James:

I suddenly remember my father turning to me telling me that he had some news, there was something he wanted to say, I thought it was going to be something nice. And then he uttered the words, I'm afraid we're gonna have to leave, we're gonna have to sell this place.

Some memories live more vividly in our minds than others, but there’s nothing quite like remembering the long, hot summers of childhood. Treasured times spent with the people we love most in the world.

James IS now a specialist in forest restoration, who works and lives for the joys of nature through the miyawaki method of soil preparation- and his family were living in Villefranche, an idyllic and picturesque town located near the French/ Italian border of the alps, when his world as he knew it was about to turn upside-down.

So I'm with my dad, we're building dry stone walls in the bright sunshine early morning, I can still remember the smell of wood smoke on the air, the feel of grass under my feet. My father taught me so much about the connections to nature and also working with nature.

And everything was in that perfect moment really, where you don't want to be anywhere else, even as a child feeling safe. feeling connected, being with someone that you love. And I don't get enough time with my dad, like a lot of children, he worked one side, I'm working the other. And we're just working together restoring this wall.

I suddenly remember my father turning to me telling me that he had some news, there was something he wanted to say, I thought it was going to be something nice. And then he uttered the words, I'm afraid we're gonna have to leave, we're gonna have to sell this place. The feelings were of disbelief. That sense of when someone tells you something you don't want to hear you often don't accept it. The sense of like the world around me standing still, like this beautiful kind of nature, this trees, these forest, everything I can remember it standing still. And the sense of cold like the kind of heat draining out of your body when you really hear something that you just don't want to hear. So I say, But dad, this can't be possible. And we have all these dry stone walls to build all these forests to clear and tidy we can't there's too much work to do. His reply was we have to it's financial. We have to I don't want to sell. But we're going to have to give this up.

Yeah, I'm a big boy. Now dad, I can make a salary, I can earn money. We all can. There's ways we can make this work. I remember like almost like a kind grin coming up on his face. That was kind of like an acceptance of my ignorance that he wouldn't want to put me down. But for him, it was like, I love your ideas for it. And I wish we could stay. I love it here myself. But we're going to have to leave Ville-Franche and you'll have to go back to your boarding school. And life continues.

But no, Dad, no, I can't please. So this sense of dread. This cold sense of those two words are probably hated more than any other which was boarding school.

Look, I'm sorry. But that's that. That's the decision. I have to make it for financial reasons. I love your ideas. But that's it. We're going to have to go. End of story.

And before I know it, next day, we're off. We're leaving France, we're driving north leaving what I considered my beautiful home behind. And then immediately without any respite, we're off the ferry back into the grey cloud of the UK, grabbing everything that I need. And we're off to All Hallow’s school in Dorset. Pulling in through the big black metal gates heading down the long black drive this sense of like a hammer house of horror, this dark building at the end of the road, that's going to be my home now for a while. Everything's dark, everything's silent, everything serious. I remember it being a really horrible day. It's wet, it's damp, it's miserable. You can hardly kind of see anything. The handbrake of the car goes on, which is almost like a finite thing. When the handbrake of a car goes on, we step out the car. Housemaster Mr. Jones, Godfrey Faucette. Come on, grab your bags, get in line with all the other boys. Dinner soon.

So these summer holidays in Villefranche, with your parents with your family. It's almost like parents plus nature equals freedom and liberation. And then you come back to the UK. And your schooling is all about. Big Black gates have a house of horror as you said in the story. And this feeling of prison I almost have this sort of feeling of Shawshank Redemption kind of coming into my mind.

04:01

Yeah, I think very much. So it's like extremes, isn't it? You're going from one extreme where you've got choice where you have freedom where you have connection into something that is like a prison, you know, you have no real say in what you do. Everything's organised for you. There's kind of no initiative, no connection. Everything's forced on you. Were in when I was in France and everything. It's like it was an interplay. It was like an interplay with with family and it was an interplay with nature. There was no kind of force, there was no pressure, there was no push. You had this freedom to kind of float as you want in a way and then we come back and it's like, she said, like through the big back gates. Everything's arranged. Everything's like aggressive and again, you know, very masculine, it's a very masculine environment. It's stiff upper lip and it's shouting and it's it's, you know, you've got Gotta be doing, whether it's sport to be part of the team and everything. So it's these two real extremes.

And in France, you have this Sovereignty of Your days, you could do whatever you wanted to do. Within reason, of course, because I know you helped out your dad. The thing is, you wanted to do that.

