It’s true!

We were right last week about who would win the World Cup, though I don’t think any of us anticipated how emphatic the win over the host side would be.  Even the home fans seemed not quite to trust themselves to believe their team would win what was always going to be a closer contest in the final.  Es ist wahr (“It’s true”) ran the headline the day after in one leading German newspaper, Die Welt.

As for Green Gym’s core business: it was encouraging to read, this week, reports of another study on the health value of exercise.  It seems that getting active is the single most important lifestyle factor when it comes to a wide range of health conditions.  The good news is that this is one factor which most of us have control over – and it can be fun. 

Coming to Green Gym can be a very pleasurable way of knocking off one of your exercise ‘5-a-week’.   The benefits begin right now: not in some projected future when we don’t fall ill with some condition we have prevented; but in the present, while we enjoy being in the outdoors, with a group of friends, doing something that’ll be useful for the environment and other people as well.

Today, for instance, there was a choice of tasks.  One option was to be ruthless and determined, cutting back vegetation before it gets a chance to overgrow one of the permissive rights of way on site:

The warden told us we were “lucky” not to be nettle-slashing again: that delight falls to one of the other voluntary groups which works at the main Earth Trust site.  (Bad luck, Friday Group!)  The task did not consist entirely of destruction.  The brash was used to build up a barrier, where members of the public are invited to keep to the footpath because the woodland beyond is “home to rare plants and animals”:

The other task, from a distance, looked like an outdoor version of pass the parcel:

Closer up, one could see that the job was one of moving logs.  By hand, one at a time, from woodpile to landrover trailer.  We discovered, as we went along, which logs only looked as if they were heavy, and which ones really were:

The exercise was like working out with free weights in the gym, except that natural gym equipment does not come with neat labels or colour-coding to show the weight in kg.  Plus, this gym floor was distinctly uneven underfoot.

On some of the logs, one could see where they had continued growing even after they had been cut.  That ‘rim’ round the edge of this one, for instance:

The woodpile had served as temporary shelter for a number of creatures, which rapidly scuttled away.  It seemed a shame to dismantle their home! For that reason, during forestry works on site 10% of the logs are left on the woodland floor to serve as habitat.

At tea-break a length of the footpath perimeter barrier served as temporary seating for Green-Gymmers and Earth-Trust workers getting their breath back:

Finally, at session end, there was a refreshing stroll over the breezy downs, and a last gaze across the meadows at the ex-, soon to be demolished, cooling towers of Didcot power station: