Speaker 1: This is a great content.
Speaker 2: Where is it going?
Speaker 1: We are recording? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Are we right? Sorry? Okay, that's your list.
Speaker 1: That was Claire. The kids are in the garden again, Claire, Claire,
Speaker 1: where's my stick? Does anyone know somebody called Louis Louis Lure,
Speaker 1: Louise Pollard.
Speaker 2: I do I know Louise.
Speaker 1: So Louise has supported us twice now on Kofi, which
Speaker 1: is the thing on our website where you click a
Speaker 1: button and you can give us a little bit of money.
Speaker 1: So she's bought us basically to two pints.
Speaker 2: Ah what. She's a good egg. She is a racing
Speaker 2: photographer from up in Yorkshire and she was, amongst other things,
Speaker 2: and I think she actually won the horse Race Writers
Speaker 2: and Photographers Awards thing back at about War twelve thirteen
Speaker 2: years years ago. She won Photographer of the Year. So
Speaker 2: she's very very good. Yeah, I mean proper, proper photographer.
Speaker 2: She did a particular particularly good photo of Frank Call
Speaker 2: winning at York and no, Frank Call the greatest race
Speaker 2: horse that ever drew breath. And anyway, she was good
Speaker 2: friends with my now sadly late father in law who
Speaker 2: was a racing journalist. And she's a good Egges, so
Speaker 2: very much of a big thanks to Lou.
Speaker 3: I googled her and it is I agree, very good. Yes,
Speaker 3: particularly the studio style horses with dramatic backlighting, all all
Speaker 3: low key lighting. It's always amazing. Love it.
Speaker 1: Have you done that game that all photographers do when
Speaker 1: they look up another photographer they've not heard of, and
Speaker 1: they go, oh, yeah, they're quite good. Actually they're really good.
Speaker 3: No, no, I don't really. I don't really get that
Speaker 3: because everyone does a different like I do my thing,
Speaker 3: and now I'm so far, so long in the tooth
Speaker 3: with this. I'm just you know, I'm doing my thing.
Speaker 3: That's exactly my thing. I mean, if you come from
Speaker 3: my thing, I'll kill you. But no one else it's
Speaker 3: doing my thing.
Speaker 2: So it's all right, How would someone tread on your lawn?
Speaker 2: Then if they were coming on, what would they do?
Speaker 2: What would be a thing? Say? You're clearly plagiarizing me.
Speaker 2: A baby can't do?
Speaker 3: Is just seconds away from saying, putting ship in front
Speaker 3: of the lens. And also the other secret I'll reveal
Speaker 3: all you just put stuff in front of the lens.
Speaker 3: You shoot very specifically with certain focal lengths on certain stories,
Speaker 3: you shoot with specific focal length with lenses how zoomed
Speaker 3: in you are. If you're shooting man and man and
Speaker 3: gun and in the sky, shoot it very wide so
Speaker 3: it looks very dramatic. That's what I do, Okay, if
Speaker 3: I'm telling a story of a morning or an evening
Speaker 3: flight of wild fowling, I will change the blue colors
Speaker 3: in the images to be very a very kind of
Speaker 3: cyan blue color rather than to be like a sort
Speaker 3: of purply blue color or light blue. I'll make sure
Speaker 3: that blue is very exaggerated in order to tell a
Speaker 3: story so the viewer knows that it's morning, noon, night,
Speaker 3: and then lower the lower the saturation of that stuff.
Speaker 1: So yeah, you also crop off center for every subject
Speaker 1: apart from dogs, and dogs are always center for you.
Speaker 3: Yes, So I do that very intentionally for editorial for
Speaker 3: the simple fact that they can put cover lines or
Speaker 3: it could potentially make a cover. So I make sure
Speaker 3: that the framing is never in the all because the
Speaker 3: middle is middle. Doesn't then leave them space to put
Speaker 3: because you've.
Speaker 1: Got to have the barcode and that you know coming
Speaker 1: up in this issue and for some reason, this magazine
Speaker 1: is seventeen pounds twenty five down on the side somewhere.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you can get a subscription off and a
Speaker 3: Hicck micro beanie and that will be one pound sixty
Speaker 3: delivered to your door for two and a half years.
Speaker 2: But then you can never leave because you can never
Speaker 2: find out how on earth do I cancel this subscription?
Speaker 2: And you actually have to ring a phone which is
Speaker 2: made out of baker light, and there's some old lady
Speaker 2: on there who makes the tea and gets hello, and
Speaker 2: you go, I'd like to cancer my subscription to X
Speaker 2: magazine and go, oh, you want to do what, dear,
Speaker 2: And you go what? And they've got every single modern
Speaker 2: technological thing other than that, I want to cancer my
Speaker 2: subscription phone, which looks like something out Churchill's Bunker.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know that, stuck in a storeroom with a
Speaker 1: note next to it saying, aware of the leopard.
Speaker 3: I think you should all support magazines because it's a
Speaker 3: great source of knowledge.
Speaker 2: Unless I don't write for them anymore. And once I
Speaker 2: started writing for them, the no one points subscribington. Really,
Speaker 2: I mean, this's be perfectly honest.
Speaker 1: Or if you're just pour like I am, well, yeah.
Speaker 2: There is that. Yes, I know how you feel. Rachel Reeves.
Speaker 1: So what have you done today today this week since
Speaker 1: we last met mister nigas me.
Speaker 2: Well, I've been actually doing some quite interesting things because
Speaker 2: I've done a bit of shooting, because obviously this time
Speaker 2: of year. Beat his day was superb fun and my
Speaker 2: son Charlie had his head a day was stood with
Speaker 2: a gun and he did very well and was safe
Speaker 2: and he actually managed to kill the things that he
Speaker 2: shot at cleanly, so that was great. I had a
Speaker 2: superb little walked up day and some very wild country
Speaker 2: up in North Norfolk with a few pals and that
Speaker 2: was all quite exciting. And then the day job's been
Speaker 2: relatively the day job so finished laying a hedge and
Speaker 2: then we've now started planting a huge amount of hedges,
Speaker 2: which is been one of those things where suddenly realize
Speaker 2: that I don't use the same muscles for planting a
Speaker 2: hedge as I did for laying a hedge. So I've
Speaker 2: got a slightly sore buttocks at the moment because needed
Speaker 2: to kick in my little spade and wiggle it the
Speaker 2: regulation four times create a planting pocket. Shove that in,
Speaker 2: you know, and you think you plant what plocket?
Speaker 1: Did you just say?
Speaker 2: Pluck it. Yeah, a pocket pocket.
Speaker 1: There's not some weird technical term I've not come across yet.
Speaker 2: Now, a planting pocket. So you make a planting pocket,
Speaker 2: which I used a Dutch planting spade. So they've got
Speaker 2: very long handle, quite a relatively narrow stainless steel, slightly
Speaker 2: curved blade to it, and it goes through our clay
Speaker 2: and it doesn't pick up the clay, and you sock
Speaker 2: that in, kick it in with your heel, four wiggles
Speaker 2: of the handle, bend down, put in the sapling, three
Speaker 2: stamps with your feet, and onto the next. Because you're
Speaker 2: planting five plants to the meter and staggered rows, and
Speaker 2: we try and do about five hundred plants a day,
Speaker 2: ah steaked and cane guarded as well. And yeah, you
Speaker 2: feel it, but I'm in two weeks time, I'll probably
Speaker 2: be able to do about seven hundred because my buttocks
Speaker 2: will have reminded me what I'm going to do.
Speaker 1: Tree planting is a weird one. It's such a workout,
Speaker 1: but it's also it's more of a mental game after
Speaker 1: a certain point because it's so tedious. Yeah, and yes,
Speaker 1: but you do just have to look back along the
Speaker 1: line and see what you did. I've got a gig
Speaker 1: once doing tree planting on a slope that was so
Speaker 1: steep we had to be roped up, which is why
Speaker 1: I was doing it. Was sort of doing rope access
Speaker 1: doing tree planting. At the same time I was swinging
Speaker 1: around with a bag of trees between my legs, which
Speaker 1: was that we've got about two hundred done per day.
Speaker 1: But that was one of these ecological mitigation things where
Speaker 1: they have to plant some trees because they've ripped a
Speaker 1: load out to put a power line in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh, for goodness sake, Yes, mitigation.
Speaker 3: Like we were talking about the other week, there's a
Speaker 3: big line of trees all planted down by the yard
Speaker 3: and they're all dying. And I don't think anyone actually
Speaker 3: cares that they're all dying. They've put them in, got
Speaker 3: the grant funding.
Speaker 1: A lot of the that's once they're planted in the ground,
Speaker 1: that the invoices are done for a lot of projects.
Speaker 1: That's as much as they care about.
Speaker 2: Well, as Harry was saying when he came on, you know,
Speaker 2: he's saying that apparently that's now being turned over. But
Speaker 2: I had to go and write mission statements and and
Speaker 2: risk assessments and all sorts of stuff for a job
Speaker 2: with a very very very large landowner in the UK
Speaker 2: to go and do tree and hedge planting with them.
Speaker 2: And one of the things that I absolutely emphasized was
Speaker 2: the fact that we want to go and do proper stuff.
Speaker 2: I wanted to see this thing that I've made my
Speaker 2: buttocks saw in planting actually become a hedge and or
Speaker 2: a tree. So yeah, I don't really want to go
Speaker 2: and mess around with that anyway. Listen enough about hedges.
Speaker 2: Make sure you've never thought so you'd hear me say, Richard,
Speaker 2: what have you been doing this week?
Speaker 1: I'm not entirely sure what day it is, because I've
Speaker 1: been so flat out doing a million different things. Somebody
Speaker 1: described me the other day as a rural del boy
Speaker 1: because I don't seem to have a sort of a
Speaker 1: defined job, but I just keep wheeling and dealing and
Speaker 1: getting from one thing to the next. I just even today,
Speaker 1: I've had one of those days where I've got ten
Speaker 1: minutes to do this thing, and then I've got to
Speaker 1: go straight out and do this thing. Well, we shall
Speaker 1: only take an hour, and now it's taken me two hours,
Speaker 1: and now I'm back late, and now I've got to
Speaker 1: go and do this, and I've got to meet this
Speaker 1: other person. And that's been a great conversation that's led
Speaker 1: to five other things, but I still haven't done the
Speaker 1: other thing. And it's just like this time of year
Speaker 1: where everyone's suddenly getting back into the swing of things
Speaker 1: after Christmas and there's loads of stuff happening. But also
Speaker 1: now I'm thinking I've got no bloody time to do anything.
Speaker 1: So one of my highlights of today was going over
Speaker 1: to see my mate Hugh over at Petrovellin Farm on
Speaker 1: the other side of the valley. Now, Hugh is our
Speaker 1: main source of milk, cheese, and beef, all from the
Speaker 1: same animal a lot of the time.
Speaker 3: I think we've heard about Hugh before, haven't we. You've
Speaker 3: seen the raw milk guy.
Speaker 1: This is going to ruin his advertising segment because he's
Speaker 1: just started doing his own yogurt as well now and
Speaker 1: making his own yogurt. So you go to this little
Speaker 1: fridge in an old horse box, an old Felwell style
Speaker 1: single horse pony horsebox in the yard, and go in
Speaker 1: there and then the fridge there. He's got this milk
Speaker 1: and he's got his yogurt. And now he's doing pots
Speaker 1: of whey as well. So in fact, I've recorded a
Speaker 1: little segment from him now which we'll play in the
Speaker 1: actual episode that says why he's doing the yogurt.
