Lessons from the outside
I took some time out from being a bean counter in London to get my hands dirty in the country on a variety of voluntary placements. It was a lot of fun. Here is some of what I learned.
1. I really don’t like being wet.
Open plan offices may feel sterile but they are almost always dry and are rarely (in London) plagued by midgies. Other things I don’t like include rat poo and compost. Horse poo, I’ve made peace with.
2. Telling the difference between a curlew and an oystercatcher is as good as my species differentiation gets.
For those who don’t have my ornithological gifts, while both birds are similar sized and can be found in similar habitats, curlews are brown with a curved beak and oystercatchers are black and white with bright orange feet and beaks. But overall I found it difficult to tell the difference between almost everything including different ponies, different types of gulls, and different types of seaweed. This was a useful check on my previously common office-based daydream that I could run off and become a wildlife ranger. I could not.
3. I need to let go of idea that ‘I would be happy if I could just get the people around me more organised’.
I worked with a lot of different groups, including my family, during this break and felt the constant low level anxiety that everything would be better if everyone was working towards ‘A Plan’. But that’s not how the world works! I’m always going to have that low level anxiety and it would be better if I could accept it than fighting a losing battle to impose structure on everything around me.
4. It’s okay to accept lifts.
Learning to drive was a definite benefit of this break. Before I had my own car I felt very awkward whenever anyone offered me a lift and would contrive to turn it down. However, since then I’ve discovered the joy of driving and of giving people lifts, and receiving them in return. It’s made me more relaxed about accepting favours from people.
5. If you turn up to a deer stalking best-practise day in a blue North Face jacket — you will stick out.
The unspoken dress code (understood by all the other student dear stalkers and gamekeepers) was variations of green and brown camouflage. It turns out that the outfitter of choice for gamekeepers and hunters is a company I’d never heard of called Harkila. A combination of my dressing faux pas, and my inability to watch the gamekeeper cut the head of the stag made it clear that I was out of my depths.
But, I did get to fire a gun (which I felt very guilty for how exceedingly fun that was) and learn about the ‘most humane’ bullets for stalking. Obviously, my favourite bit of the day was talking about the Deer Management Groups — meetings are something I can understand.
6. Its important not to get carried away by how GREAT playing with data feels.
This break put me way out of my comfort zone, so I’d frequently retreat to offering to craft surveys, crunch data, draw charts and make dashboards. It was fun, but it was also soothing. But I’m not sure that work actually made a difference to any of the groups I was volunteering with. I still need to do more to not get carried away with the pleasing familiarity of Excel and keep focusing on impact.
7. Lambs are so much better than human babies.
On a per capita basis the former will probably do less to pay for my state pension than the latter, but they are truly adorable. Checking each day for new Soay lambs at the nature reserve was one of my favourite parts of the past year. I also enjoyed seeing them in the fields and recognising this part of nature’s calendar which you miss stuck in the middle of London.
8. Stalkers and gamekeepers have a rich understanding of the land.
I’m the sort of person who enjoys letting people know that ‘the plural of anecdote isn’t data’. I’m quantitative. I shun the experiential for the empirical. But I was brought up short by the rich, detailed understanding people who lived and worked on land had of what was happening on it. I’d like to explore how to integrate this knowledge with the less granular, less frequent macro datasets.
9. I don’t like wilderness as much as I thought I did.
Or at least, I like a mildly modified wilderness that has paths, toilets and good interpretation. I have a newfound appreciation for paths, for the energy it takes to put them there and to maintain them, and for signposts upon them. Good paths keep my feet dry, keep me from getting lost, and get me to where I need to go.
10. I’m a civil servant.
I’m not a civil servant because I don’t like being wet and can’t tell a red deer from a roe. I’m a civil servant because organising shit and making things happen is what I love to do. I just need to find a way to combine that with occasional opportunities to go outside, pound some paths, get bitten by a few midgies and see some baby sheep.
