Journey
We set off about 1 o'clock after packing, lights, oil and air pressure checks. After 10 miles we hit the M25 which was already chocca and doing about 10 miles an hour, little did we know that on the road our average speed was to be 20 mph for the first 100 miles. Maybe it's better we didn't, as at junction 23 (still on the M25) I went into the service station before I lost it. When we were moving faster than 5mph driving was difficult as the roads were wet so there was a lot of spray so everything was white and fog like conditions. Not quite enough for fog lights but my Eagle Eyes sunglasses were a godsend as they are designed to remove glare and easily doubled visibility.
After junction 16 on the M1 and our last service station stop to feed the kids the road was clear and it had stopped raining we were able to get the hammer down and cover the last 50 miles in an hour.
Set Up
Arriving at 8.30 the main order of business was to get a fire pit dug and fire on so the adults could get dinner. We had to feed the kids at 6 on burgers from a service station so they didn't flake out. We Bought some logs and got the fire lit by splitting some logs for kindling and using a primitive fire lighting method which involves birch bark a stone-age turbo-flame lighter and ye olde barbecue lighting gel.
With everyone fed and packed off to bed then I got on with finishing unpacking and setting up the second tent and ended up hitting the sack about 1 am. However my reward for this was a quite magnificent full moon.
Saturday Morning
Next morning I woke at 7. I had started out warm enough but in a later conversation with Angst we would both regret not bringing our Arctic sleeping bags. The down summer sleeping bags were to win out this trip.
I had made visiting Angst a priority as Leathercraft is now his living, this was his first stall at a Bushcraft show and he was pretty nervous about it. His stuff is indeed good and you can easily see how how he is making a profession out of it.
Once breakfast had been accomplished we set off to get our bearings and unsurprisingly quickly ended up led by the kids to the 100m zip wire, which they got quite a kick out of.
On the way to the zipwire we met Treadlightly who had suggested setting up a BCUK corner and had done so, as it turns out, by being camped right next to us and recruiting some of his other neighbours. It also turned out that we'd known him from the BushMoot in 2011 but hadn't connected him to his online persona.
Lofty Wiseman
While browsing after the zipwire Ms. Swift spotted lofty Wiseman who was due to speak soon so I took my opportunity to go speak to him. Despite having sold literally millions of copies of his book and written plenty more, Lofty is (as his reputation) very approachable and very interested in people. I was still a bit nervous as even though I'd had his book since 1986 and should have had 100 questions on practical bushy/survival matters the only question I had related to the fate of the hero of his latest book and first fiction book "Operation Lavivrus". This question seemed to go down quite well and he explained he was in the process of writing the sequel and that this aspect of the story was to illustrate the soldiers doing the deeds and the officers doing the deeds and officers getting the credit. With the confidence to be expected from someone like Lofty, when I said the book was as good as anything Andy McNab or Chris Ryan did he said "it's better" and when I asked why it was only in ebook and not in print like theirs he said they were waiting to see how it did.
Lofty then popped off for a brew before his talk. When I came back to the tent for the talk he was sitting in the middle of the crowd so I sat down next to him and picked up the conversation. One of the things I mentioned was survival tins as there had been a thread on BCUK about these and Wingstoo had posted some of Lofty's comments on the subject. "Good stuff" was what Lofty had to say when he found out I was a member of the forum and then he immediately asked if I knew Drew.
By this time the kids had turned up beside me when mentioning the book and getting them signed they were greeted with the same question I was, "What's on page 18?". (I been too nervous to think of the retort "Which edition?" at the time. ). Lofty had had seven kids so was big into family and talked to the kids as normally as adults, possibly more so than the adults. Later when retrieving my pen after the book signing session he gave Mole (Swallow Jr. 2) advice on knife use and safety including that he preferred a bigger finger guard than the Mora Clipper has.
Lofty's talk started on the theme technology is great but it can fail so have a back up e.g. GPS should be backed up by a map and compass and the skills to use them. This was continually demonstrated during the talk by the slide projector refusing to work. Then followed an early history of the regiment and how they developed kit starting by botching together what they had. In Norway for example the only difference in their gear from the desert was the addition of a Parka and wood screws in their boots to hold the skis on. After laughing at them the Norwegians gave them Norwegian kit.
