By: Blonde Two
If you go down to the woods today
You’re sure of a big surprise
If you go down to the woods today
You’d better go in disguise!
For every girl that ever there was
Has gathered there for certain because
Today’s the day the Tarping Girls have their picnic.
Tarping time for all the Girls
Those clever bushcraft girls
Are having a lovely time today.
Watch them, catch them unawares,
And see them pitch then pack those tarps away.
See them gaily tie the knots
Boy do they all love Ray Mears
At six o’clock they become Mummies again
It’s time for the school run
But they’ll be back very soon to play!
Strange that the humourless, dogged, unimaginative Ray Mears became a sort of TV star. So he could eat slugs, etc; so can a dog. Perhaps he’s changed since I ceased watching him years ago, struck by the thought that he went out into the wonderful wild merely to survive, never through any enthusiasm for his surroundings. It was inevitable that his veritable mundane-ity should force TV to invent his polar opposite. Thus Bear Grylls – flamboyant and somehow a bit suspect. Of whom Paul Merton said: “He’s not a real bear, you know.” And yet one wondered.
Ray Mears played prophet in a viewers’ best novel poll, expatiated on Lord of the Rings and won. I imagined him lying down exhausted in a shelter he’d woven from ericas, having nourished himself with an aluminium cupful of cold bark soup, turning the pages of LotR, wondering about the insulative properties of hairy feet. Then passing into blessed oblivion – his and mine. I wonder where he lives. Belgravia, perhaps.
In a TV world where ‘celebrity’ and ‘adventure’ are becoming a precursor to idiotic attention grabbing behaviour (no reference to any particular person) Mr Mears is a calming and knowledgable alternative.
The calm before the storm that never happens. Why so coy about the attention-grabbers?
Blonde policy laid down before the beginning of the World-of-Blonde.
I think I still have the old 78 r.p.s. record of the “Teddy-bear’s Picnic” that we sang to back in the fifties, if not the forties! I’d rather play with the Teddy Bears than eat the woods and all therein.