We discuss therapy ferrets being used as pest control, Nature-Centric Approaches led by Phil Tovey and the ongoing and interesting case of how best to help clean up rivers.
We’re back to audio only this week, with your favourite hosts attempting to stay cool with fans, ice and who knows what else…
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The Hosts
Richard Negus website
Callum McInerney-Riley website
Richard Prideaux website
Edited and Produced by Amy Green for Rural and Outdoor.
This transcript was generated using AI and may contain minor errors.
Richard Prideaux: Is football the round one?
Richard Negus: Yeah. It's what they call in America Soccer.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Soccer ball. And the other one you're thinking of is hand egg, which is that long one.
Richard Prideaux: Well, that's that actual sport.
Richard Negus: Yes, the gentleman's game. I was rather worried to see that I was watching the Gallagher Premiership final between Northampton Saints and Exeter Chiefs. And even they stopped for hydration breaks. Who the hell stops for a hydration break?
Callum McInerney-Riley: I stopped for a hydration break.
Richard Negus: Well, that's called going to the pub, isn't it?
Callum McInerney-Riley: Yeah. What's wrong with that?
Richard Prideaux: I stopped for hedgehogs.
Callum McInerney-Riley: That's a T-shirt.
Richard Negus: We're no longer. Prido and I sat in the wood and you sat in your garret, Callum. So, it's quite bizarre that I only get to see Richard, who I've spent huge amounts of time with over 72 hours with Prido.
Callum McInerney-Riley: How was it for you?
Richard Prideaux: Wetherspoony.
Richard Negus: Yeah, it was good. Well, I enjoyed myself. He was sounder than I expected. I'll be honest, I expected when he emerged from his very dangerous looking truck to sort of come hobbling towards me, a bit like Mad-Eye Moody from the Harry Potter films, yet he was disappointingly sound, which shows he's still got some young and vim and vigour left in him.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Is it that or is he just putting it on?
Richard Negus: It's probably that to be fair, Callum. Yeah, He didn't have a stick, which did worry me. I imagined he would have a stick that he would have made himself.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Like he's aged 200 years.
Richard Negus: Exactly.
Callum McInerney-Riley: He probably feels like it.
Richard Negus: Not really a stick as such, a staff. I see Richard Moore as a staff man. He would have a staff which could help him to walk or could be utilized as a weapon. if given the opportunity.
Richard Prideaux: I do think we should bring back sort of the Blackthorn Cudgel as an everyday carry item.
Richard Negus: Yeah. Isn't there some sort of term?
Callum McInerney-Riley: Everyday carry.
Richard Negus: In Ireland, they have fighting sticks, don't they? shillelaghs. And, yeah, which are basically dangerous weapons, but.
Callum McInerney-Riley: hurleys, they're pretty good at fighting with those as well, if you ever see them get involved.
Richard Negus: Oh yeah, actually I got a phone call from a chap in Ireland who I know asking if I could help him source some ash trees to make hurley sticks. But it seems to be that actually how you have to cut these ash is a little bit complicated and most of the forestry professionals I spoke to went, I don't want to do that.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Why are cricket bats willow yet hurleys or ash? What properties?
Richard Negus: I don't know. I mean, look, England has got it nailed when it comes to cricket bats because I think about 98% of all cricket bats are made from English willow. And the Irish have got the same problem as us with ash. Now, I don't know whether it's probably the lightness of the ash that would make a hurley stick. But having only ever watched it drunk on TV, I think twice, I'm just thinking, that looks like a day. Oh, it's great.
Callum McInerney-Riley: It's absolutely great. What a sport it is.
Richard Negus: Madness. Who on earth would want to play hurling? To my English eyes, it is a cross between, just a full stand-up fight.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Hockey and fighting.
Richard Negus: Hockey fight and the bits of rugby thrown in. It's utter madness. Madness, crazy people, you know?
Richard Prideaux: I think the sticks are ash because it's the narrower shape. So they have to have some sort of the same density and flexibility, but they're more like a tool handle. So, you get some axe handles and tool handles are ash. So that's probably why, because it's sort of a length-to-width ratio thing going on.
Richard Negus: Yeah, that makes sense. But how you have to cut them is basically simulate the beaver. and you make a sort of...
Callum McInerney-Riley: You say simulate.
Richard Prideaux: Simulate.
Richard Negus: Not to simulate, no. Simulate the beaver and you make your felling cut. So you're digging with your saw right down into the stump in a sort of, well, like a beaver would cut it out. And it looks like a complete recipe for destroying your chain and bar. and probably landing a tree on you, which, sorry, Richard, that's obviously... is that too soon?
Richard Prideaux: It's a bit of a trigger for me now. Trigger warning.
Richard Negus: Sorry, yes. Anyway, what are we going to talk about today? Because, you know, it's football day today, isn't it?
Callum McInerney-Riley: It's football day.
Richard Prideaux: It's Tuesday, just for everyone's sort of sense of time and space.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Although not a really, really, really important football day, just a jolly football day. So England game tonight.
Richard Negus: Yeah, anyway, what are we going to talk about today?
Richard Prideaux: We're not allowed really to talk about the very recent Wigan coup. Sort of, now we have a new leader. So that's just boring and we're not going to talk about that.
Richard Negus: That's dull. And it's dull because we have no idea what's coming up the track. So therefore, goodbye Keir Starmer. Hello Andy Burnham. Let's see what comes. Yeah.
Callum McInerney-Riley: I just, of all the times to do it, randomly felt like it was time to start the week. I'll go, you know, crumbled under zero pressure, but didn't crumble under actual pressure. Fantastic. What a guy.
Richard Negus: I know, utterly, utterly bizarre. But anyway, he's gone. Goodbye. You will not be missed. So on to more important things.
Richard Prideaux: Yes, have any of you been threatened with prosecution by the Environment Agency this week?
Callum McInerney-Riley: Not this week.
Richard Prideaux: Not this week.
Richard Negus: No, I mean, you'd have to be surely, you know, a great polluter or something to get prosecuted by the Environment Agency, wouldn't you?
Richard Prideaux: You'd think so, wouldn't you? So who's going to say it?
Callum McInerney-Riley: The man formerly in our, nearly in our New Year's Honours list, but not in the good bit. Paul Powsland is in the news this week and everywhere I go I see a picture of Paul Powsland and he's used, like the Daily Mail says, as someone that freedom of speech is no longer around and you come out against, I don't know, people doing bad things and then you go to jail for saying anything.
Richard Negus: Yes.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Well, that's what Paul Powsland is currently being portrayed as, like someone that cleans up the river and now he's going to go to jail. But they really like to miss out all of the finer details. Some people go for it, but some people turn around and say, he should be given a medal. He's such a great guy. And I'm kind of one of them that's still rooting for Paul. I can't quite put him into the camp of terrible person. So, can you explain one of the Richards what actually happened? The incident that has led to all of this. The man constantly cleaning up the River Roding that runs for the River Roding Trust is what he runs.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Give me some background because I don't actually know that much about the chap. Who is this guy and what does he do?
Richard Prideaux: So he first came across my radar when I started doing what is always the most useful thing to do with your time, which is arguing with strangers on the internet. Because that always solves everything. So I think it was one that we were talking about right to Rome last year or something like that. That's when I first sort of came across him because he's quite into the right to roam side of things as well, it seems. But Paul Powsland, he's a barrister. I think he's the founder of Lawyers for Nature or something like that as well. But he's very much an environmental campaigner. And as you say, he's, I think he's a trustee or chair of the River Roding Trust, which is a, they're not a charity; they're a charitable incorporated organisation, a CIO. So it's a sort of a hybrid between a charity and a business.
Callum McInerney-Riley: And they say that the River Roding is London's longest river. It runs quite a long way.