Continuing on the arctic there was a section on frostbite backed up with pictures (at the end when the projector relented) showing how the frostbitten parts turn black over a period of time and only when the white line appears weeks later can the amputation take place.
Prompted by the news of the recent death of a very experienced foraged who died after picking and eating young death cap mushrooms. There followed a lot of detail on how to identify that family of mushrooms and other deadly families but always coming back to "if you have any doubt whatsoever leave them alone".
Q&A was pre-empted with "before anyone asks I don't like the short fat one and I think the other one is dangerous".
Paul Kirtley
Later I went looking for Paul Kirtley of Frontier Bushcraft to ask about his Tanzanian trips. Basically does he do longer trips and how would a middle aged softie like me who thinks 25C is a heat wave prepare for such a trip? Paul was very generous with his time and we covered a range of related subjects including the Hadza, Massai, African politics and his post on his path to being a bushcraft instructor. Then he had to shut up shop and he suggested meeting him in the beer tent after Ray Goodwin's talk that evening. Sadly I was unable to take this up as by that time I was knackered.
Ray Goodwin
Ray's talk on his canoeing career and how he got started was interesting. His endurance verges on being bonkers. He did bust the spatula myth from the Ray Mear's Bushcraft episode though. It seems the spatula he made started out as a spatula and not a canoe paddle as Ben Southall's editing of the programme suggests.
One of the most interesting themes to me that was weaved through the talk was when to sit and wait and when to go. The generic example he gave at the start was where "western" explorers would be with Arctic Natives and want to stick to to a tightly defined schedule. The explorers would get uppity about and move out on time in bad conditions and struggle through for for days only to be caught up by the Natives in one day, who had waited for good conditions. Ray mentioned on several trips about when they pushed on when the going was good and when they waited.
Sunday Morning
Having tried to do too much on Saturday I had now realised it was time to slow down take 2 priorities each do those and anything else was a bonus. Perhaps I had unwittingly been influenced by Ray Goodwin's Native attitude story.
Canoeing with Wild-Dog
Wild-Dog (Swallow Jr. 1) only had only one priority and that was canoeing so first thing we did was get in the queue for that. The first half hour session was a bit awkward and I'm not sure how much he got out of that but when we returned there was no queue so I figured I wanted to go out again even if he did not. But somehow I talked him into going out with me again and not paddling which he agreed to. As it turned out he did a lot of paddling and tired from the first time, with a bit more instruction and no pressure he did really well and was an actual partner in paddling.
Mykel and Ruth Hawke
One of my main objectives for the day was the talk by Mykel and Ruth Hawke. Slow on lunch meant I missed the first few minutes but I caught the end of a story which ended "If my wife doesn't make it out of the desert you guys won't either." as it happens I later caught up with Mykel and the full story was that the first program they did was in the desert and the producer's insisted on them walking during the day against Mykel's advice. Ruth went down with heatstroke and Mykel wanted the Medic brought in. The program makers were saying "you can't give up" at which point Mykel made his threat and the medic was called in.
One of the most interesting points of the talk for me was that they find it really difficult to find wilderness to film in. They can't use national parks as they aren't allowed to kill anything in them, so they need private land that is wilderness. Their criteria for wilderness is take a chopper up and circle without seeing any roads and they are now looking around Asia a lot for something that meets this criteria.
During the book signing I asked Mykel about where his name came from and he said his mother was Greek and that he was also Apache (he mentioned the tribe but I've forgotten it) and I mentioned briefly about the Geronimo episode of we shall remain which shows the Apache being taught to run at an very early age with the result that when on the move in his sixties he could run over 40 miles in one day. He said if they couldn't do that they would die.
