It’s been a week of arrivals and unexpected help. Birds from Africa, bats from hibernation, carpenters from Tasmania, and machine tools from Milton Keynes.
On the nature front the land around the workshop is now full of migrant birdsong – sedge warblers on the reed bed, whitethroats on the gorse and wheatears among the grazing lambs – all delightfully bucolic.
The most unexpected sighting was of a bat emerged from hibernation after our chilly spring. He was feeding over the yard in broad daylight. But, according to the client who has commissioned the first piece that will me made in this workshop (who just happens to be one of Britain’s leading bat experts) a hungry, newly emerged bat can’t necessarily wait for dark for his first meal of the year even if he risks becoming someone else’s dinner!
Arriving from Tasmania last weekend were two university friends who now spend much of their time managing nature reserves on remote islands. Fortunately for me, that means they are good at turning their hands to all sorts of things including carpentry. So I now have have a workshop with insulated and lined walls and ceiling. Thank you, Adam and Anna.
Finally I have to thank Levi Murphy, who is a JCB artist. When the machine tools arrived from Felder in Milton Keynes it was immediately obvious that the driver and I didn’t have a hope of unloading them on our own. But Levi, who was working in the yard that day, quietly and skillfully took them off the truck and slid them into the narrow entrance of the machine shop with a series of balletic maneuvers which included pirouetting the JCB using the back fork with £5K worth of table saw balanced on the front. I then took a long lunch hour to settle my nerves.
So, thank you all. Summer approaches and the workshop progresses.
This coming week it’s paint tins and floor sealing.