“Well what’s it to be tonight, lads? Gladys, fetch my bottle of Highland Park over with my pint will you please? What? Of course I want a glass. I’ll put you over my knee, my girl, and smack your bottom for cheek if you’re not careful. Second thoughts I won’t because you might start to enjoy it. Stop it now, girl! You’re about to make a happy man very old. You’re not supposed to give the customers heart attacks it’s not good for trade.

“Of course I meant it, Alf. Gladys, give Alf a kiss as you pass him will you, Love? I think he’s feeling lonely while Ellen’s at the daughter’s. What is it she’s having, Alf, her third? Now what’s it to be, lads? A tale of the old country? Tales of long ago? Something recent? A long one or a couple of shorter tales? Ok Eric. Recent it is, but I’ll probably fit something else in too because what I have in mind is quite short.

“Let’s see. We’ll call this The Beech O’er the Beck. Now give over, Stan. I forgot you know what happened. I’ll try to keep the fabrications of the new truth to a minimum. You all recall that storm a couple of months ago, The first autumn storm on the first weekend in October it was? You do? Good! Well it blew one of our beech trees down, and it fell over the beck onto Willy Graham’s barbed wire fence and into his field. No, Alf. Willy Graham the farmer, Fatty’s lad, not Billy Graham the evangelist. Hell man you need to get out more and meet a few more people!

“It wasn’t a big tree, maybe fifteen inches in diameter at the base, but it was our responsibility, and in any case the firewood would come in handy. Now you all know I’m building an extension for a new workshop at the moment, so I could have done without this. However, I took a pair of loppers into the field and removed all the thin branches worth burning, leaving the brash on the ground. I threw the branches over the beck and lopped them into lengths suitable for the fire.

“I’ll get to the brash eventually, Alf. Stan, stop it. If you can’t behave yourself, sod off and play darts. Now, Elle barrowed the firewood away to the house. Because she won’t let me do anything on my own, Gerry. That’s so I can’t say I did it without being pulled up to say we did it. It’s how she is. Yeah well, wait till you’ve been married to Gwen as long as I have to Elle then you’ll know.

“Next, using a chain saw I cut the tree into logs leaving five foot on the root stock lying over the beck. I threw the logs over the beck for Elle to barrow away. I wrapped a strop, just call it a rope, Alf, round the remainder intending to pull it over to my side of the beck with my truck using a hundred metre length of nylon strapping to reach the road. It came over to my side all right but lodged behind a pine tree. Yeah I know Murphy’s Law.

“Now, despite having about six of them, wouldn’t you know it there was no gevlik to be found, before anybody asks a gevlik is a heavy, six foot crowbar, and I usually use a spring steel buck rake tine. The three foot pry bar I did find was of no use. In fact it was so useless I over balanced and went in the beck up to my thighs. Stop it, Stan. Now Elle can always be relied on to laugh herself silly when I do anything as stupid as that, and she didn’t disappoint me, but after fifty-odd years of marriage I didn’t expect her to. She was laughing so hard she took off running to the house for the lavatory before she wet herself.

“Eventually I used some brains and with a squelching of my toes I shortened the stump by a foot with the chainsaw so it no longer lodged behind the tree, and then pulled it onto my bank with the truck. I cut it up into sixteen inch lengths just leaving the root stock. I split the wide bits with an axe into pieces that would go into the fire, and called it a day.

“I’m getting there, Geoff, I’m getting there. Now Elle can laugh at me all she likes, but I’ve had a lot of practice at being a bloke, and hence have being infuriating to the fairer sex down to a fine art. And I don’t need you having a go as well, Gladys. I could have stayed at home and been abused. So I put my boots to dry in the bottom oven of the Aga much to Elle’s disgust and fury, see I told you so. I put my clothes in the washer, to her relief, which calmed her down a bit, and, went for a bath, to her great relief. When I emerged from the bath she was almost her usual barely unreasonable self. I reckoned that to be a draw. I can settle for a draw. For a bloke, I’m not overly competitive.

