Several years ago now, when Mr Litlove was first getting serious about his furniture making, I remember he was sitting propped up against the pillows one night, leafing through a woodworking magazine. As I got into bed, I noticed the full page advert on the back cover which had the caption ‘You Can’t Rock This Joint!’
‘Good grief,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve just aged thirty years.’
All I needed was a cup of cocoa and my knitting to complete the picture. And so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that these first couple of months of Mr Litlove pursing his furniture making interests have left me with the oddest sensation of being retired. We have left the rat race and all its concerns far behind us without yet achieving the state of a cottage industry. Mr Litlove is now spending his days engaged in physical activity, and he’s been delighted to be able to reinstigate his favorite meal – teatime – into an already packed programme of refreshments. So he has been in and out of his workshop and I have been essentially a short order chef, keeping him fueled. It’s pretty much full-time work.
The first couple of weeks Mr Litlove dedicated to primping up the garage. He insulated the walls, hung up over the doors the old floor to ceiling curtains that not only lived in our sitting room for years but were donated to us by my parents, and after that, he turned his attention to the lighting. With the result that when I stand at the kitchen window after dusk, looking down the garden, I think I’m about to have a close encounter of the third kind.
Then he bought a very large, shiny green box which is apparently an air filter and is now attached high up on the garage ceiling. He wears the remote control for it on a cord around his neck, and it looks for all the world like a panic button. I’m not quite sure what new roles we’re playing; Darby and Joan, on the one hand, Wallace and Gromit on the other.
But since then, furniture has been made. Mr Litlove finds himself into chairs at the moment, and Sheraton chairs in particular. Thomas Sheraton is an interesting character, the last of the great English designers and cabinet makers who flourished in the eighteenth century. He followed on the end of an illustrious line after Chippendale (hard to get the image out of one’s head of polished pecs and too much hairspray, but try), Heppelwhite and Robert Adam. Unlike his predecessors, however, fame and fortune did not smile upon him. He was born poor and only ever scraped a living from his furniture, even forced later in life to make the sort of popular French Empire style pieces (frilly, fussy) that he disliked. In our day, furniture makers have come to view Sheraton as the greatest of that pack of stylists, the most elegant of line and proportion, but during his lifetime his shyness and sensitivity, his introspection, made him a bad spokesperson and salesman for his craft. After his death in 1806, fashions changed, and the sort of furniture he loved has only relatively recently been appreciated again.