Speaker 4: So for the first time in about three years, I've
Speaker 4: actually got a bit of milk left over that I'm
Speaker 4: not selling. So I've experimented with making yogurt because I
Speaker 4: can do it without spying extra equipment and trying to
Speaker 4: get more people to come and buy directly from the farm. Really,
Speaker 4: so the more products we can have in the fridge,
Speaker 4: the better, really.
Speaker 1: And that's what it said. So that's what I've been doing,
Speaker 1: running around doing lots of different things. I've become a
Speaker 1: director of this community interest company, which is all about
Speaker 1: connecting people to the land and training opportunities and basically
Speaker 1: doing things that are good for people and good for
Speaker 1: conservation and good for the land, using traditional management techniques
Speaker 1: and doing things properly. So I'll be talking about that
Speaker 1: in future episodes, but mainly that's what I'm doing this week.
Speaker 1: So how about you callum?
Speaker 3: That sounds like very busy work, not.
Speaker 1: Much income, but lots are busy, yeah.
Speaker 3: But very fulfilling is that not?
Speaker 1: Yeah? But invoices are really fulfilling too. Oh. I wrote
Speaker 1: an article that's just come out in the British Deer
Speaker 1: Society magazine about good social media practices, and a load
Speaker 1: of people message me saying how good that is.
Speaker 3: Can you give me just a little tiny taster of
Speaker 3: what good social media practice for deer stalkers looks like
Speaker 3: and what bad looks like?
Speaker 1: It was, Consider the wider audience, not just your mates
Speaker 1: that you're following, and consider that you are. Remember when
Speaker 1: you were at school and that it was. Remember you're
Speaker 1: an ambassador for the entire school when they sent you
Speaker 1: off on the field trip around somewhere, which is, don't
Speaker 1: set far to wheelibins and don't knock over old ladies. Effectively,
Speaker 1: bad example for me, but carry on for that. You're
Speaker 1: doing the same sort of thing for deer management. If
Speaker 1: all you do is post voters are rights, photos of
Speaker 1: deer being butchered and try and sort of emulate what
Speaker 1: you see in the there's the discover search section on
Speaker 1: Instagram which shows you the top performing deer hunting posts
Speaker 1: in America or something like that, which are all gripp
Speaker 1: and grins, guns and carcasses. If you instead post things
Speaker 1: about the reasons that deer need to be controlled. Well,
Speaker 1: how you're doing it, how you're choosing those animals and
Speaker 1: link it to food and conservation. You're going to do
Speaker 1: more to help the image of British deer management than
Speaker 1: just posting stuff for your own little circle of social
Speaker 1: media engagement, because if Americans like your stuff on Instagram,
Speaker 1: it doesn't help British deer management. You need to get
Speaker 1: the public and farmers and people like that on side.
Speaker 2: That is a very very good point, and I think
Speaker 2: preaching to the choir is one of the biggest issues
Speaker 2: that a lot of the shooter is to type. People
Speaker 2: who dominate social media have got to really stop doing because,
Speaker 2: let's be perfectly frank, most of the stuff that we
Speaker 2: see from the influences on arm of who are shooting people,
Speaker 2: it's bloody terrible because all they're doing is it's a
Speaker 2: bit like the sort of that they're they're bragging their
Speaker 2: preaching to the choir. Look at me, I've done this
Speaker 2: shot this. Look at the size that it is. Crap,
Speaker 2: he really is anyway, Anyway, I'm afraid it's something that
Speaker 2: it annoys me because I'm the only person who uses
Speaker 2: social media in the country side properly and no one
Speaker 2: else does. That's it. It's just you, only you, just
Speaker 2: me only, it's it. Yes, that's it.
Speaker 1: How about callum, Callum, what have you done with your week?
Speaker 1: How have you influenced the countryside for the better?
Speaker 3: Well, I'm going to go in reverse or because I've
Speaker 3: got some got some good fun fun. I've been busy,
Speaker 3: but a busy boy. I'm very tired today, which is
Speaker 3: not great.
Speaker 1: You look tired, You look like you need a kip.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've been up very early. I was working today
Speaker 3: in Milton Keynes. Yeah, And that is the response that
Speaker 3: you get. But the fun thing about Milton Keynes is
Speaker 3: it has all the same like design cues about about
Speaker 3: it as the town where I grew up, of Harlow.
Speaker 3: It's like a version two of Harlow New Town. So
Speaker 3: it's it's quite nice in a kind of oh my god,
Speaker 3: this is Milton Keynes, but also looking at from the outside,
Speaker 3: it's quite a nice place they've managed to put. They
Speaker 3: managed to make like if you look at London, London
Speaker 3: is chaos. It's unapologetically chaotic and there's tiny little pockets
Speaker 3: of wildlife and stuff. But Milton Kings have managed to
Speaker 3: make they made it like a grid system, and they've
Speaker 3: managed to make little pockets of like rural areas and
Speaker 3: green spaces in what is essentially like an offshoot of London.
Speaker 3: And it's it's quite nice driving around there and it
Speaker 3: feels a bit like a bit like Harlowe. Harlow was
Speaker 3: the first towns, the new town after the war there was,
Speaker 3: Stevenage was first. Sir Frederick Gibbard designed all these little
Speaker 3: tiny villages to be all centered around one main town center.
Speaker 1: Is actually good content.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I like this sort of stuff and nearly very
Speaker 3: close only because I think they were going to give
Speaker 3: it to me for free because they needed them. I
Speaker 3: nearly became a landscape architect after leaving after leaving college,
Speaker 3: so that was what I considered doing, and I was like,
Speaker 3: do I do I belong in education? Not really a maverick,
Speaker 3: So it didn't happen. But yeah, it's quite quite interesting.
Speaker 3: And Stevenage is pretty interesting as well. Not necessarily in
Speaker 3: a good way, but it is an interesting place. How
Speaker 3: they managed to put green spaces in amongst and they
Speaker 3: make they make it like an actual village. So they've
Speaker 3: got small villages all centered around a main town center.
Speaker 3: It's quite a nice way to build a sense of
Speaker 3: community but also scale it up to like ridiculous levels.
Speaker 2: Callum took me on a tour of Harlow because I
Speaker 2: was slightly dismissive because obviously I live in a house
Speaker 2: that was built in sixteen fifty five, and you know
Speaker 2: that where I live everything is old and wood framed
Speaker 2: and wattle and daub and stuff like that. And it's
Speaker 2: quite interesting is that if you go to someone like
Speaker 2: in Suffolk, like Lavanon or long Melford where they are
Speaker 2: that this was how they built this new village when
Speaker 2: there was some prosperity around during the wall Town's era
Speaker 2: in Suffolk, and it's been stuck in aspect because then
Speaker 2: Suffolk became poor for such a long while and no
Speaker 2: one could knock these places down. He showed me, and
Speaker 2: I thought, actually you could see when he was you
Speaker 2: look through. Yes, the design, the architecture is changed and whatnot.
Speaker 2: But I got that idea that there was a an
Speaker 2: element of that they were trying to recreate a village
Speaker 2: feel in an architect's mind, rather than possibly the organic
Speaker 2: growth of one usually sees in villages. And I did
Speaker 2: genuinely find it interesting. And if you go to somewhere
Speaker 2: like Welling Garden City or Lechureth, the garden cities that
Speaker 2: they tried to do after the First World War, you
Speaker 2: can see.
Speaker 3: That they're all came through both of those Today, actually
Speaker 3: it came through Winning Garden City, and.
Speaker 2: That you live in a place that was trying to
Speaker 2: do this is the Brave New World after the Second
Speaker 2: World War. Those places tried to this is the brave
Speaker 2: New World after the First World War. So one wonders
Speaker 2: what their bloody hell it will look like after the
Speaker 2: brave New World after COVID.
Speaker 3: So each of those little places, the design was that
Speaker 3: they would all have like a pub, butchers, bakers and
Speaker 3: candlestick makers right in them, in their own little center.
Speaker 3: And if you needed big stuff, you'd have a big
Speaker 3: town center to go to. So it would be that
Speaker 3: you could shop for everything locally. It's an interesting concept
Speaker 3: and one that I think that these the big cities
Speaker 3: don't really.
Speaker 2: Flat roof murder pubs in each village.
Speaker 1: I like that idea dog on the roof sometimes.
Speaker 3: And interestingly, all of the pubs in Harlow are named
Speaker 3: after butterflies or moths.
Speaker 2: Are they really that's trivia questions quiz that one.
Speaker 3: The Purple Emperor drink them off, all sorts, each one
Speaker 3: more stabby than the last.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to go into the death's head hawk moth.
Speaker 3: No, the hummingbird. I thought the hummingbird that's not named
Speaker 3: after him off, and then I was like.
Speaker 2: Yes, hummingbird. Yeah, they're funny little things they've got they
Speaker 2: do look like hummingbird and they've got this little proboscis
Speaker 2: and sticks out and you think you can't be a moth.
Speaker 2: It's like you're watching the transition from moth to bird.
Speaker 2: Fascinating things.
Speaker 1: And when you compare all that, not the moth bit,
Speaker 1: but the town's bit to someone like Telford, which was
Speaker 1: another new town which where they they've mostly gone it wrong.
Speaker 1: Mostly they aim for village and missed and just hit ghetto.
Speaker 2: There was a place outside outside Glasgow where they did that,
Speaker 2: and it was some brutalists, sort.
Speaker 1: Of the Tower Market.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I can't remember the place is name, but it
Speaker 2: is absolutely scary. Mind you. I was in Hyde Park, Barracks.
Speaker 2: I was stationed there for a bit when I was
Speaker 2: in the House or Caverage, and that was designed by
Speaker 2: some basil Spence and he was a concrete brutalist architecture
Speaker 2: officionado and it was the most god forsaken dump you'll
Speaker 2: ever think. You think, Oh, yes, where did you live
Speaker 2: when you were in London? I had a chat the
Speaker 2: other day who makes films about cookery, and he said,
Speaker 2: if you ever lived in London? And I said yeah,
Speaker 2: I said briefly, was in the Army said whereabouts? I
Speaker 2: went Ninth Bridge and he went, oh, my lord, that's
Speaker 2: rather posh.
Speaker 3: Yeah it's not real London.
Speaker 2: No quite, And I said yeah. I said, but it
Speaker 2: was at Hypark Barracks and he went, oh, that's really grand.
Speaker 1: And it's not.
Speaker 2: It's just riddled with concrete cancer. The as a cavalry barracks.
Speaker 2: It gave horses diseases because they got COPD because there
Speaker 2: was no air ventilation. All the blokes sort of got
Speaker 2: hideous colds and flus all the time because everything sweated, bizarrely,
Speaker 2: because it was just concrete. When I left Knightsbridge to
Speaker 2: go off to Sandhurst and other parts, I'd never felt
Speaker 2: so delighted to leave anywhere in my life.
Speaker 1: Is that the one where the horses are on the
Speaker 1: first floor. If you look at it, ye or terraces.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they got two story stables. I mean, it's just ridiculous.
Speaker 1: Freaked out Taurus.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know the Blues and Rules are up above
Speaker 2: us and the horses suddenly look over and there's someone
Speaker 2: sort of trying to find and straight opposite Knightsbridge One,
Speaker 2: which is one of the most expensive apartment blocks in
Speaker 2: the UK. And yeah, so it must be quite weird
Speaker 2: that you look out from this thing. You've just paid
Speaker 2: fourteen million pounds for a sort of fourth story apartment
Speaker 2: block and you look over and firstly you see a
Speaker 2: horse of the Blues and Rolls looking back at you,
Speaker 2: and then some bare chested blow covered in tattoos who's
Speaker 2: grooming it, who then realizes being looked at flashes is
Speaker 2: not but them. Yeah, great, well done. That was forteen
Speaker 2: million pounds well spent on.
Speaker 1: Right, never mind anything else. What's this bit of gossip
Speaker 1: that you teased for us.
Speaker 3: I've got a couple of points before the gossip. Okay, fine,
Speaker 3: did a bit shooting, went for a walk around with
Speaker 3: with I didn't do any shooting.
Speaker 1: I was just saying, will you hold handling a firearm
Speaker 1: during this outing?
Speaker 3: New camera camera only but technically that is still shooting.
Speaker 2: But he shot my gun once my big things a
Speaker 2: balla just because so we could have a go with it. Boom,
Speaker 2: and we put some big cartridges in.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And I think for your business partner, Gordy was
Speaker 3: the first person to let me wield a firearm in
Speaker 3: the form of that strange fully silenced Russian looking.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, exactly shooting rooks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, wow, push power thing.
Speaker 2: Yes, a not much older thing than the hush power
Speaker 2: is a bi cow silenced for ten.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, yes, yeah, mod that's bigger than the gun.
Speaker 3: Yeah, us hideous, but pretty cool as well at the
Speaker 3: same time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, especially when it's wielded by him.
Speaker 3: Like when you play a game and you find a
Speaker 3: loot box and you're not really sure what the what
Speaker 3: the weapon is. That was kind of like how that
Speaker 3: is sixty now ninety the audience with that one.
Speaker 2: Yes, loot box, I say game, Well, I say chess?
Speaker 2: Is this some of the chess? I don't know.
Speaker 3: They're like game on the line, Games.
Speaker 2: On the line games.
Speaker 3: Okay, speak to Charlie. Charlie will tell you what is that?
Speaker 2: Like an atari? I had one of those when I
Speaker 2: was younger, didn't know how it worked is.
Speaker 1: That when you listen to games Master at the end
Speaker 1: and record it and put it on a cassette so
Speaker 1: you can play the game correct.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's brilliant, brilliant. I mean it didn't ever work,
Speaker 2: of course, because it then got about it's halfway through
Speaker 2: a c nineties thing and then it went playback error
Speaker 2: and you'd lost three hours of your life, which is
Speaker 2: what I thought. Computer games are really stupid.
Speaker 3: The final piece was I did a black powder day
Speaker 3: with Ed Coles, which unfortunately there was no flint locks
Speaker 3: there because flint locks have a tendency what was the
Speaker 3: technical word not hydroponic, hydro something. Basically the gunpowder just
Speaker 3: takes on water hygroscopic, hydroscopic, that's the one. Yeah, that
Speaker 3: gunpowder takes on water and isn't very good for that
Speaker 3: sort of thing. So they were percussion caps, is that right?
Speaker 3: I think?
Speaker 2: Yes, they have some various different They have these tube
Speaker 2: caps and they have nipple caps, and yeah, I had
Speaker 2: to write I had to write an article about that.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to get the part this past the
Speaker 2: bloom in Sumbury. This a half the terminology that they
Speaker 2: use with black powder stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was some quite intense wordage there. Yeah, do
Speaker 3: you want to know my gossip?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I do want to know the gossip because it's
Speaker 1: been nearly a week and you've been teasing us about
Speaker 1: this thing.
Speaker 3: Ah wow, Ed Carles the gamekeeper, very good gamekeeper, fan
Speaker 3: of the podcast, is excellent. His wife's also a fan
Speaker 3: of the podcast, and his wife's friend is also a
Speaker 3: fan of the podcast. So we're clearly infectious in Cambridge,
Speaker 3: which isn't the first time for me. So he told me,
Speaker 3: So this is the gossip. His wife turned to him
Speaker 3: the other day and said these words, I think I
Speaker 3: quite fancy Richard Nigas and his voice.
Speaker 1: Oh, poor poor woman.
Speaker 3: Just so you know, it was I quite fancy Richard
Speaker 3: Nigus and his voice. So it wasn't the voice straight away,
Speaker 3: but she said that afterwards. You know what becks if
Speaker 3: you're listening, I'm sorry I outed.
Speaker 2: You, but Bex, do you know I've always thought that
Speaker 2: I love that name. It's one of those names that
Speaker 2: sort of comeures.
Speaker 1: Up in me.
Speaker 2: The image of Kristin Scott Thomas.
Speaker 3: She's giggling. Now, she's giggling, She's giggling.
Speaker 2: When Kristin Scott Thomas turns around and says to Hugh Grant,
Speaker 2: it's you, Charlie. I went Charlie, you widiot. This is
Speaker 2: in Fallings in a funeral Charlie widiot. Obviously marry Herts
Speaker 2: Kristen Scott Thomas. You fall and she loves you, and
Speaker 2: every man in the whole world is doing that. That's
Speaker 2: what I think Bex is probably like.
Speaker 1: The problem is all these stuff comes across a bit
Speaker 1: like used to get in the back of newspapers, and
Speaker 1: things used to get like serialized, really poor erotic dramas,
Speaker 1: almost a bit like they were just like a little
Speaker 1: little paragraph at a time, and it was not quite
Speaker 1: readers wise, and then they evolved into little four panel
Speaker 1: strip with photos and things. I mean, can you imagine
Speaker 1: what that would sound like? Amy?
Speaker 5: The morning was crisp, the kind of cold that made
Speaker 5: pheasants sound mildly annoyed. Eleanor adjusted her in practically decorative
Speaker 5: coat and trudged towards the hedgerow, clutching a flask like
Speaker 5: it was a lifeline. She wasn't sure what had brought
Speaker 5: her here, curiosity, boredom, or the overwhelming alliere of a
Speaker 5: man who looked like he could wrestle a badger and win. Richard,
Speaker 5: the hedge layer, stood amidst the tangled branches like a
Speaker 5: rogue night of the suffolk undergrow. His shirt was unbuttoned
Speaker 5: just enough to suggest he understood the assignment. His arms,
Speaker 5: thick like two well stuffed sausages, flexed with each decisive
Speaker 5: swing of his bill hook. Mourning missus grays.
Speaker 3: Richard drawled the gravel of his.
Speaker 5: Dangerously smooth. His smile was kind that suggested he either
Speaker 5: had a plan or had just remembered where he left
Speaker 5: his lunch. I brought you soup, eleanor blurted, thrusting the
Speaker 5: flask towards him with the grace of a startled goose.
Speaker 5: Richard took it fingers brushing hers, his touch rough like
Speaker 5: a particularly sensual tree trunk.
Speaker 1: This is filth.
Speaker 5: Unscrewing the lid in a way that was definitely unnecessary
Speaker 5: but also weirdly hypnotic. Yes, leak and potato, she croaked,
Speaker 5: watching as he took a sick delicious, he murmured the
Speaker 5: weird hung in the air, thick with something that wasn't
Speaker 5: just appreciation for root vegetables. He stepped closer, smelling of
Speaker 5: sweat head shimmings and reckless confidence. But I don't think
Speaker 5: she came into soup. Somewhere in the distance, A Pheasants
Speaker 5: let out a horrified squawk, as if sensing the shere
Speaker 5: lack of propriety about two unfold.
Speaker 2: My lord, Yeah, I'm all a flush the female viewership.
Speaker 1: And boon of head laying.
Speaker 2: Do you know it's that's quite that Kirs Starmer was saying,
Speaker 2: we've got to be at the forefront of a I
Speaker 2: and that sounds like someone but right me, Barbara Cartland.
Speaker 2: But it's about a hedge lighter with someone with sort
Speaker 2: of slightly preposterous hair and and a mothy beard.
Speaker 3: Is there any as now you are the the allure
Speaker 3: for the ladies? Is there anything you want.
Speaker 1: To say housewives favorite?
Speaker 3: About being the housewives favorite?
Speaker 2: I suppose, Well, I'm I'm I'm just delighted to be
Speaker 2: that man. I mean, it's who knew all that stuff
Speaker 2: that I've been talking about in hedges for so long
Speaker 2: as finally born fruit, you know, And it's not just yellowhammers,
Speaker 2: it's now all the birds. Oh, there's a bit of
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies throwback there. Yes, well, who wrote that.
Speaker 5: Amy that would be chat GPT I believe.
Speaker 2: Oh that's okay, thank god for that's also, no humans
Speaker 2: are involved in this.
Speaker 1: If we when we get to do our first live show,
Speaker 1: if we get to do it at the Game Fair,
Speaker 1: I will recount the tale of when I was propositioned
Speaker 1: whilst location scouting for BBC's hit TV drama Sherwood and
Speaker 1: it wasn't by females.
Speaker 3: Really, you do look like that could happen.
Speaker 2: It's a good story.
Speaker 1: Involved Woodland, but it did. Yes, what are we talking
Speaker 1: about this week, gentlemen? What are we talking about?
Speaker 2: I don't know. There was some show notes and now
Speaker 2: you've just sort of tried to make me out in
Speaker 2: to be some sort of the Robert Redford with a buildbook.
Speaker 1: So now we're talking about conservation.
Speaker 2: For hooray, thank god for that.
Speaker 1: Yes, So we're talking about the things that people do
Speaker 1: which are inadvertently causing harm to wildlife to habitats that
Speaker 1: are the opposite of doing conservation. It's doing doing doing
Speaker 1: a damage. And this sort of came up naturally in
Speaker 1: our little WhatsApp chats that we used to try and
Speaker 1: wrestle the show into some kind of order, and all
Speaker 1: we do sometimes was it the Was it the birds
Speaker 1: nest think that started it?
Speaker 2: Yes, it was an article that I read somewhere or
Speaker 2: other that were saying about the birds nests are now
Speaker 2: getting infested with well that they're not succeeding because they're
Speaker 2: using dog hair, and so many dogs are all lathered
Speaker 2: with shampoo, tick spray and flea treatments and all sorts
Speaker 2: of weird shampoos and things to stop them smelling like
Speaker 2: dogs that then pete. Then birds go out, they pick
Speaker 2: up the hair. They then line their nests with them
Speaker 2: and hay press. Though nests fail because of this. I mean,
Speaker 2: I think that the scientific data behind it was probably
Speaker 2: it sounds a better story than it is, but it
Speaker 2: is definitely true that one of the issues when it
Speaker 2: comes to dogs and what you spray on them to
Speaker 2: stop them having ticks and fleas and stuff, is that
Speaker 2: they then jump into rivers and they then go and
Speaker 2: that tick spray goes into the rivers, and of course,
Speaker 2: because it's designed to kill the things like fleas and ticks,
Speaker 2: it then goes and kills all this aquatic life form.
Speaker 2: So therefore that's actually quite serious. I don't use anything
Speaker 2: on my dogs like that anymore because I think, well,
Speaker 2: actually I can see that this is genuinely a case,
Speaker 2: and so yeah, that's what started it all off. And
Speaker 2: I think there is genuinely a bit of an issue really.
Speaker 1: And it's that completely second order consequence thing. You're not
Speaker 1: expecting that you're doing this one thing in your home
Speaker 1: which is going to make that bird's nest three miles
Speaker 1: away fail. Yeah, no, I think you had that sort
Speaker 1: of sphere of influence.
