An appreciation of things and times long gone

[osdset]

I am a carpenter by trade, carpentry runs in my family, my father is a carpenter, so was my grandfather, and great grandfather, and his........well you get the picture! Seven generations going back to the late 1700's, not only did we all follow the same trade, we also share the same first name, John.

I own hand tools that belonged to my great grandfather, they are no longer used, the handles are too fragile now, years of pounding with a mallet have taken their toll. The plane irons no longer seat into the wooden bodies very well, so they take pride of place in a cabinet in my living room.
Alongside these tools is a hand forged nail , 6" long, four sided and tapering to a blunt point, I pulled this nail from a 9"x4" Oak floor joist that was part of a building I was helping to restore 20 years ago, the joist needed to be cut away a bit so a new door frame could be fitted. The last man that held that nail before me was the carpenter that drove it into the joist in about 1790, it was probably delivered to him by a young apprentice, who in turn collected the nails from the on site blacksmith that made it.
Holding on to that nail connected me to the past in a way I find difficult to explain, but I'll try, it was like a virtual handshake with someone long dead, an ethereal connection to someone whose line of work I shared, though our lifestyles and conditions would have been very different, I imagined what he would have looked like, how old he was, what was his day to day life like? I might even have been related, the building is in London all my family roots are in London so who knows?
I wonder would he have had a slight chuckle at the thought of someone rescuing that nail 200 odd years later and thinking of him, or would he just have shrugged his shoulders and lit his clay pipe for a quick smoke while he had the chance?

Using vintage straights to me, is a similar experience, a connection with times long gone and the people that used them, the very same experience I have when handling my old tools.

As a tutor I once had used to say “If you want to know where you are going to, you need to know where you came from”, the past defines us all, we are the sum of what went before, and so for me at least, an appreciation of the past is a reminder of who, and what I am now.