On Sunday, I shaved and scraped an elm branch until I had a pale little spoon cradled in my hands. Three weeks before, on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, I was sawing that branch frantically into pieces that I could fit in my empty hiking bag. Just before that I was googling ‘can you go to prison for taking a branch off a path’. Google said no, but I carried on checking my shoulder like a sparrow at a birdfeeder. I put my bag of logs on my back and headed back to the car feeling very alert. I only had a vague idea of why I was doing it but I could feel I’d done something.

The logs lay there in the yard for a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I bought a length of pine from b&q and made a box. After nailing those flat planks together into a neat cuboid, the green branches in the yard looked lumpy and difficult. A week later, I decided I had better make a spoon since I’d sawn them up myself.

The spokeshave quietly skimmed off ribbons of soft bark as i pulled it towards me, showing the bone white wood. The sturdy branch became delicately thin. I had to pull the tool over knots where the grain tangled and tripped it. I tugged hard, impatient for a spoon, and gouged down into the branch making it worse. When I slowed and worked more gently, the stubborn wood let me shave over those mistakes.

With my mum’s old gouge, I hollowed out the bowl then sawed the spoon from the branch that had been wedged in the vice. I took it into my hands for the first time and felt how light it was, but not fragile- so hard and rigid. Now that I’d cut it from its branch, I had to hold the spoon’s head secure in the fold of my palm as I gouged with my other hand, like I was the dentist for a little rodent. Out of the vice, I could move tool and spoon to each other and it felt easier to be careful.

Soon it was done. The bowl was still a bit lumpy where I’d burrowed through the wood layers, and the stem had a few scars where it had been squashed in the vice. But still, it was definitely done. It was like a neolithic bone utensil hollowed out of a deer’s shin. I looked at it with the wonder of an archaeologist who had stumbled upon a spoon in the ground, not the critical eye of the carver who had just made one. I left it at the end of the kitchen table, and the last few days I have spent staring at that spoon as I eat, and turning it over and over in my hands. It has something of me in it, though more of elm and spoon. I have shaved and gouged and found an old spell.

I had to pull the tool over knots where the grain tangled and tripped it. I tugged hard, impatient for a spoon, and gouged down into the branch making it worse. When I slowed and worked more gently, the stubborn wood let me shave over those mistakes.

The branch has been severed from the hedge as part of a late summer hedge trimming. It seemed to have been  particularly brutal round- thick cut

Mechanical hedgetrimming can have

Spinning mechanical blades slash the bushes square, their new growth cut back to chewed up stumps.

Their dead leaves had already shrivelled and were curling up like cardboard in a fire.

The leaves had already shrivelled and were curling up like cardboard in a fire

I cut off the bendy twigs that sprouted off the main trunk

the branch on a path a few weeks ago. I left the car in a little village near the coast and hopped over the main road into a little wood. PATH CLOSED seemed a promising sign to follow for getting away from people. I already felt a bit self conscious- a young man wandering around at midday on a Tuesday with a big empty rucksack.