. . . shadows of the past.
Some of you have known, some have noticed and some have no idea. I’ve skirted around it a little with an occasional nod and nudge to a part of my life living as what is called a Resident Alien migrant in the USA––Texas in particular. I arrived for a preliminary first visit in the summer of 1984 and after that lived there until 2009. This then mid-part and most influential period of my working-age life is the most vivid and exciting even if the events were so all-consuming. From day one, starting out in the summer resort of Concan, Texas, I began working as a maker almost as soon as we landed. I needed a workbench and there on the living room floor of my rented house I started chopping mortises and fitting the tenons to them. This temporary home became my introduction to a new culture. The months and years soon to unfold were life-changing in blocks of time. Between my first visit and 2009, I learned what it was to be a Texan. The end result came in my returning to live and work in my native England. Not only did this period change my life, in no small measure it defined me as a person. The power of culture to change and define is seldom spoken of because usually we are so immersed in it, we don’t even see what it is that tells us what to say, what to cook and eat, buy, live by, live with and even live for. The work I took on in changing increments ultimately precipitated what I do today. Without it, I doubt what we do now would even have become possible.
Looking back, it was my craft that equipped and enabled me to do what I do today, and then subsequently thrive as I feel I do now. The 25 years of living and working in Texas left me with just £1,000. Much less than I started with. In order to survive on my return to the UK, I took a job for £10 an hour just to rent a house and pay for food. Any security I had had before 2009 was gone. The friends and associates I had there hardly spoke to me again to this day. These events and steps have shown me that we can give ourselves to an entity we feel to be wholly good only to find that it is nothing more than a cult. Nonetheless, we must all face the outcome of life after failure and heartache by picking up the pieces of self-examination and rebuild what can be reconstructed. My craft for me was the one sure calling on my life. I have always clearly said that we each have a calling and we either acknowledge it as that or we don’t. If and when we don’t, it doesn’t mean that the ‘voca‘, the voice calling, didn’t speak to us, just that we thought we knew better, or we were indeed misdirected or dissuaded by some other. This calling from my mid-youth still speaks to me now in the middle of my eighth decade. I have established a lifestyle as a woodworking master. The crafting of many things with my hands has been my life’s calling and thereby too my support for good health and contentedness.
I started my work back in the UK by establishing what would be my second woodworking school. Unbelievably, it was in the massive Neo-Norman castle in the village of Llandygai where I lived in North Wales.
Today, my work reaches a much larger audience than I thought it merited, but then that audience-in-search was and still is looking for what cannot be gained any other way. Surprisingly, there has been an emerging demand for what is now a specialised way of working. Somewhere around 1.5 million woodworkers every month clock in to my output with a large percentage now making woodwork work for them in their twilight hours of leisure time. These amateur woodworkers follow from different corners of the world. Who could have predicted such a thing? Who would have thought it could work? I recall walking across some remote ranch land in Texas somewhere in the mid ’80s when the man I was walking with said to me, “Paul, have you ever heard of something called ‘The World Wide Web?’” ‘No.’ I said, ‘What’s that?’
“Well, they say that people will be buying and selling on something called ‘online‘.”
‘That’ll never happen.’ I said.
It still took a few years from that date but here we are in its “brave new world” environs.
Though I have often written blogs mentioning my mid-life passage there in Texas, my working full time as a furniture maker, teacher of woodturning and woodworking generally, I have kept much of that part of my work and life private. I did this for good reason. During that history, things unfolded that I now see as questionable. I felt at that time it was better to leave some of that past behind and start afresh here in the UK. Was I treated wrongly? Did I leave without good reason or did I run away? Well, we’ll see.
My account of life there may take a few blog posts, but I think it will be worth it. The undone bits will show the paving stones that perhaps mapped some of my future as one of the so-called ‘gurus’ of woodworking. The undergirding of my current work began back there on that Texas ranchland. I hope to give you a better understanding of what happened through the ensuing years there and what my hopes became in doing what I am doing now. I have many fond memories of my life in Texas, but then along with those fond memories come some of the saddest too. Writing my biography these past few years has been about the foundation of my work, the losses along the way and then the outcome of my calling simply to be an artisan and craftsman. Some of the happenings along the way have made me question some of my own decisions but looking back I see how the challenges were necessary to see what things really were and what they were not. The thing I have learned through this more recent writing endeavour, my biography, is the need for absolute truth. Being brutally honest with yourself and without exaggeration or sensationalism is key to any record. That has been my hope in doing this. It’s on the anvil of adversity that character is formed. The outcome of my 74 years will be mapped out in the completion of my autobiography. In the meantime, I want to fill in the gaps for those who might just wonder what happened in those middle lost years of Texas living and indeed my whole life.