Richard Prideaux: What about the Thames?
Callum McInerney-Riley: Well, I don't know. That's what the word said.
Richard Prideaux: That's in London too.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Yeah, but I don't think it's the longest.
Richard Negus: Really? Yeah. So, old Father Roding then, right? So, OK, Mr. Powsland. that runs this charity, which is obviously not-for-profit. And what's he done?
Richard Prideaux: So various things at various times. So he's just in a channel, I think it's a Channel 4 documentary, which was about sort of guerrilla cleaning up of riverbanks because various organizations and landowners are not doing their due diligence of keeping the riverbanks clear and free of litter and things like that. A few people took exception to him in that particular incident because, for one, no one was wearing any PPE required for doing the work they were doing there. So a few of our forestry and landscaping contractor fans of the podcast stopped eating crayons for five seconds and got on there to point out that actually there's a whole world of PPE and legislation for using these tools in these places. But I took more exception to...
Callum McInerney-Riley: Can I blind rank the argument for PPE? I mean, if you're going to be doing guerrilla clean-up, PPE, I'm sure it's important.
Richard Negus: You can, if you want to do it yourself. You know, if you want to put yourself in danger, put it this way, if you choose to go and drink toilet duck, then absolutely fine. But if you take a group of individuals out and you say, I'm going to take you on a, I don't know, a pub tour of Bury St. Edmunds and say, look, I've decided not to take you on a pub tour, but here, have this instead. And you start feeding them toilet duck and then they all end up dead. Then yeah, it's your responsibility. Okay, so Richard, tell me more, tell me more, because you run a CIC.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Was he responsible for a lot of people?
Richard Prideaux: So, if you are getting volunteers to come out onto an activity or a thing that you're doing as an organisation, so like a charity, like a CIO, something that is a legally structured organisation, you have what is known as a duty of care. So you are responsible for the safety and wellbeing of people doing the things that you're asking them to do. So come along to support this organisation, we're doing good. By saying, if you come here to do this thing, you're doing good. You can't just say, well, you're all adults, if you fall over and break your leg, that's your problem. If you're saying, what you need to do is climb up over this fence, down this rickety ladder, onto this unstable bit of bank, sift through the needles and broken glass and things like that and try not to stab yourself. If anything happens to one of those volunteers, the fault lies partially with the person organising the activity. And this is not just something I've just made up. This is how every wildlife trust has to organise their volunteer days or the RSPB or something like that. And we have to do it with our organisation. And I think we were talking about this the other day, Calum, you found something from the Anglers Association.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Yeah, so there are cases of people dying on work parties. There's been a couple. One of them was, I think someone was using a chainsaw and a limb of a tree fell on a guy and killed him. And they got quite a big fine. But effectively, he's turned up on something out of wanting to help restore the river or whatever it was, or I think it was probably a lake to clear the lake that he's fishing. And unfortunately, this person lost their life and obviously wasn't wearing appropriate safety equipment. So, yeah, I get it. Yeah, it depends what they were doing. But I suppose if they're using heavy machinery and chainsaws and...
Richard Negus: It's not even that, Callum. It's that the whole point of why he wants to, and hats off to him. I think when we gave him his New Year's honour, we said that, well I said, because I nominated him for it, that actually what he's doing is admirable, but I mean, the whole challenge with the River Roding is the fact it is a very urban river, and the stretch which he's on is owned by a private entity, the riparian rights are with the owners. In a communication with him via X, I did say, well, did you ask the owners if you could gain access? And his reply wasn't, 'Yes, I did, and they said no.' He said, 'I wrote to them saying that they could give us, as in the River Roding Trust, the rights to this river. They could basically give us this river.' So he didn't actually say, can I go in and clean it up? He just said, give it to me. And unsurprisingly, the owners went, sorry, you want me to give you a large bank of river frontage in London? No, because, you know, I mean, you buy a shed in London and it costs, you know, you could buy Euston Park Estate for that. So unsurprisingly, they said no. So I don't actually know what the score is when it comes to the riparian rights, the banks of it. He clearly has been in communication with them, but because they said, no, we're not going to give you this, he took the hump. So he just went out and did some guerrilla, citizen, you know, good neighbourly stuff, but he got a load of people. And as Richard said, that's where the problem comes. And is it a big issue, Richard? I mean, is it something that actually is a big no-no?
Richard Prideaux: The thing that is there isn't necessarily a massive issue, getting volunteers to do something dangerous. It's more of a moral issue: you're getting people to do things based on goodwill of the activity rather than your safety for them. And also you're sidestepping a lot of the stuff that you could do that other organisations that achieve similar aims elsewhere do. Like when you came last week, we drove past one of the woodlands I've been managing it for well over 10 years now. That cost me a pound a year in rent because I went to the landowner, who's absentee; they live a long way away. And I said, can I manage this woodland in order to run my courses? But I'll take on all the responsibility of managing the footpaths, keeping the trees safe. And anytime a tree comes down on a neighbour's fence, I'll deal with it.
Richard Negus: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: And which is a substantial amount of work. And they went, yeah, fine, as long as you take on that liability. And so you could get access to things if you took on some of the responsibility of that landowner that they have to do. So there's that aspect. But the thing that's got him in that Paul Powsland is in trouble with now is whether it was after that documentary or whether that kicked it off, I don't know. The Environment Agency have sent him with sort of a notice of impossible prosecution. I'm trying to find the exact wording here, which is it's carrying out an investigation, but it's because the volunteers under the River Roding Trust, they removed rubbish from the river, but then they placed it at the sort of the corner of the river and the environment agency said, well, you're just dumping rubbish in a different place. It also rented a mini digger. or a digger and removed silt from parts of the river as well, which I think is the really important bit because there are some weird rules around removing silt from rivers and how much meterage you take it from because it's effectively the equivalent of building an illegal building in the water. It's sort of treated in the same way by the environment agency. So it's actually quite a serious thing. and it's sort of a tripwire Paul Powsland's hit. I don't know whether he knew about it or not, but he's a barrister, so probably did.
Richard Negus: I don't think he probably did, because funnily enough, on my way back from you, I went to Herefordshire and I met with a wonderful chap called Robert Denny, who ran a thing called the River Monnow Trust. And the River Monnow is a fantastic river that rises up in the Black Mountains and then flows through the Welsh borders, Herefordshire, what have you. Now to recover the River Monnow meant a huge number of hoops had to be dealt with and there were all sorts of river-mending work that they did. And it started off as the River Monnow Anglers Trust and then became the River Monnow Trust So it wasn't just an angling centric thing, but that was the target was to try and recover the wild brown trout of the River Monnow. And the hoops that they had to jump through, but also the goodwill and sanction that they had to get of not only the environment agency, but a catalogue of other organizations for exactly the reason you say, Richard, is that if you are going to alter flow and you're going to remove sediment. You're going to create reds of gravel for trout to spawn in. You're going to remove silt. They had a lot of silting issues there because farming practices had changed. They had too many cattle drinking from the river. All these things. These things fundamentally change the nature of a river. And I think the reality is, that Powsland was involved with that utterly fatuous book called something like, I don't know, Wildlife Guardians, some old tosh, the load of right to roam people. Wild service. Wild service. That was it. God, I don't have one of those three years. Where they are trying to go and advise people that if you see some natural disaster type thing, you know, that you see some rubbish, just trespass, it'll be absolutely fine. Or you see something you don't like or you think is wrong, go and sort it out. And I would argue that Powsland may have a huge amount of passion, interest and care for that river, but his knowledge of river mending is open to debate.
Callum McInerney-Riley: What time of year was this?
Richard Negus: Just recently. last couple of weeks.
Callum McInerney-Riley: So we're hitting water temperatures hit peak. So fish are spawning.
Richard Negus: Yeah.
