Dan Jackson: Labouring under an illusion

I HAVE been doing a bit of firewood lately. Nothing unusual in that, you may say, as winter approaches ... but for me it was a bit of an eye-opener.

When I was young and fit and had muscles on my muscles, I used to do a bit of firewood for beer money. Nothing excessive, mind - I'd just get my trusty Husky chainsaw and load up my HQ ute and tootle my way up into the countryside to cut some wood.

I enjoyed the physicality of it. First ringing up the tree and then splitting the rings with my axe. All very manly. In my head I was sharing common ground with my ancestors who worked the land etc etc ...

Fast forward to now: I'm 40, I'm fat, I've spent too long sitting in a digger. A mate of mine was having a barbecue, and I decided to take him some wood as a gift. I put the trailer on behind my four-wheel-drive and got the same Husky saw and headed for the hills.

Nothing much had changed, I thought, as I put the saw to the log and started cutting rings. Part way through my first cut, I realised something had changed since I was doing this in the '90s. My back. My back had changed - a lot. It was killing me. The saw's weight and vibrations were jiggling me around like a hairy version of the Michelin man.

Righto, the best trick I know to beat hard work is to break it up into smaller, achievable bits. So after I'd cut a couple of agonising rings, I put the saw down and proceeded to try and split them with an axe. Back in the day, I was quite proud of my wood-splitting ability. I could load the ute deck with nice cut wood in an hour or so. Not now, though ... not now.

My first blow with the axe succeeded in bouncing off. My second got stuck in the ring and I had to lever it out. Again and again this happened as I whacked away at this stupid piece of wood until eventually I had achieved a small pile of split wood, two dislocated shoulders and a borderline heart attack.

As the day was grinding on, I made the executive decision that my mate could split his own damned wood and I would just load the rings on the trailer and drop them off to him.

I soon learned why sections of log have been given the name "rings". It is not, as I always believed, because the cuts make circular pieces of wood. No, no - it is because when you lift them your "ring" pops out of your behind. Blimmin' 'eck, they were heavy. Way heavier than I remember.

But I persisted. I lifted, dragged and shoved those pieces on the trailer. I felt like I was a labourer on the Egyptian pyramids. After a long while I had a respectable pile of wood on board, and I delivered the wood by sort of half kicking and half rolling it off the trailer in front of the woodshed.

I couldn't help but notice my pitiful pile of wood next to the gaping cavern of shed space. I remarked how large the shed was and my mate duly informed me he needed probably double that for winter. I said nothing about future wood loads. Nothing at all. Next morning I awoke ... barely. I was in that horrible state where it's too uncomfortable to lie in bed and it hurts to get up. Every part of me ached. You know that muscle just below your shoulder blade in the centre of your back? Mine was in constant spasm. It was twitching like a mongoose fighting a cobra. My lower back was refusing to bend and, for some effing reason, the muscles in the arch of my foot had gone out in sympathy with the rest.

I thought I handled the pain reasonably well but, according to the fiancee, I sat at the kitchen table and moaned solid all day while being absolutely of no use.

Postscript: Since the aforementioned trip to the hills I have successfully been back and gotten a decent load of wood. I approached it more intelligently this time, making sure my chainsaw was sharp, positioning the trailer closer to the wood I was cutting, and cutting the rings into smaller pieces so they were easier to move. I also took my mate's 18-year-old son to do all the heavy lifting. Thanks, Mason.