I’m beginning to think our title is a bit of a misnomer: there’s no working and it’s certainly not a party.

A long time ago, a band of enthusiastic men and women battled against the forces of decay and rampant growth: a group of eco-warriors in Cranleigh (a cran, by the way, is a unit of measurement for fresh herring—about 37.5 gallons or approximately 750 herrings). The task: to remove the old rotten decking from a footbridge over a stream and replace all the bearer plates and decking. The vegetation team were to scour along the footpath and adjacent tracks cutting back encroaching vegetation. The bridge repair did have its moments of tension because, apart from not wanting anyone to fall in the stream, there was the more important aim of: DON’T DROP ANY TOOLS INTO THE STREAM.

Our next battle was a fight against gloriously clingy mud. Just to soften us up before battle commenced, it turned out that the gate which gave access onto a track for delivery of materials was well and truly locked. The answer: to carry a kissing gate, all the tools and a H Frame sleeper bridge across two muddy, rutted fields, achieved with much staggering, the occasional flowery expletive and a lot of puffing.

If you take a patch of deep wet clay-based mud and walk backwards and forwards through it and try digging holes and generally working it, what happens is the mud gets even more sloppy; when lining the base of canals, they used to call it ‘puddling’. Suffice to say, we got liberally daubed in mud and had great difficulty setting the gates and bridge firmly in the ground. We did manage to finish all the jobs and hobbled back to our cars. There was then a dilemma of how many muddy clothes should we remove before getting into our nice clean cars? As far as I know, no one was arrested for nude driving, so overall the day was a success.