“Two days later, I manhandled the three hundredweight stump to rot down in the woodland garden and mended my neighbour’s barbed wire fence. I collected up the brash, which I told Alf I’d get to eventually, from the field and bagged all the sawdust before putting the brash through the chipper and spreading the chip on the woodland garden. Result, five hours work for four weeks of firewood, not a particularly good deal you may think, but consider the extras.

“An attractive garden feature for growing ferns on which will last two if not three decades before it rots down, and breaking down rootstocks for fire fuel is seriously hard work for very little reward. The embedded stones can do serious damage to any tools you use. I doubt if I’ll last that long as at going on for eighty I’m already starting to rot down.

“Four barrows of wood chippings to maintain the woodland garden soil where chip just breaks down to nothing very quickly. We created the woodland garden and it is our favourite part of our holding.

“Too, there was enough sawdust to keep the cats in litter for a fortnight, and we have six cats who each have their own litter tray for use in bad weather, and it’s bad at the moment, and finally no irate neighbour. We get on with Willy, but I like to make sure it stays that way.

“And most importantly, Lads, despite my involuntary dip in the beck Elle is not one in front. Right who’s getting them in? Good lad, Gerry. Loads of time left before last orders, so I’ll rest my throat before I carry on. Pass that whisky bottle here, Gerry, please”

“Don’t know how can drink the stuff, Sasha.”

“You don’t actually think I like it do you, Gerry? And you stop sniggering, Stan. I only drink it for medicinal reasons, Gerry. No, honest! Just think it through. There’s no salt in it. No sugar. No fat and no E numbers and added chemicals. It’s health food.” Sasha had spoken with a completely sincerely look on his face and it was a few seconds before his audience realised they’d just been had and the gales of laughter broke out.

“You’re bloody impossible, Sasha,” Gerry told him.

“I know. Elle says so, and she’d know.”

A number of the older men had decidedly superannuated bladders, and Sasha waited for their return from the gents and till all had another pint in front of them before resuming.

“Ok, Lads. Going back a bit with this one. At the time of this tale I’d have been in my early forties I reckon. I know I was still lecturing at the university in Manchester and I think I’d known that I’d had enough of folk en mass for a couple of years. Their behaviour as urbanites was to me unacceptably inhuman, I could cheerfully have slaughtered them by the million and slept well at night knowing I had done evolution and the planet a favour.

“I was born on the tundra of Siberia— It’s millions of acres of virtually uninhabited, windswept, barren, permanently frozen plain, George. Well that’s a close enough description to give you the right idea. There are a few folk live there, Alf. Like the rest of them my tribe was nomadic. Yeah, tribe! As in hunting and gathering. And nomadic means only staying in one place for a bit and then moving on. Yeah, like Gypsies. I grew up north of the Arctic circle in the Soviet Union, Finland and Norway. What? Not now. I could tell tales every night for a few years about how I ended up in the UK.

“At the time of these events we lived in Winton, a village near Eccles, in the city of Salford. you’d probably call it Manchester, but Salford is a city in its own right. It even has its own cathedral. Now Winton was just a bit different from the tundra. One’s a frozen desert the other’s a cultural desert. Never mind, Alf, another time ok? In those days Eccles was the place to go on a Saturday night, where, other than Belfast, statistically you had the best chance of being killed in the UK. Winton, when we moved in had been a delightful suburban neighbourhood, but quite quickly it had become a suburb of hell without the amenities. Only difference was in hell you had better neighbours. We lived next door to a screeching ginger orangutang with armpit hair to its knees and the male was worse.

“We decided to move to Cumbria and regularly booked weekends with friends of ours who had a guest house in Windermere, whilst we looked for somewhere to live and for jobs. In our early or mid forties, we were a bit fitter in those days, and we walked and enjoyed the lakes and the fells. One weekend we decided to take the ferry across Windermere, which maybe a hundred and fifty years before had been a ford back to way before Roman times. I don’t know when the ford was destroyed by dredging for the ferry but it was about 1870 when the steam ferry started business. After crossing we planned to walk up the old pack pony route that ran to Coniston and back round to the ferry to recross back to the car.