Speaker 2: I didn't know that well, you as as a bit
Speaker 2: of a fishing of clean rivers and stuff. I think
Speaker 2: it's something that I think these knock on effects which
Speaker 2: we're now only seeing in rivers now, is something that
Speaker 2: those of us have involved in farmland conservation have been saying,
Speaker 2: do you know there's a problem here, guys, Because what
Speaker 2: we're actually seeing is a lot of the sprays that
Speaker 2: were used etc. On farms that at the time it
Speaker 2: didn't really seem a huge consequence, and then you suddenly thinking,
Speaker 2: who is not quite as many starlings about as they
Speaker 2: used to be, Oh, there's not quite as many lap
Speaker 2: wings about, and then all of a sudden they've gone
Speaker 2: and we're now seeing that same situation. Is that our
Speaker 2: farmland birds had fallen off the perch. To pardon the punt,
Speaker 2: sort of ten fifteen years ago. Our rivers have suddenly
Speaker 2: dying because there's been this cumulative effect and eventually nature
Speaker 2: went I can't do this anymore, and it's died. And
Speaker 2: it's probably something to do with largely because rivers of
Speaker 2: water has been privatized, and it never made any sense
Speaker 2: to me. My father was a civil engineer.
Speaker 3: Comes in well, my father.
Speaker 2: Was a civil engineer and he specialized in great, big
Speaker 2: sewage things. And he is ninety four and he's a
Speaker 2: card carrying conservative. Him and my mother met at Young Conservatives.
Speaker 2: He is conservative. In fact, he's probably more conservative than
Speaker 2: if you had a mating between Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson,
Speaker 2: the offspring would be less conservative than my father.
Speaker 1: Yet he said, who was going to partner Margaret Thatcher? Then?
Speaker 2: Oh, I think Nigel Lawson, You see it. Norman tebbat
Speaker 2: would be the obvious go to. But I think Nigel
Speaker 2: Lawson is actually probably even more conservative than the Norman Tebbitt, but.
Speaker 3: More of the kind and generous lover.
Speaker 2: Yeah, probably so, I mean, look, he produced Nigella. Anyway,
Speaker 2: my father said that the worst thing that ever happened
Speaker 2: in all the privatization, all the Tory policies anything, you know,
Speaker 2: poll tax. He said, it was a brilliant idea. He said,
Speaker 2: it was just badly, badly powered. Every single thing he said,
Speaker 2: other than privatizing water was the most stupid thing on
Speaker 2: every single level. And I think we are now reaping
Speaker 2: that benefit or the woes of it. But you've got
Speaker 2: this situation now where you've got all these bloody people
Speaker 2: who went and got cockapoos and other ridiculous dogs all
Speaker 2: during lockdown and they're all smothering in stuff because they
Speaker 2: got really like the way that dogs smell. I just
Speaker 2: thought dogs look cute and like an instagram them, and
Speaker 2: they cover them in all these various tick sprays and
Speaker 2: then take them for a little paddle because people have
Speaker 2: tried to diversify, and they go, it's a good idea.
Speaker 2: I'm going to go and use a bit of my
Speaker 2: river there, and you can go and swim your dog
Speaker 2: if you pay me fifteen quid to go and exercise
Speaker 2: it there for an hour, and then that's washing down
Speaker 2: and it's killing everything that lives in the river. Well done, Yes,
Speaker 2: that's good. Farm diversifications.
Speaker 3: I didn't even think of that, didn't even know that
Speaker 3: was the thing. This is, this is why the episode
Speaker 3: is inadvertently damaging nature.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what it's The thing is that you don't when
Speaker 1: you spot it, it's actually it doesn't make a lot
Speaker 1: of sense and you go, oh, yeah, I can see
Speaker 1: that link really clearly, But until someone raises it in
Speaker 1: your sphere of influence and the people you listen to,
Speaker 1: it's it's quite well hidden. And that's part of the
Speaker 1: problem with these kind of things is that they always
Speaker 1: come across as being delivered by the fun sponge. You know,
Speaker 1: we're taking away the thing you like to do by
Speaker 1: saying by telling you what the bad consequences of it are.
Speaker 1: And it's always a really difficult part of that conservation
Speaker 1: communication that how can you point out people's negative actions
Speaker 1: to them without whilest still making them feel engaged with
Speaker 1: the subject.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. And there was a there was a
Speaker 2: thing that around the time of I think the Lake
Speaker 2: Queens Jubilee was this company of spent a huge amount
Speaker 2: of money on suggesting that you buy this sort of
Speaker 2: union Jack Dawed Chinese lantern thing and we could all
Speaker 2: set them off to go and celebrate Her Majesty's jubilee.
Speaker 2: And they clearly thought this is a great idea, this
Speaker 2: is patriotic, and isn't this wonderful? And I remember I
Speaker 2: saw it quite early on, and I went well as
Speaker 2: a erstwhile household cavman, And there's a passionate conservationist who
Speaker 2: does spends their entire life trying to save wildlife. You
Speaker 2: are idiots, And if I find out where your company
Speaker 2: is based, I will burn it down because that's what
Speaker 2: you're going to do to the habitats of wildlife. How
Speaker 2: dare you even desecrate our flag with this thing? And
Speaker 2: they went, oh my god, this guy with lots of
Speaker 2: followers on Twitter's just trolled us. And of course then
Speaker 2: I rammed up the thing and do you know I
Speaker 2: blame it actually on Roll Dull. See Roll Dull.
Speaker 3: There's there's something I do expect to see.
Speaker 2: King of the Poachers, King of the Poachers, and the
Speaker 2: bloody Danny, the Champion of the World, the Tirday. Oh
Speaker 2: it's great, isn't real do wonderful? It's been such a
Speaker 2: wonderful thing. He's got my children to read. Yes, he
Speaker 2: also encourage lots of children to think that Chinese lanterns
Speaker 2: are a bloody good idea. Well, for a start, they're
Speaker 2: obviously a fire hazard, but secondly they're this stupid thing
Speaker 2: that you are basically polluting the environment by sending this
Speaker 2: thing off, and you're thinking, doesn't that look pretty? But
Speaker 2: like when people go and have, you know, birthday parties
Speaker 2: and they've got helium balloons and they're going and we're
Speaker 2: just releasing stuff because you think this looks pretty. So
Speaker 2: this gives us a brief erection of of oh, doesn't
Speaker 2: that look pretty? And then you go buger the consequences.
Speaker 2: Where's this thing going to land? You know, it really
Speaker 2: annoys me.
Speaker 1: In danger, particularly to sort of sea birds and sea
Speaker 1: wildlife as well, because they go out to sea and
Speaker 1: they think the jellyfish when they land in the and
Speaker 1: they get to it, yeah, and they get eaten and
Speaker 1: they're ingesting a bit of rubber and the plastic bit
Speaker 1: of string, or worse, the foil ones, the ones that
Speaker 1: are in the shape of letter for a second birthday
Speaker 1: party or that kind of thing. There's one in one
Speaker 1: of the woodlands we look after at the moment. It's
Speaker 1: right at the top of the tree and every time
Speaker 1: I go down there, it annoys the piss out of me,
Speaker 1: because it's just it's just winking at me in blue
Speaker 1: reflective foil, like like the chaff generator on the side
Speaker 1: of a fighter aircraft. It's just it's there, absorbing radar
Speaker 1: signal and absorbing my annoyance. But it's come from just
Speaker 1: it's escaped from the hand of a child somewhere. But
Speaker 1: all those things do land somewhere. But then littering doesn't
Speaker 1: seem to be a thing that people feel guilty about anymore,
Speaker 1: as long as they don't doing it in front of
Speaker 1: other people. That every lane that we drive along seems
Speaker 1: to have have litter on it of some type. And
Speaker 1: you know when you're getting closer to a McDonald's or
Speaker 1: a KFC or something, because the number of McDonald's wrappers increases.
Speaker 1: But the weird thing is that litter is only really
Speaker 1: of annoyance to humans. It's not actually that much of
Speaker 1: a problem for wildlife until you get to things like
Speaker 1: balloons in water, which become ingested by sea mammals and
Speaker 1: fish and other things. So people tend to focus on
Speaker 1: litter as being the major problem, But litters on its
Speaker 1: own isn't really that much of a problem unless you
Speaker 1: can count things like microplastics and granules of rubber from
Speaker 1: tires and roadside and road salt washing into water courses
Speaker 1: and stuff like that which people never think of.
Speaker 3: I see a birds make a nest out of plastic
Speaker 3: forks once. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: That's resourceful.
Speaker 2: Oh, I've seen plenty of birds using the little fibers
Speaker 2: from the cutoff bits of fertilize. Yeah, oh yeah, But
Speaker 2: I mean I laid ahedge last ease and for some
Speaker 2: lovely customers of ours, the squirrels who farm out near
Speaker 2: sort of way.
Speaker 1: When you say the customers of yours are squirrels, do
Speaker 1: you mean that is their surname or you've actually been
Speaker 1: paid by squirrels their name is?
Speaker 3: That's what a person that was paid by squirrels would know.
Speaker 2: I did actually use that line in my book Words
Speaker 2: from Hedge, which is published on May the first. It's insane,
Speaker 2: is that? Yeah? I don't know. I don't like to
Speaker 2: talk about it. Words from the Hedge, and it's on
Speaker 2: May the first, Yes, published unbound, And what's it about
Speaker 2: hedges and my words from Yeah? Anyway, So I laid
Speaker 2: these hedges for this families whose surname is Squirrel right,
Speaker 2: and they we've done quite a lot of work for them,
Speaker 2: and we'd laid one of them for the parish council
Speaker 2: which separated their land from where the village playground was,
Speaker 2: and Gord in our gang. This ditch is funny. It
Speaker 2: feels like you're walking on the sort of a cushion
Speaker 2: underneath it. And we kicked all the leaf matter out
Speaker 2: the way and discovered that this entire ditch was filled
Speaker 2: with nappies, disposable nappies that obviously some mother or mothers
Speaker 2: had taken their children, possibly fathers, I suppose, had taken
Speaker 2: their children regularly when they were in the sort of
Speaker 2: pooing in nappy stage, to every day down to go
Speaker 2: and play on the swings and slides and whatnot. And
Speaker 2: obviously they'd been shaken up by the swings and slides,
Speaker 2: and then they'd filled their nappies and then they'd thrown
Speaker 2: them into this ditch along which this hedge we were
Speaker 2: laying was running. And it's those little micro and I'm
Speaker 2: going to call it microaggressions, is that that they don't care.
Speaker 2: They think that there is no worry, no concern about this,
Speaker 2: that it doesn't affect me, that it's not really a
Speaker 2: big problem, and that then actually stretches out further in
Speaker 2: the fact that if you're prepare scummy. Yes it's scummy,
Speaker 2: but I.
Speaker 3: Just it's sunny. There's not really any excuse for it.
Speaker 3: It's just but it's there. Yeah, that's it. You're the
Speaker 3: disregard for the wildlife, you're the town, you're living for everything,
Speaker 3: for the other humans around you. It's just real scummy behavior.
Speaker 1: I've heard it described as it's a bit like the
Speaker 1: broken windows issue, that when you see other people doing it,
Speaker 1: it becomes permissive for every act there's a certain sort
Speaker 1: of number of people you can see doing it, or
Speaker 1: a level of evidence you can see, and the moment
Speaker 1: you see the evidence that's there for you, it's fine
Speaker 1: for you to do.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 1: If you see a pile of nappies, that becomes that's
Speaker 1: the place you put nappies. They've you've seen this with
Speaker 1: dog poop bags. If you start putting dog poop bags
Speaker 1: in one place on a popular dog walk, everyone else
Speaker 1: will put the dog poop bag there because I suddenly
Speaker 1: think this is some council scheme and this is where
Speaker 1: you put them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and it's well, that'll be all right. I
Speaker 2: know it's a big pile of rubbish among them, but
Speaker 2: he's a bizarre thing. Today. I put five hundred pieces
Speaker 2: of single use plastic into the countryside today intentionally, and
Speaker 2: that was because I planted five hundred hedge whips, which
Speaker 2: tick in the box. That's made Ed Milliban happy because
Speaker 2: I'm doing is carbon thing.
