cool license to ramble
good bloke on the whole - through tracks he reached the kids I worked with which made scouting more fun and gave me an excuse to go into survival more deeply with them. those ten minute snippets In my eyes worked best as they seem to struggle to keep a full program going. unlike top gear they seem to struggle for newer ideas which is a shame as they could have covered the original ones a lot better. even bear grylls has worked out he can get twice the airtime from one location so doubles the money.
the first book was well written but the later ones not so good but palletable and good for beginners which I guess is the audience after all.
I guess woodlore must be making money going by the queues for courses and the prices they charged being twice everyone elses till the rest caught up. the kit prices do seem a bit silly sometimes almost as if they are buying retail and shipping the stuff over before adding their mark up. not as much as the grylls kit though. the allan wood knives are good handmade bits of kit and weren't a bad price till collectors and people with too much money drove the prices up so they were selling at 700+ on ebay. the grylls knife starts at £350 and is factory made so someone has learnt along the way. cragghoppers kit was never that cheap anyway.
I still dont understand the whole bushcraft thing as to me and many others its just a rebranding exercise - in his shows ray does say 'this is what I like to call bushcraft' which is fair enough. scouts called it backwoods or survival skills, soldiers called it field craft, the americans called it backwoods or woodcraft but it has nothing to do with what most people do when they go into the woods - which is really just camping lets be honest. supposedly the first time ray saw a possibles pouch he told the guy he looked like a re-enactor how times change.
People have picked up on bushcraft and with the books and series so as a name its stuck, I dont have any problems with it except what people and companies are lumping together under that umbrella. its a bit like every piece of of army surplus or survival equipment of ebay has to has the letters SAS with it and increasingly bushcraft. It somtimes seems that its taken everything classed as a craft which would previously labelled the owners as a hippy and made it ok. Again I have no problems with that except some of the almost exclusive attitudes of some of the 'crafters which spoils it for the everyday person wondering what its all about. I see it on many forums where a beginner turns up with a question and get replies of boring or do a search this has been covered before. yes it has so if you find it boring then let someone else answer the question otherwise you drive people away. this almost elitist attitude isn't just something I've picked up on there is a lot who dont understand why there appears to be a rift in the first place. Maybe its just because the best source of information is still the myriad of survival handbooks out there and they dont want to be called survivalists which was the general term used untill the endtimers made it their own or survivors as they hadn't survived anything - yet!
being an overnight invention (unless you lived in newzealand) then it does seemed to have been lacking boundries as none had been defined. I think 'crafting as its now known amongst initiates is better as lets face it most of the stuff is about finding out older ways of doing stuff and becoming a bit more enviromental in our outlook. Bushcraft does sound more exciting than primitive living or stone age skills even though that is exactly what is being practised.
knives and kit are a bug bear of mine and I constantly compare cost and benefits. the jeremiah johnson type mountain men used the cheapest kitchen knives and axes they could get as they were easy to replace so I've gone out and seen just how much you can do with a veg knife, cooks knife, even just a piece or hacksaw or a tin can lid (I dont recomend taking just a potato peeler though). I'm happy with mass produced stuff as after 20,000+ they should have got it right. and I know I can replace it there is a lot of copycat rubbish out there though and allways has been. all this - 'this is better than that' or 'you must have this' is a bit daft really as surely its not whether its stainless or carbon or titanium or ventile but whether its up to the job and you know how to use it properly. chatting to someone else on here in the pub and we were talking about his recent jungle trip. he took a golock which he had reground and tuttied up but he admitted he was crap with it. When he gave it to a local iban who did everything with a large blade from childhood he said he was amazed.
I do wonder about the term armchair and how it applies. surely the true bushcrafters aren't on here or anywhere because they dont have a tv, t'internet or even an armchair for that matter. I'm happy with the term armchair being applied to the search for knowledge though as well all do some of it. as a keen survivalcrafter (there managed to avoid the term survivalist) I do a lot of armchair watching, reading and online stuff practising when I can wherever I can allways looking for different ways of doing stuff or new things to try so as I am still involved and doing stuff then its still productive, Its just that I'm sat down in my house instead of swinging in a tree practising my survivalcraft or just enjoying the outdoors