The full story
I was in my Dad's workshop before I could walk.
My whole childhood was spent watching him — making things, mending things, taking someone's broken ring and handing it back like it had never happened. People would come in worried and leave smiling. I thought he was magic.
I'd sit with his tools when he wasn't using them, holding them the way he held them, pretending I was doing what he was doing.
He taught me the best of what he knows — goldsmithing, bespoke work, the standard you hold yourself to when nobody's checking. But when I decided to do this properly, for the rest of my life, I wanted to learn the one part he couldn't teach me.
So I went to Antwerp. Three months at the Alexander Diamond Setting School, training under Alexander Sidorov, in the city where the world's diamonds pass through. Setting is fiddly, unforgiving work, and there's more creativity hiding in it than anyone outside the trade would guess. I fell for it completely.
That settled it. I specialised, and then kept going. I trained at the JURA school in Vigo, Spain, in pavé setting: the most demanding there is, where a fraction of a millimetre is the difference between beautiful and ruined. It's still my favourite thing to do.
Now I'm back at the bench next to my Dad, doing what I watched him do my entire life. Only now I've got something of my own to bring to it.