Is minimalism boring?

Some disparate thoughts.

Nobody could be happier than I am to see the progression of "minimalism" into a mainstream trend.  I have an aversion to anything fashionable - an aversion, I am loath to admit, that I have cultivated a little too carefully, in a manner than verges on the hipsterish - but minimalism, I think, really is something different.  Unlike a mere fashion, which is a phenomenon that always occurs within the confines of a consumerist framework, minimalism represents something genuinely challenging to our way of life.  Still inside a consumerist culture, what could be more radical than not consuming?  "The system", whatever exactly that is, cannot entirely incorporate its opposite.

Or can it? 

We have become so used to abundance that any kind of self-restraint or self-sufficiency can seem perverse.  Why grow your own vegetables when they are so readily available in the supermarkets?  Why fix anything when it can replaced more cheaply?  These are legitimate questions; they really are. 

My aversion to the more vulgar, self-aggrandising aspects of minimalism, has something to do with what I call "frugal fetishism".  In the (always glamorised) past, our predecessors were frugal mostly not by choice, but by necessity.  Necessity is never fashionable.  If instagram did not exist, it would not have been necessary to invent it.  Which explains exactly why it was invented.  Early 1950s housewives wouldn't have added twenty-five hashtags to pictures of their ration books or grocery "hauls".

If capitalism manages to absorb minimalism, it will do so with hashtags.

There is something perverse about wearing your minimalist credentials on your sleeve.  This is a "minimalist" living space:

 And so is this:

It is too easy to over-think all of this.  "Minimalism" certainly has many positives:

1.  Less clutter means less distraction.  The fewer things you own, the less time (and money) you have to spend looking after them, cleaning them, maintaining them, upgrading them.  Fewer things, more free time.  It's a simple equation.

2.  Less distraction means more peace of mind.  Humans, I do not think, are supposed to multi-task.  At least, we haven't yet evolved to multi-task well.

3.  More peace of mind means more peace.  When twentieth century feminists, hippies and other radicals started to realise that "the personal is political", this is what they meant. Stuff - particularly private property, ownership, forces you inward.  Culture will tell us that self-expression is possible only through property, through the maximisation of individuality.  Minimalism challenges this conception.

4.  More peace means less violence.  Well, yes, obviously.  There is a certain kind of "violence" that never hurts anyone.

5.  There is no number 5.

Minimalism challenges us because it frees up time.  Working ourselves half to death provides a distraction that is often welcome.  We are told that work gives life "meaning", a sense of purpose.  Minimalism could be the acknowledgement that we have no purpose, and that that's OK.  The meaning of life is simply to live it.

Boredom is terrifying.  That is a good thing.

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Indoor Potato Harvest #1

Another month, another meal...

This morning I decided that the time was right to harvest the first of my indoor potato buckets.  Last week, when I returned home from my brief jaunt across the Atlantic the tall, self-confident leaves potato plants grow sprout to collect their light to convert to potato, had started to look like this.  

I have read that when this happens, it's a sign the potatoes are ready to harvest, and it had been a week now,:my curiosity, first piqued, had now peaked.  Thus, I removed the leaves, turned the bucket upside down and rummaged through the soil.  This is what I collected:

 For comparison, this is what the potatoes look like next to my hand:

And this is what they look like after a wash:

OK, hardly an abundant harvest, but enough for a portion.  Cooked up with some lentils from my bottomless bag, they made a very nice lunch indeed.  Impossible to say if there's some kind of placebo effect going on, but potatoes that you grow yourself are about as yummy as potatoes can be.

There are two more buckets on the go, which aren't ready for harvesting yet, but are a bit larger than the this one, and which currently look like this:

These have had less direct sunlight, but that doesn't appear to have inhibited growth at all, so I'm confident that I'll get at least as much out of them as I did of the bucket on the windowsill.


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Bank Holiday Monday Linkdump

I haven't done quite as much internetting as normal the past week and a bit, mainly with my all-too-brief trip to Canada wreaking havoc on my body clock, quite unexpectedly, several days after I landed back on home soil to find the city I've called home for the past 12 years was attacked by a terrorist.  I may or may not have more to say on that subject in due course, though I don't really know what.  I attended the vigil in Albert Square on Tuesday evening, just as the crowd broke out into a spontaneous chant of "Manchester! Manchester! Manchester!" which I suppose sums the whole thing up as well as anyone ever could.  There's an eerie calm in the city centre; some tension with the noticeable increase in police presence - some of it heavily armed - Victoria Station and most of Corporation Street remain inaccessible, and there's a growing stack of flowers and other tributes around the edge of the Arena.  It's tempting to want to make sense of the whole thing, but of course it doesn't make sense; to find meaning in evil, but of course there isn't any.

