Saturday 23 November 2019

My Plant Database



I'd like to share something with you a piece of work in progress.  It's my database of plants, and you can view it here.  In fact, you can view it right here:



I've been building it using the excellent Airtable - a collaborative database building app you can do all sorts of great stuff with, without knowing any code.  Really, start having a mess around, it's bloody great.  I have the paid version for work, which allows you to do quite a lot more, but the free version (in which the above is built) is more than adequate for this sort of thing.

I add bits and pieces to this all the time, so if you're into plants (which you should be) please bookmark it for future reference.  Though I might branch out (ha ha) and make this into a database of all my plant knowledge, for the time being its confined to plants I actually grow on my allotment or at home.  Click on any of the individual cards to expand and read more.  Enjoy!





Related posts

The Library Of
Look at this Weird Plant
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Sunday 10 November 2019

Making Horseradish Sauce





This is what a horseradish plant looks like:


As a baby in a pot, and mature, in the earth:


Give it plenty of room to spread, because you're growing it for the roots.  The leaves are large and impressive, but irrelevant in this context, which is sauce.  This is what its roots look like:




This is what its roots look like when you wash and rinse them:



And this is what its roots look like when you grate them, mix them with white vinegar, water and salt, and put them in a jar:



And that's how you make horseradish sauce.  Be careful: grating it will sting your eyes.  Like chopping onions, but worse.  Do so next to an open window and in easy reach of a towel to rub your eyes with.  The roots as they're pulled from the ground smell distinctive but the intensity of their flavour is only released by grating them.  I used a cheese grater.  A food processor may have been less painful, but I don't have one and if I did, I don't know if I'd have used it because it would also have been less fun.  Fun is important; something to take very seriously.  That's all I have to say about making horseradish sauce.






Related posts

Jerusalem (F)artichokes
Dandelion Economics
Fermented Garlic Report

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Monday 4 November 2019

Jerusalem (F)artichokes



Jerusalem artichokes are neither from Jerusalem, nor are they artichokes, but they do make you fart. A lot.  I harvest mine yesterday. When you dig them up, they look like this, all earthy and knobbly:


When you get them home and into the kitchen, they look like this:



After you've rinsed and scrubbed them, they look like this:


And finally, when you've chopped and roasted them in the oven for about 40 minutes, tossed with oil and salt, they look like this:


Their flavour is mild and nutty, and their texture soft and chewy. A satisfying teatime snack for a wet November afternoon. Recommended, and something I think I'll grow again on the allotment next year. Their plants are tall and sturdy, and outgrew even my sunflowers. There they are on the left in this rather lovely picture of my plot in August:


It's great to have grown things I can harvest right into the autumn. I harvested my horseradish yesterday too, but I think I'll leave that for another post.  I've got some farting to do. 







Related posts

September's Coming Soon
Garlic and Other Surprises



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Sunday 3 November 2019

Pale Corridors of Routine




I've been very resistant to the idea of routine for a long time.  It's for a combination of reasons: part residual youthful rebellion, part cynicism, part of my self-conception as a "free" and "independent" person, part I-don't-know-what.  Conscious or otherwise, none are particularly well thought through.  Whenever I hear the word "routine", this song starts playing in my head:


"Outside, open-mouthed crowds
pass each other as if they're drugged.
Down pale corridors of routine
where life falls un-atoned". 

Ah, 90s music.  It's all downhill from there.  Anyway, recently I've been challenging my ingrained instincts about the evils of Routine, and come to an uncomfortably exhilarating realisation:

Routine is liberating.

When I first took the conscious effort to work less and "live" more, I assumed that the abundance of free time would spur me on to a new phase of creativity, spontaneity and living-in-the-moment happiness.  It didn't.  Why?  It has something to do with distraction.  I'm very easily distracted.  I should be doing this, but as I'm doing it, I notice or think about something else I should be doing, and as I'm doing that...and so on.  Nothing ever seems to get done.  And so I find myself in an unending state of "meta-distraction" - distracted by my own distraction.

It's extraordinary the amount of time this occupies.  While I'm a big fan of pottering, both indoors and out, that's a state of mind as well as of body, and you can't potter when you're distracted by the mundane demands of everyday life: the need to do the washing up, clean your teeth, or make tomorrow's packed lunch.

