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(BQ) Part 2 book “Admissuons life as a brain surgeon” has content: Making things, broken windows, neither the sun nor death, the red squirrel, sorry, memory, Ukraine. | 9 MAKING THINGS A long time ago I had promised my daughter Sarah that I would make her a table. I am rather good at saying I’ll make things, and then finding I haven’t got the time, let alone getting round to make the many things I want to make or mend myself. A retired colleague, a patient of mine as well, whose back I had once operated upon, had come to see me a year before I retired with pain down his arm. Another colleague had frightened him by saying it might be angina from heart disease – the pain of angina can occasionally radiate down the left arm. I rediagnosed it as simply pain from a trapped nerve in his neck that didn’t need treating. It turned out that in retirement he was running his own oak mill, near Godalming, and we quickly fell into an enthusiastic conversation about wood. He suggested I visit, which I did, once I had retired. To my amazement I found that he had a fully equipped industrial sawmill behind his home. There was a stack of dozens of great oak trunks, twenty foot high, beside the mill. Eighty thousand pounds’ worth, he told me when I asked. The mill itself had a fifteen-foot-long sawbed on which to put the trunks, with hydraulic jacks to align them, and a great motorized bandsaw that travelled along the bed. The tree trunks – each weighing many tons – were jostled into place using a specialized tractor. All this he did by himself, although in his seventies, and with recurrent back trouble. I was impressed. I spent a happy day with him, helping him to trim a massive oak trunk so that it ended up with a neatly square cross-section, and then rip-sawing it into a series of thick two-inch boards. The machinery was deafening (we wore ear defenders), but the smell of freshly cut oak was intoxicating. I drove home that evening like a hunter returning from the chase, with the planks lashed to the roof rack of my ancient Saab – a wonderful car, the marque now, alas, extinct – that has travelled over 200,000 miles and only broken down .
