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
******
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.

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:

******
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.

Spring Onion Afterlives

Here's my current stash of spring onions, leeks and celery, "regrowing" in jars of water on my kitchen window shelves:

As I've pointed out before, sadly you can't just keep regrowing these indefinitely, which is obvious when you consider nature and entropy and all that, but I wonder if there are any "hacks" I could employ to stretch out the afterlife of these sprout little greens. Like how you can add bleach to their water to keep cut flowers fresher for longer, or something like that, but obviously not quite like that.  I don't really fancy eating leeks grown in bleach.  I think about this sort of thing a lot.

Older specimens gradually start to thin away, sprout less enthusiastically, and eventually just give up, returning to the compost from whence they came.

Spring onions, after about 4 weeks in a jar of water.

More recent acquisitions, by comparison, are thicker and more vibrant:

More recently jarred spring onions (about one week).

I could just plant them back in some soil, but I have tried that before and not much came of it.  What I'm interested in is building a completely "closed loop" of free food generation, but this is probably impossible.  Perhaps aquaponics may provide some insights.  It's a fascinating idea.  Aquaponics is hydroponics plus fish.  The fish contribute and process nutriients in the water, which feed the plants, which release nutrients into the water that benefit the fish.  Or something like that.  It all gets very scientific.  Perhaps not something you can achieve on a windowsill.

Anyway, in the meantime I've regrown enough spring onion greens to fill a small jar of salt water which I can now keep sealed and allow to ferment properly.  This from about 12 spring onions, which as we've seen have probably reached their peak.  Not much but it's something: one more jar of free, well preserved food.  Useful for soups, stews, snacks and sandwiches.  Onwards!

Related posts

Zero Waste Eating is Good for You
More Fun With Food in Jars
How to Re-grow Leeks
Home Grown Green Breakfast Stir Fry
Give (Lacto-Fermented) Peas a Chance
Grow Your Own Meals Indoors, Forever and Ever?

******
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.

A Nice Cup of Tea

My kitchen sink was blocked the other day.  With the application of jiggerypokery, I was able to unblock it, and while I was in Wilko on Saturday (I love Wilko; I don't like shopping, but I do like Wilko - almost everything they sell is useful) I noticed that sink strainers only cost 50p, so I bought one.  One size fits all, you'd think, but no.  It didn't fit my sink at all.  Just a little too big.

Then it occurred to me it might make a tea strainer, something else I've been meaning to find super-cheaply (or fashion a makeshift one).  So I washed it, and got a tea cup out, and...

A perfect fit.  All things work together for good.  I've made myself a pot of mint tea, from a combination of mints from the allotment - water mint (dried) and apple mint (fresh).

And by the way, apple mint is one of the few varieties I've been able to grow productively indoors, inside one of my vertical bottle planter things:

Yes.




Related posts

My #ZeroWaste 2019 (so far)
Candletricks
Ecobricking It
Allotment Soup

******
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.