“It was sunny and a pleasant day, and there were surprisingly few midges and clegs— Clegs are gadflies, Eric. No? Just call ‘em biting, bloodsucking buggers that take a quarter of a pint of blood at a time and let it go at that. Anyway there were bugger all of the biting, flying things as we crossed on the ferry which surprised me as the damn things seem to like water almost a much as blood. We skirted the lake with its powerful speed boats, noisy bloody things, and sailing craft and it was to our right as we walked along the muddy path along its edge till we reached where the treacherously steep, somewhat overgrown pack pony track turned away to the left more or less at right angles to the lake edge and climbed up to the plateau above.

“We left the pack pony route at the top of the climb and turned left to walk through the forestry commission plantations of boringly similar spruce which had been cut back about fifty metres from each side of the bridleway to allow a wildlife corridor to flourish. We stopped regularly to watch some of the spectacular insect life notably the huge dragon flies. They look like iridescent, translucent, double crosses hovering in the sun. It’s hard to say how big they really are but they look to be about six inches long with an even bigger wingspan. I’ve looked them up, and the book I’ve got says the biggest in Britain only reach three inches long, it doesn’t give a wing span, but they do look bigger than that. Eventually we turned left off the bridleway and started to descend in an anticlockwise direction back on to the B5285 that the ferry is a part of.

“There were larch plantings on both sides of the road and about a mile from the ferry Elle said, ‘I need a wee.’ We walked into the larch on our left and came across a large erratic, must have been twelve feet across. Erratics, Alf? They’re lumps of rock that were frozen into the bottom of glaciers during the ice age. As the ice moved south they got ground away as they rolled around moving south with the ice and they ended up roundish. When the ice melted and the glaciers retreated as the climate got warmer they got left behind. I think they got called erratics because the rock they’re made of isn’t the same as everything around them. I wouldn’t swear to that though. Anyway, I told Elle to go behind the boulder and I’d keep watch. It seemed like a good idea.

“After a few seconds I heard Elle screaming, so I ran round pulling my knife as I went to see what the problem was. Yeah I know you’re not supposed to carry an eight inch fixed blade, Geoff. I do loads of things I’m not supposed to do, and don’t tell me you don’t. When I rounded the boulder the sight I saw was, to me at least, comical. Elle was frozen squatting in full flow with her hands occupied keeping her clothes out of the way. Her left hand was clutching her skirt which was hitched up round her waist with her elbow against the boulder to keep her balance. Her right hand was holding her knickers which were round her knees and she was screaming ‘It’s a bloody snake.’

“The fawny-pink slow-worm that had moved between her feet which she just baptised was moving as fast as it could away from her. It was a fair size, I’d say about a foot and a half maybe a bit longer and possibly as wide as my one of my fingers. I’d never seen one that pale a colour, but it's called leucistic, pale colour with normal eyes. If the eyes have no colour and are pink that's albino, but that's realy rare because they get eaten fairly quicky by predators who can spot them more easily. Slow-worms look like a small snake, Eric, but they’re actually a legless lizard. Best not to handle them because if you hold them by the tail it breaks off so they can escape, though it never grows back fully. They’re reputedly fairly common, but you rarely see them. I was pretty impressed, so naturally, with the sensitivity and sensibility of the boulder, I said, ‘Elle, it’s years since I saw one of those.’

“Now Elle’s a good and generous wife, and, completely misinterpreting my words, she indignantly replied biting off each and every word like it were a sentence in its own right with an emphasis on the word not, ‘That. Is. NOT. True.’ I could hear the capital letters. Despite my explanations I don’t think she has ever forgiven me for that remark. Women have damned long memories when it suits them. No. I’m not telling tales out of turn, Alf. Tell him, Stan.”

“It’s true, Alf. Elle told me that tale herself years ago. She doesn’t have Sasha’s way with words, but it was funnier somehow coming from her.”