Rating: 5 out of 5

I didn’t go looking for this. It found me (via an email from bookbub who included this as a 99p kindle offer).

The description included these words “blending memoir and nature writing at its finest, Ingrained is an uplifting meditation on the joys and challenges of working with your hands in our modern age, on inheritance, community, and the beauty of the natural world.” - I love reading good memoirs, and I read a lot about nature so this immediately appealed.

I started reading this while on holiday, staying in a log cabin in a forest. I sat on the decking looking out at trees and read chapter after chapter. It suited my surroundings beautifully.

I’ve found myself looking at furniture slightly differently. Evaluating the items I have in my own home - a chair, a side table, and those I pass - picnic benches, park benches. Wondering about the construction. Wondering about the invisible hands that brought them into being. Not are the finely finished items that Callum and his team work on but they’re still being created and deserve to be cared for.

A wonderful read.

Highlights:

Allowed to move freely around the freshly milled timber like this, the relentless Scottish wind will slowly wick away the moisture, a year for every inch of thickness, plus another for luck.

Andrew has never been fully silent. He probably whistles in his sleep, or yodels, or hums. Or all three. I
can’t say he didn’t warn us … but if someone tells you in their interview they were once fired for singing too much, you don’t actually believe them, do you?

Unearth the things you love, the things that speak to you, and ask yourself why they work – not just how.

What is it about wood that can capture our imaginations so – draw us in, speak to us as no other
material can?

A thousand years ago, Scandinavian longships were being constructed along almost identical lines to
the ship-lapped boards of my father’s Hebridean boatshed. Two thousand years before that,
Tutankhamun’s antechamber was being filled with finely wrought wooden furniture, almost as the
walls of Rekhmire’s tomb were being decorated with paintings showing carpenters hard at work, using
techniques the boys in the workshop would undoubtedly recognize today. Go back even further and
split-and-worked timber floors were being laid in sites that predate Britain’s break from continental
Europe. Further still, back when our ancestors first rolled off the production line, we actually used to
live up there in the branches. Where it was safe. Where everything didn’t want so very badly to eat us.
So it isn’t so outlandish to think that, even then, we were crafting things from wood.


By the time the sun goes down tonight, nearly half the world will have cooked over a wood fire.


is any amount of money really worth the misery of spending your time doing something you loathe?

it has been all too easy to forget that independent local businesses, the kind of hardworking businesses
that are right here on my doorstep, may be waiting in the silence for someone like me to swish through
the door. That no matter how original or full of charm and quality they may be, many will not be able to
survive without our support. And that they aren’t really businesses anyway; in towns and villages up
and down the country, they are the lifeblood, the culture and the character of communities. They are
somebody’s hopes and dreams.

Originally posted to my Goodreads account