Ty Korrigan

I came home yesterday just at the start of the second half of the Maroc v Portugal match, to a wife totally electrified, never seen her so animated. Leaping out of her chair, punching the air, hands covering face, more air punching, kicking the air, it was infectious. So I sat with her and watched the rest of the game. First ever time I have enjoyed watching football. Now I am certainly no pundit but it was as if the two sides were playing for more than just to win. Whilst the later Englerland v France was less exciting. Like two 18th century 3 deckers trying to block anothers wind whilst briefly engaging cannon fire. It lacked the energy of Maroc v Portugal. In Rabat, the King and Crown Prince left the palace to mingle with the crowds. On the pitch, a players mother, half his height and dressed in the white of a pilgrim was hugging her son. Telling ya, whatever people might think of Islam etc, the people of Morocco are the happiest, generous most open people I have have ever had the privilege of being amongst. Whether their team makes it further or not, their efforts this time will be remembered for along time in every lost hamlet of the Atlas to the Saharan frontier camps.

Christmas 2008 I was milking Jerseys in Westland South Island N.Z The farmer sent the Yank and I off in his 'ute' equipped with a regular carpentry saw to go find a Christmas tree. He gave us directions to a forestry plantation a few kms away. Took a few tries to get one down in one piece leaving a trail of topped conifers in our wake but we did manage to bring home a free tree. Would have been less fuss, more legal, less fun and cheaper to buy one though. Then a bunch of drunk Maoris stole the oldest milking cow for their festive hangi wtf! Farmer knew them by their ute tracks and name calling but let them get away as it was a kind of local tradition. Happy days....

Without Arbtalk I'd be free of you and your hord descending on me every Summer. Endless EE-BY-GUM and accusations of me being a soft Southern t**t. There must be other people willing to bring over my Yorkshire tea and Marmite...FFS.

What occured for MattyF to flounce off from you lovely fellows?

You ever come across the chatty expat who waves an arm at an acre of bog and proclaims he is going to plant Xmas trees? Or come across a field full of weeds and chloritic stunted 'pines' because when your that thick anything green is a Xmas tree...

Seriously, do they exist in the UK? In the Kent area... I've a colleague who swears his cousin is a multi-millionaire off the back of Christmas tree sales. He refers to him as though he was Ronaldo Beckham golden boots and either I swallow his endless drivel or stow his gob with a few factoids of my own. Cheers Stuart

I know that is English, just not a dialect I am familiar with.

I wasn't bored, just my usual boring self, so I began taking a note of standing conifer hedge volumes before chipping. This is really due to a recent regulation in France that requires the m3 of waste to be mentioned on quotes as part of a drive to screw down fly tipping. So I found myself measuring conifer hedges. I have found the volume is reduced between 8-10 fold with chipping. Does this match others experience or am I well out? Yawn....

My wife requested I leave Wednesdays free for rest and family. The kids have a half day so I'll do a quote and file a chain before fetching them from school. Generally 4 days on the tools but quotes on Saturday and Sunday mornings now the evenings are too dark to see phone lines and lawn sausages. I do need that midweek rest day, it really makes a difference to how I feel at the weekend.

Harry Potter and the line clearance job. Synopsis: Our hero aged 15 3/4 is asked if his Nintendo skills are transferable and given command of a 7t 19m MEWP for the day. This was a Fat Groundy Production.

A Parisian complained to the town hall about leaves. That is usually the case here.

Would more power and better gearing help or simply the lack of traction impossible to overcome?

I've a client who is a fitter at a caravan dealership. Last week he proposed a caravan mover system for under 2k euros rated to a higher weight than the chipper requires to deal with slopes and soft terrain. Mrs Lee would prefer a tracked barrow fitted with a towball as we could use it both for our renovation project and towing the chipper as well as remove logs from jobs with tighter access. I've not the funds for a mini-loader and we already have a useful small tractor with loader if there is sufficient room and wood. Stuart

I had a British client arrange to have his properties guardian/gardener pay me. I arrived on a dark wet evening and at the moment I was handed the envelope, the guardian ran off, I assumed because of the rain. Stupidly, I didn't count it. Back home, an unsigned cheque and a wedge of folding £500 short of the agreed amount, feck. I emailed the client and copied in the guardian, the client demanded a photo of the cheque, reasonable, so I sent one but he denied that the cash could have been short. He claimed to have ordered the total sum of our agreed cash payment after our work was completed during his stay in France. He refused to pay point then told me he was a retired crown prosecutor (verified by Googling him) and that I was treading on thin ice accusing him of short changing me. I resorted to the very real threat of returning the 3 loads of 7t Iveco worth of chip making his next visit a difficult one. He replied that just with that he had enough evidence to make a formal complaint to the Gendarmes citing threats, attempted exhortation, tva (vat) fraud. I replied, do so then, a British Crown Prosecutor paying cash above the legal limit for such transactions and short changing a tradesman will certainly raise their interest. And so it went on, ping pong ping pong ping. Until my tame Jersey lawyer friend told me to ask him for the evidence that he had indeed withdrawn the correct amount as he said he had made a single money order and to scan that evidence to me. Silence followed. Then a few days later a payment for €500 was made into my account and nothing more heard from him again. Stuart

I can't even walk up mine safely! After reading this, I think I'll ask Didier if he can put beads of weld along the treads.

Here in France, a great deal of the arguement over keeping the retirement age of certain jobs low is because of the physical nature of the work. Back in the day, steam engine drivers won a retirement age of 52 which is still retained despite the relative ease and comfort of a modern train. For my part, I feel an encroaching cold dull ache in my hands and a global stiffness especially after working in the cold and wet. I honestly cannot see me doing this work much past 60

When climbing, I've never had the minerals to wield much more than a 441 let alone heavy plant...

And asking on a forum is a case of you show me yours and I'll show you mine... Stuart

Fibre optic line clearance has provided a small but welcome local boom but that will be over in a month. Few larger jobs to boast about on instagram and precious few removals. 2 large eucs were the tenant is keeping the wood (Huzzah!) and a rare Monkey Puzzle, a first for my climber and again the client is keeping the wood (for he believes what lies within to be gold) What we really need is a series of storms like last years to keep the phone ringing. Stuart

We have an annoying hum from our neighbours and our own heat pumps especially on still nights. The ones that look like large aircon units. They all come on more or less together. If there is some wind, we don't hesr them so much. Stuart

Very much the way forward with pedants who nit pick anything you post on here. Stuart

Why not? they are coming down in a few years anyway. Also, have you never noticed that Lombardies often sprout from such wounds? My moral compass is fine with spiking in this case.

Yeh yeh, I'll give it to you. This image doesn't show the older ones at the start of the driveway. These show a later section, cut lower because they shade a veg garden on the estate. The ones further on are younger still and were left largely untouched. The large gaps in the rows are were we either previously removed trees with honey fungus or ones that fell down due to it.

Mirroring my own experience there. Stuart

My work experience was in 1986 on a Dairy farm. First day washing out 70 calf feeding buckets, second day helping to castrate calves, then dressing an infected cow knee, squeezing pus from the wound. Painting a barn green for 3 half days to Radio 1. Crawling inside a combine to grease some gubbins, an entire morning pumping up the rear tyre of a tractor with a foot pump. Milking cows, borthing calves, catching ringworm, eating my packed lunch ontop of the warm silage and the ephemeral perfume of cow... Stuart