Welcome back to the Forestry Mountain Bike Commissioners!

Bugger me. You take a few weeks off and what happens?

In the same week that the FC announce that their flacid publication Forest Life is actually a load of crap that nobody reads and invariably featured a spotty twat on a mountain bike on the cover, the FC have also won the rights to hold The World Falling Off Me Bike and Scuffing Me Shins Championship in our beloved Dalby Forest.

Thanks to several million pounds of public subsidy, the FC have spent years promoting this sport and can afford to invest in endless design consultants, ecological surveys, heritage risk assessments, public health benefit appraisals and god knows what. But all they have done is promote the idea that it`s ok to set off hell-for-leather through your nearest wood regardless.

Ebor Forestry would be pleased to hear from woodland owners suffering from these government sponsored idiots who desecrate ancient monuments and abuse public rights of way so that we can put a stop to this pestilence once and for all.

It wouldn`t be so bad if the buggers could be arsed to cycle up hill for once as if it was a proper sport.

Lazy, useless, ne`r-do-well bastards.

And that`s just the Forestry Commission.

Honestly, it`s exhausting being Ebor Forestry trying to dream up jokes about forestry in Yorkshire and so we are taking a little rest on our banana farm in Belize.

Come back soon.

In open space no one can still not hear you scream!

Further to us post of 24 January the FC are persisting with their policy of wiping several decades of earnest forestry endeavour from the map of Britain and subsuming the memories of several generations of foresters under the media-friendly correctness of rare grass and tiny slithery things.

We at at Ebor Forestry urge you to look at http://www.forestry.gov.uk/website/forestry.nsf/byunique/INFD-7LZKKA and take part in its self-destructive survey before it`s too late and our beloved Forestry Commission become the Vast Useless Bits of Grass and Heather Commission or even worser disappear into the maelstrom that is Natural England altogether.

After all, since when was forestry ever natural?

Ebor Forestry have a funny turn or something

This poem is oft` recited by Mrs Ebor Forestry after too many Pino Ebor Grigios during swanky shareholders do`s in the style of Stanley Holloway after Albert and The Lion with much gesticulation and the appropriate props and usually wearing nothing but a threadbare pair of Simpsons boxer shorts.

It seems to sum up EborForestry.com

'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest's ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller's head

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

'Is there anybody there?' he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and

Shaken by the lonely Traveller's call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

'Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:-

'Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,' he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

The Listeners by Walter De La Mare

For more on Stanley Holloway start here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUVzki2j87k with this great Roy Hudd performance!

London Plane sailing

There has been some criticism recently of the treatment given to these planes in Parliament Street in the centre of York.

Ebor Forestry would like to point out that these awful trees were specified amidst some pomp and ceremony in the early `90s by some now long forgotten landscape architect working from the same planning office which also specified the hated building which became known as the "splash palace" seen here in the middle distance. Instead of becoming an iconic feature of one of the few open spaces left in central York, one of the most intact and extant medieval town centres in Europe, it is in fact nothing more than a public toilet.

Apart from being inappropriate specimens for such a plaza, these trees have been nailed, stapled, plastic-banded, garroted and tied for countless ephemeral reasons dreamed up by the passing whims and fancies of even more forgotten city-centre managers and ward members trying to respond to the latest political vagary.

The bastards.

What would YOU do in the city`s poor arboricultural manager`s shoes?

Exactly.

Countryfile is moving!

Ebor Forestry doesn`t fancy Matt but would buy Meg a drink or two!

Bugger me. They`re moving Countryfile Crumbly John Craven to the Sunday teatime slot on the moving BBC television.

For the last 20 years me and Mrs Ebor Forestry have enjoyed a mutual Sunday morning sex romp imagining the other as vicariously either John Craven or Ben Fogle or on a bad day that awful woman from Ireland in an anorak.

And now what! They`ve moved the bastard to teatime where they will no doubt promulgate their half-baked, badly researched interpretation of the British countryside designed for 8 year olds to a few more hundred thousand soporifics full of TESCO factory-farmed roast chicken dinners!

Now, I for one am not having rumpy-pumpys with Mrs Ebor Forestry at teatime for anyone using a vicarious former Blue Peter presenter as a sex-aid unless it`s Lesley Judd or John Noakes and I don`t care if it`s Matt whatsisname.

I`d rather have The Archers on a DAB radio whilst enjoying the fruits of Mrs Ebor Forestry`s body.

Or better still, just doze off in front of Midsomer Murders.

Forestry Commission bugger about with the EWGS again!

The Forestry Commission have announced even more changes to the EWGS which can be viewed at http://www.forestry.gov.uk/forestry/INFD-6myjjh

If we`ve got this right, the FC are now making it easier to qualify for the grants that were available before the FC imposed a new set of rules that made it really difficult for the small woodland owner to qualify for grant aid for before the the FC changed the rules back to nearly how they were before.

I`ll have to consult with Mrs Ebor Forestry about that -

- bugger, she`s gone off to bed all menopausal.