Speaker 3: What's a hedge whip?
Speaker 2: Okay, So hedge whips are sapling, so that at the
Speaker 2: moment they're called bear root, so they dug up. I
Speaker 2: put these plastic guards on a hedge whip so young
Speaker 2: hedges aren't planting. You plant five to the meter, and
Speaker 2: I planted five hundreds a day, so you can do
Speaker 2: the math as the Americans say, for how many meters
Speaker 2: I did today. And it's backbreaking work. My buttock's ache,
Speaker 2: as I think I've already said, which will please becks.
Speaker 2: But more to the point is I had to guard
Speaker 2: them against munt jack with tree guards. Now, there are
Speaker 2: biodegradable options available, but they're not very good. They're not
Speaker 2: very good at all. They don't work, they're too expensive.
Speaker 2: The options aren't very good. I can take them off
Speaker 2: again in three to four years time and recycle them.
Speaker 2: But there's a pain in the backside. But we have
Speaker 2: to do it because society expects that our hedges that
Speaker 2: we plant, because society is paid through their taxis for
Speaker 2: me to go and plant these things. But also because
Speaker 2: we're not prepared to go and get on top of
Speaker 2: the deer issue of the over abundance of muntjack that
Speaker 2: we've got here and eradicate the wretched things, we have
Speaker 2: to guard them because the only way you're going to
Speaker 2: see a new hedge come about. So sometimes society is
Speaker 2: lazy and scummy, as Callum said, and they're throwing nappies
Speaker 2: into ditches or McDonald's wrappers, or they're setting off stupid
Speaker 2: sky lanterns or or silvery balloons and stuff filled a helium.
Speaker 2: But I'm having to do it because society or government
Speaker 2: hasn't actually thought about what are we going to do
Speaker 2: about making sure that we want to plant all these hedges.
Speaker 2: We want to have all this stuff going in so
Speaker 2: it all looks nice and cuddly and wonderful and we've
Speaker 2: got much more leafy and greener country. They haven't thought
Speaker 2: about the fact that, oh, perhaps we ought to first
Speaker 2: of all, think about getting a biodegradable alternative to a hedgewook,
Speaker 2: which is affordable hedge guard. And also the fact that
Speaker 2: we're importing every single cane that I put in, So
Speaker 2: five hundred canes came on the slow boat from China
Speaker 2: with bamboo. I said, well, bamboo's a renewable thing, but
Speaker 2: it came all the way from China that the bags
Speaker 2: they're written on has got Chinese writing all over it.
Speaker 2: So being green just because I think, oh and I wonderful,
Speaker 2: just plant aller the hedges. Well, actually I'm not. I've
Speaker 2: put single use plastic into the environment, and I'm using
Speaker 2: bamboo canes that have come from three corps the way
Speaker 2: around the world.
Speaker 1: You get some projects that specify that you need to
Speaker 1: have the UV degradable hedge cards, which are completely useless
Speaker 1: and pointless because they just break down to shards of
Speaker 1: plastic that don't go anywhere, so they become spaniels stabbing
Speaker 1: things rather than and they don't and then they go
Speaker 1: in the grass and then they don't get UV on
Speaker 1: them anymore, and they just litter there and you can't
Speaker 1: pick them up because there's too many bits.
Speaker 2: And also, of course we've got we've got. The other
Speaker 2: thing is that women, you see, and with the pope
Speaker 2: on this is the contraceptive pill.
Speaker 1: What's I wondered where you were going with that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I wondered. I thought it was just thought you're
Speaker 3: gonna have to fade them out for a problem with women.
Speaker 2: The problem women, it's actually the problem they shouldn't know sixties. No,
Speaker 2: But isn't the contraceptive pill doing something to our water,
Speaker 2: to our fish? Now?
Speaker 3: The E two that goes into the water actually turns
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, you probably here babies crying.
Speaker 1: The sound of your living offspring and actually enjoying themselves downstairs.
Speaker 3: Yes, so the high levels of estrogen that go into
Speaker 3: the water, and specifically the studies are done on I
Speaker 3: thing called E two. So it decreases the sperm count
Speaker 3: and motility motility, motility in male fish. But it also
Speaker 3: makes male fish the wriggliness, It makes your sperms not
Speaker 3: works proper, and it also makes a lot of male
Speaker 3: fish turn closer to female.
Speaker 2: Oh, so it makes it like trip Lloyd, you know,
Speaker 2: with the old what's it called rainbow tracked.
Speaker 3: Some fish, some of those trout species, if they get
Speaker 3: a high density of one. I don't actually I don't
Speaker 3: know if it can go both ways, but I think
Speaker 3: it's like if you get a high density of males,
Speaker 3: some of them can turn female, and the high amounts
Speaker 3: of estrogen or E two or whatever they call it
Speaker 3: in their turn fish into females, which makes obviously their
Speaker 3: world population rapidly decline through more estrogen in water.
Speaker 2: So I mean to conclude, then, is that what we're
Speaker 2: talking about is that all women should come off the pill.
Speaker 2: We should shoot more muntjak, and that anyone who uses
Speaker 2: lanterns sky lanterns, Chinese lanterns call them we will. And
Speaker 2: those stupid balloons of the shining.
Speaker 3: Burned at the stake but not from China.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, the user condom the people at the spe Honestly,
Speaker 2: do you know, I might become an MP because I
Speaker 2: think I think therefore, what we've got to do is
Speaker 2: that we ought to as a society actually think about
Speaker 2: the end use is that we are far too much
Speaker 2: right here right now. This scratches my itch. This makes
Speaker 2: me feel good. Is that perhaps we ought to talk
Speaker 2: about real stuff rather than morons going on about our
Speaker 2: nature's in depletion. And blaming conservatives for it or something
Speaker 2: simplistic like that, or saying is, oh, it's all because
Speaker 2: there's these earls and lords who own lots of land.
Speaker 2: That's why we haven't got stuff. No, actually, it's much
Speaker 2: closer to home is we are all responsible for our
Speaker 2: little microaggressions against nature, against wildlife, against our environment. And
Speaker 2: just think a little bit more. You haven't got to
Speaker 2: wear bloody sandals and vote green and be weird and
Speaker 2: eat mung beans and lentils and go vegan. That's just stupid.
Speaker 2: But what you do have to do is perhaps think
Speaker 2: about the instantaneous easy itch that's been scratched, has been
Speaker 2: done by scientists to make your life easy because they
Speaker 2: want to flog you stuff, and don't do it anymore.
Speaker 2: Think a little bit more.
Speaker 1: I've got a ramp, so I'm gonna wait for Calumbar
Speaker 1: speak and then I'm gonna rant.
Speaker 3: So one of my one of my things that I
Speaker 3: do with the boy is so I don't do it
Speaker 3: every single day every Saturday. But there's a community group
Speaker 3: they call themselves the Wombles, and we go out on
Speaker 3: a Saturday. We all meet up at eleven o'clock. We
Speaker 3: get bin bags. Probably six people turn out and we
Speaker 3: go and clean up the local area with a bin bag,
Speaker 3: a litter picker and take the dog baby strapped to
Speaker 3: the front, boy next to me, and we go out
Speaker 3: and we pick up litter and if you a bag.
Speaker 3: Because he's so determined now to do it and he
Speaker 3: wants to get his fine motor skills to a good point.
Speaker 3: It takes him about two hours to fill a black
Speaker 3: bin bag up. But I'm quite happy to be patient
Speaker 3: and wait for such things because I think that these
Speaker 3: these things are lessons learning like that, and he finds
Speaker 3: it quite fun, you know, trying to pick up cigarette
Speaker 3: butt with a cigarette with a litter picker off the floor.
Speaker 3: He finds it quite fun. It's a bit of a challenge,
Speaker 3: it's it's something to do.
Speaker 1: But motor skills and all that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just just learning and going deep into a hedge
Speaker 3: for a can of monster or something. You know, it's
Speaker 3: a bit of fun as well. But just learning about
Speaker 3: how you know that we don't do that and respecting
Speaker 3: our environment, having respect for those around us, and also
Speaker 3: a little bit of a community element. I think is
Speaker 3: a really important lesson to learn early on in your life.
Speaker 3: So you don't carry on because I think it's largely
Speaker 3: it is a cultural thing. I think some people like
Speaker 3: it's it's funny, it's customary. To well, it's not customery.
Speaker 3: It's a culture thing to throw stuff into rivers. A
Speaker 3: lot of people don't care about polluting rivers, just throwing
Speaker 3: rubbish into a river because they think, well, the river flows,
Speaker 3: so it will take it away from.
Speaker 1: Here and then you can't see it anymore and it's gone,
Speaker 1: and it's gone.
Speaker 3: So they think about throwing stuff in rivers. And I
Speaker 3: was in Manchester in a park fishing for great big
Speaker 3: brown trout and there's just people going to their back
Speaker 3: garden and launching nappies, use nappies directly into the river.
Speaker 3: And it's crazy. That's like, they don't see anything wrong
Speaker 3: with it. And it's so important to teach your kids whoever,
Speaker 3: teach whoever it is, that doing stuff like that not cool,
Speaker 3: not cool.
Speaker 1: So my rams is sort of related to that. But
Speaker 1: bear with me, audience. I am a massive hypocrite if
Speaker 1: you like it in one way, because I've been working
Speaker 1: in the outdoors as it's termed, for nearly twenty years,
Speaker 1: So it was nearly twenty years ago, I started going
Speaker 1: through all my qualifications to being an outdoor instructor, and
Speaker 1: I started working all over Snowdonia, then all over the UK,
Speaker 1: and then ended up working all over the world doing
Speaker 1: everything from working in outdoor centers with kids groups to
Speaker 1: then I used to I was working on overseas trips,
Speaker 1: go up and down Killamanjaro and Everest base Camp and
Speaker 1: things like that. And then I started working as a
Speaker 1: remote area medic, which is a posh name for the
Speaker 1: person holding the first aid kit on multi day races.
Speaker 1: And then I started organizing huge multi day triathlons and
Speaker 1: I was a safety officer and director for those.
Speaker 3: I introduced you as a man that does everything except video,
Speaker 3: and then he said I do video, and so yeah,
Speaker 3: he does everything then, so.
Speaker 1: It's not adhd R. Yeah, it's definitely not ADHD. So
Speaker 1: I'm about as outdoors as it gets. Qualifications in hillwalking
Speaker 1: and mountain I'm a mountain leader, climbing instructor, mountain biking,
Speaker 1: all of that. I also teach wild food and foraging.
Speaker 1: So I should be an ideal candidate for right to Rome.
