By ‘C’ (with thanks to our two
session-leaders today):
This was our
warm-up this morning:
The
first raking after a meadow-cut this season? There’ll be plenty more to
come!
If this is livin’ on Tulsa time, people were
taking it terribly seriously, and possibly more
at EC pace:
at EC pace:
We may only
have been joking when we maintained we would have that small patch of land cleared
in ten minutes. In fact it was precisely 10 mins after our
(unusually precise) 10 o’clock start that the job was declared finished:
So then it
was on past the pond we had helped develop, towards our main task.
Before we
could get going, some discussion of which direction a diagonal was to be
cleared. It was thought best to check
with the site warden before starting to cut!
Once we had
the green light, Green-Gymmers were let loose, with a choice of blade:
Working with
the short-handled slasher – a variation on the sickle
|
Using the
dasselbasher. In the background: the air
station
|
Cutting was
only one part of the job. There was also
the business of loading on to wheelbarrows, and transporting to compost-heap:
A treeful of
discarded warm-tops bore witness that this was warm work on a warm day:
Meanwhile,
above us, the RAF was practising its own loading and lifting:
Someone
joked that this must mean it was tea-break at the air station: the
first load looked like a shed; and the second, like a pair of tea-crates.
Curiosity
about what our neighbours were up to, continued to our own tea-break:
I am not
sure the volunteer concerned did manage to see any more from his higher
vantage-point.
The usual
early-autumn chat about where people had travelled to over the summer, prompted
one member to recall a rhyme, which he maintains will not make any sense to a
younger generation (and is considerably more polite than contemporary
variations):
There was a young man from Pitlochry,
whose morals were simply a mockery.
He kept under his bed
a young lady, instead
of the usual item of crockery.
This in turn
prompted an interesting literary-critical question:
Is it a poem?
– No, it’s a limerick.
Surely a
limerick is a kind of rhyme. And that
kind of simple rhyme is a sub-set of the genre ‘poetry’?
What we do
know for sure is that after our efforts this morning, that stretch of Chilterns
chalk-stream is now running fast and free, as it should:
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