After another talk by Daniel Mosiro & Jason Ingamells I hooked up with Ms. Swift and the kids and Mykel was standing with a pint next to the Hennie Haynes stall where they were promoting his knives. We were able to get a photo for with the kids and this is where I caught up on the desert story. Mykel struck me as being the most personable person I've ever met, and just a regular guy. A lot like Lofty with an American flavour. Happy to take plenty of time encouraging Mole to join in the photo when he got shy and talk to Wild-Dog about his watch/compass/other things gadget clipped to his belt.
Daniel Mosiro & Jason Ingamells
In between Mykel's book signing and bumping into him at the Hennie Haynes stall I had been at a talk with Daniel Mosiro & Jason Ingamells. Jason had brought over the Massai dance troupe. Jason started working with these guys so that he could have both access to the Massai for his bushcraft courses and that benefit went the other way as well. The tribe are very poor but due to this arrangement they have a thriving school which gives the kids more choice in that they can choose to go traditional, modern or a mix. One of the main components is the dance troop. Daniel was the only one who had been to the UK before and had an excellent command of English. He started by saying we would find his Massai name unpronounceable so we would stick with Daniel. I had seen him conversing with other people regarding gathering water and telling it them it takes a day to fetch water and it lasts for five days. The other six who made up the troop have not been outside their own area before let alone outside Kenya or on an aeroplane. I did speak to them later and they had found the aeroplane terrifying.
Daniel spoke a bit on various questions. The things that struck me most was the roles in the culture and that they give responsibility to the kids very young and keep increasing this. A boy will start looking after his father's cows/goats age four. When a woman reaches 60 she is deemed to be old and doesn't have to work anymore but what she does do is round up the kids and tell them the mythical and historical stories of the tribe. Men on the other hand teach the kids what they do.
Sunday Evening
After dinner I caught up some BCUK people. Angst was trying to get us to join him in the stall-holders "pub" quiz but as Treadlightly and I weren't stall-holders we felt a bit out of place and went off to the beer tent. Outside we met Elen, who showed a striking turn of pace when the fire-spinning guy who was the entertainment put on some thumpy music she didn't like. I wasn't able to stay as long as I would have liked as, due to the heat I think, I now had a migraine style headache and felt like throwing up. I got back to the tents and moved my sleeping gear in the big tent with the others. Ms. Swift gave me a something for it and it all settled down and I went to sleep pretty quickly.
Monday Morning
Woke up very early but in much better shape. Even with the focusing on one or two things there was still a lot to do today. Mole wanted to do canoeing and had a knife safety session booked in with Ian Cresswell at 12.30. One of my main reasons for coming was the Massai who were dancing at 11.00 & 14.00. I'd miss the 11.00 taking Mole canoeing, and if 14.00 was cancelled for some reason I'd have missed them all. On top of all that we had to pack our gear up and leave by 15.00 to give us plenty of time to get back to London for work the next day and allow for returning Bank Holiday traffic and possibly the same level of traffic carnage as on the way up. Fortunately the early start helped.
Canoeing with Mole
I was wondering how the canoeing would go with Mole's size. The instructor said a canoe paddle set on the ground should come to your chin. I found this really unwieldy and would have preferred a paddle about half that length, but according this criteria Mole's paddle fitted. Mole's first session was quieter than Wild-Dog's and he got into it much quicker and did well, possibly helped by me expecting to be me paddling and him along for the ride so I wasn't as pushy. I found out later from Ms. Swift he had liked it a lot.
Ian Cresswell
At 12.20 Mole had disappeared. I found him sat queued for his knife safety with Ian Cresswell. The format for the bushcraft show was that Ian did a one-to-one with each child for 30 mins. There was no charge for this and Ian was doing this from 10 - 5 each day with a lunch break. I had asked him how he coped with that and he had said Port in the evening. That's a great line but watching Ian working you can see he has a genius for it and it doesn't look like a struggle for him at all more like something he is naturally meant to be doing.
Massai Dance Troop
After lunch it was down to the Massai for 14.00 which was ON. As it turns out this being the last thing was a great way to end, going out on a high. As long as I wasn't trying to photograph or film and actually just watch and be there in the moment it was a remarkable experience. When tuned in the depth of the experience (and maybe the shortage of sleep) reminded me of Stonehenge Summer Solstice experiences.
We set off about 1 o'clock after packing, lights, oil and air pressure checks. After 10 miles we hit the M25 which was already chocca and doing about 10 miles an hour, little did we know that on the road our average speed was to be 20 mph for the first 100 miles. Maybe it's better we didn't, as at junction 23 (still on the M25) I went into the service station before I lost it. When we were moving faster than 5mph driving was difficult as the roads were wet so there was a lot of spray so everything was white and fog like conditions. Not quite enough for fog lights but my Eagle Eyes sunglasses were a godsend as they are designed to remove glare and easily doubled visibility.
After junction 16 on the M1 and our last service station stop to feed the kids the road was clear and it had stopped raining we were able to get the hammer down and cover the last 50 miles in an hour.
Set Up
Arriving at 8.30 the main order of business was to get a fire pit dug and fire on so the adults could get dinner. We had to feed the kids at 6 on burgers from a service station so they didn't flake out. We Bought some logs and got the fire lit by splitting some logs for kindling and using a primitive fire lighting method which involves birch bark a stone-age turbo-flame lighter and ye olde barbecue lighting gel.
With everyone fed and packed off to bed then I got on with finishing unpacking and setting up the second tent and ended up hitting the sack about 1 am. However my reward for this was a quite magnificent full moon.
Saturday Morning
Next morning I woke at 7. I had started out warm enough but in a later conversation with Angst we would both regret not bringing our Arctic sleeping bags. The down summer sleeping bags were to win out this trip.
I had made visiting Angst a priority as Leathercraft is now his living, this was his first stall at a Bushcraft show and he was pretty nervous about it. His stuff is indeed good and you can easily see how how he is making a profession out of it.
Once breakfast had been accomplished we set off to get our bearings and unsurprisingly quickly ended up led by the kids to the 100m zip wire, which they got quite a kick out of.
On the way to the zipwire we met Treadlightly who had suggested setting up a BCUK corner and had done so, as it turns out, by being camped right next to us and recruiting some of his other neighbours. It also turned out that we'd known him from the BushMoot in 2011 but hadn't connected him to his online persona.
Lofty Wiseman
While browsing after the zipwire Ms. Swift spotted lofty Wiseman who was due to speak soon so I took my opportunity to go speak to him. Despite having sold literally millions of copies of his book and written plenty more, Lofty is (as his reputation) very approachable and very interested in people. I was still a bit nervous as even though I'd had his book since 1986 and should have had 100 questions on practical bushy/survival matters the only question I had related to the fate of the hero of his latest book and first fiction book "Operation Lavivrus". This question seemed to go down quite well and he explained he was in the process of writing the sequel and that this aspect of the story was to illustrate the soldiers doing the deeds and the officers doing the deeds and officers getting the credit. With the confidence to be expected from someone like Lofty, when I said the book was as good as anything Andy McNab or Chris Ryan did he said "it's better" and when I asked why it was only in ebook and not in print like theirs he said they were waiting to see how it did.
Lofty then popped off for a brew before his talk. When I came back to the tent for the talk he was sitting in the middle of the crowd so I sat down next to him and picked up the conversation. One of the things I mentioned was survival tins as there had been a thread on BCUK about these and Wingstoo had posted some of Lofty's comments on the subject. "Good stuff" was what Lofty had to say when he found out I was a member of the forum and then he immediately asked if I knew Drew.
By this time the kids had turned up beside me when mentioning the book and getting them signed they were greeted with the same question I was, "What's on page 18?". (I been too nervous to think of the retort "Which edition?" at the time. ). Lofty had had seven kids so was big into family and talked to the kids as normally as adults, possibly more so than the adults. Later when retrieving my pen after the book signing session he gave Mole (Swallow Jr. 2) advice on knife use and safety including that he preferred a bigger finger guard than the Mora Clipper has.
Lofty's talk started on the theme technology is great but it can fail so have a back up e.g. GPS should be backed up by a map and compass and the skills to use them. This was continually demonstrated during the talk by the slide projector refusing to work. Then followed an early history of the regiment and how they developed kit starting by botching together what they had. In Norway for example the only difference in their gear from the desert was the addition of a Parka and wood screws in their boots to hold the skis on. After laughing at them the Norwegians gave them Norwegian kit.