Speaker 1: They hate me because I think everything's Actually we've got
Speaker 1: probably the best balance of access to conservation right now
Speaker 1: as it is, we don't. We have a huge problem
Speaker 1: with outdoor recreation in the UK and around the world,
Speaker 1: but in the UK, particularly over the last ten to
Speaker 1: fifteen years, driven by social media and just changes in culture,
Speaker 1: that the outdoors is being sold and the outdoors I
Speaker 1: mean green spaces, I mean habitats, I mean riverbanks, moorland, woodland, footpaths,
Speaker 1: field edges, all of these places that we talk about,
Speaker 1: they are being sold to people, to the public entirely
Speaker 1: as places of recreation. They are not. There's no mention
Speaker 1: of habitat in the messaging that goes out to the
Speaker 1: outdoor recreation sector. You can pick up a copy of
Speaker 1: Trail magazine and I would give you a ten pounds.
Speaker 1: So every time you see the word habitat in there
Speaker 1: that relates to natural habitat or to anything like that.
Speaker 1: When you see the word conservation on the British Mountaineering
Speaker 1: Council website, they talk about, you know, we have these
Speaker 1: conservation projects. What they are are footpath repair projects from hiking,
Speaker 1: these scars that are left on the side of fells
Speaker 1: and mountains that are from people walking on the tracks
Speaker 1: and so many people walking through there. It's a road
Speaker 1: to a scar on the mountains, so they replace it
Speaker 1: with some stone and it makes it born resilient. That's
Speaker 1: not conservation, that's repairing hiker damage. And this is the
Speaker 1: huge disconnect between outdoor recreation that's not related to a
Speaker 1: habitat as in fishing, farm field sports, stuff like that,
Speaker 1: the stuff that we tend to talk about all the
Speaker 1: other stuff mountain biking, kayaking, while swimming, hillwalk and climbing.
Speaker 1: All of the messaging around those topics is that these
Speaker 1: places are for recreation and that's it. They are a venue,
Speaker 1: that is all they are. You see virtually nothing about
Speaker 1: the negative impacts of those things in those places. And
Speaker 1: when you start talking to the organizations that represent people
Speaker 1: like the British Mountaineering Council or Mountain Training or British
Speaker 1: Canoe Union or Mountain Biking UK and all these other
Speaker 1: places about the effects of people, they go, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: aren't farmers awful? So what's the sod all to do
Speaker 1: with this argument? The us going out to the outdoors.
Speaker 1: We cause habitat disturbance. We make habitats unviable through disturbing it,
Speaker 1: far too often by letting dogs off leads, run through
Speaker 1: the undergrowth. I mean, your one dog might not have
Speaker 1: a huge impact, but when it's the fiftieth dog that Saturday,
Speaker 1: then it's going to mean that ground nesting birds can't
Speaker 1: get established, small mammals can't get established there, or they're
Speaker 1: just living in terror the whole time. Footpath is more.
Speaker 1: Footpath damage is more than scars and the landscape. It's
Speaker 1: compression of soil. It's disruption of habitats, really fragile habitats
Speaker 1: when you think about mosses and bogs and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: and just selling the outdoors as a venue, which even
Speaker 1: organizations like the Ordinance Survey, the people make the bloody maps,
Speaker 1: they have these huge schemes where they just say get outside,
Speaker 1: just go outside. It's great for your mental health. Go outside.
Speaker 1: We'll go outside and do what urinate on a war memorial,
Speaker 1: desecrated badger. Which of these which of these get outside
Speaker 1: activities is meant to be positive? Is it just buying
Speaker 1: mapping services from the bloody Ordnance Survey? That no, So
Speaker 1: that is my no.
Speaker 2: That's a worthy rant because I.
Speaker 1: Tell you you're OK. I didn't swear that was the
Speaker 1: most the biggest effort was not using the language I
Speaker 1: wanted to use.
Speaker 2: One of the worst things that I hear, and that's
Speaker 2: what's the face. The woman who was a Green MP
Speaker 2: for Brighton and then stop being one came Caroline's Lucas
Speaker 2: that's it rhymes of me. She came out with this
Speaker 2: nonsense when she was trying to push this that we
Speaker 2: should have right to Rome in England, she came out
Speaker 2: with all this gubbins and this this or she thought,
Speaker 2: I've got a really catchy thing, is that people need
Speaker 2: nature right now? I thought, no, you're looking at this
Speaker 2: completely the wrong way around. Do nature need people? Now?
Speaker 2: I'll be honest. Nature does need me. It actually needs
Speaker 2: me because if you're going to be a farmer, your
Speaker 2: job is to grow food. My job is to try
Speaker 2: and make sure that there's some natural habitat in the
Speaker 2: in the farmed environment. So therefore, if you like, nature
Speaker 2: doesn't actually need the farmer. But what nature does need
Speaker 2: is people like me who plant hedges, plant trees, plant
Speaker 2: new woods, make sure that the woods grow all. Look,
Speaker 2: there's a hedge that now needs managing, so we can
Speaker 2: make it more by diverse. It needs me, But does
Speaker 2: it actually need the rest of society were they say, well,
Speaker 2: unless people care about nature, unless they actually engage with it,
Speaker 2: then they won't care about it, which is a very
Speaker 2: good argument. But until they have shown themselves suitably qualified
Speaker 2: and equipped to worry about nature, then I don't think
Speaker 2: that nature does need humans. And I think that one
Speaker 2: of the greatest tragedies If what I read in the
Speaker 2: Guardian is that the GCSE for Natural History is being
Speaker 2: binned by this ridiculous government who masquerade is supposedly leading
Speaker 2: us at the moment that they're lead that they're casting
Speaker 2: a design because it's a Tory idea, then that's really
Speaker 2: sad because at the end of the day, we have
Speaker 2: to educate people that we need more Xavier's Callum sons.
Speaker 2: But it shouldn't be Callum's just his job to do it.
Speaker 2: Society's jobs should be to educate young people. That is
Speaker 2: not acceptable to throw shitty nappies in a ditch, It
Speaker 2: is not acceptable to let all these things go, and
Speaker 2: that you don't just have this god given right to
Speaker 2: go out into the countryside. You actually nature doesn't need
Speaker 2: you unless you're responsible for nature.
Speaker 3: But I'm not defending the right to roam blot but
Speaker 3: you do need. You need that exposure to nature in
Speaker 3: order to understand it, to engage with it and respecting it,
Speaker 3: and potentially you probably do need to, you know, maybe
Speaker 3: the amount of times I must have walked through terrible
Speaker 3: areas along the river, not knowing what I was disturbing
Speaker 3: as a young boy, because no one showed me that stuff,
Speaker 3: you know, but walking through like walking through stinging metals
Speaker 3: and discovering a mallard on a nest, thinking I've probably
Speaker 3: just led a fox right to it, because now I've
Speaker 3: trampled all of that down and you know, made a thing.
Speaker 3: But I just wanted to go and fish down the river.
Speaker 3: But I hadn't thought that trampling stinging nettles was going
Speaker 3: to you know, never, I never thought that that was
Speaker 3: going to be a thing, because I had no guide.
Speaker 3: So I suppose what we need is the guidance of
Speaker 3: people to show us that that's probably not a good idea,
Speaker 3: what good practice looks like.
Speaker 1: You know, there's a very mucky argument that rights to
Speaker 1: rome engage in which is they imply which because your
Speaker 1: argument there, Calum is completely correct. But the right to
Speaker 1: rome argument, whether it's by the sort of the loose
Speaker 1: organization or whether it's just people who who advocate for it.
Speaker 1: The implication is that unless you have full right to Rome,
Speaker 1: nobody anywhere will have any access to nature. We have
Speaker 1: fantastic access to green spaces in the British Isles.
Speaker 3: Strongly agree it's there's loads.
Speaker 1: If you go onto the Right to Rome website now
Speaker 1: it will say you only have access to eight percent
Speaker 1: of the land in the UK. In England, which is
Speaker 1: actually the right is the Countryside right of Way Act
Speaker 1: access areas. So two thousand Countryside right of Way Act
Speaker 1: was the right to roam within certain areas, mostly upland areas,
Speaker 1: some heathland, some forest, so a lot of it's set
Speaker 1: in lake district, Peak district, places like that, not near
Speaker 1: towns because it was done above a certain height of contour,
Speaker 1: a certain distance from road, and other things like that.
Speaker 1: In Wales it's twenty percent of the land is under
Speaker 1: Right to Rome. You never hear that figure quoted by
Speaker 1: the Right to Roam organization because it really doesn't help
Speaker 1: their stats. It also does not include the thousands and
Speaker 1: thousands and thousands and thousands of miles of public footpaths,
Speaker 1: bridalway roads under other use and all these other tracks
Speaker 1: that you have a statutory duty to maintain as a landowner,
Speaker 1: which a lot of mount landowners do, which are footpaths
Speaker 1: that take you all the way across the country, zigzagging
Speaker 1: back and forth. You can zigzag all over the place.
Speaker 1: And in fact, I'm going to be this summer walking
Speaker 1: from Ivy Bridge in Devon over to Oxford almost entirely
Speaker 1: on public footpaths, and I'm not going to be crossing
Speaker 1: that many roads walking alongside the A three O three
Speaker 1: or whatever. So there's loads of places you can go
Speaker 1: to which are not included in that figure. We have
Speaker 1: fantastic access. Part of the problem is that if you
Speaker 1: add more access to the land, add more people onto
Speaker 1: those places and give them more access, the only thing
Speaker 1: it can possibly do is make people feel better about
Speaker 1: their lives. It can do nothing to benefit nature, It
Speaker 1: could do nothing to benefit conservation. If your argument is
Speaker 1: there aren't the habitats are terrible and you need more
Speaker 1: people in there to help the habitats, well that's complete bollocks.
Speaker 1: You just need If your whole argument is about habitats,
Speaker 1: then advocate for better habitat management. It's got nothing to
Speaker 1: do with right to Rome.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yes, he's done a lot of harm. I
Speaker 2: really do, because he's turned thing which we can all
Speaker 2: agree is we need more habitat, we need better landscapes.
Speaker 2: We need to go and make sure that farming is
Speaker 2: compatible and works with nature. But this daft idea when
Speaker 2: it as soon as you turn anything to do with
Speaker 2: nature into a political football, I think that that is
Speaker 2: bad for nature because nature doesn't needs politicians. Like my
Speaker 2: dog needs a bra. It's just something it doesn't. He
Speaker 2: doesn't need it. Now you can argue about and I'm
Speaker 2: quite happy to go and discuss the people who look
Speaker 2: at rewilding as an option of conservation management rather than
Speaker 2: my interventionist conservation management. But that whole thing that the
Speaker 2: human being must come first, I see that the right
Speaker 2: to roam argument is utterly no different to that parent
Speaker 2: who thought it was okay to chuck nappies into a
Speaker 2: ditch because they thought, no, I come first. Actually here, me, me,
Speaker 2: human are much more important than that vole or that
Speaker 2: yellow hammer or anything else that uses that hedge. And
Speaker 2: they they I mean that right to Rome thing that
Speaker 2: I'm actually with Richard, and I don't have OCD autism.
Speaker 2: And what as CND that he's got. But I am
Speaker 2: equally manic about it because it's the most selfish idea
Speaker 2: that I've ever come across. It's utterly bonkersly batshit. If
Speaker 2: you claim to love wildlife, you claim to love nature,
Speaker 2: how can you think that imposing more human beings on
Speaker 2: spaces that nature needs can possibly be a good thing?
Speaker 2: Because we are the wrongans here. You know, it's not
Speaker 2: our fault. We've just evolved into this thing. But selfish gits.
Speaker 3: As a person that often turns one man walking in
Speaker 3: the woods into two people walking in the woods and
Speaker 3: being an observer of whatever it may be, dear, etc.