Links concerning the attack:

Reactions to Manchester Bombing Show How Anti-Muslim Bigots Are “Useful Idiots” for ISIS at The Intercept

Useful idiots in their own context (we all have our part to play) the Ministry of "Defence" confirmed that the picture of a bomb with "Love from Manchester" written on it was genuine, and came from a plane to be launched in Cyprus, from which previous airstrikes against ISIS have been launched.  Lovely bombs make the bad people go away.

But to the point.  Some other links:

Articles:

Happiness research shows the biggest obstacle to creativity is being too busy at qz.com

The new Blue Frontier - an enticing update on "seasteading" at The European

Meet the Frugal Millennials Planning for Decades of Retirement at The Walrus

How the gig economy is ruining our lives at The Idler

Finland's basic income experiment is already making people feel better after just four months at World Economic Forum

Shocking Photographs of People Lying in 7 Days Worth of Their Trash at boredpanda.com

More and More Women Are Opting Out of Motherhood at vegan anarchist primitivist

Music:

There's an dusty corner of the blogosphere dedicated to music that is actually good or interesting (and sometimes both).  Lots of great music blogs haven't been updated for years, but that's fine because they still exist, and many of their links are still active, leaving you more than enough aural rabbit holes to tumble down.  no longer forgotten music is posting prolifically, and has a nice big juicy blogroll that I suggest you get your teeth into.

Have a pleasant bank holiday Monday.  Imagine if banks took a lot more holidays.  One  a week, say.  I don't think that would be so bad.

Travelling Light

I landed at 9:55am and sped through customs. Having no checked baggage to wait for made this easy. I flashed my passport to the powers that be and that was that: home.

I had spent the last two days in Toronto, which is 3,412 miles from where I live. It was only poor forward planning that left me there so short a time. Somehow my reputation proceeded me: at the wedding, at least three different people asked me if I was "the guy who's only here until tomorrow". They were impressed, perhaps, by my fleetingness; or confused, more likely. No point hanging around, I said. No, I didn't say that really. Not out loud.

Toronto is a charming place. I stayed at the Holiday Inn in the Downtown area, amongst skyscrapers, 24 hour mini-markets, an "Irish" pub or two, and other buildings of little aesthetic or actual interest. I jumped to the conclusion that the whole city was much like this, which was a mistake. It is not. My apologies, Toronto, I was tired.

Through the miracle of more or less ubiquitous WiFi, Kieran and I located one another immediately, and settled upon the Hair of the Dog pub on Church Street as the location where we eat, refresh ourselves and compose a speech for tomorrow's wedding. Are we the best men (both in the context of the wedding, and in general)? Do we really have only three minutes between us to speak about, of all people, Ross? Do Canadians drink beer in pints? So many questions.

Kieran was not feeling well. Kieran flies great distances all the time. His last trip was to Libya. He feared he might have caught a cold from another passenger. I speculated he might have caught some awful tropical disease. This didn't reassure him, and he corrected my geography. Libya isn't tropical.

We ordered beer and drank it; food, and are it. We agreed that writing a speech about Ross under such conditions was impossible. So we drank more beer, and retired.

Next morning, Kieran instructed me to meet him at Kensington Market, about a mile's walk from my hotel. It was raining heavily at 7am as I sought and found somewhere open that time on a Sunday that might provide coffee. The machine in my room was not working, although in fact at was, as Kieran later demonstrated. By the time I had consumed a "breakfast cookie" (gluten free and vegan) and a "triple" Americano (confirming in the process that Android Pay works in Canada) the rain had eased off and I set off on foot to Kieransville.

My sense of direction is terrible. It's not inconceivable that without Google maps and GPS I might by now be dead. Still it helps to have some human input when you're navigating a strange city, so I asked someone sweeping up outside a Wendy's for directions. This way is north, she said. This way is east. If you want to get to Kensington market, you need to walk east to the corner of Something and Blah and get the streetcar. I fancy a walk, I explained. It's only a mile on the map. Oh, she said. This threw her for six. Walking to your destination in Canada is as unusual as in the USA, perhaps. She had no idea how to give directions to pedestrians. The second stranger and asked for help was the same. I trusted Google though, and it saw me right. People: useless.