Callum McInerney-Riley: So to be getting a mini digger down and to be disturbing silt and the whole of the downstream to be covered in silt is horrendous for spawning fish because the biomass that is locked into the bottom of the riverbed. is then released into that. And that can cause things like algae blooms. And if we get rain, like we just had last night in the south, horrendous rain, algae blooms pop up, the rain hits the water, the algae takes the oxygen with the water, oxygen crashes, all the fish die downstream.
Richard Negus: Yes.
Callum McInerney-Riley: It can happen hundreds of times. I mean, I'd be surprised if oxygen hasn't crashed in the last few days since a big storm. So he could actually be causing genuine, huge environmental impact by disturbing silt and getting a mini digger on it. Like really bad, really bad.
Richard Prideaux: I would think the best place to get commentary on anything is again from strangers on the internet. Yeah, podcast, I found that. when we were doing some research for this, talking to a few of the Countryslide patrons, they were sending in bits they were sort of found. And there were some interesting comments over on Reddit, which, if you're not a millennial, it's sort of like an internet forum inhabited by some of the weirdest people on earth.
Callum McInerney-Riley: It's a village notice board.
Richard Prideaux: Smeared with excrement.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Yes.
Richard Prideaux: Just as a point of fact, he won't face any legal issues from litter picking. He's in the \*\*\*\* for deciding to be like Alan Titchmarsh and Charlie Dimmock and go all Ground Force on the river and turn it into some kind of water feature. The EA seem like they haven't been doing enough here. Thames Water, as usual, have been dumping sewage like absolute \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*. But that doesn't mean some rank amateurs can just start it all up as well just because they've watched a few episodes of the Really Wild Show and read a George Monbiot book. That's from Crudle.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Done, Crudle.
Richard Prideaux: There's some interesting other commentary around it, which is a bit left field, or should I say right wing, because there's this whole right wing libertarian movement, which is transatlantic now, because it's everyone here who doesn't like the government and all of the Americans who don't like government or the idea of royalty and they think we have to do whatever King Charles says and stuff like that. There's a whole subset, and you can go and find it on wherever you get your internet nonsense from, of right-wing libertarians who've never heard of Paul Powsland or any of these issues. The first time they've seen it is they've seen a news story which says, local man fined by government for picking up litter on his river. And the truth of this is some kind of governmental overreach at every level. And this is some poor man forced to take action because the local town wouldn't. And it's very, it's interesting watching incredibly right-wing people supporting a man who I think is probably incredibly left-wing.
Callum McInerney-Riley: This is what I've been getting on my Facebook. It's all right-wing libertarian stuff.
Richard Negus: Now listen, I've got a very funny one when it comes to complete nutters, rivers and just oddballs. And this was an absolute gem that came up from Patrick Barkham the head environment correspondent for the Guardian. And I know it's easy to pick on the Guardian and you shouldn't do it, but I'm going to do it anyway. Now he's written a story here and I'm just going to read you the opening path from this. What does a kestrel make of the dog sniffing in the long grass below? Why does an exhausted salmon pause before a weir? How will an otter experience the rumble of a passing train? Now that's a very valid question. What does nature think of the intrusion of human beings? And would you ask in this circumstance a kestrel, an otter or a salmon? No. What they decided to do was get some well-meaning but completely batshit mental people to pretend to be kestrels, salmon and otters and live.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Was this Boomtown by any chance?
Richard Negus: God knows what they're doing. Anyway, basically these nut jobs decided to go to and go on a river in Somerset called the River Tone and pretend to be otters, salmon and kestrels and see how, try to see through the eyes of it. And I read this piece with a growing incredulity, going, this is absolutely bonkers.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Sure you weren't on the onion?
Richard Negus: Well, until I read the bloke who's actually organizing this. It's basically an ex-squaddy, yeah? And he's managed to go and he's called, where's his name? Phil Tovey, the director of Nature-centric Approaches at ASRA, wherever ASRA is, I really don't know, it's some an acronym which probably is in another CIC. And the former soldier said the testimonies they received from people as Otter, as Kestrel and as Salmon were rather like civilians caught in a war zone who struggled to find food, safety or shelter. And I thought, I'm actually smelling where this is coming from. Basically, this is a dude who is ex-army, right? And what he's done is he think, how can I milk the teat of the Muppet? I know I'll get them to pretend to be salmon, otters and kestrels and just laugh at them while they're going, and flapping around on the bank and then sort of, trying to open up freshwater mussels with their little paws and \*\*\*\* like that. And he's probably getting paid 250 notes a day per person for all this \*\*\*\*. And he is going, yes, I think that's really good, mate. Yeah, brilliant. And then he's going back to the pub, right? And he's going, you will not believe what I managed to get him to do this time. You know, it's brilliant because one of these individuals actually said, I think it was the one who was pretending to be an otter. And it's rather amusing. She comes out with an absolutely brilliant line, which was, the whole point was not to go out and see an otter, but to be in the world as if you had taken that imaginative leap into otterhood and see what happened.
Richard Prideaux: Otterhood.
Richard Negus: Otterhood, yes. She said, I'd never thought about where I needed to do a poo before. this is brilliant. I mean, it's an absolute genius thing. You, Richard, have been absolutely cocking this up. You're teaching people to go out and how to lay a hedge and coppice a wood. What you should have done is just gone and say, climb that tree. You're a nuthatch now. And you boom. You know, don't teach all that practical stuff that might be of actual use in conservation. Just get people to pretend to be a shrew. and charge them through the nose for it. We've done this wrong for years now. Thank you, Guardian. There is nothing that makes me feel better about life than reading a Patrick Barkham column about someone worrying about where they might \*\*\*\* like an otter.
Richard Prideaux: This is in the same category as those people who go on back to nature, rewild the mind retreats, and what they do is do a lot of yoga and green tea.
Richard Negus: Yeah.
Callum McInerney-Riley: An ayahuasca.
Richard Prideaux: If you want to rewild your mind and go back to nature, let's go and work in a spruce block for a week. You'll spend a lot of time in nature. You'll also see a lot of weird things and meet some interesting people and rewild your mind. You'll go very wild, almost feral, in fact, if you sort of worked in forestry for a week, maybe.
Callum McInerney-Riley: A taste of crayons.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, and that's not Lucozade in that bottle. But there's.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Trunk of champagne.
Richard Prideaux: OK, so this is something that annoys me immensely is. There's a whole set of people now who run courses and businesses and organisations that do these connect to nature things, which go in several different directions. One, they do sort of as Richard's outlined there, and they do it through art and performative dance. And actually, I've seen that here in Wales, one of the latest curlew projects, they had they had drumming circles as part of the Curlew awareness project. I mean, presumably drumming whilst to raise money to buy some.243 rounds to shoot a fox with. It's presumably what they're doing to actually help the Curlew. But no, they were just doing drumming circle sessions funded as part of the Curlew project. So that sort of stuff annoys me at a cellular level. But then you've got these back to hunter-gatherer mindset I'm trying not to mention the names of any businesses here because I don't want to get sued and I've got to meet these people. They'll take you to a conifer block or a wood block for a week without your phone. And then other people who actually do work on the land will come and bring things to them or manage it out of the rest of the time. But while they're there, they'll take a lot of hippies from London or mid-30s yoga women and they'll go out and sort of live under a shelter made of twigs and leaves and then butcher a deer and then do some sunrise yoga sessions and things like that, which is all sold as reconnecting you back to nature, which I kind of get in that if you spend a lot of time doing things in the outdoors in nature, your brain does change and you do see the world differently. But you could also do that by spending a week doing coppice management or by doing practical conservation or something like that, something that's actually outside of yourself. Any of these things where it's you do this thing and, just by doing that thing you are connecting to nature or you're helping nature. No, you're not. That's just helping yourself. That's just self-indulgent \*\*\*\*. What you need to do is the Fight Club version of reconnecting and rewilding yourself, which is taking yourself into somewhere and doing voluntary hardship because that resets your brain and then do some good whilst you're doing it, like some habitat restoration or other conservation. Weirdly, Paul Powsland's thing, if you did it properly and set it up properly and took all due care and did things like that, you could actually make that something that reconnects people to nature and rewild their mind. But you've also got to make sure you got a permit from the bloody EA.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Yeah, probably not meddling. Just have it. I think The environmental stuff is the only thing that I really get a permit from the EA for, but and potentially damaging nest habitat or spreading Japanese knotweed or whatever it is that you could be doing. So I think a plan, having a plan, Powsland's plan would be good. But yeah, I get what you're saying. I completely get what you're saying.
