While the whole of London heads out of London for the bank holiday weekend (the last of the year, boo hoo), Mr Pod and I are cleverly biding our time and waiting for them all to come back before we head off ourselves, on our own little “special” holiday.

Admittedly our timing has more to do with the fact that Mr Pod’s sister is getting married next week, but it still makes us look cleverer than the millions of Londoners who are on the move this weekend – it’s always such a chaotic exit.

We, on the other hand, are using our bank holiday weekend to prepare for our own delayed bank holiday, codename: Roadtrip 2008.

If all things work out as planned we will not only be attending a wedding in the Lake District (arguably one of the most beautiful parts of the UK), but we will also be stopping to have a look at some beautiful woods on our way up North. So we are in the process of planning our Woods stops along the way. 

We are also still trying to build up some kind of a Woods knowledge base (in case we run into a Woods person and we look like a couple of lost tourists rather than Wood admirers). So what have we learned so far?

We’ve learned that once upon a time the whole of the UK was covered with woods. Nothing but woods. And if you stopped the sheep from grazing now, and got rid of all the people, the Woods would slowly re-establish themselves and would return the UK to it’s mystical grand old self. 

We’ve learned that there is a whole Woods language which, to be honest, makes very little sense to a Woods novice. Take a word like coppice. We know it’s important, and we know it alludes to chopping down trees on a periodic basis, and that it’s good for a Wood to be coppiced, but we really still haven’t got a clue.

We’ve learned that sawing wood is hard work. We know this because we had to saw a small plank of pine in half with a blunt cheap hand saw the other day. It took about 10 minutes and seemed like at least an hour, and it had us huffing and puffing like as if we’d just run the 400m relay. How unfit are we? Scary.

We’ve learned that there are lots of people out there who have owned Woods for decades and who talk a language and have a sensibility that bears no resemblance to our own. It’s as if they are members of some secret Wood community. 

And the more we read the more we want to be allowed to join!

Imagine: Your own bit of Wood, where you go and pitch a tent, and fall asleep, snug in your sleeping bag, to the sound of the leaves rustling in the wind, to the smell of grass and trees and bluebells, and to the sight of the star spangled sky overhead. Magic. 

Oh and we want bees too! But we will come to that later.

 

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