Today I made a new personal achievement to add to my cv - tree felling! At the bottom of our garden were two spindly coniferous trees (sorry I'm not an expert so I can't be more specific), one of which was already blocking out most of the sunlight and threatened to further loom in immensity if left unchecked. It turned out that most of the branches were half rotten and could just be pulled off. The tallest tree was about 12 ft and I took it down with the classic technique of cutting a wedge in the same side as I wanted it to fall, cut a slit in the other side then basically pulled it down. The root took ages to get out, but it was very satisfying. I'm revelling in my arm-scratches right now. I worked as a gardner when I first left school, it can be quite nice work but it is very tiring, I fell asleep after my efforts today.
My sleep was aided by watching the "Wonders of the Universe" on BBC i-player, a documentary with Brian Cox warbling on about the arrow of time, while mooching about various moody locations. There were some turtles in it, I'm not sure if it had a major revlatory point to make as I fell asleep about half way through it (the Star Trek effect). There have been quite a few interesting documentaries on BBC lately, Horizon last week had a look at whether humans are still evolving, although it mostly showed the presenter in various moody locations. It touched upon variations in human populations over the world - Sherpas in Nepal having a greater network of blood vessels to aid survival at higher altitudes (although I'm not nc that this was just a physiological rather than genetic adaptation) and the prevalence of the lactase gene for digesting milk, very common in north european populations and very rare in south east asia. Explains why I didn't see many milkman doing the rounds in Cambodia.
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