Richard Negus: I suppose the thing is, Callum, is that what you've got with him is because his whole thing is about the land ownership is terrible if it's the people who currently own land and therefore.
Richard Prideaux: Which him are you talking about? Paul Powsland.
Richard Negus: Powsland. So therefore what he's saying is that I live here, I've got a sense of place, I love this place, therefore I have a right to do it. That's the whole I get it.
Callum McInerney-Riley: And also, I mean, the people that do have the rights over it are absolutely taking the \*\*\*\* by dumping. So even by him making a sort of quite punk rock statement of, you know, I'll do what I want, when someone says, well, you can't do what you want, he just points the finger and says, well, you let them do what they want. So The point is still made. He still makes a very good point.
Richard Negus: Exactly. He makes a point. But he also in the same time \*\*\*\*\*\* all over us who actually do stuff the right way. And I guess like you're saying, it's a punk rock mindset is that, you know, I won't do what you tell me. I have to say there is a very funny other thing that Patrick Barkham has written. He's done some mega stuff. Not intentionally, it's just by accident. He's also gone on one, which is quite amusing, is that he gave the story to Rajiv Sial, the home affairs editor of The Guardian, is that apparently therapy ferrets kept in UK's largest child prison have been co-opted, in quotes here, by managers to kill rats, and I quote, resulting in a bloody incident and concerns over child and animal welfare. So therefore it then goes into a lengthy thing saying that basically what the old screws did was that they set these ferrets which are basically played with by these naughty kids who were locked up in what we used to call Borstall back in my day.
Richard Prideaux: And we don't call child prison now.
Richard Negus: No.
Richard Prideaux: That's not the term.
Richard Negus: No, it's a good juvenile correctional centre or something like that, isn't it? Child prison. They use them to basically bolt some rats and then the warders have stomped on them. Now I bet you those kids who were banged up in Chokey were absolutely loving this because there's nothing better than going ratting. I mean, I do hasten to add.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Introducing Juvenile Correction Centre children to field sports. I reckon I could get a Shooting Times piece out of that.
Richard Prideaux: The next generation of gamekeepers.
Richard Negus: That is definitely Patrick Galbraith-era Shooting Times. Get inside. Get them some terriers. Yeah. So anyway, they do that. They go on for absolutely sentences after sentences. How terrible it is that the warders are basically going ratting with ferrets and then they're stamping on the rats, right? And then eventually they come round to it and say, that might be actually a little bit of an issue, the fact that our prison system is overrun with rats. that's literally sort of, 'Oh yeah, and there's also quite a few rats in the prison. That's not the thing that worries them. It's the fact that they may have disturbed these kids by killing rats.
Callum McInerney-Riley: There's probably a few of them in there for that.
Richard Negus: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's almost a thing in here about misappropriation of funds that they're using a ferret for something which it's not supposed to be used for. It's supposed to be a thing that they cuddle, not the fact it's an absolutely voracious predator that wants to go out and kill things like rats. But there we go. You know, something, the Guardian is quite literally the gift that keeps on giving.
Richard Prideaux: Are we filing that away under they don't understand our country ways?
Richard Negus: Yes.
Richard Prideaux: Even though it's in a prison, they don't understand our custodial ways.
Richard Negus: They generally don't. It's utterly bizarre. Imagine that, \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\* people for using a ferret, like ferrets are supposed to be used for. It's wonderful, isn't it?
Richard Prideaux: I'd actually quite like that I have that on my record, inappropriate use of a ferret.
Richard Negus: Have you ever actually got told off for inappropriate use of a ferret? Because I have. Back when I was at school, I.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Where is this going? I'm glad he said ferret and not German.
Richard Prideaux: I refuse to believe he went to school.
Richard Negus: I was entered for the public house.
Richard Prideaux: You entered at public school.
Richard Negus: No, that's why I was like that.
Richard Prideaux: Are you Stephen Fry?
Richard Negus: I was entered for the House public-speaking competition. And then I thought, you know, all these other guys were going to do all this proper stuff. So I thought, I'm actually going to take my ferrets in. And I'm going to talk about ferrets and ferreting and the need for controlling rabbits as we used to have back in the 80s with two ferrets in my hands. You know, it's a classic.
Richard Prideaux: And you'd say you're not autistic?
Callum McInerney-Riley: Yeah, I was going to say, oh my God. This is my ferrets.
Richard Negus: These are my ferrets. So that I mean, look, I'll tell you what, I'm going to cut to the most important thing is I actually won the House public-speaking competition and I got a book token for it, which of more at the end of the story. Anyway, because unfortunately the House public-speaking competition was after lunch, I obviously had to take them into school. So I bought my ferret box in and I had double biology, I remember, before lunch. and I put the ferret box in a little cupboard underneath these very old-fashioned science desks, with our gas taps and all that malarkey. And there was a... I put them in there, the teacher was none the wiser, and it was all fantastic, until there was suddenly a loud squealing sound from over on my right, and my ferrets had got out of the carrying box. and they had made their way through little gaps where the gas tap pipes came through and they'd gone all the way to the end. They'd then gone on a little bit of an adventure. They climbed up and they discovered that there were gerbils in a fish tank. obviously a dry fish tank with sort of sawdust and stuff in there and they thought let's go and kill them. And so they then went in and merrily killed these gerbils and the squealing was the sound of a ferret's fangs going through the skull of a gerbil. Now my biology master wasn't that happy. He was pretty irate about it. Bizarrely, for a teacher at a school like mine, he was very left-wing and he then berated me because he said this was literally what happened when we went hunting was that we just went willy-nilly anywhere, killing what we liked. But thankfully he didn't confiscate my ferret so I was able to go through and do it. But anyway so I won the House public-speaking competition which is very good and Whenever you won any of these competitions, you were given a book token, which you then had to go to the bookshop in town, buy your book, and then give it to your housemaster who gave it to the headmaster. When it was speech day and you were given your prizes for various things, he presented you with various books. And Ken House, who was our headmaster, he was presenting the complete works of Shakespeare to Anthony Herndon for excellence in English. and and we had Dostoevsky's, and he was going through all these absolute literary tomes, and he goes, 'House Public Speaking Prize goes to Richard Negus, and his book is Lurchers and Long Dogs by Colonel Ted Walsh. The good disgust on his face as one of the boys of his school went up to proudly get with a public speaking thing with two ferrets in his hands and he was being given Lurchers and Long Dogs by Colonel E. G. Walsh, a [bleep] dog's book for a man with \*\*\*\*\* habits. It was absolutely superb. I loved the look of disgust on his face and it was more or less my last middle finger to the world of education. Fantastic.
Callum McInerney-Riley: You know, Richard Negus is the Paul Powsland of public school, isn't he?
Richard Prideaux: When we make sort of a monument to Richard when he dies in the next few years, and he's putting up somewhere in that church that's just down the road from his cottage, we carve it in stone. And I want him to be represented with a ferret in one hand and a bill hook in the other. Just sort of standing there.