So I've been experimenting with setting myself a routine that captures every necessity of my life: both at home and at work, and against my intuition, I've found that actual freedom may be here after all.  It involves not just allocating certain time slots to certain tasks (like writing this blog post, for which I've blocked out an hour) but following checklists of the littlest activities.  I have a "home from work" checklist in Google Keep that's set to activate at 7:30pm, around the time I get home on work days that covers everything from taking off my shoes, to charging my phone, to emptying refilling my water bottle, to making sure my towels are in the bathroom so when I stumble bleary-eyed into the bathroom the following morning, I can get straight into the shower, secure in the knowledge that I won't have to scamper naked and soggy back to my bedroom when I get out.  It's kind of insane, kind of obsessive, but it makes me feel good, and so I'm going to keep doing it.  I have lists for every situation.

Amongst these, I block out time on my calendar (Google probably knows more about me than I know about myself, oh no) for the changing tasks I have to complete during the day, week, or month.  When to go to the shop and what to buy, when to take my compost to the allotment, when to clean the bathroom, do laundry, order repeat prescriptions, or change the bed sheets.  The purpose of all of this is not to have to think about any of it at all.  Without thinking, there can't be any distraction either.  My mind clears.  I become focused, and happy.  It's working extraordinarily well. 

It works at work, too.  Now I've taken on more responsibilities, and soon I'm going to start managing at least one person, too, I have to organise my time for similar reasons.  Everything in its right place!  A song about distraction, if ever there was one.




It's "its", not "it's".

But by making a routine that gets my job done, and following it, I find I can keep distraction at bay here too.  No thinking, just acting.  Then when I do need to think, I have the mental strength and flexibility to do so.  Thinking is not the natural state of the human organism.  It requires effort.

Time's up.  End of post.  Next!






Related posts

Over the Edge of the Map
The State of Play
The No-Day Working Week
On Ticking Things Off Lists
The Art of Pottering
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Saturday 2 November 2019

Work, Monotony, and Happiness




Something unexpected has been happening to me over the last few weeks.  I've started to enjoy my work.

I'm having difficulty processing this.  How to react to this realisation?  Resist, or submit?  Enjoying your life is important, and not something to dismiss simply because it comes from an unexpected source.  If there are tedious, monotonous, esoteric tasks in your life that you actually enjoy doing, then you should embrace that.  Sometimes happiness just happens.

Some of my work is tedious.  And strangest of all, it's the tedium of it I find myself enjoying most of all.  I think this must be because it's tedium with purpose - collecting and working out how to manage a large amount of information, to be built into a collaborative, cloud-based database for the benefit of a large health and social care organisation.  When it's launched, I hope, it will significantly improve the services we provide for some of society's vulnerable people.  We're terrible at handling information, and the processes we use for doing so are so antiquated and bureaucratic as to be barely functional.  The result of all this is confusion, frustration, and the pointless proliferation of paperwork, which serves a purpose neither to the people providing the services nor to those receiving them.  I won't go into any more detail than that just now - I can't, without lapsing into business-speak - suffice to say it's a genuinely worthwhile project.  It has some of the markings of a bullshit job but doesn't fully qualify as one.  Or I don't think so, anyway.  You can never be sure with jobs.

This t-shirt actually exists, implying the existence of
people who unironically love hoovering.  Think about that.
But aren't I "anti-work"?  Well, yes.  And I remain so.  That almost everyone in modern society has to choose between wage labour and destitution is one of the great evils of our world.  It's an invisible, intangible and seemingly necessary evil, but one that's made all the more evil by its being so.  So to clarify, I'm not anti-work per se, so much as anti-job.  If work is defined only as doing things for a reason, then I'm not against that.  I'm quite often in favour of doing things, at least some of them for a reason.  Not all work involves jobs - a great deal of it, apparently, persists despite and even in contradiction of, the presence of jobs - but all jobs involve work.  The work done by people with jobs is very often pointless, frustrating, repetitive, demeaning and depressing - but there is always a reason for it, even when that reason is bullshit.  No work is done on the job overtly, intentionally and admittedly for no reason.  Where no reason exists, someone will make one up.  It may or may not be the person doing the work who makes up the reason for doing it - but if nobody does or can, the work will not continue.  This is in the nature of jobs.


All jobs, should, in my opinion, make the person doing them happy.  That is my fundamental political stance.  Life should be happy, and if life has to involve working, then working should involve and facilitate happiness, too.  It is only acceptable to structure a society in such a way that having a job is the only alternative to poverty where those jobs also, and without exception, make the people doing them happy.

And here's the thing about happiness.  It's not something you earn by achieving goals set only for yourself.  Happiness comes from making others happy.  Your life, considered in isolation from all other lives, is meaningless.  But meaning is found in giving meaning to others.  Try denying this.  Try living as if it isn't true.  It won't make you happy.  Of this I am absolutely certain.