Speaker 3: I know that even two people walking really quite quietly
Speaker 3: through the woods, nature does not like it, and it
Speaker 3: runs and everything just runs away. So to have people
Speaker 3: boldly knocking around in woodland, and you know, kids running around,
Speaker 3: it's not doing any good for nature. They're just going
Speaker 3: to run around. And if you've got multiple people in
Speaker 3: different ends of a wood, there's not going to be
Speaker 3: They're just going to all go go to ground all
Speaker 3: the all. The nature is not going to be loving
Speaker 3: their life in the wood. You can't have people. You
Speaker 3: can have people existing in nature, but they need to
Speaker 3: exist in their little spaces where they can exist in
Speaker 3: nature and engage with it. And then there also needs
Speaker 3: to be little areas where you don't go in, you
Speaker 3: don't disturb them, and you let nature do its thing.
Speaker 1: How does that work with rivers and things like that,
Speaker 1: where you've often got a kind of a moving habitat
Speaker 1: where it's not fixed that the wildlife doesn't stay in
Speaker 1: one place.
Speaker 3: You just simply get Really so, the most wildlife rich
Speaker 3: areas in which is going to be a big contradiction,
Speaker 3: because this is the bits I like fishing the most
Speaker 3: are the backstreams and little back eddies off of the
Speaker 3: main river. The main river is usually almost always devoid
Speaker 3: of life. There's barely anything in the main river. You've
Speaker 3: got people knocking about in boats, you got you know,
Speaker 3: a footpath down there. There's hardly anything in the main river.
Speaker 3: But you will see like a deep mill pool though,
Speaker 3: where fish can get away, where they can they can
Speaker 3: hang about in. So their the aquatic life will tend
Speaker 3: to be in places like mill pools, and that's also
Speaker 3: because they're oxygenated and other such things. Or you'll find
Speaker 3: areas where fish can get cover, so it will be
Speaker 3: trees overgrown so they're not disturbed by things from above
Speaker 3: from because fish don't know if your friend or foe.
Speaker 3: They don't know if you're a predator. They don't know
Speaker 3: if you're going to dive them and eat them from above.
Speaker 3: They've got no idea. So they need to be hidden.
Speaker 3: They need to be sat behind a rock in some flow,
Speaker 3: or they need to be underneath, you know, under the
Speaker 3: undercut bank where the current is. Fish will always seek
Speaker 3: shelter and to hide. They don't want to be out
Speaker 3: in the open. Very rare you see fish out in
Speaker 3: the open because they're just two at risk of predators.
Speaker 3: So yeah, the nature generally will find the most quiet
Speaker 3: secluded are, especially rivers where they can do their own thing.
Speaker 3: I was telling someone the other week about how one
Speaker 3: time when I was pole fishing, I was very very
Speaker 3: quiet in this little backstream, and I saw two kingfishers
Speaker 3: which would be the nesting pair, and then their offspring
Speaker 3: all come up. So there was like I don't know,
Speaker 3: I was young, It was probably only about fourteen, but
Speaker 3: in my head there was like seven, but there was
Speaker 3: probably more like four or five, but there was all
Speaker 3: these kingfishers just come darting up the stream, sit on
Speaker 3: these these roots that have been exposed by the flood water.
Speaker 3: They sort of darted around and then they all started off,
Speaker 3: and I never saw all of them together again. I
Speaker 3: saw one blue flash zip down the river every now
Speaker 3: and again, and that.
Speaker 2: Sort of probably watched the fledging. I would imagine what
Speaker 2: a wonderful experience that would be.
Speaker 3: And since speaking to other people, that's it, that's probably
Speaker 3: they don't really spend a long time together once they
Speaker 3: once they fledged, they're gone. That was probably their first
Speaker 3: and only flight together. And I just sat there watching
Speaker 3: it because I was quiet. The float didn't move, and
Speaker 3: I was completely tucked out the way like I was
Speaker 3: in a hide or something, and no one and no one,
Speaker 3: you know, I wasn't disturbing anything.
Speaker 1: When you said pole fishing, I assumed it was going
Speaker 1: to be for catfish.
Speaker 3: No, just one of those little old roach pole sort
Speaker 3: of jobbies. If you ever use one of those, it's
Speaker 3: a great way of fishing elastic through the top. So
Speaker 3: when a little tiny roach takes it, the elastic takes
Speaker 3: the lunges and and and then you can just swing
Speaker 3: them into your hand and it's a fun way of fishing,
Speaker 3: you know, very delicate and precise. You can catch quite
Speaker 3: small fish. I just mentioned to one of my friends.
Speaker 3: I just I mentioned my the thing about polluting, about
Speaker 3: what's the official title of the episode, inadvertently destroying nature,
Speaker 3: And the first thing he said was balloons and Chinese lanterns,
Speaker 3: which we've adequately covered. And then he said, oh, and
Speaker 3: fly tipping. And I said, well, that's not really inadvertent,
Speaker 3: and he says, gone, actually, and then he said I
Speaker 3: think it is. And I asked him to elaborate. This
Speaker 3: is James. Shout out to James, and he said, the
Speaker 3: amount of people that pay for what they assume is
Speaker 3: reputable people to take their rubbish away, yes, and it
Speaker 3: ends up at a lay by somewhere, And he's got
Speaker 3: a very good point. I think that is. I think
Speaker 3: people have a very genuine feeling that the person they
Speaker 3: are employing is going to take it away and put
Speaker 3: it somewhere, responsibly pay the dump charge to put it somewhere,
Speaker 3: and they don't. They go and dump it in the countryside.
Speaker 3: So I mean, really, if someone offers to take it
Speaker 3: for fifty quid, it might be worth paying hundred and
Speaker 3: getting someone you really know and can vet that can
Speaker 3: take your stuff away because it could well end up
Speaker 3: in la by.
Speaker 2: I suppose, and our throwaway society that would be extremely
Speaker 2: difficult for us to get out of. I just can't
Speaker 2: see it because I don't think most companies want to
Speaker 2: lessen their packaging and everyone wants to get their stuff
Speaker 2: by Amazon and bloodh blahdah blah. I think it does
Speaker 2: highlight that there is in the news today, was it
Speaker 2: that they have now brought out, well, the population figures
Speaker 2: of this country again, seventy three seventy three million. I mean,
Speaker 2: we are getting to a point where you think one
Speaker 2: of the reasons we are at this tipping point with
Speaker 2: the littering and the various usage. Yes, our societal laziness
Speaker 2: is a contributing factor, but when you've got such a
Speaker 2: large society then it can only be bad. And I
Speaker 2: do feel we probably have got too many people here
Speaker 2: really and unless we can train them.
Speaker 1: When you talk about population numbers as well, there's this
Speaker 1: story that comes up again and again, which is when
Speaker 1: I think it was like the consultum of retail supermarkets
Speaker 1: or something. They did surveys a few years ago before
Speaker 1: COVID and they sort of worked out the population might
Speaker 1: be closed as a ninety million based on the number
Speaker 1: of the amount of food they sell, which kind of
Speaker 1: ties up with some water companies looking at the amount
Speaker 1: of sewage they have to process and for a town
Speaker 1: of a certain size. I think it started looking at
Speaker 1: Slough originally and then it moved on to other places,
Speaker 1: and there are these disputed claims that the population could
Speaker 1: actually be quite a lot higher. It's just that we're
Speaker 1: not able to count properly. It's a weird one for
Speaker 1: us because in our little valley in North Wales here
Speaker 1: we tend to go sort of into Wales, further into Wales.
Speaker 1: We don't often go out into England. And we have
Speaker 1: to go to Chester for something last Sunday and I
Speaker 1: went in there as bloody hell, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: people around it. It was like I got fatigue from
Speaker 1: people from just having to go to Atoby Carvery. You know,
Speaker 1: it was a stressful event for me.
Speaker 3: Any time going to be Carvery' is a stressful.
Speaker 2: Isn't that going back to the nineteen seventies anyways, I
Speaker 2: mean that's quite exciting.
Speaker 3: Isn't Well, there is a technique for the Toby carvery you.
Speaker 3: So they ask you what you want, so you'll specify
Speaker 3: what you want, so they'll carve you up. You know,
Speaker 3: so I'll just have I'll just have the beef. And
Speaker 3: then once they've carved you your portion of beef, you
Speaker 3: just say, actually, I have a little bit of a
Speaker 3: little bit of the others because they ain't taken any off.
Speaker 3: So let them carve you the full portion of beef first,
Speaker 3: and then get your get your turkey and gammon. See
Speaker 3: that that is the content people come here for.
Speaker 2: This is the sort of harlow, the harlow inside cd
Speaker 2: underbelly that Callum brings to this how to get scammed?
Speaker 3: I think I think you've also got the intro that
Speaker 3: just there. O.
Speaker 1: God, right, so have we finished talking about all the
Speaker 1: horrible things that people do to old life?
Speaker 2: Basically we are awful human.
Speaker 3: Some people eat as well humans.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, we could go onto the fact that no
Speaker 2: where we're Yes, of course, then we could go and
Speaker 2: have to we'd have to argue with someone who go
Speaker 2: and say, hold on new lock and trample through wood
Speaker 2: shooting stuff, and you like sort of sitting by rivers
Speaker 2: and catching fish and you know, come on, you two
Speaker 2: face gets why don't you go and do that when
Speaker 2: you've got a line, you'd be in the line of
Speaker 2: beaters going and tapping out a load of pheasants and
Speaker 2: partridges and whatnot, which is a good thing for another day.
Speaker 1: I will sum that up with I will put the
Speaker 1: life of my firstborn against the idea that the worst
Speaker 1: pheasant shoot in the British Isles, the very worst commercial
Speaker 1: pheasant shoot in the British Isles, accidentally does more good
Speaker 1: for conservation and wildlife than the best run Three Peaks
Speaker 1: Outdoor Charity Challenge mass participation event company.
Speaker 2: Oh and people thought I was the controversial one.
Speaker 1: It's the thing. It's that field sports even anything.
Speaker 3: Else about Toby Carvery.
Speaker 1: We shouldn't let him have access to the internet whilst
Speaker 1: we're talking, should we?
Speaker 2: No, No, exactly. Anyway, we nearly finished it because I mean,
Speaker 2: I just feel that if Richard Rant said anymore, I'm
Speaker 2: able to lose my crown.
Speaker 1: No said, Okay, I'll go back in my box for
Speaker 1: next week. We've got some questions from listeners. Shut up,
Speaker 1: count We've got We've got some questions from listeners, one
Speaker 1: which you can't remember who it was from. We need
Speaker 1: hot tips on hedge and particularly for planting maiden trees.
Speaker 1: So brand new in establishing a hedge and protecting them
Speaker 1: against sheep. I'm interested in this because we've got sheep
Speaker 1: in the woodland that shouldn't be there.
Speaker 2: So okay, so okay, So you plant a new hedge
Speaker 2: five to the meter staggered row about thirty meters in
Speaker 2: between the rows. Don't plant six? Is deaf ro say,
Speaker 2: because that's just plain stupid, because if you've got half
Speaker 2: decent soil, you're setting up at least one for the
Speaker 2: young things to die. And how do you protect them
Speaker 2: from sheep? Well, that's a very good question. We don't
Speaker 2: have any sheep around here. But I would suggest that
Speaker 2: you the thing you're going to have to do is
Speaker 2: you are going to have to fence that in with
Speaker 2: a little bit of with a little bit of fencing,
Speaker 2: because at the end of the day, we have it
Speaker 2: easy here. The only things we have to go and
Speaker 2: protect the munching of the teeth of deer or of hairs.