Callum McInerney-Riley: With a lurcher by side.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. So there we are. That's the main show. We're heading on into the after show where we're going to tell all the stories that we're not allowed to tell in the real world. Bye.
Richard Negus: Goodbye everyone. Goodbye.
Richard Prideaux: Is football the round one?
Richard Negus: Yeah. It's what they call in America Soccer.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Soccer ball. And the other one you're thinking of is hand egg, which is that long one.
Richard Prideaux: Well, that's that actual sport.
Richard Negus: Yes, the gentleman's game. I was rather worried to see that I was watching the Gallagher Premiership final between Northampton Saints and Exeter Chiefs. And even they stopped for hydration breaks. Who the hell stops for a hydration break?
Callum McInerney-Riley: I stopped for a hydration break.
Richard Negus: Well, that's called going to the pub, isn't it?
Callum McInerney-Riley: Yeah. What's wrong with that?
Richard Prideaux: I stopped for hedgehogs.
Callum McInerney-Riley: That's a T-shirt.
Richard Negus: We're no longer. Prido and I sat in the wood and you sat in your garret, Callum. So, it's quite bizarre that I only get to see Richard, who I've spent huge amounts of time with over 72 hours with Prido.
Callum McInerney-Riley: How was it for you?
Richard Prideaux: Wetherspoony.
Richard Negus: Yeah, it was good. Well, I enjoyed myself. He was sounder than I expected. I'll be honest, I expected when he emerged from his very dangerous looking truck to sort of come hobbling towards me, a bit like Mad-Eye Moody from the Harry Potter films, yet he was disappointingly sound, which shows he's still got some young and vim and vigour left in him.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Is it that or is he just putting it on?
Richard Negus: It's probably that to be fair, Callum. Yeah, He didn't have a stick, which did worry me. I imagined he would have a stick that he would have made himself.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Like he's aged 200 years.
Richard Negus: Exactly.
Callum McInerney-Riley: He probably feels like it.
Richard Negus: Not really a stick as such, a staff. I see Richard Moore as a staff man. He would have a staff which could help him to walk or could be utilized as a weapon. if given the opportunity.
Richard Prideaux: I do think we should bring back sort of the Blackthorn Cudgel as an everyday carry item.
Richard Negus: Yeah. Isn't there some sort of term?
Callum McInerney-Riley: Everyday carry.
Richard Negus: In Ireland, they have fighting sticks, don't they? shillelaghs. And, yeah, which are basically dangerous weapons, but.
Callum McInerney-Riley: hurleys, they're pretty good at fighting with those as well, if you ever see them get involved.
Richard Negus: Oh yeah, actually I got a phone call from a chap in Ireland who I know asking if I could help him source some ash trees to make hurley sticks. But it seems to be that actually how you have to cut these ash is a little bit complicated and most of the forestry professionals I spoke to went, I don't want to do that.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Why are cricket bats willow yet hurleys or ash? What properties?
Richard Negus: I don't know. I mean, look, England has got it nailed when it comes to cricket bats because I think about 98% of all cricket bats are made from English willow. And the Irish have got the same problem as us with ash. Now, I don't know whether it's probably the lightness of the ash that would make a hurley stick. But having only ever watched it drunk on TV, I think twice, I'm just thinking, that looks like a day. Oh, it's great.
Callum McInerney-Riley: It's absolutely great. What a sport it is.
Richard Negus: Madness. Who on earth would want to play hurling? To my English eyes, it is a cross between, just a full stand-up fight.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Hockey and fighting.
Richard Negus: Hockey fight and the bits of rugby thrown in. It's utter madness. Madness, crazy people, you know?
Richard Prideaux: I think the sticks are ash because it's the narrower shape. So they have to have some sort of the same density and flexibility, but they're more like a tool handle. So, you get some axe handles and tool handles are ash. So that's probably why, because it's sort of a length-to-width ratio thing going on.
Richard Negus: Yeah, that makes sense. But how you have to cut them is basically simulate the beaver. and you make a sort of...
Callum McInerney-Riley: You say simulate.
Richard Prideaux: Simulate.
Richard Negus: Not to simulate, no. Simulate the beaver and you make your felling cut. So you're digging with your saw right down into the stump in a sort of, well, like a beaver would cut it out. And it looks like a complete recipe for destroying your chain and bar. and probably landing a tree on you, which, sorry, Richard, that's obviously... is that too soon?
Richard Prideaux: It's a bit of a trigger for me now. Trigger warning.
Richard Negus: Sorry, yes. Anyway, what are we going to talk about today? Because, you know, it's football day today, isn't it?
Callum McInerney-Riley: It's football day.
Richard Prideaux: It's Tuesday, just for everyone's sort of sense of time and space.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Although not a really, really, really important football day, just a jolly football day. So England game tonight.
Richard Negus: Yeah, anyway, what are we going to talk about today?
Richard Prideaux: We're not allowed really to talk about the very recent Wigan coup. Sort of, now we have a new leader. So that's just boring and we're not going to talk about that.
Richard Negus: That's dull. And it's dull because we have no idea what's coming up the track. So therefore, goodbye Keir Starmer. Hello Andy Burnham. Let's see what comes. Yeah.
Callum McInerney-Riley: I just, of all the times to do it, randomly felt like it was time to start the week. I'll go, you know, crumbled under zero pressure, but didn't crumble under actual pressure. Fantastic. What a guy.
Richard Negus: I know, utterly, utterly bizarre. But anyway, he's gone. Goodbye. You will not be missed. So on to more important things.
Richard Prideaux: Yes, have any of you been threatened with prosecution by the Environment Agency this week?
Callum McInerney-Riley: Not this week.
Richard Prideaux: Not this week.
Richard Negus: No, I mean, you'd have to be surely, you know, a great polluter or something to get prosecuted by the Environment Agency, wouldn't you?
Richard Prideaux: You'd think so, wouldn't you? So who's going to say it?
Callum McInerney-Riley: The man formerly in our, nearly in our New Year's Honours list, but not in the good bit. Paul Powsland is in the news this week and everywhere I go I see a picture of Paul Powsland and he's used, like the Daily Mail says, as someone that freedom of speech is no longer around and you come out against, I don't know, people doing bad things and then you go to jail for saying anything.
Richard Negus: Yes.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Well, that's what Paul Powsland is currently being portrayed as, like someone that cleans up the river and now he's going to go to jail. But they really like to miss out all of the finer details. Some people go for it, but some people turn around and say, he should be given a medal. He's such a great guy. And I'm kind of one of them that's still rooting for Paul. I can't quite put him into the camp of terrible person. So, can you explain one of the Richards what actually happened? The incident that has led to all of this. The man constantly cleaning up the River Roding that runs for the River Roding Trust is what he runs.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Give me some background because I don't actually know that much about the chap. Who is this guy and what does he do?
Richard Prideaux: So he first came across my radar when I started doing what is always the most useful thing to do with your time, which is arguing with strangers on the internet. Because that always solves everything. So I think it was one that we were talking about right to Rome last year or something like that. That's when I first sort of came across him because he's quite into the right to roam side of things as well, it seems. But Paul Powsland, he's a barrister. I think he's the founder of Lawyers for Nature or something like that as well. But he's very much an environmental campaigner. And as you say, he's, I think he's a trustee or chair of the River Roding Trust, which is a, they're not a charity; they're a charitable incorporated organisation, a CIO. So it's a sort of a hybrid between a charity and a business.
Callum McInerney-Riley: And they say that the River Roding is London's longest river. It runs quite a long way.
Richard Prideaux: What about the Thames?
Callum McInerney-Riley: Well, I don't know. That's what the word said.
Richard Prideaux: That's in London too.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Yeah, but I don't think it's the longest.