Kensington Market is an interesting place.  It's not a market in the British sense of the term: more an entire city block of shops selling things that markets usually sell, indoors and out.  An abundance of fruit and veg, and herbs:

At 10:30am on a Sunday morning, one of the many tattoo parlours had a queue of enthusiastic and impatient locals waiting for it to open, which might be the most hipster thing I have ever seen:

Or maybe that's this:

Or possibly this:

No, it's this:

Kieran and I made a brief documentary:

We settled in a cafe to write our speech for the wedding.  Kieran ate a breakfast bagel.  I had something strongly avocado-themed.  Obviously.  It was delicious, and reasonably priced.  Canada is very reasonably priced.  That said, my monthly budget flew straight out the window as soon as landed.  When you're spending foreign money, it doesn't feel like you're really spending money, but you are.  A taxi from the airport was $60.  I could possibly have walked it.  The bus back was $7.70.  I could possibly have walked that too, although I might have missed my flight.

Everything I needed for my journey fit into the backpack I use in everyday life: my suit for the wedding, my Chromebook, phone and various chargers and batteries, my passport, a change of clothes, my toothbrush, and my medication.  I wore the same shoes for travelling and walking as for wedding, which performed admirably.  To be in a foreign country with only the things you can carry to get you through the day, with only a cheap(ish) hotel room to lay your head in, with only one pair of shoes and some of your wits, feels wonderful.  I think the intoxicating feeling of the "travel bug" has a lot to do with just being able to leave your stuff behind, and get on with living.  Money, unfortunately, remains necessary.

Or perhaps not.

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Musings for Airports

I've always liked airports. I don't know exactly why: perhaps it's their bleak permanence, their strange and incongruous quietness. You see faces exotic and alien, but every face you see in the airport is one you will never see again. There is not even the illusion of community: everyone is only passing through. The airport's employees are efficient and seem so sad, as efficient people often do. All of this appeals to me.

Perhaps it's just that there's no better time or place than to listen to Brian Eno's classic, Music for Airports - or to give its full title and due respect, Ambient 1: Music for Airports - the quintessential album of the ambient genre that Eno is, if not quite credited with creating, rightly revered as its father. (Nobody really creates ambient music: it just sort of...happens.  I think Brian would be the first to admit that).

Forty years after its release, still no other music has captured the sound and feeling of being in an airport as perfectly.  It's curiously absent from YouTube, but here is a timestretched version that works just as well, maybe even better:

Another thing I like about airports is their spaciousness. Hardly anyone is in a hurry at an airport. The distances to be travelled are greater, the logistics more complicated: allowances are made. Occasionally a final boarding call is issued, and panicking family laden with children, luggage and duty free carrier bags, rushes towards a gate, but it happens too quickly to break the mood. The rest of us gawp at their laptops and phones, amble through the sickening array of outlets for ties, luggage, "accessories", designer clothing, aftershave and cosmetics, insurance, alcohol, express manicures, chocolate, children's toys, arcade games, and fast food; or sleep, or stare off into space or, if they're me, walk the corridors from one gate to another, snapping boring photographs of boring things, things so boring they exist nowhere else and barely seem to exist even here.  With Eno in my ears.  I've never been happier.

This afternoon my dear friend Ross will be marrying Virginia, which is what I am doing in Toronto, in case you are wondering.  Ross has lived here for years, we have known each other for decades and he's probably the only person I know well who appreciates ambience as I do.  He told me a few days ago he will be making his entrance to Music for Airports.  Just imagine that.

Related posts

Music for Gatwick Airport


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Mistakes on a Plane

Lufthansa and Air Canada's vegan options are...somewhat limited.  Life is absurd.

How to Own Only One Pair of Shoes (and Get Away With It)

We're all familiar with the concept of the 'false economy'.  Choosing a cheap option when more expensive ones are available may only save you money in the short term, since cheaper items tend to be less durable, and therefore need repairing and replacing more frequently.  Of course, it's also important to be aware that under consumer capitalism, even despite the equally well-known phenomenon of 'built in obsolescence', this isn't always true.  Many things are more expensive simply due to 'branding', which is almost entirely a matter of perception and manipulation.  A 'designer' item of clothing could very well have been made in the same factory, by the same workers who made clothes for the likes of Primark or Tesco.  While this does not necessarily prove that the items sold by different retailers are identical, it is highly unlikely that the enormous price discrepancies between them could be accounted for by the differences in actual quality.

