Sunday 19 October 2008

Ray Mears – Vanishing World

On Friday me and ‘im outdoors when to our first event for the Guildford book festival. Ray Mears in jeans and a familiar dark green shirt, sleeves rolled up, sat for an hour talking to Fred Marden (whoever he is) discussing his new book and life in the wilderness. I found it quite interesting, and it was nice to see that even in the flesh he is much as he is on TV. He comes across as very sincere and reminded us on several occasions that teaching bushcraft is his job and it just happens that he’s got a TV show too. He does at least seem very aware of the plight of the people he visits and made the very good point that we should sort our own country out before poking about with someone else’s.
The half hour or so of audience questions were made up of the normal sort of questions he’d obviously been asked a hundred times before and a few more inspired ones.
All in all I think it was a good couple of hours, even if ‘im outdoors thought he promoted his book too much. It is after all a book festival, and if he doesn’t promote his book why else would he be there?

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