The joy of showing my grandson how to wield an axe

Until a fortnight ago there was a healthy, graceful, 70ft-specimen of Eucalyptus dalrympleana — or mountain gum — in the garden. Now there isn’t. Or rather, the remains of the trunk and branches are lying in sections on the ground. To knock a few quid off the tree surgeon’s bill, I’d grandiosely told them not to bother reducing the trunk and major branches to fire-grate-sized logs. Leave it in rings, I said, and I’ll split them up with an axe. Which they did. The next time I looked out, the men had departed and there were a couple of tons of wood lying in wheels in the sodden grass. The biggest rings, from the base of the trunk, were about two feet in diameter and a foot thick. Not a problem. A joy. I filed a razor-sharp edge on the axe-head, put the two biggest, knottiest-looking rings one on top of the other for a chopping block, and started swinging.

Why is splitting wood so supremely satisfying? Does anybody know? The first afternoon of log-splitting didn’t feel like labour. The lovely tree bore me no ill-will and yielded generously to the blade. Knots were few and honest about their hidden extent. My pile of split wood grew quickly and looked as photogenic in the winter-afternoon sunlight as only a woodpile can.

My old axe and I became reacquainted. Accuracy was at first based on hope, then faith, then belief, then certainty. As confidence grew, the starting point of the axe-head moved further down my back so that full momentum could be achieved long before the axe-head reached the apogee of the arc. Each stroke of the axe meant a preliminary rough guess at the amount of force required to split the wood.