Here is a plain, white cotton Armani shirt on sale for £101.50 (reduced at time of writing from the original price of £145).  The last smart white shirt I bought was from Primark and cost me £5.00.  Is the Armani shirt 20.3 times better than the Primark shirt?  Will it last that much longer?  When it was reduced in price by £43.50 did it also fall in relative quality from 29 times to 20.3 times more durable than the Primark shirt?  Of course not.  I don't even know how such a thing could be possible.  A white shirt is a white shirt.  You wear it on your body.  If you're convinced that a designer label shirt could possibly be that much more valuable, in any practical sense, than a generic one, that is because you're an idiot.  And you are an idiot because Armani and the like spend a lot of money turning you into one (or assuming you already are).  Which they consider a worthwhile investment, since they get that money back when you buy their shirts (which makes them idiots too.  Conclusion: We are all idiots).  

Playing games like this is a healthy occupation: a quick exercise in rationality that can immediately cut through the fog of misperceptions created by the advertisers and marketers of this world.  All this is just by way of context provision for the point of this post, which is how I only own one pair of shoes, and that's enough, and you might want to consider trying something along those lines.

The shoes I own are slip-on, plain black shoes I bought for £9.99 at "Shoe Zone" in Bury earlier this year.  They are not designer shoes, of this we can be certain.  They may, however, be leather, which (yes, yes) as a vegan, I should not really be wearing (or paying for, more's the point) but we'll talk about that some other time.  They are comfortable and appropriate in all situations.  These shoes are made for walking.  Also for wearing.  All I want in a pair of shoes, to be perfectly honest.  But then there's the fact that I'm popping over to Canada for the weekend to attend a wedding of a great and true friend, and that for weddings it's normal to wear clean, shiny and decent looking shoes.  I've had these shoes for a while now, and they've taken something of a battering, but they're still functional and that's the only thing that matters.  Unless, perhaps, you're wearing a suit and being at a wedding and pretending you're some kind of adult.  So I thought I'd try faking it.  Apparently, after faking it for a given length of time, one makes it.  This seems like a path worth following.

First, I got myself some 'leather glue'.  I applied this to the problematic parts of my shoes.  After letting it set for 24 hours, I was left with an ugly, yellow residue.  Not ideal, but waterproof.  Hopefully.

By this time, the dried glue began to peel off in the more visible areas, to my delight, leaving the areas that I had actually wanted to glue (namely, where sole meets shoe, and had come unstuck) attached.  I added another few dabs, more carefully this time, and left overnight to set.

The next day, which was only yesterday, I put them to the test, and the shoes performed splendidly.  It was raining heavily, but my feet stayed dry.  They looked a bit weird, yellow with dried glue as if recently seeping puss (imagine that - septic shoes) but so what?  They're shoes.  This is what to focus on.  Unless you're soon to be attending a wedding.

Next I discovered that there's such a thing as "shoe paint".  I clicked a few buttons on the internet and parted with £7.75.  The shoe paint arrived almost instantly.  Thanks ebay.  I applied some to the glued areas of the shoes, and behold:

Presentable

All they really need now is a quick once over with a shoe brush (perhaps a little polish, if I can nab some) and they're good as new as far as I'm concerned.  I can wear them with my freshly pressed suit at Ross' wedding, and that will be that.

If you've prepared to take some very small steps like this, then you've got shoes that you can wear at a wedding.  If they're shoes you've been wearing every day anyway for months, you've got shoes you can wear any time, and anywhere.

You might ask, given the cost of the shoe paint and the glue (£10.25 altogether) why not just buy a new pair of shoes, identical ones even, for another £9.99, saving yourself 26p?  That's really the whole point here.  That's how "the economy" works.  It's stupid and it's wasteful, and we all know it.  A year down the line, probably less, you'll need another pair, and then another.  Fight the power.  Do not multiply shoes without necessity.  It's a small gesture, I know, but it counts for a lot.

More important still, this used to be a completely normal thing to do.  It isn't anymore, and that's all of our faults.

