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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