Speaker 2: We don't have that. So I mean, actually it's fairly straightforward.
Speaker 2: You just lay out a rope and you plant five
Speaker 2: to the meter and you heal them in and you
Speaker 2: make sure they're put in. But the most important thing,
Speaker 2: of course is that you are going to either mulch
Speaker 2: them and keep them irrigated during their first couple of
Speaker 2: years of growth and then they're done. Guard them against
Speaker 2: browsing fensome from sheep.
Speaker 1: Yea worse than deer in some ways, because you can
Speaker 1: sort of. I've seen people do dead to some degrees
Speaker 1: of success, like big dead hedge lines either side of
Speaker 1: tree planting and woodland and particularly coppices to keep deer
Speaker 1: away from it and sort the deer's brows through it.
Speaker 1: And if they can't munch on something, they wander off.
Speaker 1: Because sheep are suicidal. They'll just keep pushing through anything
Speaker 1: they come across until they get something.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the padded and armored, which doesn't help.
Speaker 2: I mean, the long and the short of it is
Speaker 2: that yes you can. If you can diminish hair and
Speaker 2: breer deer and hair browsing, do say beer and dear
Speaker 2: bowsing and drinking coffee. I must go, I must have
Speaker 2: a drink. But the thing I think that obviously with
Speaker 2: livestock you're going to have to keep it retained anyway,
Speaker 2: and once they're established, the sheep are actually beneficial to
Speaker 2: the hedge because they act like a little flail mower
Speaker 2: and they'll browse off that side and it makes it
Speaker 2: tiller out. And that's all fine. Just got to keep
Speaker 2: them that delicate stage of the first sort of three
Speaker 2: to four years of growth. You need to fence them
Speaker 2: out with stock fencing or electric net. I guess what
Speaker 2: are the questions we got? Well, I've got one actually
Speaker 2: from my mate right, and this, I mean, it's quite funny. Now.
Speaker 2: He's one of my best pals, he really is. He
Speaker 2: works up north with grouse, right, and he says about
Speaker 2: hedge laying, He's asked me a question, he said, why
Speaker 2: do you make such a mess and would it not
Speaker 2: look a lot better with a nice bit of pig
Speaker 2: netting with a couple of strands of barbed wire above?
Speaker 2: Thank you and anticipation. Wilf, oh, some spaniel catchures.
Speaker 3: Have you not been called the hedgelayer hedge slay?
Speaker 2: He's done me that. Yeah, he's done that as well.
Speaker 2: He's a menace, is Wilf. And he doesn't need an
Speaker 2: answer to that question because he eventually, after me getting
Speaker 2: very cross him on his lowland ground, he got a
Speaker 2: hedge layer in to go and lay some hedges, and
Speaker 2: he sent me some pictures and he said, what do
Speaker 2: you think of this rich? And I was finally able
Speaker 2: after him. Every single time I ever put one of
Speaker 2: my hedges up on X, he just goes and puts
Speaker 2: this thing saying what a king mess. And I was
Speaker 2: finally able to go and say what a king mess
Speaker 2: back to him because he actually wasn't very good. But anyway, yes,
Speaker 2: so that was a stupid question from a friend of mine, Wilth.
Speaker 2: But I did say I would read it out on
Speaker 2: this podcast just to make him feel wanted, because he
Speaker 2: lives in a cottage in the middle of nowhere, up
Speaker 2: on top of a moor.
Speaker 1: So you know, I was just going to plow on
Speaker 1: and do show business. But I just want to point out,
Speaker 1: for no reason whatsoever, Callum has just changed his jumper
Speaker 1: during this for no reason, just to distract us, I think, right,
Speaker 1: can weep? We've got show content to do right, an
Speaker 1: early notice that we are well two thirds of us
Speaker 1: again to be appearing at the British Shooting show on
Speaker 1: the Friday, only because I badgered them and badger them
Speaker 1: and badger them until they gave us some press passes,
Speaker 1: so thank you very much Shooting Show for giving some
Speaker 1: press passes. We are going to be recording some interviews
Speaker 1: there that I've got nothing to do with guns. We
Speaker 1: don't want to talk about guns at all, but we
Speaker 1: are going to talk about the sort of stuff that
Speaker 1: we normally talk about at the British Shooting Show. So
Speaker 1: Callum and I are going to be there and trying
Speaker 1: not to bring the podcast into further distribute. Richard refuses
Speaker 1: to go because he's a bit like that. Amy's going
Speaker 1: to be going as well.
Speaker 2: I don't like leaving Suffolk and I mean that's the
Speaker 2: long on the shore. I have to be.
Speaker 1: Extractly to be on Cambridge.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. You know it's all hilly after that, isn't he.
Speaker 2: I can't be doing that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll be there. I'll be alive and in spirit
Speaker 3: and enjoying talking where you hate.
Speaker 2: Micro cap this time, Callum.
Speaker 3: I'm also going to feature on the Guns on Pigs
Speaker 3: podcast in only who let you on the lovely people
Speaker 3: at Guns on Pegs. I'm not sure how many people
Speaker 3: they've had that have never fired a gun at any
Speaker 3: kind of creature in their lives.
Speaker 2: You're fire You've fired a camera at lots of things
Speaker 2: that then subsequently got shot. So have you been shot? So,
Speaker 2: I would say probably being shot? Probably, yes, being shot.
Speaker 1: You're in this weird world of being possibly the most
Speaker 1: prolific attender of driven bird shoots in the UK who's
Speaker 1: never shot at any of the birds.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think very niche club.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you've got a unique take on this. Although they
Speaker 1: do say you get a pair of garters.
Speaker 2: Oh, get a pair of Shootings garters. I wore them
Speaker 2: the other day. They're bright pink.
Speaker 1: But where am ine? I've been on there? I was
Speaker 1: on there in September and mine, Yet they don't chap.
Speaker 1: Where's garters? Right? We I want to say thank you
Speaker 1: to the huge up taking listeners we've had as well,
Speaker 1: and all those new people who've started listening to the podcast,
Speaker 1: particularly since Christmas, and a lot of people are finding
Speaker 1: us and all I can say is I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: I'd also like to thank all those women that have
Speaker 3: been tuning in. We're only going to make better content
Speaker 3: for you from now on.
Speaker 1: Well, this is the first time we let Amy speak
Speaker 1: as well.
Speaker 3: I know I didn't know she could speak.
Speaker 2: Well, we aren't going to let us speak again if
Speaker 2: she goes and uses all that smarty, filthy language. It
Speaker 2: was like, so what the Jilly Cooper's arrived in the thing?
Speaker 1: We want to hear Claire's response to this.
Speaker 2: Well, she's going to actually, look, we've got one in March,
Speaker 2: haven't we?
Speaker 1: The Women episode?
Speaker 2: The Women episode to celebrate National Women's Day. We've got
Speaker 2: we just here. Well, actually Richard doesn't, because my wife
Speaker 2: thinks that Richard's got a lovely voice. So therefore he
Speaker 2: gets to go and do all the talking, and Calum
Speaker 2: and I get the evening off and and off we go.
Speaker 1: It's because I'm the most effeminate to the three of us.
Speaker 1: I think that's why this mustachioed woman called Richard. Well,
Speaker 1: I just look like Renee from Lolo. So therefore I've
Speaker 1: got this.
Speaker 3: Shark. I'm finding this quite difficult, as you've both now
Speaker 3: got admirers, and yet nobody wants you know, a barrow
Speaker 3: boy that sounds a little bit like Danny Dyer if
Speaker 3: you brought him off team. What's not sexy about me?
Speaker 2: Oh? I find you. I find you quite sort of
Speaker 2: sexy and a sort of well well attractive, well acceptable.
Speaker 2: Well you know, I quite like you you know, I mean.
Speaker 1: I'm entertained by him.
Speaker 3: If you saw me in a dark alley, you wouldn't
Speaker 3: run away because I don't look like a threat.
Speaker 2: If you're wearing that bungle outfit, you don't look speedy.
Speaker 3: Wow, this is this is very personal. I'm going to
Speaker 3: fill out where who's hr Ain't is Amy hr?
Speaker 2: Amy's hr Yeah, but she's on mute, So you'm sorry,
Speaker 2: but you're you're.
Speaker 1: You're amusing though. And as the old adage goes, if
Speaker 1: you can make them laugh, you can make them breakfast.
Speaker 2: Yeah, laugh them into bed, which actually usually happens. When
Speaker 2: I get them there, they start laughing with So it's
Speaker 2: the sort of this ass about face way that I
Speaker 2: do that. Anyway, listen, if we finished talking about people
Speaker 2: who we don't like and human.
Speaker 1: Try and bring this one back into harbor. So thank
Speaker 1: you all for listening. If you go to our show notes,
Speaker 1: there's all sorts of links about what we all do.
Speaker 1: There's a Patreon things you can sign up and support us,
Speaker 1: or you can just give us a one off payment
Speaker 1: like Louise did. It's all on there. It's on the website,
Speaker 1: so there's all the little links. It will cost you
Speaker 1: not very much. It will cost you less than a coffee,
Speaker 1: So just go and give us some money because we're
Speaker 1: only going to use it to do things like live
Speaker 1: events and recordings in places and try and offset the
Speaker 1: costs of that. If you like the podcast, I judge you.
Speaker 1: But if you do like the podcast and you think
Speaker 1: other people might like it, then please share it. Share
Speaker 1: it with other people that in your circle and your group,
Speaker 1: even if it's just to say, can you listen to
Speaker 1: what these three idiots are talking about this week? We've
Speaker 1: got some places we want this podcast to go. We've
Speaker 1: got some stuff lined up already. We are thinking weeks
Speaker 1: in advance and when. The feedback we're getting is quite
Speaker 1: good and we do think other people would like it,
Speaker 1: So if you can share it with other people, then
Speaker 1: please do. If you have suggestions for us as well,
Speaker 1: other than stop making it because we know that one already,
Speaker 1: please send them in. We've got social media there you
Speaker 1: can get in touch with any of us.
Speaker 2: There a.
Speaker 3: No I think, just double down on the share it
Speaker 3: with people. Send a little WhatsApp to your pals and
Speaker 3: say I found this entertaining. You might too. That's it.
Speaker 3: Just because podcasts got absolutely terrible discoverability. No one will
Speaker 3: find podcasts. So even if you can shake someone and say, look,
Speaker 3: this is a podcast app, you download it here and
Speaker 3: you can listen to it here in your ears.
Speaker 1: And it's not shameless for us, because we're already there
Speaker 1: and we're just going to keep making it anyway. But
Speaker 1: we have got some guests coming up. There's one this
Speaker 1: month which I'm really looking forward to because I know
Speaker 1: nothing about his topics, so I'm going to ask him
Speaker 1: loads of questions. These guests deserve a wide audience and
Speaker 1: to be heard by a lot of people. So share
Speaker 1: it for the guests, share it for their message, right,
Speaker 1: thank you for listening, Thank you everyone. Were back next
Speaker 1: week with more, well more of the same. Really, it
Speaker 1: might be shorter, it might be longer, who knows. At
Speaker 1: this point Before I go, Richard, yes, where do you
Speaker 1: think we really went wrong with the British Empire?
Speaker 2: Well? Ending it largely. I mean, if you think about it,
Speaker 2: we had very few civil servants, a few good men
Speaker 2: with rifles, and most people were damn happy, weren't they.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, okay they had a flag other
Speaker 2: than their own. But we just went wrong because what
Speaker 2: we said, was that, of course you want your independence.
Speaker 2: No I tell you