Your fault.

Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site.  I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog.  So it's really nothing to be afraid of.  Cheers.

Other recent zero waste/minimalism posts include:

What is a meal? (And other difficult questions)
Taking the Zero Waste Plunge
My First 'Zero Waste' Weekend
Individually packaged sugar portions are stupid, and so are you, and so am I, and so is everything else in the world
"I have everything I need"

How to Own Only One Pair of Shoes (And Get Away With It) (Part Two)

The Shame of the Game (of Evil)

I have sinned in the eyes of Google.  

Zero Waste Eating is Good For You

One of the non-essential possessions I still possess is a Withings WiFi Body Scale. I bought it about 18 months ago when I was still being reckless with my money and becoming a little preoccupied with the "quantified self" aesthetic (I'd also bought a smartwatch, which I have since discarded).  It's just a set of scales for weighing yourself, but this being the future, it is of course as "smart" as every other previously inanimate object on the market, so that when you stand on it, it shows you other things besides your weight; such as your BMI, heart rate, body fat percentage, current CO2 levels in the air, and other statistics that might make you crap your pants (and so, perhaps, lose a little more weight in the process). Naturally, the scale connects to your smartphone and is accompanied by an app which logs and reports back to you vis à vis your vital statistics.

It's been a while since I stood on it, but yesterday I did and was pleasantly surprised to find that my weight has dropped 8.5lbs since my last "weigh in" on 3rd April. Now obviously I can't attribute this entirely to my new moves towards a "zero waste" life, but it occurred to me over the weekend (my first actual attempt to go zero waste) how living this way is naturally conducive towards maintaining a healthy weight. Two reasons:

1. Processed and packaged foods are not, by definition, zero waste. Rather like with going vegan, going zero waste immediately rules out many of the "convenient", unhealthy, and usually meat and dairy-heavy options available. If you're serious about the switch, such options are so far beyond the pale of acceptability as to cease to be tempting very quickly.  (Three and a half years since going vegan, I no longer even see the "meat" on supermarket shelves as food at all; I see it as dead bodies).  Crisps, ready meals, processed foods in general are almost always wrapped in several layers of packaging, most of which is difficult or impossible to recycle.  This leaves you with predominantly fresh, unprocessed options.  Here, as posted previously, was my food shopping on Friday:

And here is another couple of days' sustenance, purchased yesterday:

Accompanied by the obligatory porridge breakfast, and bulked up with lentils, food "hauls" like this can last me 2-3 days, and leave no waste at all.  Vegetable scraps can be composted; tins and glass can be recycled.  Everything else can be eaten.

2.  Since some shops have no zero waste options at all, I have to venture further afield to find acceptable choices.  The nearest mini-supermarket to me is extremely poor in this regard.  Almost all of its green veg, its bread, and fruit comes wrapped in some plastic or other.  The only exception I noticed was pineapples, and man shall not live by pineapples alone.  Apart from Bury market, which isn't open at the hours I sometimes need to get my food (neither is Strawberry Gardens) the next nearest source of food is a giant Tesco about ten minutes' walk away.  Here was where I bought the potatoes, parsnips, broccoli in the picture above, none of which I could have bought in zero waste form at the Co-op across the road.  Thus I am forced, in my pursuit of the zero waste ideal, to walk further.  (I don't drive a car, and getting the bus would actually take longer).  Walking is good for you.  Ta da!

Just an afterthought to end on.  It's interesting how supermarkets stock both packaged and non-packaged versions of identical foods.  Leeks, carrots, onions, broccoli and parsnips were all available both wrapped in plastic, and not.  Why does this happen?  Further investigation is required.  Taking pictures of the food on supermarket shelves, by the way, is a completely normal thing to do.  Nobody will give you a funny look if you whip your phone out every 20 seconds to capture a picture of something utterly prosaic, for future reference.  Tell them you're doing "research" if they ask.  Which they won't, I promise.

Why?

Why?

Related posts

Taking the Zero Waste Plunge
My First 'Zero Waste' Weekend
Individually packaged sugar portions are stupid, and so are you, so am I, and so is everything else in the world
What is a meal?  (And other difficult questions)
Landfill/sofa
How to Own Only One Pair of Shoes (And Get Away With It)
Composting Your Own Hair
Eating from the Bottomless Pickle Jar


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Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site.  I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog.  So it's really nothing to be afraid of.  Cheers.

