Twenty Minutes - My Summer Job - AL Kennedy

The award-winning author AL Kennedy's grandmother was an exacting, furious woman who loved the particularities of wood. A meticulous, experienced French polisher, she knew how to apply thin alchemical layers of varnishes and lacquers to make surfaces gleam with a deep, inner shine. AL Kennedy describes the charcteristic "cheap whip and spring of young pine, or the dry and intelligent complications of restored mahogany, the sharp density of beech, the melancholy heat in oak", all qualities that were familiar to her grandmother. In this moving testimony to her grandmother's hard won craft and exacting skill, AL Kennedy honours the work of a generation of artisan craftsmen and women. Producer: Mark Smalley.