Gnarlyoak

Aye, sometimes it can be a thin line and a split second between going home safe in the evening or ending up in A&E or worse. Its been 11 weeks since my accident and I'm still healing although I am hoping to be back working again from January. I know from my own experience, that it was sheer luck that I did'nt end up more seriously injured.... or worse. My sympathies to the family and friends of the poor chap in Oz.

I am not qualified to argue or debate the mechanics of sudden branch drop, but...... Quite frankly I thinks its a deplorable knee jerk reaction implemented by a gutless LA at the behest of corporate lawyers trying to justify their miserable existence in response to a tragic "accident" to remove 200 & probably quite healthy trees!

No mate, P. trichocarpa is the Western Balsam Poplar from West North America. The tree I referred to, to create the Hybrid Black Poplar is the North American Eastern Cottonwood (P. deltoides)

YES you do! Every tree, every time. The only exception is trimming the side of a hedge with hedgetrimmers.

On a web "forum" yes. But if one assumes that the finished CV is to be printed out and a hard copy delivered to a potential employer, then your name, address and contact number at the top of the page is essential. An email address is less important, but if you have an alternative contact number such as a landline for your home address then it would be useful to include that.

Speaking personally from a climbers point of view, if I was tasked to take down or reduce said tree, then the answer is yes I would climb it. I would of course be constantly making calculated risk self-assessments as I climbed the tree and/or started the work. I would not climb or progress further than I felt I comfortable with or if by doing so I felt that it would threaten my own H&S or that of my collegues, or the environment we were working in. To your last question. No, I would not let inexperienced learners climb this tree. Yes you are taking an over cautious approach, but in the circumstances your approach is perfectly sensible and appropriate.

Well done sir. Still needs a haircut and shave though. Given the billions of pounds it costs the NHS to treat obesity in the UK, perhaps it could prove more cost effective if people were given a similar kind of yoga therapy to help them overcome their pyschological barriers that prevent them taking control of their problems. If after 6months, they have'nt lost 1/2 their body weight and are able to stand on one leg poised like a ninja, then you know they are just a greedy fat lazy arse. In which case they can be crossed off the "throwing good money after bad" list and made to go private for their medical treatment. So 6 months to train up a few yoga guru's, 6 months yoga therapy for the lardies, and hey presto NHS annual bill reduced by billions, the savings of which can then be used to significantly reduce the countrys multi-billion pound deficit. Sorted! Letter to No. 11 Downing Street. Dear Mr. Osborne......

Spellcheck! Spellcheck! Spellcheck! In this day and age when most documents are created on a computer, there is simply NO excuse for not running the document through a spell checker, which is usually embedded within the software you used to write the document. Grammar. Alll names of individuals, companies, address details inc. postcodes and the beggining of paragraphs should begin with a capital letter. eg: Peter Smith, PS Plumbing, 23 High Street, Stafford. Also make sure that your punctuation and spaces are in the right order. eg: 93 tennyson road,stafford ,st17 9sr (9 errors!) Should be: 93 Tennyson Road, Stafford, ST17 9SR When seperating statements or narrative within the body of a text with a comma, the comma should appear immediately after the end of a word. There should not be a space and then a comma. eg: also wood working . sheds , rabbit hutches , dog kennals . kidling firewood , and decking. Should read: Also wood working. Sheds, rabbit hutches, dog kennels, kindling firewood and decking. Once again a spell checker would pull up on most if not all of basic errors like these! Bullet points. When you list bullet points, the narrative of each point should begin with a capital letter. eg: a. Good prac...... b. Experience..... c. I.T.Comm....... In the latter example, note that when you shorten a word to the first letter only followed by a fullstop, then that letter should be capitalised. Perhaps a personal preference, but I would highlight each section heading by either typing it in bold or underlining. This just helps to break up the page, and makes it easier for any potential employer reading it to go directly to the most salient points that interest them the most. Work experience should be listed in reverse chronological order, starting with your current or most recent job and going backwards to your first work experience from leaving school/college. You should also name the college or institution from where you gained your additional qualifications and training. Well done to you to putting your CV out there on a public forum and seeking advice on its format and content. I do hope you take on board any criticisms as constructive, but your initial draft is full of sloppy and unnecessary errors from start to fininsh, many of which could of been avoided and corrected had you bothered to take the couple of minutes needed to run it through a spell check. You have trumpeted in your education details that you have gained a Level 2 in Adult literacy! No offence, but were you being tought by a 10 year old, or did you just sit at the back of the class "txtng ur m8s"? Remember first impressions last! An incoherent and sloppy CV will quickly end up in the bin and you will not get that interview. Once you redraft your CV, print it out and take the time to sit and read through it yourself without any distractions. Then read it again, make any changes that you think are necessary, then print it out again and ask someone else to read it through for you, and get their feedback. Probably best if its not one of your mates that went to the same school as yourself! Once it is polished to perfection, you cand send it out to all potential employers confident that it is likely to clear the first hurdle, in that when your CV is opened it will be placed on someones desk for further consideration rather than immediately tossed in the bin. Good luck mate.

