A confession - when I first started making chairs, I began to wonder if I couldn’t just set up a machine to do this job. It seemed to take hours. My knuckles started to bleed while my fitness watch assumed I was swimming the channel. Not much fun, but I stuck at it.

Steambending wood is like being goalkeeper for a rubbish football team. Long periods of boredom punctuated by a few seconds of frenetic activity, where you can get everything right and still somehow lose.