INGRAINED

The story of how a personal financial crisis forced the author to get creative.

Robinson is the eldest son of a Hebrides-bred furniture maker whose skills with people and wood he holds in awe. Alas, Robinson does not share his father’s talent for the craft of woodworking. Though bright and sensitive, he’s painfully shy. He skips university to take a job in a pub, and it’s only when his father asks him to help with his business that Robinson is forced—a position his passivity often puts him in—to reluctantly start paying attention to the skills required of a craftsman. He completes his apprenticeship at a large commercial concern in New Zealand before returning to Scotland to make a go of it on his own. Luckily, he meets his soulmate Marisa, an outgoing college grad of Italian heritage with an entrepreneurial spirit and a knack for conceptualizing furniture design. The couple begin a business creating bespoke pieces for corporate and other well-to-do clients. But when their largest client cancels a contract, they make a quick decision to open a boutique on the high street of an Edinburgh suburb. Robinson is a painstaking writer, clearly inspired by authors like Anthony Bourdain, Bill Bryson, and A.A. Gill, but his talents can seem larger than his subject often calls for. The medium-stake drama of whether the business will open or survive can seem overwritten. And yet passages about walking in a highland forest among the ancient oaks and more recent “immigrants” like Douglas fir, or comparing the grains of wood for various purposes, reveal him to be a master of sensory prose.

A woodworker shows he’s equally gifted with words.