Link – The Bear and the Bees

Pizza and a hand made chair

Recently, we were having pizza (and a glass of wine) at the local winery when an email pinged into my inbox. I resisted the temptation to look at it there and then, but instead resolved to look at it later as I was, at that moment outside admiring at the owners 1974 blue Rolls Royce, which was parked out in the rambling grounds of the winery. He very kindly allowed me to take it out for a spin, so I did. Carefully…

I do feel quite like an east end villain enjoying the spoils of my last ‘blag’

Not only does the winery do a very nice glass of sauvignon blanc but they make lovely pizzas in a enormous Italian oven that quite literally fell off the back of a lorry. Apparently the leg of the oven had broken ‘beyond economical repair’ according to the insurers and the new owner acquired it for a fraction of its new price. The new supports for the oven didn’t look great and so it was bricked into the corner, where it does sterling service.

The pizza oven – boxy, but good…

After lunch, I managed to check the email whilst sitting near the house greyhounds, who roam free through the dining area. They are rescue dogs, who otherwise would have been put down and with the exception of “Psycho” who is wearing the blanket like a shawl, they are very good natured animals.

This sofa is not for sharing – dogs only…

The email was from Rundell & Rundell, the Kyneton company who had arranged the ‘lost trades fair’ I attended some time before. I’d signed up
for a chair making course in the hope that a place would eventually become available. Lisa, the lady jointly in charge of the business and of taking bookings told me that there was quite a waiting list, but that she’d add me to it.

The email said that there was a cancellation, the first in around five years and could I get there the next week. Yes! I said, clearly not working out the logistics properly as I was in Singapore at the time. My domestic suggestion that I would be coming home for the week to see them all and that I’d be making a chair whilst there was quickly seen through and it was pointed out that I was coming back to make a chair and that I might see them all whilst there. Point made and taken.

Kyneton is a bit of a drive from home and so Mrs Jerry researched some B&B’s and motels in the area. Sadly, the prices were around $200 plus for a night, so that was a non starter, I therefore persuaded Scarlett, my 1970 MG roadster to take me there on an almost daily basis. She didn’t mind the cold mornings and with only one tyre blowout, she faithfully carried both me and ‘Q’, a local farmer, who was also attending the course, along the country roads and through the tiny villages that must have been social centres during the gold and wool rushes.

On the way – an autumn morning in the lovely hamlet of Glenlyon

The countryside here is remarkably English in appearance, but it’s obviously not England as the mobs of Kangaroos standing around in the fields demonstrate. I love the cold misty mornings with the top down on the car (Scarlett’s roof is full of holes and so drafty that it feels just the same with the roof on or off!) It’s funny how a car can make you happy though. Driving her on days like that just makes me smile.

Delinquent sheep mugging a farmer

I have to confess to have been a complete woodworking dunce at school. Well, perhaps not a dunce, but I was certainly too busy acting out to have paid enough attention to the rules and niceties of working with wood. Over the years I have turned my hand to making shelves, boxes, kennels and parrot stands, with varying degrees of success. To be honest, my earnest efforts could have best described as ‘rustic’ and driven more by necessity than a genuine desire to create something unique and long-lasting.

The course I was about to embark upon was seven days long and was advertised as teaching a person how to make an heirloom wooden chair in the traditional way. The kind of chair I was intending to make is known as a Windsor chair or ‘double bow’ named for the two bow shaped pieces of wood used in its construction – it’s a British chair, but one that is also known as a ‘sackback’ chair in the United States.

The yanks named the chair for the burlap (or hessian) sack that they slung over the back of the chair to keep the draught away from the sitters body in the old houses. When I first looked at the chair, I wasn’t sure how comfortable it could be, but I was pleasantly surprised when I sat in one.

The essence of traditional chair building is that you make everything by hand, use no electrical tools and certainly no sandpaper, because they didn’t exist back in the eighteenth century, but I have to admit that the legs were turned on a lathe and I used a power drill, for the angled holes. Curved pieces of wood, such as the bows, have to be steamed and bent by hand, much in the same way that they would have been well over two hundred years ago.

Bending the top bow – fresh out of the steamer

Due to that lack of sandpaper, traditional tools such as draw knives, scrapers and travisher’s are used to shape and smooth the green and unseasoned wood.

My Fijian mahogany seat, part way through being ‘dished’ and trimmed.