So, if you want to be happy in your job, find one that that serves to make others happy.  You may find it has very little to do with how high your salary is - though obviously if it isn't high enough to cover the cost of your life, then that isn't going to help much with the happiness, but beyond that, more money isn't going to correlate very closely with more happiness.  But the more your work contributes both to your own happiness and that of others (without both, neither can exist), the happier you will be.  Make yourself happy by making others happy.  It's a virtuous circle.







Related posts

A Case of the Mondays
The No-Day Working Week
The Map and the Terrain
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Sunday 6 October 2019

Dandelion Economics







From "the news" this week we learn that coffee could become a rare luxury as farms are hit by climate change - words that send a shiver down the spine of the likes of me, a chronic coffee-holic.  

As usual though, it's market economics that frame the story, with climate change contextualised as the increasingly inconvenient externality. A change in the dynamics of supply and demand is, apparently, all the consumer needs to consisder, as, "if more isn’t done to support coffee farmers in the country [Peru] the quality of coffee in the UK could diminish while lower production volumes could prompt prices to increase." 

Capitalism is known for its contradictions, generally those that play out in the competing interests of the employee and the employer, but another aspect that I don't think is given enough thought is that between the putative moral duty of the consumer and the needs of the supplier at the source of whatever is being consumed. "Fair trade" has been presented as a more palatable alternative to "free trade" - protections for producers that factor in the workers' rights and needs to earn a decent wage under decent conditions: as opposed to an entirely laissez-faire arrangement where such things are intentionally not taken into account, so as to supply the cheapest possible product to the consumer - from which the owner of the means of production can still turn a profit, of course, but which preferably keeps the actual producers themselves in relative poverty, and so dependent on the process and whatever exploitation they may have to endure in order to ensure their own survival. Supporting "fair trade" products, then, becomes an obligation for the "ethical consumer" - buying a product that may be slightly more expensive ensures support for the producer that the market would not otherwise supply. Milton Friedman spins in his grave, everybody's happy. 

None of this calls the existence of the economic process itself into question. People want coffee, therefore people must have coffee, whatever it costs - and even when that cost is, quite literally, the earth. If "50 per cent of land currently used for coffee isn't going to be suitable for it by 2050, and coffee farmers are abandoning their farms", then the conclusion to be drawn might not be, "there simply won't be enough coffee and so we could, conceivably, get to a point where coffee is no longer available for, say, £1.50 at Greggs, but becomes a premium product for only those who can afford to enjoy it" - but that we should simply stop consuming coffee altogether, not continue to consume it while externalising the environmental costs for as long as the market and/or planet can take it.

But what then of the coffee producers in Peru? Some are already finding alternative sources of income, but those that aren't continue to depend on the compulsive coffee drinkers of the world for theirs. Don't we have a duty to exchange our money for their goods? Capitalism is what lifts millions of people out of poverty every year, right?  If demand ceases, then so does supply.  If we rich people don't go shopping, poor people stay poor.

It seems perverse to gloss over any version of this arrangement as "fair".  Trade between rich and poor is, perhaps, intrinsically unfair.  Perhaps trade by definition is unfair - although, to be, um...fair - perhaps "fair" isn't well defined.  I don't know the solution to this problem, but I'm pretty sure it is a problem.  So much for my economic chops, I came here to talk about dandelions.






"Dandelion coffee" is, apparently, a caffeine-free alternative to the coffee that's made made from coffee.  I'm certainly intrigued by the idea.  It's made from roasted and dried dandelion roots - here's a good video taking you through the whole process of making it for yourself.  So it's something I'd like to have a go at, but mainly for the fun of it, since there's no way I could ever source enough dandelion roots myself to meet my own demand for daily hot, black beverage.  Dandelions grow here and there on my allotment, and of course they're an abundant and prolific "weed" but I'm hardly going to spend all of my spare time gathering all the roots I can find to make nearly enough for an adequate stash.

So I've started looking for reasonably priced, locally sourced dandelion coffee and, well, it's not easy to come by. Here, for example is 500g of "Grade A Premium Quality" (whatever that means) dandelion coffee for £11.99 - four times the price of the same amount of the ground coffee...from Papua New Guinea. "Having worked directly with growers in Papua New Guinea and other parts of the Pacific, we are unique in having first-hand experience of sourcing only the best goods."  That'll be that "fair trade" again.  Moving on.

Here's a source of "organic dandelion leaves" grown in Devon...that's no longer available.  What they ever did with the roots, if anything, is unknown.  Cotswolds Dandelion Root Coffee Substitute exists, but gives no indication as to where their dandelions are grown.  I have emailed them to see if they might like to tell me.  Other competing products contain lactose, or are only 8% dandelion extract to begin with, "very unhealthy" according to one disappointed reviewer.  It's not going to be the easiest thing in the world to come by.