Richard Negus: Really? Yeah. So, old Father Roding then, right? So, OK, Mr. Powsland. that runs this charity, which is obviously not-for-profit. And what's he done?
Richard Prideaux: So various things at various times. So he's just in a channel, I think it's a Channel 4 documentary, which was about sort of guerrilla cleaning up of riverbanks because various organizations and landowners are not doing their due diligence of keeping the riverbanks clear and free of litter and things like that. A few people took exception to him in that particular incident because, for one, no one was wearing any PPE required for doing the work they were doing there. So a few of our forestry and landscaping contractor fans of the podcast stopped eating crayons for five seconds and got on there to point out that actually there's a whole world of PPE and legislation for using these tools in these places. But I took more exception to...
Callum McInerney-Riley: Can I blind rank the argument for PPE? I mean, if you're going to be doing guerrilla clean-up, PPE, I'm sure it's important.
Richard Negus: You can, if you want to do it yourself. You know, if you want to put yourself in danger, put it this way, if you choose to go and drink toilet duck, then absolutely fine. But if you take a group of individuals out and you say, I'm going to take you on a, I don't know, a pub tour of Bury St. Edmunds and say, look, I've decided not to take you on a pub tour, but here, have this instead. And you start feeding them toilet duck and then they all end up dead. Then yeah, it's your responsibility. Okay, so Richard, tell me more, tell me more, because you run a CIC.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Was he responsible for a lot of people?
Richard Prideaux: So, if you are getting volunteers to come out onto an activity or a thing that you're doing as an organisation, so like a charity, like a CIO, something that is a legally structured organisation, you have what is known as a duty of care. So you are responsible for the safety and wellbeing of people doing the things that you're asking them to do. So come along to support this organisation, we're doing good. By saying, if you come here to do this thing, you're doing good. You can't just say, well, you're all adults, if you fall over and break your leg, that's your problem. If you're saying, what you need to do is climb up over this fence, down this rickety ladder, onto this unstable bit of bank, sift through the needles and broken glass and things like that and try not to stab yourself. If anything happens to one of those volunteers, the fault lies partially with the person organising the activity. And this is not just something I've just made up. This is how every wildlife trust has to organise their volunteer days or the RSPB or something like that. And we have to do it with our organisation. And I think we were talking about this the other day, Calum, you found something from the Anglers Association.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Yeah, so there are cases of people dying on work parties. There's been a couple. One of them was, I think someone was using a chainsaw and a limb of a tree fell on a guy and killed him. And they got quite a big fine. But effectively, he's turned up on something out of wanting to help restore the river or whatever it was, or I think it was probably a lake to clear the lake that he's fishing. And unfortunately, this person lost their life and obviously wasn't wearing appropriate safety equipment. So, yeah, I get it. Yeah, it depends what they were doing. But I suppose if they're using heavy machinery and chainsaws and...
Richard Negus: It's not even that, Callum. It's that the whole point of why he wants to, and hats off to him. I think when we gave him his New Year's honour, we said that, well I said, because I nominated him for it, that actually what he's doing is admirable, but I mean, the whole challenge with the River Roding is the fact it is a very urban river, and the stretch which he's on is owned by a private entity, the riparian rights are with the owners. In a communication with him via X, I did say, well, did you ask the owners if you could gain access? And his reply wasn't, 'Yes, I did, and they said no.' He said, 'I wrote to them saying that they could give us, as in the River Roding Trust, the rights to this river. They could basically give us this river.' So he didn't actually say, can I go in and clean it up? He just said, give it to me. And unsurprisingly, the owners went, sorry, you want me to give you a large bank of river frontage in London? No, because, you know, I mean, you buy a shed in London and it costs, you know, you could buy Euston Park Estate for that. So unsurprisingly, they said no. So I don't actually know what the score is when it comes to the riparian rights, the banks of it. He clearly has been in communication with them, but because they said, no, we're not going to give you this, he took the hump. So he just went out and did some guerrilla, citizen, you know, good neighbourly stuff, but he got a load of people. And as Richard said, that's where the problem comes. And is it a big issue, Richard? I mean, is it something that actually is a big no-no?
Richard Prideaux: The thing that is there isn't necessarily a massive issue, getting volunteers to do something dangerous. It's more of a moral issue: you're getting people to do things based on goodwill of the activity rather than your safety for them. And also you're sidestepping a lot of the stuff that you could do that other organisations that achieve similar aims elsewhere do. Like when you came last week, we drove past one of the woodlands I've been managing it for well over 10 years now. That cost me a pound a year in rent because I went to the landowner, who's absentee; they live a long way away. And I said, can I manage this woodland in order to run my courses? But I'll take on all the responsibility of managing the footpaths, keeping the trees safe. And anytime a tree comes down on a neighbour's fence, I'll deal with it.
Richard Negus: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: And which is a substantial amount of work. And they went, yeah, fine, as long as you take on that liability. And so you could get access to things if you took on some of the responsibility of that landowner that they have to do. So there's that aspect. But the thing that's got him in that Paul Powsland is in trouble with now is whether it was after that documentary or whether that kicked it off, I don't know. The Environment Agency have sent him with sort of a notice of impossible prosecution. I'm trying to find the exact wording here, which is it's carrying out an investigation, but it's because the volunteers under the River Roding Trust, they removed rubbish from the river, but then they placed it at the sort of the corner of the river and the environment agency said, well, you're just dumping rubbish in a different place. It also rented a mini digger. or a digger and removed silt from parts of the river as well, which I think is the really important bit because there are some weird rules around removing silt from rivers and how much meterage you take it from because it's effectively the equivalent of building an illegal building in the water. It's sort of treated in the same way by the environment agency. So it's actually quite a serious thing. and it's sort of a tripwire Paul Powsland's hit. I don't know whether he knew about it or not, but he's a barrister, so probably did.
Richard Negus: I don't think he probably did, because funnily enough, on my way back from you, I went to Herefordshire and I met with a wonderful chap called Robert Denny, who ran a thing called the River Monnow Trust. And the River Monnow is a fantastic river that rises up in the Black Mountains and then flows through the Welsh borders, Herefordshire, what have you. Now to recover the River Monnow meant a huge number of hoops had to be dealt with and there were all sorts of river-mending work that they did. And it started off as the River Monnow Anglers Trust and then became the River Monnow Trust So it wasn't just an angling centric thing, but that was the target was to try and recover the wild brown trout of the River Monnow. And the hoops that they had to jump through, but also the goodwill and sanction that they had to get of not only the environment agency, but a catalogue of other organizations for exactly the reason you say, Richard, is that if you are going to alter flow and you're going to remove sediment. You're going to create reds of gravel for trout to spawn in. You're going to remove silt. They had a lot of silting issues there because farming practices had changed. They had too many cattle drinking from the river. All these things. These things fundamentally change the nature of a river. And I think the reality is, that Powsland was involved with that utterly fatuous book called something like, I don't know, Wildlife Guardians, some old tosh, the load of right to roam people. Wild service. Wild service. That was it. God, I don't have one of those three years. Where they are trying to go and advise people that if you see some natural disaster type thing, you know, that you see some rubbish, just trespass, it'll be absolutely fine. Or you see something you don't like or you think is wrong, go and sort it out. And I would argue that Powsland may have a huge amount of passion, interest and care for that river, but his knowledge of river mending is open to debate.
Callum McInerney-Riley: What time of year was this?
Richard Negus: Just recently. last couple of weeks.
Callum McInerney-Riley: So we're hitting water temperatures hit peak. So fish are spawning.
Richard Negus: Yeah.
Callum McInerney-Riley: So to be getting a mini digger down and to be disturbing silt and the whole of the downstream to be covered in silt is horrendous for spawning fish because the biomass that is locked into the bottom of the riverbed. is then released into that. And that can cause things like algae blooms. And if we get rain, like we just had last night in the south, horrendous rain, algae blooms pop up, the rain hits the water, the algae takes the oxygen with the water, oxygen crashes, all the fish die downstream.
