Swap! In The Name Of Love

In the wee hours of each and every Sunday night, at precisely the moment when the Weekend morphs into a Working Day and everyone's dreams are suddenly wrought with a sense of tedious desperation, something special happens in Machynlleth. A computer server kicks up a gear or two, whirrs to itself happily for a moment before blasting out hundreds of identical emails, each one marked for a different recipient, most of whom live locally. This is no spam server. This is the communication that people in Machynlleth jump out of bed early for on Monday mornings. For this mass email is Mach Swapshop.

It is in essence a little like Freecycle but rather than giving things away for nothing, people are encouraged to swap stuff. So if you're offering a desk but really need a chair, you can say so and someone else whose chair needs are over-supplied but are somewhat lacking in the desk department, would respond forthwith and the trade would occur at some mutually benefical time and place. Often of course the match is not quite so serendipitous, so people more usually settle for a bottle of wine, a bar of chocolate, some ready cash, or if they're feeling really generous, nothing at all.

I have a huge radish

Swapshop also lets people do the reverse and put Wanteds ads in, again with the swap philosophy in mind. Upcoming events also get a section so anyone can advertise something they're involved with. In the last Swapshop email I count twenty events advertised, including such diverse activities as a pub quiz night (which I'm planning on attending), a children's book club, a one-woman play about Edith Nesbit, a planetarium show, arts and craft classes, the weekly public lecture Mach Speak (the forum I spoke at a few weeks ago), a children's halloween party and a taster session of Emotional Freedom Technique, Matrix Re-printing, Reiki and Indian Head Massage, to name but a few.

This week's Swapshop email was number 651 so assuming it's been going weekly all that time, I make that over twelve years of Swapshopping! It's definitely well used. There are probably between 30 and 50 things being offered each week. I've made good use of it myself so far, mostly to obtain things - a free-standing clothes rail, a water barrel for my polytunnel, net bags to hang melons from, a jack-to-audio cassette adaptor so I can listen to music in my caravan, lots of plastic pots for seedlings, wooden pallets for stacking firewood, and lots and lots of horse manure. But I've also used it to give away the decrepit old trailer-tent that was on my land when I bought it, to a couple who have since become friends (they're on my pub quiz team tonight.)

I'm concerned these 80 cabbages aren't going to be ready to harvest before I leave in two weeks

Not only is Swapshop all the above but there is often a pithy and uncredited mots de la semaine at the top of each email. I'll leave you with the latest one:

“Imagine if trees gave free wi-fi, we would plant them like crazy. It's a pity they only give us the oxygen we breathe”

Wild Thing

An aspen leaf. It's had a good life wobbling in the breeze. Now it's laid to rest.

The nights are drawing in, and doing a bit of colouring in as well. A new carpet of orangey-brown leaves is being laid everywhere especially around my caravan where the aspens grow (they like to be the first to shed all their leaves). There was a spate of cold nights reaching 1.5 degrees C at the lowest. My fingers that morning were quickly numbed as I spent an hour picking salad leaves, I could barely tie knots in the bags afterwards.

It's pitch black by 7pm which means it's always dark by the time I've finished supper in the caravan and cycle up to my home. I tend to leave my bicycle parked near the top of my land's access track next to a majestic old oak. There's a hole in the bank just next to the tree at about eye-level and on Thursday as I reached for my bike my headtorch happened to shine directly into the hole and I was startled to see two eyes glinting back at me. They belonged to a mammal, quite a large one. I could see its front half. It had brown fur with markings on its face. It didn't seem fazed by my light but just stared back or looked nonchalantly off to one side. After almost a minute of this it eventually decided to retreat inside its den.

The polecat den is just after that large trunk on the left. You can't see it in this photo.

I'm pretty sure it was a polecat after an extensive Google Images search on my return home. Polecats are not so rare these days apparently though it's the first one I've ever seen. It's possible it was a feral ferret. Ferrets are the domesticated version of polecats and are very similar looking. They can also interbreed with polecats to create hybrid polecat-ferrets, also difficult to distinguish. But I think it was probably a polecat. I've reported it to the Vincent Wildlife Trust who are currently running their third 2-year survey of polecat sightings across Britain (dead or alive).

Otters are supposed to be living along the river here too. The ecologist who did my Preliminary Ecological Assessment in 2013 didn't find any evidence on my land but that didn't stop him writing of their probable existence in his report. Neighbours have said they've seen them further up the valley. But I've yet to catch a glimpse of one.

My entire sweetcorn harvest. Better luck next year.

