Oh good

Would hate to seem rude, and I need to try and keep up a bit more with the techies myself.
Does anyone remember Nature tables at school, and growing water cress on cotton wool? It's not quite living off the land
@Rich. but I resonate with that concern. Taking children out, blackberrying, catching minnows in a jar, and the whole mushroom thing is a bit dodgy but well....
Skinny, scrawny, tough short little soldiers in WW1, used to living tough, poor souls. Joining up to escape the gruelling life an an agricultural labourer. Hard to imagine that they could see enlistment as an escape, but many did. And the public schoolboys, 6 inches taller on average but still tough, if not brutalised, getting beasted in hard sports and getting walloped. I guess they must have had the ghastly old Spartans in mind.
We had a hill behind our house, it was great to go up there on my own and sit and look over the city as it got dark. There was a scary tramp up there. We found his den and the word was, he had a knife. He came to our front door one summer's morning and my step-father Peter asked what he wanted. The tramp mumbled something and my step-pa passed him a bottle of milk off the doorstep.
My grandmother used to pay my mother sixpence for finding her toad and frog specimens. Not to kill. She was a frog conservationist, but it meant my mother spent a lot of time alone out in the woods and meadows. It's such a sad thing we daren't let our children have that same freedom the same...I certainly didn't dare, though my girls did outdoor things and outward bound stuff and I just hoped they'd like it and get a taste for it.