On 22/03/2023 01:33, Jules Yim wrote:
Our paths may have crossed in Gloucestershire, as I boarded for extended spells in Stow-on-the-Wold with colleagues I call my UK surrogate parents. The drive via Bishop's Cleeve into Cheltenham in a long summer's night is quite the treat.
Yeah, we have some nice countryside around here!I have been to Singapore, back in... 1993 or so, when I was 13. The highlight for me at the time was the electronics parts/tools shops in the Sim Lim Tower (I think I got the name right); the worst part was that my mother decided it would be fun to buy a fake Rolex watch by following a process she'd learnt from a long-haul airline pilot who often visited the area - we had to visit a particular tailor's shop and ask to "speak to Alex"; the shopkeeper would then ask what hotel we were staying at and we had to give a particular name - having completed this trial we were ushered through a secret door hidden behind a rack of cloth, into a blank room that had a video camera in it, whereupon "Alex" opened a door that only had a handle on his side, letting us into a room where he sat at a table, with a bank of CCTV screens of the shop and the intermediate room and his escape routes out the back, and a row of open suitcases full of fake watches. Some haggling later, we duly emerged with a fake watch. My mother was full of delight at how exciting it had been; I was just full of relief that we hadn't been shot or arrested...
[snip]
What is your least favourite thing? (Mine is "strict schedules that fillall my time with boring stuff")Being forced to compete. It brings out the zero-sum approach in me, and it isn't pretty to say the least.
Ugh yes. Competition has its place, but not everything in life has to be a race - in fact, not everything CAN be, it's just not sustainable.
What is your latest thing? (Mine is "Forestry", my wife and I bought alittle patch of forest so are learning how to look after it)Tai chi <https://www.wustyle.com.sg/>! I picked it up about a year ago. It's slow going, a proper disciple model. I've barely mastered the 12 steps after 12 months!
Another thing that doesn't need to be a race ;-)
Would the patch of forest count as rewilding?
No, as it's already wild! It's what's known as "replanted ancient woodland". In the UK, "Ancient woodland" is any bit of land that's been recorded as being woodland for about 300 years, as that's when we first started properly mapping places - anything that's been wood for that long has probably been wood since the retreat of the glaciers. "Replanted", however, means that it's had humans chopping down and replanting trees, so although the larger biosphere is ancient, the trees themselves aren't necessarily. Such replanted ancient woodland has much more diversity of flora and fauna than newly-created woodland, or stuff that's been rewilded. Ours has been turned into a hazel coppice at some point in its history; the trees are mainly hazel and the older ones shown signs of previous coppicing (where you keep chopping the tree at ground level so it regrows into lots of thin, tall, poles which are useful for various things). So one of our goals will be to slowly replace hazels with other local species - ideally grown from stock from the nearby Forest of Dean, as they will be well adapted to the local conditions - in order to restore diversity in the tree population.
-- Alaric Snell-Pym (M0KTN neé M7KIT) http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/
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