Of course, another option might be to just stop drinking coffee altogether - and not substitute it with anything. I wouldn't die without coffee, just as I haven't died without meat - something the wave of opportunistic vegan burger-pushers don't quite seem to have grasped yet (hey MacDonald's! vegans don't actually secretly crave meat at all, and might not always be looking for a substitute that reminds them of bloody, mutilated flesh).

I'm looking forward to trying dandelion coffee, locally sourced if all possible - and if it isn't, it might be fun to cultivate a few more dandelions on my allotment until I've enough roots to roast my own.  Or I could just not do that, remove coffee from my life, and carry on living.  In the end, perhaps this is the only economically sane act.  Don't consume ethically: if it can be avoided, just don't consume at all.










Related posts

More Fun With Food in Jars
Salt, of the Earth
Sacred Economics
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"
Doing Without

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Saturday 28 September 2019

The Map and the Terrain





This week the Labour Party adopted a policy of reducing the average working week to 32 hours, within 10 years of taking office. By a funny a little coincidence, I also started work on a new 32-hour a week contract. This was actually an increase for me, from part time (22.5 hours) to something more closely approximating "full".  So it goes.  Cheers, John.

John.
Now I'm already a Labour voter, and see no good reason to switch (and no, I really don't care about "Brexit" one way or the other) given the other options available, and in fact I'd prefer it if we didn't have to vote at all but just worked out which policies are objectively the best and then implemented those, subject to periodic (and also objective) review without any of the ideological and bureaucratic faff that passes, anachronistically, for government in the present age. Which is one reason I don't talk about politics very much any more.  People tend not to think I'm being sincere.  Which I may not be, it's too soon to tell.  Put it this way: once we had the divine right of kings, and soon we'll have superior artificial intelligence to rule the minutia of our lives (or give the appearance thereof, which amounts to the same thing) but in the meantime, briefly, we had to make do with democracy. So none of the new policies Labour have unveiled at their conference this week strike me as radical, controversial, or un-achievable - even if they are, in these dark times, unrealistic. The right for a two-day weekend was hard fought for, but eventually won: a three-day weekend shouldn't be too much more to ask. Three days down, four to go.

Three years ago plus a number of months, I gave up working entirely and went to the Highlands of Scotland for two weeks to camp out in the stillness, breathe clean air and think about my life. I had the vague intention of trying to live a new life without money, which was of course ridiculous. I'd saved up around £6,000 - a comfortable buffer against immediate destitution; and had given myself the impression, also ridiculous, that I could make ends meet during the transitional period from citizen to vagabond by selling of most of my stuff, grifting here and grafting there as I eked out a place for myself in world dependent on the flow of this thing called "money" - points in a game I had never asked to play.

This was all, I re-emphasise, ridiculous. I am not a reasonable person.  Perhaps the three years of working at night had pickled my brain in unused melatonin, and 12 years on Prozac had inhibited the reuptake of serotonin selectively enough to the point I could no longer think clearly at all: or perhaps to rationalise my impulsiveness away like that is to miss the point. Life doesn't teach lessons, doesn't make linear sense, and isn't supposed to because life isn't the sort of thing that's supposed to "do" anything at all. The abstract doesn't rule our lives, only the material does that.

George
On Sunday, the day before starting my new contract, I returned from another trip to Scotland, where I spent a week with the charity Trees for Life, helping to rewild the Caledonian forest. I'll have more to say about this in subsequent posts: suffice to say here that it was intense, beautiful, spiritually and bodily rejuvenating, and maybe even a bit worthwhile. So that's another trip to the Highlands - the only place on these islands approximating "wilderness", and this time not as a result of coming out of contracted job, but coming back to an even more secured one. Another funny little synchronicity it's fun to imbue with some deeper meaning it doesn't need. The parallels amuse me, and that is enough.





