Hi!

I’m actually writing this last week, as I’m dashing off to Helsinki on Monday 13th, for seminars at the weekend (18th and 19th). So, greetings from snowy Finland!

On New Year’s Day I went into my shed to sharpen a scraper, and while testing it for sharpness cleaned a patch of something off my bench top. This lead me to dress the bench. For non-cabinetmakers: dressing the bench means planing it flat, something you need to do every now and then because wood changes shape over time, and it’s useful to have a dead-flat bench to work on. New Year’s Day seemed like a perfect time for it, getting things ready to make stuff in 2025.

Here it is:

This inspired me to do something I’ve been meaning to do for over five years: get rid of the entirely practical and unutterably boring desktop on my otherwise excellent standing desk, and replace it with something more, well, me.

Here’s the desk as it was:

I bought a slab of oak kitchen worktop, slightly smaller than the original desk (to make the new one fit better in the space, and to allow for banding, etc.). The main design feature was a well for the keyboard to put it at the correct height relative to my wrists (which is what the big L-shaped slab of oak is doing on my old desktop).

So, I cut out the hole, made a bottom for it, and then decided to run some walnut edging round it. The front edge of the desk is quite important- it needs to be rounded and comfortable.

Then, because I am a fool, I decided to run banding at the ends too. This is a problem, as every woodworker knows, because wood shrinks and expands in its width, not its length, so as the desktop moves over time it will either knock the end banding off, or split, or do something else horrible. My solution was to dovetail the end banding into the walnut lip, fixing one end of the end banding, and lightly glue it along its length, with a screw in a sliding slot holding down the other end. This should allow some movement.

The banding at the back edge of the desk is screwed in (no glue at all) for reasons I’ll go into in a minute.

Now, the back edge. Wire nests are the bane of modern desks, and mine is no exception. The back of my computer has nine wires coming out of it. And they all need to go places. So I decided to invent a way of keeping them in order: holes (no great invention) covered by removable pieces of wood, so the hole can be smaller than the plug at either end. This way you can wire things in, and then organise the wires. This is what I came up with:

The mitred cover piece just sits in there. Cutting the compound mitres (ie angled off square in more than one direction) was tricky, but went pretty quickly. I’ve only screwed this whole piece into the desktop so if I need to make adjustments I can just take it off and work on it in the workshop without affecting my actual work.

The worktop I bought was pretty cheap, and it had a couple of unacceptable splits in the top surface, such as this one:

I decided to patch it in a contrasting wood (brown oak), like so:

This was done entirely with hand tools- pencil, marking knife, chisels, saw, plane. No routers, they’re too likely to run off with me and make an even larger problem to solve. Then a lot of scraping, sanding, and polishing, and it’s done!

The wire solution seems to be working:

And the dovetails polished up ok:

To cap it all (ha ha) my Christmas present from my wife and kids was a new set of keycaps, which have photos from when my kids were little on them. Adorable!

So, now, what shall I write? Reply to this email to let me know…

Medieval German Wrestling coming your way soon…

It’s not all been woodworking- I have also put the finishing touches on Jessica Finley’s upcoming new wrestling course, which covers the Twirch Ringen plays from the Von Baumann manuscript.

Like this:

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What the heck are they doing in that image? I know, because Jess did it to me… and it was horrible. In a good way. The course includes the seven Twirch Ringen plays, their counters, and their counter-counters, as well as instruction on falling, setting up the plays, and connecting the plays. It’s an awesome mini-system that is perfect for anyone studying German medieval martial arts, and also greatly expand your wrestling base if you’re a Fioreist.

So, expect the course to launch at the end of this month, in the usual way. There will be a week or so of sale offer, and then a month or so after that it will be included in the Mastering the Art of Arms subscription. Speaking of which:

Reminder: 50% off your first month of Mastering the Art of Arms

Just a reminder: we have a 50% discount on the Mastering the Art of Arms subscription running, which gives you access to all of my online courses. You can use the code 2025STARTRIGHT at checkout to get half off the first month, or use this link. This code is valid until the end of January. You’ll find the Solo Training course, How to Teach, the Medieval Wrestling, Dagger, and Longsword courses, the Complete Rapier course, and a ton of other stuff too. Something for everyone! Well, everyone likely to be on this list, anyway. The subscription will renew at the end of your first month at the full price, but you can cancel at any time (I don’t take it personally).

Farewell Lenard Voelker

If you’ve read my book The Medieval Dagger you may have noticed the dedication to Lenard Voelker: gentleman, scholar, and inspirational martial artist. He sadly died last month, and I’ve written a short appreciation of his friendship on my blog, here: https://guywindsor.net/2025/01/lenard-voelker/​

This was actually the first thing of substance I wrote on my new desktop setup.

What I’m reading

In the last newsletter I mentioned Ken Follett’s The Evening and the Morning. I said “It’s pretty well researched, and generally a surprisingly accurate portrayal of life back then (not that it’s my own area of expertise, so I may have missed stuff).”

Hoo boy, did I miss stuff. This from my friend Roland, who is very much more clued up about the 11th century than I am: “I read The Evening and the Morning when it was first published, and I absolutely hated it. It’s riddled with outdated clichés, especially concerning the supposedly primitive living conditions (no underwear, sleeping on the floor, ropes being rare and valuable, etc.). The depictions of campaigning and warfare are similarly oversimplified—they were far more complex and sophisticated than Follett portrays.

In my opinion, The Evening and the Morning is an extremely bad and unintelligent book, populated with ridiculously stereotypical characters. It’s downright irritating, and the medievalesque world it conjures feels no more authentic than something out of a Ridley Scott film.”

Tell it like it is, Roland!

I’ve also been reading Max Barry’s The 22 Murders of Madison May, which is a bizarre multiverse fantasy/thriller about a woman who is stalked across realities by a really “fan”. It’s weird, gripping, and I’m 100% sure has no historical inaccuracies because it’s set in an imaginary present :)

I’m still reading The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. It’s a bit too dense (in terms of new information- it’s very approachably written) to just read through- I need to think about what I’ve just read before moving on. For sure they have forever debunked the evolutionary theory of human organisation (band-tribe-chiefdom-state): not least because many anthropological studies describe human cultures that seasonally switch between what you might think of as an egalitarian nomadic style of organisation, and a rigidly hierarchical one.

cheers,

Guy