Simon in full flow entertaining Phil with his campfire tales – some crazy story involving fire no doubt! Ha.
My two mates telling stories of a misspent youth
Not an awful lot to tell you in terms of work and woodland management – we didn’t do any! I met these two reprobates on a bushcraft course that Phil was running. Simon is a self-employed blacksmith. We all seemed to hit it off together and have stayed in touch and been planning to meet up at my wood for a while. We finally managed it a few days ago. I took them for a tour of my piece and a longer tour around some of the other areas. I learned a few interesting things, how you can use the leaves of horse chestnut as soap and how to attract woodpeckers by rapidly tapping a coin on a tree to mimic a rival bird. We made a fire, had a brew and some lunch and sat around swapping stories of our miss-spent childhood days, having a good old laugh. Phil joked that we haven’t really grown up. We still like doing the things we enjoyed as kids, lighting a fire, building a den, messing about with sticks and knives etc.
I gave that some thought and arrived at this conclusion. When we are very young, we know little. So we are just who we are, fascinated by the world immediately around us, exploring, playing, learning about our environment and how we fit into it. We find out which insects and plants hurt us, what plants smell nice and even what some taste like. We mess about in pools and streams, in the woods and the fields. Our world doesn’t extend far from where we are right there and then. We are centred. Then society and the man-made world pulls us away from that place. It fills our heads with all sorts of distractions, school, work, mortgages and child rearing and we lose track of ourselves and our connection with nature and our planet – our ancestral home. Some people continue to live their lives in this way. But if you’re lucky, you might realise that you have travelled too far from your true self – that innocent enquiring child you once were. You might take up an interest in nature in some way – bird-watching, hiking, bush-craft, woodlands or fishing or whatever and those that do, soon find their centre again. The activity seems to bring you right back to where you are, right here and now and the lost child comes out to play. Yes I sound like some sort of new age nutter but it’s not the nature and the woodland that made me that way, it’s the previous lack of it. So I think we have grown up. We’ve found our true selves again. Try it, go out and play again.