There are several parts to the sack back chair; the legs, the seat, the bows and the spindles. In order to work the green wood for the spindles, it’s best to use it when it has been soaked for a couple of days and then cut into staves, around half a metre long. There is a device known as a shave chair, which looks a bit like a cross between a ‘steam punk’ rocking horse and a medieval torture device. The shave chair helps you grip pieces of wood while you are working them between a leather padded jaw and using a traditional draw knife, shape the wood to your needs.

Sitting at the shave chair, my position for several hours a day. My ‘under construction’ chair is next to me.

The thought of creating something literally from green wood was something that I relished, but at the same time, worried me because the thought of using such fine motor skills or truthfully, finding such skills in the first place was a little daunting, because my hands are to woodworking what boxing gloves are to flower arranging. The traditional draw knives and spoke shaves felt very strange to me but even for a woodworking duffer like me, under the careful tutelage of the instructors Glenn and Peter, I soon got the hang of them. I did discover that I seem to suffer from a condition called ‘grain blindness’ (not recognised by the British Medical Association) – thats not something to do with home made alcohol, it’s just that I seem to have an issue with recognising which way the wood grain runs, not something that aids a woodworker, so things tend to take a bit longer than they might for other more able chair makers.

Drilling the back bow. Note the mirror for checking the angle of the drill.

Glancing around the workshop at my fellow trainee chair makers and seeing that they were all moving along much more quickly than I was, I couldn’t help but feeling that I really could have done with an electric sander, but that just wouldn’t have been in the spirit of things. I think that perhaps I could have made a small fortune selling small squares of #220 grit sandpaper though…

Everyday at around ten o’clock, Mrs Rundell came around to the workshop with freshly made cakes but one day, some fantastic home made doughnuts and jam appeared. Her son Tom had knocked them up for us that morning and they were still warm when we fell upon them like hyena’s on an unattended fresh kill.

Warm doughnuts and strawberry jam – it doesn’t get much better than that.

Fuelled up by the excellent snacks, I got back to the pleasurable work of assembling the various parts of my chair. Some fine tuning was needed to make sure that everything fitted as it should and muttered curses could be heard from more than one of us as we struggled to fit the spindles into the top bow. Once we were all happy, we warmed up the traditional brown glue (allegedly made from cow lips and a**eholes) and sparingly dabbed the parts before fitting them together.

It was at this stage when I learned the meaning of bodging. Apparently skilled itinerant tradesmen in the Chilterns (a beautiful area of England) who used to turn chair legs using a bent sapling to power a lathe were known as ‘chair bodgers’ so, ‘bodging something together’ wasn’t originally a pejorative term, but when used to describe my earlier attempts at woodworking, it certainly could have been.

The very cool sapling lathe. Note the beard required to operate one.

As I had seen at the lost trades fair, there was a whole subculture of traditional artisans who built stone walls, tanned and tooled leather, smithed metal and worked wood and as they called into the workshop to say hello, they looked the part too. Beards seemed standard, as were sturdy boots and checked shirts. The beard was sadly beyond me, but for a week, I got to be a small part of the community.

The finished article – back at home

At the end of my seven days, I really felt that I had achieved something. Because I wanted to get home, I missed the end of course cheese and wine party, but sitting at home on my handmade chair more than made up for that.

From Big India back to the dogs

After two weeks in India Chennai (Madras) and Mumbai (Bombay), I am overdue to go back home to the family. Unfortunately, I have 48 hours before I get there, two overnight flights and a day in Singapore. It has been a good trip, meeting people and learning new things. Not all of which, I actually wanted to know…

After my first week in a very ordinary hotel in Chennai (great food and service though), which unfortunately smelt strongly of something nasty, I found myself back at the Juhu beach Marriott in Mumbai. It’s a hotel I try to stay in whenever I’m in the city because it has a great business club floor and and really good gym and pool. I have also been vegetarian for the last thirteen and a half days and I’ve lost a kilo in weight. That has, of course been assisted by the usual bout of intestinal nastiness which I get when I haven’t been here for a while and have lost whatever resistance I once had. It doesn’t seem to matter how careful I am, but after years temporarily hosting almost every intestinal parasite known to science, it only seems like I need to pick up a dirty glass and BOOM, it’s all back on me. Literally.

