Getting fit lickety split

We won’t pretend it can be done in just one Green-Gym sesh, converting a Christmas-celebrating bod into a lean, mean conservation-machine.  But I think we would suggest that a morning’s work-out with Green Gym is as effective and pleasant a way as any to get the transformation underway.

The means by which this feat was to be achieved in our first full session of 2019?  “Processing timber”.  Which meant:

1. unloading a trailer
2. splitting and stacking logs

All by manual labour, in glorious sunshine (if bone-splittingly cold in a keen nor’wester).  And to begin, a most pleasant short walk, down to the log store, past a horizon of sheep:

No matter how much experience some of our members have, there is generally something new and interesting to be learned from the introductory talk.  Today: the benefits of staying symmetrical when splitting wood with axe or splitting-wedge. 

However interesting the lesson, though, volunteers’ ambient air temperature meant that as soon as the site warden had finished his delivery, Green-Gymmers swarmed round the glove-bucket and set to work right away.  Unloading the trailer was something people could fling themselves into, without having to set up work-station and equipment first.

As for the log-splitting, the suggestion was that anyone who had not done much before might like to work in a pair with one of the old & bold.  Even the most experienced, however, found from time to time that they had to team up.  Some gnarly specimens [yes, I mean timber, not volunteers – Ed.] simply would not obediently split in one strike:

The site-warden remained most usefully on hand to give further instruction.  To be sure, strategy for turning lengths of branch into firewood is as simple as The Beautiful Game, but there is such a thing as tactics:

“Football tactics are rapidly becoming as complicated as the chemical [sic] formula for splitting the atom.” 

attr Jimmy Greaves

Refinements to log-splitting theory depend on water content of timber (willow is soggier than oak, for instance) or on size and shape of branches.

Even with all that cumulative wisdom and experience, the session still had to be extended a little, in order to retrieve the situation where there had been “a pig of a log to split”.  Somehow, all three splitting-wedges and two axes got buried in it – and had to be extracted, before that team could leave:

Meantime, the log-stackers were discovering that the technique they needed is similar to that used by dry-stone-wallers, except for the slope at the end of a row:

Progress by half-time

“Final look-what-we-did picci”

All this activity, of course, generated a degree of noise:

This engendered lively curiosity among some of the livestock quartered nearby:

It created not a ripple of interest, however, among the nearest – in the mother & baby unit.  We thought we had detected the odd (contented) sound off.  Sure enough, a camera lens held at arm’s length by a natural aperture in the wall revealed creatures entirely absorbed in the world encompassed by the care between parent and offspring:

Below is the official portrait of ewes and lambs which were born about three weeks before Christmas, at home in the barn.  They look almost as contented as Green-Gymmers and site-warden were by session end, “a very satisfied and happy crowd”: