Oak is a truly fabulous resistant and strong materials for making many things – furniture in the home is a primary use of oak.   When you think that many of the oldest churches in this country date back to the 13th & 14th centuries and still contain the oak trestles, pews and testers, not to mention the fantastic altar rails and chancels.  I have in mind one particular church that has stood since 1388 and contains the ‘new pews’ from 1642.   This is always the joke. I was on duty as visitor hostess when we opened the church on the morning of the millennium – we had lots of US visitors because there was a memorial for some pilots from the 2nd world war visiting the 98th bombardment stones.   These visitors duly trooped into the church as something to pass the time.  They firstly could not get their collective heads around the fact there was a year 1388 – 300 years before the USA was seriously developing.  Then to be told the ‘new pews’ dated back to 1600s was such a puzzle to them.  But they were more than 300 years after the church was finished so when installed, each one lovingly carved by one man in the village, they were new..  The church was busier in those days and his lovingly carved pews proved to be too few so they just stuck aisle seats to each end of the pews, roughly modelled as an expedient at the time, no one ever guessing they’d still be cherished and smiled at nearly 400 years later.

When I moved into my first house, many years ago, I was  limited by way of funding.   Having stretched myself to the absolute limit to get the mortgage and settle all those annoying extras that still come as a bit of a surprise, despite my conveyancing solicitors best efforts to explain all.  Searches . . .  looking into whether the house was likely to fall into some sinister planning loophole or new road scheme compulsory purchase nightmare, or had any odd covenants on the property or the extensive garden and land attached.    So having cleared all these hurdles and found enough cash to move in,  I then had to start in earnest to get a few sticks of furniture together.  Obviously I was expected to gratefully accept all the old brown furniture that all the grandparents, great aunts and uncles known and unknown, had seen fit to keep forever.   Some of these offerings were passable and I gratefully accepted not only the proffered tables, wardrobes, chests of drawers, tall-boys and side tables,   but some of the ugly tat too just to be able to get a favourite uncle to hire a van and move it all for me.

After many years and several house moves later, I reached a point in my life when I could afford to jetison the heavy old brown stuff and buy that dream sideboard I’d seen in one of the top stores a couple of years ago and was now on sale at a very reasonable price in a discount warehouse near me.  What luck.  this gorgeous light coloured real oak beauty was available, together with a very nearly perfect matching dining table.  Sensing a possible sale, the manager measured both items and sent me home with said figures and one of his own steel tape measures to check that the sideboard would fit into the space planned.  It did and the table would be smaller than the one it would replace.  Oh my word, being able to buy these two items of oak furniture made me crazily happy and I still love them both.

I just love oak furniture – now that I am older, slightly more affluent and more decidedi n my tastes, I love the feeling of reliablility that comes with oak.  It won’t fall over or snap;  the colour is genuine and it needs very little looking after.  Ok, the man-made materials that the out of town furniture super emporiums sell in the stasck it high, sell it cheap modus operandi are great when you have a space that needs cheap furniture for the family to function.  But after years of this, we suddenly realise that hey, a decent oak table and chairs, to match a very attractive oak side board is now very much what we want.  The suppliers of oak furniture  whatever shade, be it light, medium, stained, rich dark . . . .  are now having a fantastic resurgence after some lean years of being the ‘old fashioned’ ones.  They suffered during the years of scandinavian manmade or rubber wood practicalities throughout the recessonary years of 1990 to 2019.  Now the folk from those days are more affluent and realise they want the quality of oak.