I always wanted to do woodwork on a regular basis, but it simply did not look like a serious option in order to earn a decent living. The culture I grew up with (working class white people in the heyday of Apartheid in what is now known as the Old South Africa) suggested that only a University degree could enable you to do that. Over the years I realised that this is complete bs, but at the time I had to make decisions on a future career there were basically three options as I saw it (or maybe in hindsight, as my family and local community saw it): medicine, law and theology.

At least this made it an easy choice, so medicine it was. Soon after I made this decision it became apparent that it would almost immediately take me away from woodworking, even sooner than expected. By the age of 15 I had to drop woodworking as a school subject, because one could only take it at what they called Standard Grade, which did not earn one enough bonus points to even hope to get into Medical School. Therefore History replaced woodworking, together with the usual academic subjects such as Maths, Biology, and Science. That was way back in 1988.

Since then, woodworking became something I saw as a pursuit for “one day when I am all grown-up”. According to this life philosophy, I only grew up in 2010 (at the age of 39), which was the year when I started to setup a workshop in the double garage of our newly bought house in Windhoek, Namibia.

In future posts I will fill in the gaps and explain the idea behind this blog site. At present I am trying to figure out how this blog-site works, so hopefully it will become more attractive as I learn more tricks.