Thoughts from a non empty room

I am coming to the realisation that the most basic problem in my life is distraction.  There are so many things to think about; in the day-to-day and in the abstract, that I find myself darting constantly from one to the other without ever actually really getting anywhere.  "Find myself" is a curious expression to use - I almost never really find myself doing the things I do.  Minute to minute, I am hardly present at all.

"Live in the moment" is the cliché, and recently I have begun to make my peace with clichés.  Clichés are there for a reason, and usually it's only pride that prevents us from accepting them and the wisdom they contain.  Accept this please, and humbly, because it is true.

One idea that underpins what I call "my new life", the beginning of which was marked last year by the decision to stop working full time, move deliberately towards a greater material poverty, and to value time above money.  Selling my non-essential possessions would maximise the time I could spend living off the savings I had accumulated from working too hard for too long at a career path which, although worthy enough, I had never really wanted.  (I never really wanted to be an adult, truth be told).  In turn, pairing my life down to the essentials would allow me to focus on what really mattered to me, even if I still didn't know exactly what that was.  In doing this, I would free up still more time to learn about ways to lower my financial and material needs still further: a virtuous circle of experimentation and self-discovery.  Somewhere along the way I would make peace with the "selfish" aspect of this decision, learning to live not only for myself but for the world, contributing in whatever way I could to making human life slightly less dull and disappointing - something which I still believe, for the vast majority of us, it quite definitely and unnecessarily is.  I would blog about this as I went along, and here we are.

That is the heart of the matter.  It has been satisfying to learn more about the trend towards minimalism (the kind that has nothing much to do with Steve Reich or Brian Eno or Stars of the Lid, although there is no reason why it shouldn't and plenty of reasons, thinking about it, why it should) in popular culture.  This is the "minimalism" that is as much ascetic as it is aesthetic - the recognition of the important truth hidden inside another uncomfortable cliché, that consumerist culture is making us miserable and alienated, and is built upon an unsustainable capitalist economics that threatens the very existence of life on earth (or at least, of the kind of affluent, convenience- oriented societies we have come to take for granted).  Sites like Sell All Your Stuff and Becoming Minimalist, and the plethora of blogs, Facebook groups, and communities (both online and offline) are testament to the power and popularity of these ideas, putting up a real show of resistance against consumerism, what might even be called a dawning of a new era in our cultural consciousness - one that connects us back to the original hippy spirit, and well beyond that into the more radical spiritual traditions that have been tarred with the same brush that has tarred the hippies too.  It's a quiet and gentle revolution, but no less radical or powerful for being so.

When you're motivated by powerful and easy to articulate ideas, there's a single-mindedness that comes with that, which can be a great source of strength.  More than a year since my decision to, in my own way, "drop out" I have no regrets at all, except perhaps that I didn't take the leap sooner than I did.  But in my own situation, still, I find myself distracted.

One of the attractions of minimalism for me is the thought that an absence of stuff, of "clutter" in my home would allow me to focus more on doing things, in the most practical of senses.  When you don't have as many things, not only do you not have to spend as much money maintaining them, subscribing to them, cleaning them and so on, you don't have to spend as much time using them.  With this should come a peace of mind, an improved focus and concentration as there are simply fewer things in your immediate environment to distract you.

For me, this has not happened.  This is why I sat down to gather my thoughts and write this post: distraction is an unsettlingly deep and pervasive problem for me.  It does not seem, overall, that having less stuff in my life has afforded me the mental clarity I crave: or not yet, anyway, though there have been inklings of it if my more meditative moments.  Certainly the abundance of time I now enjoy outside of having to work simply to pay for the bare necessities of life like food, accommodation and high speed internet access has been a blessing, but I am still a long way from the kind of mental discipline I need to really use this way of life for good.  I very much want to write a book about veganism's intersection with transhumanism, and what that means for the future of life on earth, but this requires not only time, but focus.  This is something I lack.  I find myself preoccupied by small concerns (should I wash up now, or later?  maybe I'll have another coffee, and then I'll sit down to work on my book?  Oh look the floor needs sweeping, perhaps I'll go for a walk in the park to clear my head...Oh look, now I'm in the park, I'll take some pictures, record some sounds, whip my phone out and look up some things about plants and trees and birds and lakes and aquaponics and vertical gardening and space travel) that are no fewer in number than the larger or more "important" concerns that come with things like interest rates, or mortgages, or any of the other things we minimalists are doing our best to tear away from.

