Ep 243 - New Site, PHDs & Slop Chat!

We recorded this one outside in the sunshine, which felt almost unreasonably good. Wem and I had a lot to catch up on and approximately no plan for how to do it. This is what came out.Wem started with a holiday debrief from the Picos de Europa in northern Spain. A campervan, the mountains, storks nesting on telegraph poles, vultures, a scops owl that everyone else in the vicinity mistook for a car alarm, and a brief but passionate argument for why campervans are the best possible holiday format for families who find transitions hard. There is also a detour into the biggest swing in Spain and a childhood memory of Wem's involving shoes, fences, and wet morning grass that I will not spoil.Then I had some news to share. The woodland is growing. I have agreed a price on a flat, bluebell-filled acre right next to the existing site, which takes Children of the Forest from three acres of north-west-facing hill to over four acres, with open canopy, big old oaks, and a completely different feel to everything I have worked in for the last decade. Ten years to the month, as it happens. We talk about what that kind of change feels like when you have been going through a flat patch, and why Looby McNamara's Cultural Emergence design web has come back off the shelf to help me think through what comes next.Wem also gives a PhD update. Coming to the end of year one, with a redrafted research proposal about play at forest school in progress. We have a really honest conversation about what it feels like to step back into being a beginner when you have spent years being experienced in your field, about research ethics and children, who actually benefits from data, and what genuinely participatory research can look like when children are co-creators rather than subjects.And then we both get a bit ranty, in the best way, about AI-generated event posters, what folk art actually is, the difference between collecting skills and collecting outputs, and why a badly made Word document flyer tells you more about an event and the person running it than any AI image ever will. The Lost Folk gets a mention. So does an accordion Wem has apparently acquired. There is also a wren on a stump that derails everything completely for about two minutes and I have no regrets about that.References from this episode: Cultural Emergence by Looby McNamara, The Lost Folk, and the Bulworthy Project rewilding estate, where white storks are now nesting in the UK.