Just get us there on time

Take the kids to the volunteer coppicing group, doing their bit for the habitats at the local environmental centre.

If the organiser says go then I can usually turn up at short notice with a car full of willing volunteers, lured on by the thrilling dangers of long-handled pruning shears and maybe the sight of someone else's blood.

At the go this weekend, it is no trouble finding the workforce. We have two extra bodies on sleepover.

I don't have enough spare seats in the car, but I note how easy it is to coax any extra bodies into the boot. I only have to offer one ginger nut and in they go, hanging on to an old folding chair and a stinking pair of muddy wellington boots.

If only they were this biddable when it came to a maths worksheet.

Fly-by Ashridge

Double-quick march round Ashridge, woodland estate that holds deer and my complete phobia about getting lost (again). But I have to do this walk, even at the speed of a 747. I have begun to panic that with the many duties and responsibilities I am now misguidedly shouldering, I may miss footling about in autumn altogether.

(In case anyone suspects home ed vandalism on the mushroom, it had already been uprooted.)

Once again with Hunger Games

Just about a perfect day as you get.

Bunch of home ed kids get together to kill each other; wood & dog walkers bemused; I enjoy wood.

(For those interested in running the same, the rules we play by, below).

Rules:
Games last 2 hours.
You need two bases for play: water and food. You must sign in for water every 20 minutes and food every 30 minutes. A parent is at each base to record your arrival. If you fail to sign in within the time, you are out of the game. There is no need to tag in for food or water in the last 15 minutes.

Combat:
Each tribute (player) wears three ribbons. One ribbon on each shoulder, one ribbon on the chest. In combat you try and get each other's ribbons.
If you lose one of your shoulder ribbons you are injured.  If you lose both your shoulder ribbons you are out of the games. If you lose your chest ribbon, your wound is fatal, and you are out of the games.
If a tribute gets you out, you can't then grab for their ribbons. We rely on you being honest about this.
If you are wounded (have one shoulder ribbon remaining) you can receive medicine from a Medical Base. (You can go to the medical base when you have lost an arm ribbon, but should only take one ribbon.  You can't 'stock-up' on spares!)
If you go to the Medical Base, your new ribbon counts after you have attached it to yourself.  If another tribute grabs your one remaining shoulder ribbon while you have your new one in your hand you are out.
Players who are out, return to the parent at the picnic site.

Winning:
The first player to successfully tag the Base Tree after the two hours has elapsed.

Creating leaders for tomorrow

Once a month, a group of us fearless parents take our home ed kids to the great outdoors, where we dump them, en masse. Then we parents leg it, leaving the offspring entirely to their own choices, negotiations, problem-solvings and knife-sharings.

You can tell we parents do this in great conviction. You know those notions: the tribe raises the child; it's an interdependent society; we all have to learn to co-operate ourselves out of hazards; we must learn to negotiate routes through problems; find those places in ourselves that are strong, weak, indifferent; and set in motion the reality and wonder about being a leader or a follower. 

I entirely believe in these ideas, too. I'm more than happy to put them into practice. And the afternoon is always a test of kid co-operation. They quickly come to face their options. Once we've frisked them for breadcrumbs and pebbles, they have to consider that if they don't form some functioning social cohesion, one of them will be eaten by lions, picked up by the police, or become feral and have to be raised by wolves.

After a suitable time, we return to pick up our children, praying it hasn't gone all Lord of The Flies.

But this time, it's the parents who are late at the meet point.

All I can say is, I have nothing but a quiet awe for people who can find their way out of woods.

 

I simply do not know how they do that directional north-south-east-west positioning thing without technology. Have they got more magnetic sensory equipment located in their noses than the rest of us? 

If I had become a leader rather than a follower on our six-mile hike - across every track that looked exactly the same as the last one - I would still be there, somewhere, lying dead and stiff under the mud and frozen soil. But no, thanks to my wise choice in becoming a follower, I wasn't dead by sundown.

Neither were any of the children. Don't ask what went on with them. Be happy only to know that this time there were no broken arms, busted teeth, split lips, torn clothing, or a pig's head on a spike.

Taxing the spirit of forgiveness at Christmas

The local home ed group meet for a Christmas party in the woods.

What on earth possessed me, at that meeting point, to volunteer to wait at the car park, in order to direct late-comers?

What? Anyone who reads this diary knows that you can stick me in a wood and within ten seconds I am hopelessly lost. I do not know what happens to me, apart from I discover I have no sense of direction and never had any. Suggesting that I might actually be able to lead someone else to a meet-point in a wood is asking for trouble.

It was, it did, and I got it.

But wait! In my defence, listen to these instructions. At the time I heard them, they seemed perfectly reasonable. BUT YOU TRY FOLLOWING THEM.

Grit to leader (happily, obviously demented): Shark, Squirrel and Tiger will come along with you! I will wait here and bring the late arrivals! (Clearly defective in the brain.)

Leader to Grit: Great! Go along the path, through the gate, up the hill, and there's the tree.

Grit to leader: Fine! See you later! (Someone should knock some sense into her.)

TWO HOURS PASS

Grit (to party blindly following her in circles through a wood, except for the wing who saw what was coming and legged it back to the safety of the cafe): I think the tree we're meeting at is in that direction! Wait! What time is it? Oh! Is the party over? Hey, everyone, the party's over! (Long pause.) Does anyone remember the way back to the car park? (Lucky to be alive, quite frankly.)

