oldest man I could find, and popped the question.

‘Well’, he said. ‘It’s all gone now. Can’t get it. Can’t bring it in. Don’t bother with it now…’

Presumably, since people still make guitars and, er, other things out of rosewood, it can’t all be gone, but I appreciated the melodrama of the sentiment put in for my benefit, and of course this is what makes General Woodwork Supplies extra-special. You get your wood, and you get your guilt with it. My elderly friend shuffled silently off, leaving me to examine a splendid reel of red twine. Presently he reappeared with a small bundle of thin strips of marbled purple wood.

‘This is the end of it’.

For no extra charge, he bound it up with lengths of the red twine, with a knot tied with one gnarled hand. A few years ago I got him to show me the knot, a kind of hitch, but mischievously he called ‘under, over, under, over’ regardless of the actions until it was impossible to fathom. He did it again, faster, and then again, just to ram home the point, too fast to follow at all. We were both laughing deeply and loudly. This time he was less extravagant, but the wizardry is still unmistakeable. The knot can be undone by a short tug of one end, and tightened by a tug of the other. It’s worth going to General Woodwork Supplies just to see the knot tied.