Friday 12 September 2008

Friday 12th September 08

I took our youngest into school and then straight into town to buy train tickets for the weekend, purchasing assorted medications, toothpaste etc for the family, and home pretty quickly.

There'd been a phone call from Richard who had removed a big tree from his back garden and I'd started taking bits of it home a week or two back. Today I took my chainsaw to try to chop up the stump... which was tough as my electric chainsaw is small and the trunk was big, but in an hour we managed to get it more or less sorted. I came home with a generous load of chopped roots and chunks of trunk.

Stacked a load, Gill came in with loaf, had lunch... and a very relaxed pottering-about type of afternoon. Included splitting and stacking wood, composting, tidying...

Eldest child went to a friend's house after school but on the way there something happened to his front wheel and the tyre came off, so at 6.45 I cycled down there and popped his bike on my trailer and him on the crossbar to bring both home.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

“I’ll compost your corpse” has to be one of the most unusual offers I’ve ever received. It didn’t come from some bloke whose pint I’d just knocked over but from Britain’s king of compost himself, John Cossham so I had to take it seriously.

John - you're scaring me

Compost John said...

Hi Dave 'nut thief' Squirrel!
I regularly compost small mammals and birds which have perished on local roads after being hit by big metal monsters. These corpses add nutrients to my rich compost and I think are an ethical way to recycle these 'poor unfortunates'.

I have a couple of rat traps as rats dig holes in my compost heaps (not a crime like theft) but slightly annoying, and more importantly, my neighbours 'blame' me for the existance of these little animals and occasionally comment in negative terms. When I kill a rat, I always add it to my hot tumbler to turn back into soil.

Which is what I'll do with any squirrels I catch. I've been in contact with a human who looks after forests, and apparently you and your kind do a lot of damage to trees, not just nut theft. So the forester gave me advice about reducing your numbers.

I like animals, which is partly why I don't eat them. However, when certain animals negatively impact on my desired lifestyle, I have to make a difficult choice.

What are your thoughts on this? What punishment do you think is appropriate for eating ALL my walnuts? The tree cost me £70 and is a special grafted one which won't get huge (allegedly!) So I would happily SHARE my produce as I happen to think you look cute and have a right to exist, despite being an American invader! But you are greedy, like some humans can be too, and I think that humans need their numbers reducing as they are doing similar things to Planet Earth as you have done to my tree. But due to something called 'ethics' it is deemed unnacceptable to cull people but probably ok to do it to rats and squirrels.

RSVP