If I was being flippant, I would say too many in terms of work opportunities and salaries. ie: If there were less there would be more work for higher pay. But on a serious note, I would'nt even know how to go about trying to give a quantifiable answer to question 1 & 2. 3. Given an average 8hr day 5 day week, from a self employed climber perspective, I would say I'm perhaps actually climbing no more than 5hrs max on any one day. So 25hrs per week

Yeah I would, at least you'll get some descent weather. With the weather we've had in this year, you'll soon need gills and webbed feet to work here. Other areas in Europe worth considering outside UK and Ireland. Maybe Sweden, most Swede's speak and understand English very well. You could also try "damian" on this site. A Brit based in Vienna, Austria, all of his crew are usually native English speakers. Vienna is a cracking place and again many of the locals have a good command of a bit of English. Salaries in UK for treework can be a bit piss poor & can vary quite a bit, on a sliding scale North to South, from £300 - £700. With perhaps the average being around £400 everywhere outside South/South East. The top end of this scale you'll usually only find in London area, where cost of living is sunstantially higher (oh.... and be "top-notch"!). These websites might help give you a feel for the UK treework jobsmarket, if you have'nt already tried them. They also have sections for internatial vacancies in UK/Europe/Oz/NZ:- Arbjobs.com | find Arb jobs / Tree work Tree Work Jobs | Arboricultural Jobs | Arborist Jobs Good luck mate.

Sounds like it may have been a hybrid Black Poplar. A cross between the European Black Poplar & a North American Eastern cottonwood. The cottonwood non de plume is the describtive name to account for the cotton wool like seed dispersal similar to what you described you had seen in France. Trees have either male (staminate) or female (pistillate) flowers that are located in drooping catkins. Males carry fat red catkins in early spring, females have thin yellow-green catkins in spring, the fruits mature around mid summer, the capsules split open and shed "snowstorms" of cottonwool like seeds. The seeds are actually tiny and attached to small silky hairs that assure dispersal by the wind, but these fine hairs tend to stick and cluster together which creates the snowstorm effect. Sorry but I could'nt tell you where in the UK you could source a useful or reliable amount of these seeds for the purpose you require. Not a highly thought of tree in the UK in terms of its end uses, but somethings that Poplar has and is used for include:- In ancient times, the Greeks and Etruscans made shields of poplar, and Pliny also recommended poplar for this purpose.[9] Poplar continued to be used for shield construction through the Middle Ages and was renowned for a durability similar to that of oak, but at a substantial reduction in weight. In many areas, fast-growing hybrid poplars are grown on plantations for pulpwood. Poplar is widely used for the manufacture of paper. It is also sold as inexpensive hardwood timber, used for pallets and cheap plywood; more specialised uses include matches and the boxes in which camembert cheese is sold. Poplar wood is also widely used in the snowboard industry for the snowboard core, because it has exceptional flexibility, and is sometimes used in the bodies of electric guitars and drums. Poplar wood, particularly when seasoned, makes a good hearth for a bow drill. Due to its high tannic acid content, the bark has been used in Europe for tanning leather. Poplar wood can be used to produce chopsticks. There is increasing interest in using poplar as an energy crop (along with willow) for biomass or biofuel, particularly in light of its high energy-in / energy-out ratio, large carbon mitigation potential and fast growth.

