Opening boxes of old things makes me completely sentimental. I tend to just reorganise the piles a little more economically than they were before without throwing anything away. In amongst the wreckage I found this little totem - courtesy of Mr McMillan's fierce woodworking class at Central Middle School, 1992. It was the first time I'd picked up a chisel, and though perhaps it looks quite imaginative for a 9 year old, we were all making essentially the same thing, with only the 'features' and colour-scheme self-determined choices.
I remember it quite clearly - being frustrating and fiddly, annoyed at the roughness of the gouges and the certainty of it breaking apart. It ranked low on the satisfaction scale. My relationship with the chisel has evidently not changed a lot in the intervening years...
Heavily influenced by my mini-craftsman neighbour who was fashioning what he considered to be a direct representation of Zig, of Big Breakfast fame, out of his miserable scrap of pine, mine leant a little towards Zag - or so I had thought, but looking at pictures again now of that particular TV phenomenon, there's not a lot in it...
