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I often ask mysef the same question! After a childhood spent in post-war, heavy industrial Lancashire, my parents moved us to the island of Anglesey, off the north coast of Wales. I thought I had gone to heaven and fell in love with that wild and craggy place where the wind, ever restless, seemed to blow , often with huge ferocity, for a lot of the time. The wildlife was fascinating, with a great variety of birds, the fishing tempted me away from school on many a day, and the woodwork teacher in school refused to let me "have a go" on the lathe because, as he put it so gently, "you are 'opeless with wood, Mercer!" He was a South Walian, and those damning words he uttered shaped my view of South Walians for a very long time indeed..... For family reasons, the planned career in medicine never happened, and instead I became a Research Ornithologist at Station Biologique de la Tour du Valat in the Camargue, southern France. After a while in that wonderful paradise, I came back to Britain to work as a government scientist, studying the breeding biology of Oystercatchers - a job which had many interesting spin-offs and took me to many countries. Eventually, I began to miss Anglesey and its unique mystery, and returned to become a teacher with a burning desire to get children to appreciate the wonderful world around them. That swallowed a thirty-year chunk of my life, and culminated in me fracturing my spine in a fall at home (something I had failed to do in thirty years of mountain-climbing!). This meant that my career as (by now) head teacher was over. Shortly after that, my wife of over twenty years, Liz,died of cancer after a brief, but cruel, illness - leaving me with our son of 12 years old, Llyr, to sort ourselves out. Life does that sort of thing occasionally! Somewhere along the way I had managed to pick up a Batchelor's degree in Statistics, and Masters' degrees in both Science and Education, and also became a Chartered Biologist ....but always, the lathe eluded me - even though I yearned to try my hand at wood-turning. Somehow there was never enough time.....or money.....or space (or a combination of all three) until one day in the summer of 2003, when I saw a small lathe offered on the Ebay auction site and thought "What the heck!" ...........and bought it. Within weeks of starting to use the lathe, I found a remarkable affinity with it, and I found so much more too. Like the sheer bliss of watching a chunk of rough wood turning into something beautiful as the shavings slowly buried my feet....like the smell of wood freshly cut into .....and like the thrill of watching people pick up a piece that I have made, and watching them almost caress it because they, too, can sense the beauty of it. I was accepted onto the Register of Professional Turners of the Worshipful Company of Turners of London in the summer of 2007. This gave me more satisfaction and more of a sense of fulfilment than all my academic qualifications put together....and I would love to see my old woodwork teacher's face if I could tell him! So, after a turbulent final few years on the island of Anglesey,not helped by a long bout of a very frustrating and debilitating illness, I made the decision to relocate to West Berkshire, in the heart of England, where I found my soulmate.....and discovered all the Oak and Ash I could ever wish for. Now I can turn some of that wonderful old wood into pieces which express exactly how I feel about MY world.......Life can be good - very good!
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