Load up and go!

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:

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: