How to keep warm and fit in 9 easy steps.

1. Post a message on-line asking if anyone has wood to chop on a 50:50 share.
2. Get a reply from a lady who says "yes, but you might want to have a look at it first."
3. Go to the woodland to see 6 acres of devastation where various contractors have clear-felled pine, bulldozed it into huge piles and left it to rot.  There is also a lot of dead oak standing about looking precarious.  The wood is on a steep hillside.
4. Turn up with a handsaw and a billhook and start work sawing down trees and sawing up trees.
5. Get a "bit tired" and decide to call it a day, then spend another half hour carrying the metre long 10 inch thick oak logs to the car.
6. Ask the time and discover you've been working at it for 4 hours non-stop, which explains why your arms ache a bit.  This is one of many advantages of refusing to have a clock - you get more done and you turn up on time for everything*.
7. Split the sawn wood 50:50 with the lady who is surprised you didn't use a chainsaw.
8. Come back with a mere metre cubed of logs.
9. Eat a whole packet of pasta, finish the wine and go to bed.

Yes, it's Mount St Helens, but it gives you an idea.  Just add a goat or two.

It would take us about 2 hours to chop the wood down the chemin (see earlier post), which yielded about a metre cubed, so taking travel time out of it and having to give half away, it works out the same.  It would be better, of course, if we could just chop wood in the huge woodland at the bottom of our field but the owner has a reputation for being a bit of an arse...

Oh well, still beats a gym subscription any day of the week.  Except when it's raining.

*Not having a watch means I always over-estimate how long I will take to get somewhere and end up on time, whereas if I had a watch, apart from constantly looking at it for no reason, I would think I could leave and get somewhere in half an hour and would be late because something would inevitably cause a delay, like a bus driver having one of those mystery tea breaks exactly half-way to your destination where he stops and reads his paper for 15 minutes while being perfectly aware that everyone on the bus is wanting to get to work/is bursting for a pee/is trying to catch a plane/etc.  I got the earlier bus and am now having a cup of tea with plenty of time in hand in a mock-Italian/American cafe with loud upbeat music, quiet downbeat clientele, drinks in paper buckets and pastries for giant people.