The wrong woods

Scared myself witless by getting lost in some woods. Fortunately I did not become so totally out of control that I began growling, stripping off, and daubing myself in horseshit while swinging from a trunk.

I had plenty of crap to choose from, actually. And a lot of mud. But I retained enough sense of sanity to remember my pocket talking device, so I telephoned my way out. I was texted back to the car park by a friendly fellow home educator who told me I was in the wrong woods.

The wrong woods? Yes! I spent all that time being trailed by children turning ugly and confrontational because I was making them miss their woodland play session and I was in the wrong woods. But the right woods look totally different, don't they?

No wonder woods, trees and forests have the reputations they have. Not for the dogging, but for the spooky sounds, or absence of sounds, and the way those bushes kept creeping along behind me, muttering blasphemies and shaking their undergrowth.

I may have lost my mind a little at the sight of that four hundredth tree, it is true, but it also struck me how I simply have a different emotional reaction to different woods. Some my guts like, and some they do not. Pine-based ones do not smell right. They do not feel right, and the air does not move in a comforting manner. Macbeth would feel quite at home in the clammy embrace of the dead sounds and still airs of the pine place. What a relief to arrive in the beeched-out bits with their red gold crunch and a sensible way of twisting your bark. I was more than relieved to see them.

But it's true, isn't it, that woods are both exciting and scary. And you don't have to be lost to know that once you're inside them, you're not the one in control.

A little knowledge

Evidence, once again, that the gritlets leave the house to grunt at other human beings apart from me. Today they are out, having fun with corpses.

I keep telling Squirrel it is copse, but she's having none of it. I've given in gracefully, and corpse it is. So here are the gritlets, having fun with corpses, Texas Chainsaw style.

I am told, by the papa of the gang, that everything went well. No actual human limbs were severed, although quite a few thickety sprigs met their end. All the experimental junior woodsfolk were placed under the watchful eye of a he-giant, a Hercules of the woods, who could do proper grunting and cutting with long saws. He prevented each of the juniors from dismembering themselves or anyone else on their first corpsing experiment.

I'm not convinced no other dark work was afoot. It looks to me like Shark has begun to know the supreme power that can shudder through the body when wielding a pair of heavy slicing clippers and a shining sharp-toothed saw. I'll take no chances. After this first blooding with bark and block, I resolve now to nightly lock the garage door, and keep my hedge clippers under closer watch.

Let's dance

Come on, it's how I enjoy myself. The kids, on the other hand, enjoy themselves not by photographing jiving trees, but by dragging the forest about and sorting it into sacrificial piles. I am told this is called den-building.

But it's true to say, that no matter how much we both enjoy tramping the winter woods, we're unlikely to be tree-wise enough to correctly eye-spy that ash dieback.

Not all was lost

Drove around the countryside, looking for a wood. As time ticked by, I got increasingly stressed. Didn't help.

I wasn't as shouty as that time I went looking for Salcey Forest.

Then, I was careering around the random lanes of Gayhurst, the car screeching on two wheels as we spun round hairpin bends, and I'm shouting to the children Look out for trees! They unhelpfully sent me hurtling towards neat rows of firs standing to attention in perfect country gardens - manicured trees, pruned, cleaned and tidied up trees, trees who hold their arms prettily by their sides, compliant with complementary herbaceous borders and sweet alpine flora. I started yelling then, too. I wanted messy trees, blown down trees, spindly trees and every type of tree, the disaffected, grumpy, awkward trees, the little bastard trees who wander about, muttering, cursing, looking for trouble. Look out then for the peace-keeper trees who muscle in when the night turns ugly, when they square up to each other and rustle their branches, and the rebels say, You looking at my leaves?

The children fell silent. I may have become slightly mad. But I was driven by the hour and growing desperate. And today it's the same. The small mammal group? Due to assemble in the wood at 10 o'clock? Look! It's 11 o'clock! Surely they'll already have set the traps, trapped mini mouse, found her, examined her tiny fearful eyes, soft brown fur, thin trembling tail, all gone aahh! then let her scamper back to Mr Mouse, and we'll have missed it all!

Yes, it's nearly as bad as that time in Salcey Forest when the group assembled and went off without us to look for the elephant in the lake. We missed that, too.

Well, eventually we do find the wood. Late. It is just as I said it would be, there on the horizon, encircled around by spreads of neatly cropped fields, rows of fences and close shorn grass clipped by quiet horses. Access is hard. That single track road I missed and missed as we drove by? It is a hidden, private wood. We slip inside with a strand of public access. But bursting entanglement, this land is densely filled. Inside, messy, spilling, disordered, a frontier space for any woodsmen to relearn their crafts while they tangle with mad birch, vengeful elder, the blackthorn sprites and whipping hazel to catch them unawares. It's a perfect space. For light to dapple, mud to congeal, growth to sprout, oak to soak, ash to splash, and for kids to peer, looking quietly for mini mouse.

We missed the group. Of course we did. But for an hour or more, we caught the wood.

Go on, do something for the weekend.

Woodworks

Thankfully, I can choose to spend a day like this.

Facing marauding Vikings, watching eyes grow from under a chainsaw, stealing woody craft ideas, discussing leather skills, meeting old friends, photographing decorous weaving with leaves and flowers, talking tree taming, beekeeping and surviving (my advice: take a packet of biscuits), and ending the hours thoroughly enjoying the music of Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick.

Thank you, Woodworks!

(But boy, was Tiger cross the horses didn't show. Woodworks, my caution is, make that good for next year, or I'm making you suffer as well.)