This afternoon I took one of my two bean-bag sofas and moved it from the front room into the bedroom.  Immediately, everything changed.

I suppose expecting to attain enlightenment immediately once I'd cleared the unnecessary stuff out of my life was naive.  These things take time.  Who knows how long?  I have to remember that there is joy to be found in finding out.

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Sunday Linkdump

Some things that have come to my attention this week.

Indoor garden update

Look I made a video.

Individually packaged sugar portions are stupid, and so are you, so am I, and so is everything else in world

A night shift became available suddenly last night, so on the way in I decided to treat myself to a coffee, even though I said I should probably stop doing that. Anyway, it caught my attention in doing so how Costa have adopted a policy of offering 25p off the price of your takeaway coffee if you bring your own reusable cup. This is surely a good thing, if it encourages people not to use disposable coffee cups, and might even signify the first inklings of high street giants of the potential profits to be made from the zero waste demographic. Naturally, however, I have a number questions.

First question: am I turning into my dad? Much to the amusement of my mother, particularly now that money is not the worry for them it once was, my dad has always an insatiable appetite for not spending money on things if he can avoid it. My mother calls it his "east Midlands streak" - the two of them originating from Derby, you see. I've never heard anyone else refer to people from Derby as unusually frugal (I thought that was Yorkshiremen, or is is it Scots?) but my mother knows a lot of things nobody else seems to know, and I respect that. The issue I am about to comment on with a borderline autistic level of pedantry is also just the sort of thing my dad would notice, and now, for reasons not entirely mysterious I suppose, I have started noticing too.

Not the only time this cup has ever,
or will ever be used, probably.

Second question: aren't the cups that coffee comes in when you don't take it outside reusable?  They are, after all, reused.

Third question: why, then, is coffee you sit down for still more expensive than coffee you take away?  A medium "Americano" (that's black coffee, if you're old enough to remember when you could call it that) costs £2.30 "to go", and £2.50 to sit in.  Coffee to go comes in disposable cups.  So if you bring your own cup, it costs £2.05.

I look the next logical leap, which is what, I have no doubt, had my Dad been there, he would have done too, and asked the "barista" question number four: what if I bring my own reusable cup but stay inside to drink my coffee?  Would this cost £2.25?  That would be a saving of 5p to drink my coffee in my own cup indoors, compared to drinking it in a disposable cup outdoors.  Would this be acceptable?  I'm willing to pay the extra 5p to sit indoors, offset against the saving of 25p saving both you the trouble of washing one of your own cups, and the ecosystem the trouble of accommodating more plastic.  It's win-win.  Is all of this consistent with your overall business model and this quarter's profit projections?

Leave her alone Dad, she just works here.



She gave me that "oh god not another pedantic weirdo customer why do they always talk to me I just want to go home and drink wine" look that nobody ever expects, but everyone always deserves.  (Be nice to people in customer service please, they hate you; they really, really hate you, as they have every right to do).  I shut my mouth and sat down.

On the way down, I stopped off at the coffee accessories station, or whatever it's called where you get your sugar, napkins and so on - oh lord, that's probably exactly what it is called) to grab my usual handful of sugar sachets, when it hit me just in time: zero waste.  Individually packaged sugar portions aren't zero waste.  Alright, they're made of paper and so probably recyclable (or that weird plasticy paper, and so probably not) but still, they are wasteful, pointless, excessive.  Question five: would it be cheaper to offer a bowl of sugar on the table, just as cafes once did?  Six: what business advantages are there in offering individually packaged sugar portions, disposable wooden stirrers (question seven) and plastic spoons (question eight) when reusable alternatives exist, and did long before the likes of Costa ever came along?  Economists, I believe, refer to such considerations as "externalised costs" - i.e. costs not factored into overall calculations of profit for the business, since the price is paid by someone else: or in most cases, something else, i.e. the environment (i.e. everyone else).

A zero waste option for sugar users was unavailable, so I took my coffee without sugar on this occasion.  (Well how about that?  Going zero waste is good for you, too!)

21st century urban coffee management and accessorising solutions.