05:18

Exactly I was doing at that moment exactly what I wanted to do. In life, I could choose, I didn't have to go and build dry stone walls or, or clear the ground is what I wanted to do. You know, it was instinctive. I didn't think I wanted to be in nature, I just wanted to be in nature, because that's where I felt content. And it's just that, like, you're saying that sovereignty, you know, it's being able to choose even as a child, what you want to do, and of course, like we say, your kids have to, we have to keep them in line. Otherwise, they, you know, we don't have sticking their fingers in an electric socket, or something like this, you've got to tell kids not what to do. But we, you know, we focus so much too much on No, rather than, you know, encouraging with yeses, you know, instinctively in schools like that boarding schools. It's no, like, everything's No. And kids need that sovereignty and they love when we work with kids, because we work I've worked a lot with kids with the projects I do. The this kind of life comes out of them when when you work with them, you know, they come out of classrooms, and, and they're a bit anxious, a bit nervous, give them half an hour planting their frying worms at each other. They're laughing, they're jumping around. And this like they've reclaimed the real part of themselves that that's kind of bashed out by society. And in schools, these two

worlds are just so polar opposite. You've got great experience in France, bad experience in the UK. Yes. In France, which is the majority No, is the majority in the UK. I mean, they couldn't be more different.

06:59

Completely, like literally like chalk and cheese. It really is. Yeah, that was why it was so hard to accept, in a way, it's like, you know, if it was going back to something that was reasonable, then it would be okay. But it's literally kind of like what, you know, painting, the picture of what you don't want to do was what I was having to go and do. And so it in a way amplified France even more, because because you know, the focus on something negative makes the positive, even more positive as well. Well,

you're from the UK, but France sounds like home when you were 12 years old, your real home, in your heart and physically speaking, but the majority of your time was spent in the UK in a place you didn't want to be. Exactly.

07:45

I mean, I'm sort of in the UK because I was born there. But we say like my heart and my soul resided much more in France to this day, you know, like if I think about the South of France and recall things from there, it still like brings me a sense of happiness, like I have this strange thing whereby, if I smell wood smoke, I instinctively think of France, I instinctively think of being a child in France, because we used to have bonfires like with my dad with my family, we'd have these big bonfires on cold mornings. And you'd have this like, you know, smell of wood smoke, that's really evocative that something very ancestral, I think it kind of conjures up something in us from our past. And so if I smell a wood smoke, now, bang, I'm straight back in France. They've literally it's almost like I've been teleported back there.

The power of smell. It should never be understated. Oh, my God,

08:39

I think it's the most evocative sense, actually, for taking you somewhere. So true.

I've got a watch that my grandfather gave me, probably 25 years ago, and it's in this case, and it was an engagement present that my grandma gave my granddad. And it was given to me Yeah, many years ago. And the beauty of that box and that watches every time I open it, I smell the home that my grandparents lived in. And that house that was in Ireland in the Republic of Ireland, it was sold many years ago when when my grandma died maybe 1011 years ago, but I can just teleport myself or transport myself back in time. As soon as I opened that box, it's like I'm opening this box into a world that doesn't exist anymore, but I could just go back then it just brings back all these memories like you say it's very evocative.

09:36

It's extraordinary, isn't it? Like you said literally takes you back. They're literally like, like transports you back to a previous happy time. So it's it's incredibly strong, credibly strong thing. Yeah.

And I think we underestimate how much of our inner children are still inside as you know, the 10 year old James the fifth General so on and so forth, they're still in you right now in the same same for me. But we sometimes we just, we forget that just because we're in our 30s 40s 50s, whatever it is, we're adults, we think those people are not there, and they are there and we need to keep serving them. And we are serving them through smells, and through what we hear and so on. You

10:22

know, we sometimes think now that you know, the things that we have the emotions that we have as kids things like joy, creativity, that we have to slightly lock away that maybe we have a sense of guilt at feeling joy, because you know, it's it's a harder world out there at the moment, isn't it, you know, it, the news is negative, you want to kind of bury your head a lot of the time. But that sense of joy is like such a high vibrational emotion, creativity, like we need more creativity in the world, kids creativity is great because their minds just go and, and they create without boundaries. But now we kind of limit our creativity, because we can't think it's, it's possible and kind of, for me with nature, I've learned a lot from people who think without boundaries, who let their creativity go. And in their lifetimes, they achieved amazing things. But the thing they've done is to step into their creativity, and take the boundaries off. And I think there's a big lesson there for all of us about, about how we can you know, perceive life and, and have a positive effect. And there's an ancestral aspect to it, you know, we should we instinctively ancestrally learn from our parents, we learn from our clans, we learn from those safe people around us, and from olders. And, you know, we've lost that we now like in our society in the West, now we think old people, you stick them in a home and forget about them work the cultures that the strongest indigenous ones, they respect age, because you have wisdom, and creativity with age, and we've lost that. And I think one of the most powerful things, you know, that we can do is when you link young people to old people, you know, when you can share if you can get someone who's lived a life, sharing their knowledge with a child, there's kind of this incredibly strong connections again, particularly with nature, if you've got someone who understands how an ecosystem works, you can show a child the magic of nature, because magic does exist within nature, though, everything connects on so many levels. And, and those kids come to life. It's wonderful to see it's like recreating something in them. That's dormant really.

