Chain(saw) of Fools

As both of my legs had just been severed with an accidental slip of the chainsaw I found it necessary to sit down quite swiftly on the ground before starting to call for help. Unfortunately I was a couple of miles from the nearest main road, having driven along a long winding track into the Forestry Commission plantation to find a spot to fell a nice Christmas tree. To add to my misfortune my mobile had run out of battery (I’d tried to charge the phone up the night before but it had developed an annoying habit of wriggling free of the lead), and I hadn’t had time this morning to let anyone know where I was going.  With consciousness slipping away I reflected that I should have paid more attention to the safety aspects of my CS30 training course.

I Bought A Bog

Seventy-two years ago a book was published called I Bought A Mountain. Its Canadian author, Thomas Firbank, had spent the previous decade managing a 2400-acre sheep farm in the mountains of north Wales, having bought it for £5000 in 1931 (£257,000 in today’s money). In the book he describes in brisk prose the joys, tribulations, triumphs and disasters of this experience, an outsider struggling, and eventually succeeding, to gain the acceptance of the close-knit hill farming community of Snowdonia. This book has been loaned to me as required reading because two days ago I bought a Welsh bog.

Fly Me To The Moon

Every once in a while the serenity that enfolds Pilsdon like an all-in-one pyjama suit is outrageously ruptured by the thunderous by-pass of a flying machine, its wings nearly clipping the roof of our manor, its roar jingling the cutlery and making it impossible to speak. Sometimes two will pass in quick succession to double the insult. There is a sweet arrogance about the way they roar so slowly past, ponderous in their perilously low flight above the hedgerows and spires of Dorset. They know they are interrupting whatever is going on below and they know there’s not a thing anyone can do about it. 

Be Still

Most of us will only sit still when our attention is arrested by something in front of us, be it a TV screen, a computer monitor, a smartphone, a tablet or, for the old-fashioned amongst us, a book. Without external visual or auditory feed we quickly become restless. We have become very accustomed to a near-constant input of information, entertainment, or their unlovely spawn, infotainment. Our smartphones alert us when someone we barely know has tweeted about something we care even less about. Taxis and buses are installed with in-vehicle TV screens to give passengers adverts to gawp at. iPads provide digital distraction on trains so people need not look out of the windows any more, and no doubt the windows themselves will soon be replaced with OLED panels promoting the latest 3D blockbusters.  We are losing the space to allow ourselves just to be.