What you really want to see here in Snowdonia is the pine marten. This is the second rarest British mammal after the wildcat. They're doing OK up in Scotland but here the population numbers are tiny and not growing. This has prompted the Vincent Wildlife Trust to boost the Welsh population by bringing a few down from Scotland and hoping they get on with the local Welsh ones. A few came last month and more are on their way according to this press release . It doesn't say exactly where they've released them but I'm hoping one wanders past my caravan soon. Camera at the ready!

Oh no! one of my two decent squashes has split

Beware the Gwyniad

The mice have paid the slugs to eat the bait before they are tempted to have a nibble

There is a lake twenty miles to the north of my home where the Gwyniad lives. 22,000 years ago as the last glacial period came to a welcome end this plucky little whitefish was left stranded in Llyn Tegid, or as the English prefer, Bala Lake. The species is found nowhere else on Earth now, or at least wasn't until a few years ago when some of them were scooped out and popped into a nearby lake. Some scientists had noticed that population numbers were dropping so it was thought best to double their chances of survival and give some of them a new home. Let's hope they make it to the next glacial period.

The town of Bala perches at the north-eastern corner of the lake where the River Dee flows out from it, off to Chester and the Irish sea. Apart from the lake, Bala has one high street and a church wherever you happen to look. It also has a reputation for being a bastion of Welshness. Welsh is the language you'd hear on the street. The parish church advertises a Welsh-language-only service followed by a bilingual one. All the signs are Welsh first then English.

One of the very few butternut squashes in my polytunnel

Luckily for me, it also has a ystad ddiwydiannol (don't bother trying to read that backwards, it's Welsh for industrial estate) with a unit that advertised chainsawing servicing and repairs. For my trusty saw, or should I say untrusty, had once again given up on me and, no doubt daunted at the remaining piles of wood that need sawing, simply refuses to start.

On Monday I made the journey to Bala choosing the scenic route which confusingly is also the direct route, being several miles shorter than going via Dolgellau. It does involve climbing over the highest mountain pass in north Wales, however, which is rather wonderful for its views at the top. You can even get out at a little car park there and once finished taking in the panorama, be informed by a small sign that test drivers of Austin cars used to hurtle along this self-same single lane track.

The wooden-steepled mediaeval church of Llanbrynmair which I visited for the first time last Sunday

So the chainsaw people took my chainsaw into the back and pretty quickly got it roaring away. A few minutes later it was back on the counter. “Yes it's fixed” said the man, “he's tuned the carburettor and replaced the fuel filter.” I handed over the required number of pounds and after a short mosey around Bala, went home. Of course, the infernal machine still refuses to start. I called them up and spoke to the guy who'd worked on it who told me rather gallingly that it had started pretty easily for him. I hung up. Thankfully in rural Wales, like deep space, no one can hear you scream.

The wood pile grows ever larger

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

The bolted lettuces lift their arms to the rising sun in worship

As my axe swung down to split the round larch log before me, at the exact moment it made contact a shotgun blast went off just across the river making it feel like I had a far more powerful tool in my hands. This axe was dynamite! The wood didn't split though.

The sheer number of axe swings I've been making recently coupled with the fact that the pheasant shooting season is now open presumably makes it a statistical likelihood that the timings of axe thwack and gun shot will coincide once in a while. That doesn't stop it feeling like a miracle.

Count those rings. I reckon it's over 70 years old

Most of the eighteen big larch trees that were sectionally-felled by the council back in March as they improved the road barrier bordering my land are still lying around in intimidating piles. At least they were until a few weeks ago when I bought a new chain for my chainsaw which miraculously healed it of its inability to cut through anything, and since then I've been using all my spare moments to saw the large chunks into smaller chunks and then splitting them with an axe. Trying to get someone with a log splitter to come and do it for cash has proved fruitless so I've turned myself into a lumberjack. And I'm ok.

The split wood is being stacked on a series of pallets and covered with corrugated iron sheets to keep the rain off. According to this firewood-selling website larch only takes a few months to dry out properly. Then I'll be hawking it around the local wood-burning-stove-owning population.

This was taken a few days ago. It's now full. I'll have to start making it higher.

Talking of statistics (which we were a couple of paragraphs ago, unless you skipped it due to the utterly boring nature of statistics) a recent WWF/Unilever survey has shown that only 1% of us could correctly identify five common British trees - oak, ash, birch, beech and horse chestnut. Now I don't know exactly how the survey posed the question but if it said “Here are the leaves of the oak, ash, birch, beech and horse chestnut, can you identify which is which?” then if all respondents had answered completely randomly you'd still expect a 0.83% success rate (1 in 120). Let's round that up to 1%. So the survey is actually telling us that no one at all knows one tree from another. Time to get people out of the cities and into the woodlands.

A miniature mushroom woodland on one of my garden paths