Richard Negus: Yes.
Callum McInerney-Riley: It can happen hundreds of times. I mean, I'd be surprised if oxygen hasn't crashed in the last few days since a big storm. So he could actually be causing genuine, huge environmental impact by disturbing silt and getting a mini digger on it. Like really bad, really bad.
Richard Prideaux: I would think the best place to get commentary on anything is again from strangers on the internet. Yeah, podcast, I found that. when we were doing some research for this, talking to a few of the Countryslide patrons, they were sending in bits they were sort of found. And there were some interesting comments over on Reddit, which, if you're not a millennial, it's sort of like an internet forum inhabited by some of the weirdest people on earth.
Callum McInerney-Riley: It's a village notice board.
Richard Prideaux: Smeared with excrement.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Yes.
Richard Prideaux: Just as a point of fact, he won't face any legal issues from litter picking. He's in the \*\*\*\* for deciding to be like Alan Titchmarsh and Charlie Dimmock and go all Ground Force on the river and turn it into some kind of water feature. The EA seem like they haven't been doing enough here. Thames Water, as usual, have been dumping sewage like absolute \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*. But that doesn't mean some rank amateurs can just start it all up as well just because they've watched a few episodes of the Really Wild Show and read a George Monbiot book. That's from Crudle.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Done, Crudle.
Richard Prideaux: There's some interesting other commentary around it, which is a bit left field, or should I say right wing, because there's this whole right wing libertarian movement, which is transatlantic now, because it's everyone here who doesn't like the government and all of the Americans who don't like government or the idea of royalty and they think we have to do whatever King Charles says and stuff like that. There's a whole subset, and you can go and find it on wherever you get your internet nonsense from, of right-wing libertarians who've never heard of Paul Powsland or any of these issues. The first time they've seen it is they've seen a news story which says, local man fined by government for picking up litter on his river. And the truth of this is some kind of governmental overreach at every level. And this is some poor man forced to take action because the local town wouldn't. And it's very, it's interesting watching incredibly right-wing people supporting a man who I think is probably incredibly left-wing.
Callum McInerney-Riley: This is what I've been getting on my Facebook. It's all right-wing libertarian stuff.
Richard Negus: Now listen, I've got a very funny one when it comes to complete nutters, rivers and just oddballs. And this was an absolute gem that came up from Patrick Barkham the head environment correspondent for the Guardian. And I know it's easy to pick on the Guardian and you shouldn't do it, but I'm going to do it anyway. Now he's written a story here and I'm just going to read you the opening path from this. What does a kestrel make of the dog sniffing in the long grass below? Why does an exhausted salmon pause before a weir? How will an otter experience the rumble of a passing train? Now that's a very valid question. What does nature think of the intrusion of human beings? And would you ask in this circumstance a kestrel, an otter or a salmon? No. What they decided to do was get some well-meaning but completely batshit mental people to pretend to be kestrels, salmon and otters and live.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Was this Boomtown by any chance?
Richard Negus: God knows what they're doing. Anyway, basically these nut jobs decided to go to and go on a river in Somerset called the River Tone and pretend to be otters, salmon and kestrels and see how, try to see through the eyes of it. And I read this piece with a growing incredulity, going, this is absolutely bonkers.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Sure you weren't on the onion?
Richard Negus: Well, until I read the bloke who's actually organizing this. It's basically an ex-squaddy, yeah? And he's managed to go and he's called, where's his name? Phil Tovey, the director of Nature-centric Approaches at ASRA, wherever ASRA is, I really don't know, it's some an acronym which probably is in another CIC. And the former soldier said the testimonies they received from people as Otter, as Kestrel and as Salmon were rather like civilians caught in a war zone who struggled to find food, safety or shelter. And I thought, I'm actually smelling where this is coming from. Basically, this is a dude who is ex-army, right? And what he's done is he think, how can I milk the teat of the Muppet? I know I'll get them to pretend to be salmon, otters and kestrels and just laugh at them while they're going, and flapping around on the bank and then sort of, trying to open up freshwater mussels with their little paws and \*\*\*\* like that. And he's probably getting paid 250 notes a day per person for all this \*\*\*\*. And he is going, yes, I think that's really good, mate. Yeah, brilliant. And then he's going back to the pub, right? And he's going, you will not believe what I managed to get him to do this time. You know, it's brilliant because one of these individuals actually said, I think it was the one who was pretending to be an otter. And it's rather amusing. She comes out with an absolutely brilliant line, which was, the whole point was not to go out and see an otter, but to be in the world as if you had taken that imaginative leap into otterhood and see what happened.
Richard Prideaux: Otterhood.
Richard Negus: Otterhood, yes. She said, I'd never thought about where I needed to do a poo before. this is brilliant. I mean, it's an absolute genius thing. You, Richard, have been absolutely cocking this up. You're teaching people to go out and how to lay a hedge and coppice a wood. What you should have done is just gone and say, climb that tree. You're a nuthatch now. And you boom. You know, don't teach all that practical stuff that might be of actual use in conservation. Just get people to pretend to be a shrew. and charge them through the nose for it. We've done this wrong for years now. Thank you, Guardian. There is nothing that makes me feel better about life than reading a Patrick Barkham column about someone worrying about where they might \*\*\*\* like an otter.
Richard Prideaux: This is in the same category as those people who go on back to nature, rewild the mind retreats, and what they do is do a lot of yoga and green tea.
Richard Negus: Yeah.
Callum McInerney-Riley: An ayahuasca.
Richard Prideaux: If you want to rewild your mind and go back to nature, let's go and work in a spruce block for a week. You'll spend a lot of time in nature. You'll also see a lot of weird things and meet some interesting people and rewild your mind. You'll go very wild, almost feral, in fact, if you sort of worked in forestry for a week, maybe.
Callum McInerney-Riley: A taste of crayons.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, and that's not Lucozade in that bottle. But there's.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Trunk of champagne.
Richard Prideaux: OK, so this is something that annoys me immensely is. There's a whole set of people now who run courses and businesses and organisations that do these connect to nature things, which go in several different directions. One, they do sort of as Richard's outlined there, and they do it through art and performative dance. And actually, I've seen that here in Wales, one of the latest curlew projects, they had they had drumming circles as part of the Curlew awareness project. I mean, presumably drumming whilst to raise money to buy some.243 rounds to shoot a fox with. It's presumably what they're doing to actually help the Curlew. But no, they were just doing drumming circle sessions funded as part of the Curlew project. So that sort of stuff annoys me at a cellular level. But then you've got these back to hunter-gatherer mindset I'm trying not to mention the names of any businesses here because I don't want to get sued and I've got to meet these people. They'll take you to a conifer block or a wood block for a week without your phone. And then other people who actually do work on the land will come and bring things to them or manage it out of the rest of the time. But while they're there, they'll take a lot of hippies from London or mid-30s yoga women and they'll go out and sort of live under a shelter made of twigs and leaves and then butcher a deer and then do some sunrise yoga sessions and things like that, which is all sold as reconnecting you back to nature, which I kind of get in that if you spend a lot of time doing things in the outdoors in nature, your brain does change and you do see the world differently. But you could also do that by spending a week doing coppice management or by doing practical conservation or something like that, something that's actually outside of yourself. Any of these things where it's you do this thing and, just by doing that thing you are connecting to nature or you're helping nature. No, you're not. That's just helping yourself. That's just self-indulgent \*\*\*\*. What you need to do is the Fight Club version of reconnecting and rewilding yourself, which is taking yourself into somewhere and doing voluntary hardship because that resets your brain and then do some good whilst you're doing it, like some habitat restoration or other conservation. Weirdly, Paul Powsland's thing, if you did it properly and set it up properly and took all due care and did things like that, you could actually make that something that reconnects people to nature and rewild their mind. But you've also got to make sure you got a permit from the bloody EA.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Yeah, probably not meddling. Just have it. I think The environmental stuff is the only thing that I really get a permit from the EA for, but and potentially damaging nest habitat or spreading Japanese knotweed or whatever it is that you could be doing. So I think a plan, having a plan, Powsland's plan would be good. But yeah, I get what you're saying. I completely get what you're saying.
