A long walk to Dorset

Nature was looking a bit bedraggled:

And the rain was drizzling down.  Which was unfortunate because this was not an autumn afternoon, it was Tuesday morning; and, as is well known, it is not supposed to rain on a Tuesday morning.  Nevertheless, sufficient numbers of Green-Gymmers to make up a football-team turned out for an Autumn-Tidy-with-Attitude. 

Offered a range of tasks, nearly all the volunteers took a fancy to what seemed an enormous job, demolishing a bramble bush so large I had to use the widest angle possible on my little camera to take in a line of workers:

Perhaps folks all opted for this task because to get there we had already walked most of the length of the site.  Hence one volunteer remarking, “It’s a long walk to Dorset” – adding that he couldn’t remember which comedian’s catch-phrase that had been.  (Answer is: Billy Burden – radio show Workers’ Playtime around the 1950s.)

Whatever the motivation, a task one might have expected to take two sessions was completed in one:

The first-class refreshments at tea-break might have had something to do with the productivity level of the workforce: two specialities specially imported from abroad.  Bara Brith (lit. ‘speckled bread’) had been brought back from a trip to Wales.  The other had been bought (largely, I think, on account of the advertising slogan) at nowhere more exotic than a South-Oxfordshire Tesco, where a very excited employee had recognized the product at once, and explained that in Jamaica it is served at Easter time, with cheese:

Both loaves were served this morning sliced and spread with butter.  Mwynhewch eich bwyd!   (‘Enjoy!’  I have no idea what that is in Jamaican patois.)

To add to the Green Gym tally of success today, two other jobs were done as well.  There were some small trees to be taken out (for the benefit of the others growing in the area); and there were nettles to be slashed, where they were growing in anti-social locations.

“Oh, well,” as Billy Burden would say, “been lovely ’avin’ a chat.  I’d better be goin’ now.  ’Tis a long way back to Dorset.  Cheerio, cheerio.”