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