sime42

Nice. They look sturdy enough. Are you planning to apply any kind of timber treatment? It would be interesting to see how long it would last without.

Yep, a lot of people these days are simply not at a practical. What a shocking state of affairs.

This is turning out to be another varied and interesting thread. Arbtalk at its best. Speaking from bitter personal experience over the last twelve months I can say that the UK automotive engineering industry is pretty much screwed at the moment unfortunately. A combination of Brexit and then the Covid-19 fiasco. It was also struggling a bit before all this, as a result of the dirty diesel engines scandal a couple years back. My experience is primarily with JLR, Jaguar Landrover, but as tbey are sadly now one of the few remaining large car manufacturers in Britain i think its fairly indicative of the whole. There's program pauses or cancellations, job cuts and production volume reductions all over the place. The consensus is that it should only be a short-term dip, but the problem is no-one knows how long tbat short-term will last, it could be six months or six years. All the major car companies are now scrabbling to switch to electric power as quickly as possible. JLR have stated that they will electrify all their models by 2025 i think. Thats a massive amount of potential work. The worry is that much of the engineering and design work will be done abroad, global economics. India are now a major player in this. Long-term prospects for the automotive industry in Britain have not looked good for years now, its been in decline over the course of my lifetime at least.

It's very hard and heavy. Traditionally used for making mallets and such like.

Ray likes a bit of fishing so I wouldn't worry. [emoji12]

I know. Me included. Always good to see some diversity in everything.

I'm from Devon and also spent a lot of time in Cornwall, so anything from down that way always sucks me in.

Wow, this thread is developing some interesting twists and turns. How come you're on a Tree stuff forum, as a fisherman, do you do tree work as well? Maybe I missed something on another thread in the past. Just curious. I thought most of the Spider Crabs go abroad to Europe. Has that not been fcked by Brexit as well? I've been watching and enjoying This Fishing Life on BBC. Not sure how representative it is.

Poor Tamsin!

Yep, even worse than chickpeas and lentils. If Sophie Grigson said that then they must be bad!

They're shockingly gaseous! Wild garlic is a bit too in my experience but not a patch on Artichokes..

Sorry you couldn't read the original RM article, I didn't realise that. I could read it all when I originally posted the link to it. My brother did say something about it being free to read for one day only, but I took no notice at the time. I didn't know the Telegraph was a fascist rag either! Apologies for that too. I'm not a newspaper reader. The essence of the article from what I remember was an interview with Ray whilst they were out for a walk in a forest somewhere. Talking about what he's up to and thinking about these days. His point was that we should all be rewilding ourselves, as well as the landscape. There's not much point doing the latter if people don't appreciate the flora and fauna that benefit from rewilding the land. I agree. I'm with you on Grey Squirrels. I hate the little fckers! Something needs to be done to control them, they're causing so much largely unseen damage to various parts of the environment.

I'm slightly concerned that he may disappear from our screens sometime soon. After seeing him mention the white, middle-aged and male thing. It wouldn't be a surprise if he did get axed. Maybe as you say he is also in danger of having saturated his market. The mass market anyway. I reckon us diehard fans will keep following him wherever he ends up, maybe an obscure cable channel or just YouTube. It sounds like he still has a vast amount of knowledge to be imparted to anyone who's interested.

You certainly get some bonus points for baking and eating the hedgehog! What did it taste like?

Will do. It's good to share knowledge like this. Don't hold your breath though, might be a while until I get round to it! I'm using a stand in at the moment; a Samurai, a cheaper version of a Silky. It's noticeable not as good, but it's not bad. It's about half the price but more than half as good as a Silky. Good for thought.

We made a bivvy and covered it with bracken fronds once. Then found out the spores are thought to be carcinogenic. Nice!

Is that what they call a Sod House? Always seemed a rather unfortunate name to me!

That's a tempting little trailer to what sounds like an interesting story! I thought it was an emergency situation out in the wilds somewhere, but then I saw the bike shed so I'm a bit confused.

Let's not even get started on Bear Grylls! Absolutely no match for Ray. I know what you mean. Ray is soothing to watch and listen to, whilst Bear Grylls is just edgy and sensational, annoying.

Looks like we could start a Bushcraft discussion. I've only been brave enough a couple of times.to tough it out with only a bivvy bag. Very liberating though.

Seems like I'm not his only fan on here, great to be in good company. I must admit that he went down slightly in my estimation when I saw the prices of gear that he merchandises, daylight robbery some of it!

Interesting interview with Ray Mears here. One of my personal heroes. Ray Mears: ‘It’s a difficult time to be a white middle-aged man on TV’ WWW.TELEGRAPH.CO.UK The naturalist has written a new book in lockdown which sets out how we can rewild ourselves, not just nature

This is interesting. As a right handed person, I sympathize for you left handed people! Some of your examples Id heard of before but most I'd never even considered. Screws stopped me in my tracks, the right hand wrist is naturally stronger in a clockwise direction, so you're always at a disadvantage using the left hand. I don't understand trowels though, can you explain that one please? Surely trowels, gardening and bricklaying, are completely symmetrical. Have you ever tried training yourself to be ambidextrous? Years ago I developed some RSI in my RH wrist from too much computer mouse work, (I know!). I had a degree of success in learning to do it left-handed. Same with excessive snedding using a Billhook.

Cheers gents. I'm feeling inspired to give it a go now. I'm pretty handy when it comes to tools and fixing stuff so I'm fairly confident that I'll make a half decent job of it now I know it's possible at least.

Looks like some kind of Willow to me.