Recently I tried to book a weekend learning Bushcraft but thanks to Ray Mears excellent TV programs, the companies that offer such training are all booked up for at least 2 yearsLast Sunday, to my amazement, there was a Church parade for the local Scout group - I thought they were extinct but no - for 100 years ago this year Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell (1857 - 1941 )introduced woodcraft skills and outdoor life to the poor lads from the London slums.
Like Ray Mears efforts it was astoundingly successful. Indeed so much so that they are now celebrating their Centenary.
There is something in us that hankers after the simple life - look at the enormous sales of BBQ kits and for that matter I believe, that the fishermen vastly outnumber, the active soccer & rugby fans, put together.
From catching food to cooking over wood outdoors to camping and caravanning there is an instinctive urge to get away from the thrall of urban life.
Last autumn I had the pleasure to visit a Craft and Country Fair in the village of Rainford.
Wonderful ferret racing - imagine! but there were charcoal burners, hurdle and basket makers . There was a bowyer making long bows and a bodger turning tool handles using as bent down tree as a spring to power his lathe. There was a cutler dressed in mediaeval leather clothes making knives.
There is something in the Spirit of England that causes ordinary working men and women to research the ancient techniques of hand work of all kinds.
There are the ReEnactment Societies that take their endeavours very very seriously. I bumped into a Roman Centurion in a village near Chester and one of Cromwells Roundheads in the fields near my home. They make replica kit to the exact specifications of the real thing and live exactly in the ancient way as their chosen Association deems correct.
My brother is making a steam engine [even to actually casting the steam chest] and my sister is making the carriages to go with it.
All over the country there are girls [usually] who are learning horse care and all that goes with it
and a horsedrawn ploughing match is a great attraction.
What ever you may think of there is someone, somewhere who is actively engaged in it whether is be competition archery to learning how to light a fire with a bow drill to knapping a spear point from a lump of flint.
When the Oil wells really begin to dry up and all forms of power become atrociously expensive. the world as we know it. will be colder and certainly darker. The work we do will largely depend on these skills so carefully treasured, even resurrected, by hundreds of clubs and associations all over the country and certainly in Europe.
Notice however that the dead hand of Big Business and its Government is strangely missing from all these activiities.
Although best left alone in this way, it would seem useful, to have a public database of contacts, that would supply a lifeline to these precious skills for when they will surely be needed, in our immediate future.
The present generation of pensioners are the only ones left who have actually had to live in an age when there was no traffic, mobiles, Internet, TV, or Jetliners and there are many delivery men in old folks homes who could tell the youth of today how to harness up a horse and put a pint of stout in its feed to perk it up.