Continuing on the arctic there was a section on frostbite backed up with pictures (at the end when the projector relented) showing how the frostbitten parts turn black over a period of time and only when the white line appears weeks later can the amputation take place.
Prompted by the news of the recent death of a very experienced foraged who died after picking and eating young death cap mushrooms. There followed a lot of detail on how to identify that family of mushrooms and other deadly families but always coming back to "if you have any doubt whatsoever leave them alone".
Q&A was pre-empted with "before anyone asks I don't like the short fat one and I think the other one is dangerous".
Paul Kirtley
Later I went looking for Paul Kirtley of Frontier Bushcraft to ask about his Tanzanian trips. Basically does he do longer trips and how would a middle aged softie like me who thinks 25C is a heat wave prepare for such a trip? Paul was very generous with his time and we covered a range of related subjects including the Hadza, Massai, African politics and his post on his path to being a bushcraft instructor. Then he had to shut up shop and he suggested meeting him in the beer tent after Ray Goodwin's talk that evening. Sadly I was unable to take this up as by that time I was knackered.
Ray Goodwin
Ray's talk on his canoeing career and how he got started was interesting. His endurance verges on being bonkers. He did bust the spatula myth from the Ray Mear's Bushcraft episode though. It seems the spatula he made started out as a spatula and not a canoe paddle as Ben Southall's editing of the programme suggests.
One of the most interesting themes to me that was weaved through the talk was when to sit and wait and when to go. The generic example he gave at the start was where "western" explorers would be with Arctic Natives and want to stick to to a tightly defined schedule. The explorers would get uppity about and move out on time in bad conditions and struggle through for for days only to be caught up by the Natives in one day, who had waited for good conditions. Ray mentioned on several trips about when they pushed on when the going was good and when they waited.
Sunday Morning
Having tried to do too much on Saturday I had now realised it was time to slow down take 2 priorities each do those and anything else was a bonus. Perhaps I had unwittingly been influenced by Ray Goodwin's Native attitude story.
Canoeing with Wild-Dog
Wild-Dog (Swallow Jr. 1) only had only one priority and that was canoeing so first thing we did was get in the queue for that. The first half hour session was a bit awkward and I'm not sure how much he got out of that but when we returned there was no queue so I figured I wanted to go out again even if he did not. But somehow I talked him into going out with me again and not paddling which he agreed to. As it turned out he did a lot of paddling and tired from the first time, with a bit more instruction and no pressure he did really well and was an actual partner in paddling.
Mykel and Ruth Hawke
One of my main objectives for the day was the talk by Mykel and Ruth Hawke. Slow on lunch meant I missed the first few minutes but I caught the end of a story which ended "If my wife doesn't make it out of the desert you guys won't either." as it happens I later caught up with Mykel and the full story was that the first program they did was in the desert and the producer's insisted on them walking during the day against Mykel's advice. Ruth went down with heatstroke and Mykel wanted the Medic brought in. The program makers were saying "you can't give up" at which point Mykel made his threat and the medic was called in.
One of the most interesting points of the talk for me was that they find it really difficult to find wilderness to film in. They can't use national parks as they aren't allowed to kill anything in them, so they need private land that is wilderness. Their criteria for wilderness is take a chopper up and circle without seeing any roads and they are now looking around Asia a lot for something that meets this criteria.
During the book signing I asked Mykel about where his name came from and he said his mother was Greek and that he was also Apache (he mentioned the tribe but I've forgotten it) and I mentioned briefly about the Geronimo episode of we shall remain which shows the Apache being taught to run at an very early age with the result that when on the move in his sixties he could run over 40 miles in one day. He said if they couldn't do that they would die.