Richard Negus: I suppose the thing is, Callum, is that what you've got with him is because his whole thing is about the land ownership is terrible if it's the people who currently own land and therefore.
Richard Prideaux: Which him are you talking about? Paul Powsland.
Richard Negus: Powsland. So therefore what he's saying is that I live here, I've got a sense of place, I love this place, therefore I have a right to do it. That's the whole I get it.
Callum McInerney-Riley: And also, I mean, the people that do have the rights over it are absolutely taking the \*\*\*\* by dumping. So even by him making a sort of quite punk rock statement of, you know, I'll do what I want, when someone says, well, you can't do what you want, he just points the finger and says, well, you let them do what they want. So The point is still made. He still makes a very good point.
Richard Negus: Exactly. He makes a point. But he also in the same time \*\*\*\*\*\* all over us who actually do stuff the right way. And I guess like you're saying, it's a punk rock mindset is that, you know, I won't do what you tell me. I have to say there is a very funny other thing that Patrick Barkham has written. He's done some mega stuff. Not intentionally, it's just by accident. He's also gone on one, which is quite amusing, is that he gave the story to Rajiv Sial, the home affairs editor of The Guardian, is that apparently therapy ferrets kept in UK's largest child prison have been co-opted, in quotes here, by managers to kill rats, and I quote, resulting in a bloody incident and concerns over child and animal welfare. So therefore it then goes into a lengthy thing saying that basically what the old screws did was that they set these ferrets which are basically played with by these naughty kids who were locked up in what we used to call Borstall back in my day.
Richard Prideaux: And we don't call child prison now.
Richard Negus: No.
Richard Prideaux: That's not the term.
Richard Negus: No, it's a good juvenile correctional centre or something like that, isn't it? Child prison. They use them to basically bolt some rats and then the warders have stomped on them. Now I bet you those kids who were banged up in Chokey were absolutely loving this because there's nothing better than going ratting. I mean, I do hasten to add.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Introducing Juvenile Correction Centre children to field sports. I reckon I could get a Shooting Times piece out of that.
Richard Prideaux: The next generation of gamekeepers.
Richard Negus: That is definitely Patrick Galbraith-era Shooting Times. Get inside. Get them some terriers. Yeah. So anyway, they do that. They go on for absolutely sentences after sentences. How terrible it is that the warders are basically going ratting with ferrets and then they're stamping on the rats, right? And then eventually they come round to it and say, that might be actually a little bit of an issue, the fact that our prison system is overrun with rats. that's literally sort of, 'Oh yeah, and there's also quite a few rats in the prison. That's not the thing that worries them. It's the fact that they may have disturbed these kids by killing rats.
Callum McInerney-Riley: There's probably a few of them in there for that.
Richard Negus: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's almost a thing in here about misappropriation of funds that they're using a ferret for something which it's not supposed to be used for. It's supposed to be a thing that they cuddle, not the fact it's an absolutely voracious predator that wants to go out and kill things like rats. But there we go. You know, something, the Guardian is quite literally the gift that keeps on giving.
Richard Prideaux: Are we filing that away under they don't understand our country ways?
Richard Negus: Yes.
Richard Prideaux: Even though it's in a prison, they don't understand our custodial ways.
Richard Negus: They generally don't. It's utterly bizarre. Imagine that, \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\* people for using a ferret, like ferrets are supposed to be used for. It's wonderful, isn't it?
Richard Prideaux: I'd actually quite like that I have that on my record, inappropriate use of a ferret.
Richard Negus: Have you ever actually got told off for inappropriate use of a ferret? Because I have. Back when I was at school, I.
Callum McInerney-Riley: Where is this going? I'm glad he said ferret and not German.
Richard Prideaux: I refuse to believe he went to school.
Richard Negus: I was entered for the public house.
Richard Prideaux: You entered at public school.
Richard Negus: No, that's why I was like that.
Richard Prideaux: Are you Stephen Fry?
Richard Negus: I was entered for the House public-speaking competition. And then I thought, you know, all these other guys were going to do all this proper stuff. So I thought, I'm actually going to take my ferrets in. And I'm going to talk about ferrets and ferreting and the need for controlling rabbits as we used to have back in the 80s with two ferrets in my hands. You know, it's a classic.
Richard Prideaux: And you'd say you're not autistic?
Callum McInerney-Riley: Yeah, I was going to say, oh my God. This is my ferrets.
Richard Negus: These are my ferrets. So that I mean, look, I'll tell you what, I'm going to cut to the most important thing is I actually won the House public-speaking competition and I got a book token for it, which of more at the end of the story. Anyway, because unfortunately the House public-speaking competition was after lunch, I obviously had to take them into school. So I bought my ferret box in and I had double biology, I remember, before lunch. and I put the ferret box in a little cupboard underneath these very old-fashioned science desks, with our gas taps and all that malarkey. And there was a... I put them in there, the teacher was none the wiser, and it was all fantastic, until there was suddenly a loud squealing sound from over on my right, and my ferrets had got out of the carrying box. and they had made their way through little gaps where the gas tap pipes came through and they'd gone all the way to the end. They'd then gone on a little bit of an adventure. They climbed up and they discovered that there were gerbils in a fish tank. obviously a dry fish tank with sort of sawdust and stuff in there and they thought let's go and kill them. And so they then went in and merrily killed these gerbils and the squealing was the sound of a ferret's fangs going through the skull of a gerbil. Now my biology master wasn't that happy. He was pretty irate about it. Bizarrely, for a teacher at a school like mine, he was very left-wing and he then berated me because he said this was literally what happened when we went hunting was that we just went willy-nilly anywhere, killing what we liked. But thankfully he didn't confiscate my ferret so I was able to go through and do it. But anyway so I won the House public-speaking competition which is very good and Whenever you won any of these competitions, you were given a book token, which you then had to go to the bookshop in town, buy your book, and then give it to your housemaster who gave it to the headmaster. When it was speech day and you were given your prizes for various things, he presented you with various books. And Ken House, who was our headmaster, he was presenting the complete works of Shakespeare to Anthony Herndon for excellence in English. and and we had Dostoevsky's, and he was going through all these absolute literary tomes, and he goes, 'House Public Speaking Prize goes to Richard Negus, and his book is Lurchers and Long Dogs by Colonel Ted Walsh. The good disgust on his face as one of the boys of his school went up to proudly get with a public speaking thing with two ferrets in his hands and he was being given Lurchers and Long Dogs by Colonel E. G. Walsh, a [bleep] dog's book for a man with \*\*\*\*\* habits. It was absolutely superb. I loved the look of disgust on his face and it was more or less my last middle finger to the world of education. Fantastic.
Callum McInerney-Riley: You know, Richard Negus is the Paul Powsland of public school, isn't he?
Richard Prideaux: When we make sort of a monument to Richard when he dies in the next few years, and he's putting up somewhere in that church that's just down the road from his cottage, we carve it in stone. And I want him to be represented with a ferret in one hand and a bill hook in the other. Just sort of standing there.
Callum McInerney-Riley: With a lurcher by side.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. So there we are. That's the main show. We're heading on into the after show where we're going to tell all the stories that we're not allowed to tell in the real world. Bye.
Richard Negus: Goodbye everyone. Goodbye.