There should'nt be VAT on lids. Essential safety wear like lids and boots are VAT free! No.?

Cheers Steve, Hmmm, must admit this was my first thought. Any ideas what might be the cause, I'm using IE. I have'nt knowingly made any changes to it recently and rest of the AT pages look pretty much OK.

An issue I've noticed since the weekend is:- The "Active Threads" box on the homepage, where it shows a scrolling (upwards) list of new threads, when the list of threads reaches the top of the box, it clears and starts again from the beggining. In the past it used to continue scrolling upwards to show about another box worth of new threads. There are are threads there, I can see the top of the characters of the next one just before the box clears and it restarts the scrolling list from the beggining again!

Are writing that with your bestest sarcastic voice in your head? Is there any easier access over/through one of the neighbouring properties? If not then probably your only option would be to lay dust sheets down through the house and hump the brash out. Major ballache though! And if she wants to keep the woodchip, just fire it back through the letter box.

If a tree is infected then it is not tree work as normal! There is a ban on knowingly transporting infected material. The timber will be useable as firewood, but it will have to be treated first before it can be transported from infection site.

Trees confirmed or suspected of having the disease should not be removed. They need to be qurantined and reported to DEFRA/FC See FC website: Forestry Commission - Pests and diseases - Ash dieback (Chalara fraxinea)

AAAAAgh..... I think we need to get this 115 sites confirmed report into some perspective before we all get whipped up into a frenzy created by the news media giving people doom laden headlines rather than factual information. About 111/2 of these 115 sites are all nurseries or newly planted stands from nursery stock. Probably all of these nursery stocks were propagated on the continent before they were shipped over to the UK. Likely as not to have come from Holland. It is also worth noting that before this hysteria broke out in the last couple of weeks, the first confirmed case of chalara fraxinea in the UK was found in a nursery more than 6 mnths ago back in March! The disease has only been found in the indigenous wild tree population in about 3/4 locations in the South East (Norfolk/Suffolk) so far. So I don't think there is any need for knee jerk panic over reactions just yet. (IMHO) As for disposal. There are no restrictions moving any arisings from ash pruning or felling operations, unless they are definately infected with chalara. Trees confirmed or suspected of having the disease have to be left in situ, quarantined and reported to DEFRA/FC. They then will decide how the tree is to be disposed of. As for Joe Public, there is no law preventing them from weilding a chainsaw, so yes a number of them will jump on the bandwagon and feed off the fear of the less enlightened and be out there felling good strong decent trees simply to make a fast buck.

There are currently no restrictions on felling ash trees and removing their arisings........... Unless: The tree/s is definately infected with chalara, in which case you cannot transport any material from the felling site. You will also need to report it to LA TO or FC or DEFRA. So you need to know what to look for so you can identify the disease. There have been various threads posted on here now with videos and sites where you can get more info. the FC website also shows specific areas where the disease has been found or is strongly suspected. Forestry Commission - Pests and diseases - Ash dieback (Chalara fraxinea)

I'd be keeping a close eye on those saplings mate. Did you buy them in or raise them yourself. If you bought them in, check with the nursery where you bought them from. Many ash trees sold by nurseries were originally raised on the continent, and is one of the vectors for bringing this disease to our shores. Of the 100,000 tree reportedly already destroyed in this country, 50,000 of those belonged to a single nursery and all of them had been imported from Europe!

I'd say you'll be alright for ash handles for a while yet, ALL the ash trees are not going to disappear overnight! If chalara takes hold it will be steady decline of the tree stock over a number of years, so with a steady supply of timber coming on stream I can't imagaine the price will go up either, more likely to go down. Once the timber is down, it can be treated with fungicide, the brash because of its volume will probably need to be burned close to felling site. But that all depends on what control measures DEFRA put in place once they work out how best to tackle the situation.