Yeah, I completely agree. And you look at people, all the people who are in nursing homes in their 70s and 80s. Think of all the wisdom that they've generated over the years, and it's just not being utilised. And some of these young kids, they could learn from the mistakes made from these adults in their 70s and 80s. But now we stick them in a nursing home, but we don't give access to to kids like that anymore.

13:10

No, and as you say, it's so mutually beneficial. Do you want I mean, everybody benefits from that. It's such a powerful thing. I mean, one, one of my dreams in life is to try and take children young and educate them about nature and about reforestation. Because again, I don't think I think we underestimate the power that children can make, you know, we think, Okay, if you want to plant a forest, if you want to do restoration, if you want to get an ecosystem restoration, you've got to be 20, you've got to go to university. It's rubbish. Take a child at 10 years old, who's instinctive, show them the techniques, and they can go off and turn their garden into forest, get their friends together. And for me that that's something that that I would love to do with my life is to educate children, to empower themselves in nature, so that they can make change so that they don't sit there feeling like less hope and hope. And that actually they can, they can take those steps

themselves. It almost feels like you're passing on the lessons that your father gave to you to other kids.

14:16

Very similar. Exactly, exactly. I mean, no one owns knowledge in life, don't we? We're kind of Guardians of knowledge, and we pass it on and we should pass it on, you know, we should pass on everything we know. Like you said before, by mistakes, we should pass on our mistakes. You know, because you learn so much in a moment of a mistake. You learn so much more when you make a mistake. And when I make mistakes with my work all the time, but I learned from it, you know, you observe it, why didn't that work? And then that kind of like, you know, improves your mindset. You come up with a solution. And it's exactly that it's that kind of flow of information down through three generations. So

James, I didn't go to boarding school but when you were saying In all of this about leaving boarding school and go into France and vice versa, and the freedom element of being in your summer holidays, building dry stone walls, and then going back to school and having this regimentation, how do you think we change the education system, in your opinion from everything that you've learned, everything you've experienced as a kid, and then everything you've experienced as a parent watching your own kids go to school? Because there's some parts of it, some aspects of it that do work. And there's absolutely some parts of it that do not work. Why should kids have this feeling of I've been released from prison? Why? Why should we have that in society? Why? Why should kids feel that education and learning in an environment with teachers feel like prison? Why does that have to feel that way? And

15:51

it does. I think, like you're saying, you can see the release in kids, when they run out of school, or they run out of play time. I mean, kids go to school, sit in their lessons, and then look forward to play time don't know, so they can run around and be kids. And, and I think it's I honestly, I know, it's a very simple thing. So I just don't think we listen enough schools. You know, it's dogmatic. It's talking at kids. It's repeating the same facts that you repeated to the year before. And I think we need to listen to kids more, that would be the so the two key things, I think, be the lesson, get the kids point of view, get them interactive, let them be creative. Don't necessarily say No, that's wrong. You know, if you think about it, like kids can't be creative at school. I mean, they do a bit of art. But there's no, there's no kind of space in there for free thinking. It's like, this is right, that's wrong. It's very black and white, you can't go into that grey creative stage,

the dreaded red pen. This is correct. This is wrong. Why did you do this? You've made that mistake.

17:03

Yeah, exactly. Why, why? Why have you got 30% in physics? Well, probably because you're not good at physics, and you'll never use it in your life. I mean, it's, it's, you know, every as I say, every child, every person has a genius inside them. But we just need to locate where that genius is. And if education did that more, we could find those those specific things within kids, it might be art, it might be healing, it might be that they work with nature, it might be that they're scientifically brilliant, it might be that they've got an innovator, they might be a mediator, but each each of every child in the world has something unique in them a gift that they can offer, but we don't unlock it. That's the problem with education.

I had situations at school where it was a boring subject, traditionally for me, but because there was an engaging, charismatic teacher. And they taught it in a way that I understood or in a way that actually sound interesting with certain analogies that I could relate to. I should actually this subject is not as bad as I thought. It's

18:08

quite staggering. Isn't that the effect like a teacher can have on a child? I mean, you can take two different teachers, you could take physics and their child that might get 20% might get 80 or 90%. With the right teacher.

Yeah. And then they could completely change their mindset from previously. I'm bad at this subject. I can't do it. I don't have the ability to actually I have surprised myself and I got 80% this time. It mustn't be my ability. It must be my level of enthusiasm and passion. Exactly.

18:42

And and it's, you know, and children are so affected by what we say, you know, every like, that's not good enough. You're not you know, you haven't done well. You've gone through a harder that, you know, it's energetic. The kids take that on and they believe it. Do you know what I mean? So so you're locking down that potential in them again by by negativity,