I'm sure that somebody, somewhere - probably a whole committee of someones - have considered all of these questions, and many others, from every possible angle, and come to their conclusions for sound and defensible business reasons.  You would expect no less, and no more, under  'endless growth' capitalism.  Which leads me to ask my only real question here: under current economic models, are such things as offering tiny incentives to customers to reuse their own cups ever going to be anything more than shallow and meaningless gestures of caring about the deep and important environmental problems of wastefulness and sustainability?  Can capitalism ever make its peace with the growing trend away from consumption and towards zero waste, minimalism and truly subversive anti-consumerism?  Or will it, as it always does, incorporate these ideas, step by tiny imperceptible step smoothing them out until they remain available only as commodified "choices", compatible now with the existing paradigm but stripped of any power they might have had to really change anything?

It remains to be seen, but here is a clue.  The barista, her only defence against my passive-aggressive onslaught of ridiculous questions about cups and pennies and sustainable business models, offered me a solution.

Costa sell their own reusable cups for you to take away and bring with you next time.

95p each.

Made entirely of plastic.


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My First 'Zero Waste' Weekend

Strawberry Gardens forever...

Friday is a market day in Bury, so I made it my mission to explore for the first time with my "zero waste" goggles on.  Results were...mixed, but encouraging.

If you believe Google maps, then Bury's "Strawberry Gardens" (a sister of the larger fresh fruit and veg stall in Manchester's Arndale Centre) is in Bury market, but Google is not infallible.  I'm sorry to be the one to break it to you.  Strawberry Gardens is just next to the market, on Princess Parade, easy to miss between chintzy cafes and charity shops, but well worth a visit for the aspiring zero-waster.  Some items are available unpackaged:

And some are not:

Apparently this man's middle name is 'Avacado'

I found myself thinking about plastic (again) and its association with cleanliness and hygiene.  Wrapped in plastic = hygienic, right?  And still covered in dirt from the ground it grew in = unhygienic?  This is an unhelpful way to think.  I'm not nearly well versed enough in the science to tumble down this particular rabbit hole, but a cursory google (yes, alright, not infallible, just very, very useful) leads speedily enough to research linking plastic wrapping to exposure to estrogen (which is linked to breast cancer) and associations with plastic and just about every health problem you've ever heard of.  Wading through the quack science and clickbaity gibberish to get to the source material is tricky, but undoubtedly worth the effort, at least for someone who actually understands what they're reading (which I don't).  For the rest of us, walking the line between the David Wofle-type conspiracism that has reached its tendrils into nearly every corner of the internet, and full scientific literacy (which has not) it's best to just be very, very careful what we accept at face value.

Still, the prospect of that unnecessary exposure to plastic through our food seems plausible; and if it  turns out to be completely and utterly harmless to lick clean the tray you microwaved a ready-made lasagne in for tea every single day, I don't really think you'd want to.  Best just to avoid plastic wherever and whenever you can, until further notice.

So, in Strawberry Gardens, I helped myself to one large sweet potato, two baking potatoes, a net full of carrots, and two courgettes.  At the counter I put them straight into my knapsack, paid, and off I trekked.  Next task: soap.

Waste not, want not, boys and girls.

Soap is a necessity, and the zero waste groups are full of discussions of the issue from every possible angle.  Dare I say it, but women, who are often more...um, complicated in their  personal hygiene habits, seem to be having a harder time going zero waste in this respect.  Cosmetics are a particular issue (just as they are for vegans, and for comparative reasons).  As for me, I only use bar soap for washing, cleaning and making myself presentable anyway, so the only hurdle here would be finding bars of soap in either cardboard packaging or - the holy grail - no packaging at all.  And would you know it, on my second scan of the first stall I came to, I struck gold:

Not actual gold, obviously.

The courgette is included for comparison.  These are two hefty bars of soap, which when sliced into a more conventional size will yield about 10 bars altogether. Total cost: £1.  The other alternative (at the same stall) was 6 bars of "travel soap", packaged only in cardboard, for the same £1, but a much smaller amount.  There were described as "vegetable soap" on the boxes, which is another consideration for me, as a vegan, but I settled instead for quantity.  These bars have a home-made look about them, but it did not occur to me to ask how they might have been made.  I had my mind on other things.  Next time.

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I had a kind of epiphany this week that the time was right for me to go zero waste, instead of just idly thinking about it.  You can read my ridiculous ramblings about that by clicking here.

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