31/08/2026
I don’t think I realised quite how clever they were until they were gone.
Last week we lost two people who have been there my whole life. King Harald of Norway and Dolly Parton. I don’t suppose their paths ever crossed, and yet in the days since, what we’ve been left with in both cases is the same thing. Their words.
Read them side by side and the philosophies are strangely alike. Be kind to other people. Be kind to yourself. I’m sure they’d both be rather pleased to know the effect those words are having now, and my hope is that it lasts.
That’s the whole reason we carve, really. A sentence said out loud is gone by the evening. The same sentence cut into oak is still there twenty years later, gone silver in the weather, still saying it.
My own answer is on the last slide. So now yours. If someone carved one line of yours into a piece of oak, what would you want it to say?