I always seem to get a family shopping list when I go to India and this time, it was cushion covers. Now, you wouldn’t have thought that buying cushion covers could be difficult but let me tell you, this time I had very specific instructions, not to buy anything that wasn’t exactly like the internet search pictures. My driver sent the shopkeepers the pictures on my phone who assured him in advance, that they had exactly what I wanted but when we arrived, I found out that they had the Indian equivalent of “same same, but different” They were so insistent that their wares were in fact what I really wanted, I almost began to doubt myself.

My targets – hand screen printed and embroidered…

Time for a short digression – I asked my driver to take me to the ‘gateway of India’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_of_India This is a beautiful monument built by the British for King George V and Queen Mary to ceremonially enter the Jewel of the old Empire. It wasn’t actually finished in time for their visit in 1911 and they had to be content with seeing a cardboard model instead. When it was finished, it served as the first port of entry for British VIP’s from its opening in 1924, until the Somerset Light Infantry marched the Empire out of India on February the 28th, 1948.

The gateway -a must see for locals and Gora’s* together

(*not always a derogatory term for foreigners)

Anyway, back on story. I have been to the gateway many times, but for me, it never gets old. As an Englishman, albeit one several countries removed, I cannot help but feel emotional when I think of the great and good (and bad) of my countrymen and women who had the audacity to presume to rule India for almost 200 years. I felt the need to see the sunset from the gateway and I asked my usual driver to take me there. He rolled his eyes, as he often does when I ask him to go against the traffic at the busiest time of the day and he manfully pulled one of the most dangerous U turns my sometimes fragile mental state has had to contend with.

We got to the gateway some 30 minutes after sunset, but that was my fault for not making the decision much earlier. That and the fact that Rajasthan was playing the Mumbai Indians (yes, that really is the name of the local cricket team) in the vicinity and a multitude of fans had almost blocked Marine drive, which is the seafront road adjoining Chowpatty beach.

Indian craftsmanship at its best.

Eventually, I stepped out of the car only to be accosted by a young lady carrying a small baby who immediately said “Sir, don’t give me money, but please buy me food” Two years previously I had been accosted by and had accompanied a lady with a baby past several open and relatively pleasant smelling food stalls with me offering to buy her some food to the ‘nearest shop’ which was actually a table set up in an alleyway and I handed over enough rupees to feed a small village for half a bag of rice and litre of water. I looked a little closer at the lady and realised that she was the very same person that I had been previously ‘had’ by. My driver, always polite, but clearly no stranger to the scam, looked quizzically at me and having been my driver the last time I was there, was amazed when I asked him to translate that it was lovely to see her again and that her baby hadn’t aged a day.

He said “Sir, how can you remember her?” thinking that as a daft foreigner, I might actually think that all non white people look the same. I reminded him of the night we first met her and how much I had spent for so little and he laughed and translated the same to her. She had the good grace to smile, admit that it was her other sisters baby and waggle her head in the friendly way that they do here as I purchased a jasmine garland from her as a consolation prize.

I walked across the road to Leopold’s, the ‘touristy but good’ iconic restaurant that was attacked in 2008 as part of the assault that killed numerous people and seriously damaged another nearby institution, the Taj hotel.

‘The Taj’ Still being repaired ten years later.

Leopolds Cafe has the reputation of having the rudest waiters in India. I wasn’t sure about that, but I certainly found that they were the wittiest in town when I was accompanied by my driver Dharminder who speaks Marathi (the local dialect) and translated the wonderfully catty commentary they kept up non stop, to describe customers who did not openly venerate the profession of waiting table. It’s fun, the beer is cold and the food is relatively hygienic, so I try to go each time I am there.

Dharminder told me that had already spoken to the ‘lady with the baby’ and shown her the photographs of my shopping mission and asked her to find out where they were sold. For a price, she had reported back that she had found a shop nearby and that their stock was exactly what the strange Gora was after.

The shop was tiny and the floor to ceiling shelves were packed with colourful fabrics and with four of us in it, there was barely room to turn around, but the owners scurried up and down ladders fetching everything that they thought I might want. It was clearly a well rehearsed routine and they shuffled and dealt fabrics onto the counter like card sharps. I face timed Mrs. Jerry (at 1am unfortunately) to show her the wares and the whole performance was repeated. The lady with the baby stood at the window, smiling and head waggling whilst no doubt, mentally counting up her commission.

I came away from the evening with a stack of colourful cushion covers and yet another unique Bombay experience.