After another talk by Daniel Mosiro & Jason Ingamells I hooked up with Ms. Swift and the kids and Mykel was standing with a pint next to the Hennie Haynes stall where they were promoting his knives. We were able to get a photo for with the kids and this is where I caught up on the desert story. Mykel struck me as being the most personable person I've ever met, and just a regular guy. A lot like Lofty with an American flavour. Happy to take plenty of time encouraging Mole to join in the photo when he got shy and talk to Wild-Dog about his watch/compass/other things gadget clipped to his belt.
Daniel Mosiro & Jason Ingamells
In between Mykel's book signing and bumping into him at the Hennie Haynes stall I had been at a talk with Daniel Mosiro & Jason Ingamells. Jason had brought over the Massai dance troupe. Jason started working with these guys so that he could have both access to the Massai for his bushcraft courses and that benefit went the other way as well. The tribe are very poor but due to this arrangement they have a thriving school which gives the kids more choice in that they can choose to go traditional, modern or a mix. One of the main components is the dance troop. Daniel was the only one who had been to the UK before and had an excellent command of English. He started by saying we would find his Massai name unpronounceable so we would stick with Daniel. I had seen him conversing with other people regarding gathering water and telling it them it takes a day to fetch water and it lasts for five days. The other six who made up the troop have not been outside their own area before let alone outside Kenya or on an aeroplane. I did speak to them later and they had found the aeroplane terrifying.
Daniel spoke a bit on various questions. The things that struck me most was the roles in the culture and that they give responsibility to the kids very young and keep increasing this. A boy will start looking after his father's cows/goats age four. When a woman reaches 60 she is deemed to be old and doesn't have to work anymore but what she does do is round up the kids and tell them the mythical and historical stories of the tribe. Men on the other hand teach the kids what they do.
Sunday Evening
After dinner I caught up some BCUK people. Angst was trying to get us to join him in the stall-holders "pub" quiz but as Treadlightly and I weren't stall-holders we felt a bit out of place and went off to the beer tent. Outside we met Elen, who showed a striking turn of pace when the fire-spinning guy who was the entertainment put on some thumpy music she didn't like. I wasn't able to stay as long as I would have liked as, due to the heat I think, I now had a migraine style headache and felt like throwing up. I got back to the tents and moved my sleeping gear in the big tent with the others. Ms. Swift gave me a something for it and it all settled down and I went to sleep pretty quickly.
Monday Morning
Woke up very early but in much better shape. Even with the focusing on one or two things there was still a lot to do today. Mole wanted to do canoeing and had a knife safety session booked in with Ian Cresswell at 12.30. One of my main reasons for coming was the Massai who were dancing at 11.00 & 14.00. I'd miss the 11.00 taking Mole canoeing, and if 14.00 was cancelled for some reason I'd have missed them all. On top of all that we had to pack our gear up and leave by 15.00 to give us plenty of time to get back to London for work the next day and allow for returning Bank Holiday traffic and possibly the same level of traffic carnage as on the way up. Fortunately the early start helped.
Canoeing with Mole
I was wondering how the canoeing would go with Mole's size. The instructor said a canoe paddle set on the ground should come to your chin. I found this really unwieldy and would have preferred a paddle about half that length, but according this criteria Mole's paddle fitted. Mole's first session was quieter than Wild-Dog's and he got into it much quicker and did well, possibly helped by me expecting to be me paddling and him along for the ride so I wasn't as pushy. I found out later from Ms. Swift he had liked it a lot.
Ian Cresswell
At 12.20 Mole had disappeared. I found him sat queued for his knife safety with Ian Cresswell. The format for the bushcraft show was that Ian did a one-to-one with each child for 30 mins. There was no charge for this and Ian was doing this from 10 - 5 each day with a lunch break. I had asked him how he coped with that and he had said Port in the evening. That's a great line but watching Ian working you can see he has a genius for it and it doesn't look like a struggle for him at all more like something he is naturally meant to be doing.
Massai Dance Troop
After lunch it was down to the Massai for 14.00 which was ON. As it turns out this being the last thing was a great way to end, going out on a high. As long as I wasn't trying to photograph or film and actually just watch and be there in the moment it was a remarkable experience. When tuned in the depth of the experience (and maybe the shortage of sleep) reminded me of Stonehenge Summer Solstice experiences.