What on earth am I doing with my life? Well believe it or not, I have a plan.  It's not a complete plan, but it looks something like this:


  1. Having spent the last three years living, not entirely of necessity, hand to mouth, I've got rather good at skrimping my way through the weeks and months. I got myself an allotment and started growing my own food a bit; I've learned how to bake bread, preserve and multiply food in various cheap and tasty ways, and bring down living costs to a lower the average level by using fewer appliances, experimenting some to find what is and isn't really "essential", deliberately limiting my spending to various degrees, and so on. This means I an easily live on the wages of three days a week or less, while working consistently at least four, and saving up between £100 and £150 a week. Over 3 years, this adds up to approximately £15,000 to £20,000.
  2. That's a nice little chunk of money.  Why save any up if I still harbour a desire to live without it?  Well, what's changed is I won't be saving it up specifically for me, but to invest in a community I'm hoping to build.  This is something I haven't blogged about much yet either, but is becoming a larger part of my life - out of the stunted beginnings of the "Manchester Tiny House Eco Village" Facebook group something substantial is starting to emerge.  We're meeting now every two weeks - a scattered but Greater Manchester-focused bunch of architects, engineers, dreamers, musicians, gardeners, environmentalists and the curious - to plan and scheme our way into building some kind of community.  It's early days but the words "sustainable", "affordable", "alternative" and almost as often "happy" keep coming out of our mouths.  I'm one of the dreamers/gardeners of the group, so the curve of learning from people who really know what they're talking about, about things like passive houses, planning permission, local politics, project management and building regulations is a steep one for me, but I feel that I'm part of something special.  Special enough to invest not only my time in but also, when I have some of it, my money.
That's really it, in outline form.  Live as simply as possible, work a little harder, to save up enough money to put into a form of life I want to live on a more permanent and sustainable basis, maybe just in time for when that sort of thing becomes not only desirable, but essential.

There's a web of contradictions I still have to untangle in my head, but that's all part of the process.  What do I really think about "money"?  Is community something that I, more of a solitary soul by inclination, really want?  What, in the end, is "work" and is it really that bad?  How can working to survive and really, joyfully living be combined? - and so on.

But the map is not the terrain.







Related posts

Oh No, Not Utopia Again
The No Day Working Week
Paying Not to Die
Go to Bed
Repairing my only pair of shoes again.
Taking the Zero Waste Plunge
Uncomfortable Questions
Scraps of a Manifesto
The State of Play
A Case of the Mondays
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Saturday 7 September 2019

Salt, of the Earth




I've been thinking about salt recently.  No, not the metaphorical salt of internet shitlordery, consumed in the tears of your antagonists, but actual salt.  Sodium chloride.  Table salt.  White powder.  Salt and vinegar.  Salt.

Anyway, according to legend and maybe even history, Roman soldiers were paid in salt.  From the Latin sal we derive the words "soldier" and "salary", suggesting some kind literal connection.  Being "worth your salt" idiomatically speaking, indicates this too.  Salt was a valuable commodity in ancient times for various reasons, one of which seems to have been its use in food preservation, hence why my mind has been wandering though this territory.  I like to imagine Roman soldiers tucking into some sweet, salty picked onions around their campfires or in their tents between pillages, orgies and crucifixions and whatever else they did for fun, though more likely they preferred their salted meats and almost certainly wouldn't have had much time for vegetarianism.  Imagine a Roman vegan.  Not easy is it?  So there probably weren't any.

Actual photograph of an actual Roman soldier not being a vegan.

The Romans are dead though, and I'm alive - and I'm vegan, which means I win.  As I experiment more with pickling and lacto-fermenting foods, I find myself accumulating portions of food not substantial enough to preserve on their own in one go (unless I get some really, really tiny jars) which means I need some temporary storage solutions while I gather enough material to pack into a jar of any worthwhile size.

One example is nasturtium seeds: abundant in their own way, but only enough to gather by a couple of handfuls at a time.  What I've been doing as I collect them is submerging them in salt water until I've collected enough to make a jar of "poor man's capers".  Let me tell you, this is well worth your time, because pickled nasturtium seeds are absolutely bloody delicious. 

Nasturtium seeds, in salt water, ready for pickling.
The recipe I've followed actually advises soaking your seeds in salt water for 48 hours to "mellow the hot peppery flavour" which is fair enough - completely raw, nasturtium seeds are pretty spicy - even if not absolutely essential.  So what I do is add the seeds to a jar of unsealed (but covered) salt water until I've enough to make a sizeable jar's worth of pickled seeds.  What this also means is that some will have had more time to de-pepper themselves than others in the meantime, which I think adds a certain depth to the flavour of the pickled end product.

It's an impossible recipe to go far wrong with, requiring only white vinegar, salt, sugar and a bay leaf.  And as I said, very much worth your time.  Take a look at how pleasing to the eye the end product can be:

Also pictured: piccalilli.
So, yes.  Let's hear it for salt.  And seeds.  And the Romans.  And stuff.








Related posts

More Fun With Food in Jars
Wild Garlic Experiments
Spring Onion Afterlives

Made another scrappy allotment video today.  Here it is:




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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.