Swings and roundabouts I think Chris. I've had work cancelled the eve before a job was supposed to start, and I think you just have to take it on the chin. There have been occasions when I turned up on site and have the contractor back out of doing the job. On such occasions I do ask (not unreasonably IMO) for a small financial consideration to cover me for travel/fuel expenses maybe £20-£40. On other occasions I've been booked for 3 days, nailed the job in 2 and been happy to accept 50% of my fee for the day I was no longer required. Never been my experience (yet!), but if I had a client who cancelled too often at short notice then I might insist on some form of cancellation fee the next time they booked me just to remind them not to take the P. The only times I've ever let a client down at the last minute has been due to a car accident, on the way to a job, a car breakdown, on the way to a job! And when I broke me bloody leg the other month, and I had to let the client know I could'nt work 3 days before I was due to start a 3 month contract which I had spent weeks helping to organise and set up!

Could'nt you just have your Silky (or whatever make of handsaw that you use) in its scabbard clipped to your pants/belt to cut the thicker bits of hedge or do you need a longer reach than that?

That is a great shame ELG. It may surprise you as much as it surprised me that the first person to come up with the idea of distributing and wearing the poppy as an act of rememberance of the fallen was an American lady inspired by a poem written by a Canadian doctor who served in the trenches of WW1. The idea was then taken up in Europe, first by a French woman to raise funds to look after children left orphaned by the war. Then in the UK the idea was taken up by Field Marshall Douglas Haig in 1921 when he set up the Royal British Legion to help look after wounded veterans who were unable to support themselves. Here's the strory:- ""The first official poppy appeal was held 85 years ago in the UK. But when - and why - was the first poppy sold? The red poppy worn around the world in remembrance of battlefield deaths has nothing to do with the blood shed in the brutal clashes of World War I. Instead it symbolizes the wild flowers that were the first plants to grow in the churned-up soil of soldiers' graves in Belgium and northern France. Little else could grow in the blasted soil that became rich in lime from the rubble. Their paper-thin red petals were the first signs of life and renewal, and in 1915 inspired Canadian doctor John McCrae to pen perhaps the most famous wartime poem: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row... “ It was this poem which inspired an American war secretary to sell the first poppies to raise money for ex-soldiers. Two days before the Armistice was declared at 11am on 11 November 1918, Moina Michael was working in the YMCA Overseas War Secretaries' headquarters during its annual conference in New York. While flipping through a copy of Ladies Home Journal, she came across McCrae's poem, and was so moved that she vowed to always wear a red poppy in remembrance. That same day she was given $10 by the conference delegates in thanks for her hard work, which she spent on 25 silk poppies. Returning to the office with one pinned to her coat, she distributed the rest amongst the delegates. Since this group had given her the money with which to buy the flowers, Ms Michael saw this as the first sale of memorial poppies. She then threw her efforts into campaigning to get the poppy adopted as a national remembrance symbol. Two years later, the National American Legion's conference proclaimed the poppy as such. Among those at the conference was Madame E Guerin, from France, who saw poppy sales as a way to raise money for children in war-ravaged areas of France. Having organised the sale of millions of poppies made by French widows in the United States, in 1921 she sent her poppy sellers to London. Field Marshall Douglas Haig, a senior commander during WWI and a founder of the Royal British Legion, was sold on the idea (as were veterans' groups in Canada, Australia and New Zealand). So that autumn, the newly-established legion sold its first remembrance poppies. And so the tradition began."" Today the poppy appeal is still as important and relevant, not just as an act of rememberance of the sacrifices made by British and Comonwealth troops in the 2 World Wars, but to acknowledge the committment and sacrifices that are still being made by British troops in all conflicts since 1945 right up to the present day. The Royal British continue to help and support the veterans and their families of all British armed forces past and present, so it is equally important that we as citizens continue to support them in their efforts, to donate and wear our poppies with humility and pride.

I saw an FC guy being interviewed on the news last night. He was asked by the interviewer if he was confident if the measures they were implementing to contain the outbreak in East Anglia would halt the spread. After a long pause he simply replied "hopeful". From the look on his face as he said it it I got the impression he was hopeless. If Daltontrees is right and there is already another outbreak in Scotland, then it is very likely that the genie is well and truly out of the bottle on this one. Tragic!