AHPP

Sustainable English hardwood charcoal you mean. Have your marketing department keep up.

Aware breaking ground possibly different... There’s a reason I don’t do this sort of thing. I simply wouldn’t bother. Too much effort for one tree (however nice). Build a school instead. Raise the next generation of kids to invent tree building nanobots or time travel.

I do defer to you on the jobsworth costs etc but you are going to have to tell me how it takes 2/3 years to find and wrap a tree. Pruning and waiting doesn’t cost much money unless you’re guarding it in between. Tell us about the oaks. Sounds interesting. I assume the embassy job? Please refrain from giving exact costings where I, the British taxvictim have footed the bill.

You’re most right on the allowance for failure though. Moving a tree that dies is still going to be six figures. Have three stabs at it and that’s a lot. No idea what insurance would look like on it. Suspect not especially comforting.

There are good tracks off the back and a lot of stone. Someone got a crane up there after it was felled. Part of my maths was using a digger to bury the worst of the clipboards. And plant it thirty feet back from the original to save stump grinding and having to work right on the wall. So do it with diggers. Even if it had to be hand dug, you could swarm the place with volunteers. Remember the wailing when it was felled? They can all do an hour of digging. I’m aware I’m now being more practical than realistic regarding red tape but your 2/3 years to find and uplift is similarly mad. What on earth would take that long? It’s a sycamore. You could probably get one within twenty miles with a shoutout on the news. Crack teams of arborists, architects and aestheticians don’t need to roam the countryside like Mason and Dixon, in search of the perfect plant. Local farmers could WhatsApp pictures of whatever they wanted to sell, probably including sycamore trees.

You get that kind of welcome in the civilised parts of the union in my experience.

Show your workings!? Four twenty tonne diggers for a day to dig one up, wrap it and put it on a low loader. The drive (with a bloke with a bowser in a van to water it like Free Willy). Another couple of days of twenty tonners to crawl it up the hill. About a week for for some pontificating historian to supervise. Bloke on a quad for fifty days running mulch and water up. Incidentals. Not as cheap as not bothering but not £750,000.

And one for yourself, barman.

I’m selling a brand new Sig rangefinder if anyone’s interested btw. Kilo 3k. RRP £475. Price from me £375.

Still loving the irons. Opened up the aperture (to 3mm, want to go bigger) with a rat tail file in a drill (rotate anti clockwise btw; it screws in if you go clockwise). Morning routine is ring the postcard sized steel 53m from the french windows before going out for a piss. A mate dropped in a 2x pistol scope. I’ll dovetail the barrel for it when I shorten it. Nice to shoot with but ruins the carry. Will keep as a quick attach for watermelons, heads of state etc. Irons for normal use.

And filled it in this afternoon. RIP the big dribbling ginger boy.

Cyborg up.

Luckily I’m now expensive/dislikable/shit at my job (perhaps all) so I have very little work on, almost never on consecutive days. I’ve had it in the busier past though where I’ve been out on the road without the skidder and then someone's come through with a skidder job they were dallying about before I’d left. I sometimes disappointed them, other times drove back to base (usually five hours each way) to get it. Similarly, have been sat in the van at the end of one job, waiting for a deposit to come though so I can go there for the next day rather than home. Not the end of the world and nearly always worked out but annoying periods of my time wasted by people who could have just done something now rather than after dinner.

One of the funniest things I’ve seen is my mate standing in his garden with a Browning Auto 5 and two boxes of fags, hoping to blast a mole. Literally hours.

The uncertainty is the biggest annoyance for me. I’ve had people ask at 08:00 if I can do the next day, I get back to them at 08:01 saying yes and then they don’t confirm (by paying) until 16:00. If they’d paid at 08:05, I could have made the journey at my leisure, seen a friend on the way, made a nice trip of it. Instead, I’ve waited all day and then tear arsed down at night in a bad mood. Got fed up with that so now take a firmer line. Still happy to do short notice at long distance but it’s a matter of pay within an hour or the offer’s dead. I’m also considering changing from a van to a horsedrawn carriage so people will need to book more in advance anyway.

What are you driving these days, @Big J?

That guy’s the new Tank Murdock!

Have you thought about getting a small van?

A bargain for sale in Southampton earlier. £4.5k for machine, grab, drill and bucket. I paid nearly double that a few years ago. I have occasionally felt the shame of overpaying but it’s been so bloody useful that I don’t care that much. Until the next time I feel sore that is.

High enough to be informal, low enough to be classy. You can’t pay to move it. Not until I get set up to take yen.

I have in the past livestreamed myself on facebook, cooking. Once, memorably, a bit pissed up, made a fish pie with some herring from the early nineties. I also air the Bathcast, which is me in the bath, talking about whatever. More fans of that than you’d think.

Now there’s a solution! A better solution would have been doing it when you mentioned it a couple of years ago of course but I’ve only ever done the odd hole with it. Will give you a call.

Done. No way to carry on though. Plus my welding is gash.

I’d use galvanised gate hardware with zerofuchs rendered.

Not enough tomato but quietly impressed the meat-and-two-veg caterees. Have made pasta but only beginner shape (roll and cut for linguine/tagliatelle type thing). If I was going to do shapes for maximum sauce area, I’d use a bit of threaded rod to roll them out. Food grade stainless obviously, unless it’s expensive, or even slightly inconvenient.