My flights home were long and not the most comfortable ever, but I shouldn’t complain as I am now back by the fire at home, watching the dogs.

George, transfixed by the flames.

‘Kiasu’ in Singapore

Singapore – looking towards the CBD and over the Padang (playing field), with the purple lights. The well lit roads are all part of the F1 race route and you can see one of the stands to the bottom left.

I am back on the road again after 6 weeks of virtual house arrest following some fairly vicious bone carpentry. My first trip out of Australia is back to Singapore, a country I know very well and I am again staying at the hotel with the satanic toilet (http://wp.me/p7wOIN-5o). This time, I am limping a bit and I’m supposed to be using my cane, but I am far too vain to be caught with it by anyone I know.

The marina bay sands casino (and hotel); it’s known locally as ‘the surfboard’

When you live in Singapore as a foreigner, one of the first terms you learn is “Kiasu” … It is a Chinese word in the Hokkien dialect that defines anxious and selfish behaviour and means ‘scared to lose’ or, ‘FOMO’ to all you millennials. My other favourite daughter, who actually speaks the language, tells me that a related term is “Kiasi” or the extreme fear of death – related because missing out on something is apparently just as serious as dying. A state of Kiasi might apparently cause a person to lose their sense of justice and righteousness and act in way that was normally alien to them as exemplified when the store doors are open for the Chinese new year sales. All of this eastern culture can be a bit confusing for the newbies who try to reconcile Asian linguistic nuance and mysticism with the ultra modern architecture looming over the traditional colonial buildings.

The term ‘Kiasu’ sums up the predominantly Chinese attitude towards living competitively here. Currently, the Island is gearing up for the Formula 1 races (next week) and the locals are already acting like they are practising their standing starts. I’ll give you an example: if you are walking towards an escalator and there’s someone approaching from another direction; even if they are further from the thing than you, you can guarantee that they will quicken their pace and attempt to beat you to it, because they are ‘scared to lose’…

Kiasu on the escalator

If you are on the MRT (the tube) a similar thing happens. Sadly, it isn’t generally in the local culture to allow commuters to alight before cramming onto the carriage and there is always a bit of a stoush* to get in and out.

* vernacular Australian for a scrap

In order to improve the situation, the government has sensibly placed lines on the ground showing where people should wait until the doors open and other travellers alight from the carriage. However, there is absolutely no way that a local of a certain vintage (my age and older usually) will allow someone to get off before they get on, even if it means dropping the shoulder and barging their way on.

The Singaporean guide to getting on and off the tube properly!

In a bid to engender more socially acceptable behaviour, the government has embarked on various initiatives that try to ‘educate’ the populace into being less selfish and dare I say it, more ‘international’ in their behaviour. A caveat here, I have many Singaporean friends and having enjoyed living here for 6 years, I can say that Singapore is definitely not as bereft of good manners as I may appear to be painting it. No, wait a minute… it is absolutely the case and what’s more, most of the locals will agree with me…

On the aforementioned tube trains, there are ‘messages’ on the floor and on the windows and walls, advising people that they should stand for the elderly and infirm (I pretty much qualify as both at the moment), take your bags off your shoulders, so as to avoid swiping others and to “give way to have a better day” (FFS!). They even have cartoon citizens to encourage people to identify with the characters positive behavioural traits.

Surely, the very image of a Singapore millennial?

As for me; I tried to navigate the station with my cane and was jostled, barged and tutted at, right up to the final limping step onto the carriage. And yet, whilst in the sanctuary of the car and surrounded by advisory signage, I was deferentially ushered into the seats reserved for the elderly, infirm and pregnant. I accepted gratefully, having got on the circle line towards my destination, purely to avoid long underground treks between stations. I was even prepared to effectively circumnavigate the country on the circle line for the sake of a seat, but I soon found that the evil eye is alive and well and saved for people suspected of faking their conditions. I had various Aunty’s* standing, navels six inches from my sitting eyeline, shaming me into turning over the holy grail of a seat to them so I did, twice and they accepted, twice.

*the Singapore ‘Aunty’ is a subgroup of ladies of a certain age, who exhibit various traits that some find amusing. Think of the lady who peeks from behind her net curtains and gossips about the way ‘things used to be’ and you’ll get an inkling of the type of person we are referring to.

Anyway, it was a productive trip and I enjoyed being back in the warmth. Sadly, I have only got 24 hours at home before getting the next plane, this time to China!