Be The Jam

One thing with this being dark most of the time thing that we have going on at the moment is that it is quite possibly the worst time for ones head torch to stop working. It is really frustrating having to do everything by the light of the fire, I do have a small maglite but compared to the head torch it is next to useless and it runs through batteries at an alarming rate.

Note to self - don't attempt to fix things until they are completely and utterly broken, that way things can't get any worse.

Today started with the usual feelings of "crikey it's cold" and "I'm not going to get up until it's warmer" but moved quickly on to frying freshly picked mushrooms over a fire whilst water for tea, washing and shaving heated. Then I had to leave the woods kicking my way through piles of freshly fallen leaves and that heavy drizzle that comes at you sideways on the rain. The bus whisked me into Oxford and since first thing this morning I have been absent from the real world and residing here in cyberspace, organising the website, writing begging letters in the hope of getting equipment / sponsorship / gainful employment and generally trying not to get distracted by the girl sat next to me.

Yesterday I had a cunning plan. I have used an old piece of camouflage tarpaulin to build my semi - permanent basha, this leaves the proper military basha free to be used on excursions about the countryside. The only problem is that the tarpaulin is a bit misshapen and no mater how much I adjust it it sags in the middle. To keep the maximum amount of rain and wind of me it is stretched at 45 degrees between the ground and some overhead branches, the sag in the middle is sufficiently large to use up a lot of what would otherwise be head space. Sitting under a piece of tarp in the middle of a downpour can get quite miserable after a day or two and having not much in the way of head space doesn't improve matters much. Now before anyone starts writing in telling me that I haven't put it up properly and all that is required is sufficient tension to pull the thing flat I have to mention that no matter how much tension I put on the thing it won't lie flat. To be sure I have put in an awful lot of tension on occasion, tent pegs have been ripped out of the ground, bungee cords have pinged off into the yew tree not to reappear for days or even weeks on end and more than one hole has been put in the tarp as the result of slightly over-enthusiastic tensioning of the thing. What was called for was a new approach. This is were the cunning plan came in. A few sticks put in the ground at 45 degrees should hold the thing out of my hair and indeed they do. I found three strong sticks and sharpened them and stuck them into the ground at the aforementioned 45 degrees, it was soon apparent that this wasn't strong enough to withstand some of the winds that we have been having recently, so I found some lengths of hazel left over from my attempt to make a chair and fashioned some supports out of them. To my utter amazement they worked! I'll take some photos.

I have been forwarded the following - one small step for monkey, one giant leap for politics.http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1965569.stm