Another side of ursusanglicanus

At long last, some photos of what I do with my life when I am not working as a translator or as a church deacon.  Woodworking classes.

It also largely explains my absence from LiveJournal  recently : classes were five evenings a week + Saturdays, and left little time for much else. It’s now back, thank heavens, to three.

Here is me, free and behind bars – of my own making, me with Luc, the instructor, and a chalice box which I made in the class with Luc’s help, and which my wife has lined.

I’ve been it a year and am enjoying it immensely. My grandfather was an excellent joiner and taught carpentry, like Luc. My father taught it for a year in China, but never taught me, so it’s in the blood somewhere. The classes are real professional ones, provided by the City of Brussels in different locations in town. For this module we are in a series of classrooms close to the city centre, 4 floors of workshops and classrooms, with some pretty modern equipment. I’m a bit surprised that, just off retirement age, they allowed me in at all – most of the others could be my sons, or the youngest, at a stretch, my grandsons. At 200 euros a year it’s nearly free, or me clawing back the thousands of euros of city tax I have paid over the last 30 years !

Other modules are in the huge Arts et Métiers building, down in what is now the Arab/African end of town, where they teach just about every handicraft, from car maintenance to bookbinding to picture frame decoration to hairdressing. For me, coming very much from the ‘nicer’ and ‘white’ end of the city, it has been an eye-opener on a younger generation and a different social class. Good craftsmen, I find, tend to be good people, and I feel very comfortable there.