Woodward: “It was a tough day at the office…I was disappointed with the 30 points they scored in the first half.”
Dallaglio: “In most areas, we came second best…this is very disappointing for all of us.”
Of all teams, it had to be against the All Blacks. Juffs, if you read this, Umaga’s boys did great, you have permission to gloat.
We live in London, a mere drunken banker’s stagger from Canary Wharf and the new financial heart of London. We are lucky enough to have a ground floor flat with a small south-facing garden. In this garden, we can enjoy good weather by eating and loafing in the garden, admiring SWMBO’s flowers and shrubs. For this, it has to be said, is her domain. Were such matters within my remit, all the garden bar the patio and the shed, would be be given over to cultivating vegetables with, perhaps, the odd decorative planting here and there.
As a child, I grew up in a home where in the back garden, my Dad grew a fair proportion of the vegetables we ate. Although this was done partly by choice, it also helped to supplement the far from stellar incomes of a self-employed engineer and nurse. Although we were far from self-sufficient, I now realise that we were living an mild approximation of the lifestyle later portrayed to great comic effect in ‘The Good Life‘. Although I don’t remember playing a very active part in the actual market gardening, I do remember being captivated by John Seymour’s seminal book, The Complete Book of Self Sufficiency. Seymour’s plain economic yet evocative prose made the backbreaking and often thankless life of a smallholder seem simple, achievable but most of all, enviable. Not that this spurred me into action at the time, I simply did as little as possible to help and grew up eating good food that was well prepared with ingredients whose provenance was, for the most part, known. In the intervening years, my awareness of issues environmental has quietly grown and I have long held the desire to have a less frenetic and immediate life, hoping instead to ‘downshift’, as it is now called. Recently, SWMBO and I have discussed a variety of ways in which we can bring this about – ultimately, to find a way in which can spend far less time in traditional work environment (nine to five, stressful work, long commute, little family time*), enabling us to spend more time together working in, around and maybe from the home. Over the years and months, various bouts of online research and reading have brought us to the point where we are now seriously looking at a number of ways in which we can make this idea a reality, whether at home or abroad. Although I am by nature a serendipitous optimist, I am no wearer of rose tinted specs and I am realistic enough to know that a corporate salary will be a necessary evil for a while yet if we are to affect such a change. Having said that, I recently came across the Down The Lane website and I have to say that the lifestyle Richard Cannon is creating for himself is probably the most realistic work/life balance I have seen and close to that which I believe I would be happy with. One of the key factors in wanting to find a smallholding or, failing that, a house with a large garden in a more rural setting is our determination to have greater control over the food we eat. We try and shop wisely and we try to ensure that we eat healthily – or at least we thought we did until we read the Chemical World investigation supplements recently published by The Guardian. If you are not disposed to read it, I won’t cover the same ground here, save to say that I have not bought prepacked washed & ready-to-eat salads since. Although farmer’s markets and organic box deliveries are a boon for those seeking safer organic alternatives, they are a tad too strong for our budget and still keep us at some remove from the source of the food. Likewise, the exceptional quality of the produce of Rick Stein’s food heroes – whilst quite rightly lauded and championed – comes at a price that puts it into the occasional treat category for us. I suspect that in approach if not execution – I don’t have a Channel Four production budget to play with – we are more inclined towards the path trod by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. In essence, we would like to be able to grow a fair proportion of the food we eat and make informed decisions on the produce we buy in. In the last year or so, I have taken to carting the sprogs off to the Borough Market to show them what meat looks like before it is skinned and butchered, how a large fish is filleted in seconds by an experienced hand and to buy vegetables with dirt on that they can handle, smell and taste before buying.
All of which is a very roundabout way of getting to the point of this post-with-pictures. Earlier today, I and three of the sprogs had great fun setting up a couple of organic growbags on our south-facing patio today and planting them out. Anything which involves mucky hands, full watering cans and sharp knives is a winner with kids so a good time was had by all. Ranging across the two bags, we have gone for old favourites like tomatoes (plum for sauces, ordinary for salads) and cucumbers and the less ordinary aubergines and chillis.
Click to enlarge
As all these like a deal of warmth and sun, we decided a little husbandry was called for. With no budget or inclination for shop bought stuff, the eldest and I decided to scrabble around the garden and shed for the wherewithall to build a ‘greenhouse’. An hour later, we had fashioned a detachable and re-usable leanto affair from transparent rubble sacks, canes, scrap fence wood and tapes both parcel and duct. As you can see from this rather iffy shot, the result is an exercise in frugality, recycling and craftsmanship.
Click to enlarge
Whilst I have done this sort of thing before, it is a first for the kids so I will attempt to diligently report on their progress as super-smallholders in the weeks to follow.
*Strangely enough, whilst taking a breather after losing the first draft of this post, I read Madeleine Bunting’s Guardian Weekend piece ‘‘Sweet smiles, hard labour‘ which contains a damningly accurate summation of what it is like to work in my industry sector at the moment. Is it any wonder that folks at all levels of corporate life want out? I hinted to SWMBO that she might read it to better understand why I can be less than communicative upon returning from work on a Friday.
Footnote: Now the peed-offness has subsided, I can releate that I lost a version of this post after writing for an hour or so earlier today. I was particularly annoyed as I nearly always hardcode my posts in EditPad Lite or HTML-Kit, saving frequently as I go. I didn’t on this occasion as I was bracketing the pictures with text so I thought I would try Blogger’s Preview function as a handy way of seeing how things were looking. Suffice to say, I shall be sticking to tried and tested methods in the future.
Ken Livingstone has just been returned as the Mayor of London for a second term after a close run contest with Steve Norris.
City and East, which is our local constituency in the London elections, are just reported as having returned Labour – though the BBC result page has yet to update – they must be busy!
Reading Roger’s post on his new Trek bike reminded me that I have an old neglected Trek 900 in the shed. It’s not that I don’t want to ride it, it is just hard to fit rides in along with work, family, running and everything else. It is hard to believe that I used to clock 100+ miles a week as a cycle courier way back in the early eighties. In weather like we’re having, I often think back to the freedom and the companionship that that the job offered – the quick snatches of conversation in Soho Square between jobs, the chocolate pudding and custard in the Court Cafe, hanging out of the office window watching the world – and the film industry girls* – go by, changing the gas bottles for the prostitute downstairs and refusing the freebie offered in return. When I started, there were only a handful of cycle courier outfits in London and it was still something of a novelty. Nowadays, it is a full-blown industry with associations, federations, international gatherings and competitions.
Sadly, one of the things that hasn’t changed a great deal is the lack of a decent integrated transport policy for London, despite the best efforts of the likes of the London Cycling Campaign and the London Bicycle Messenger Association. The fact that major cities around the world seem incapable of developing coordinated transport schemes means that the more vulnerable users like pedestrians and cyclists are perpetually at risk from other road users. In all my 20 years of cycling in London, quick wits, defensive riding and treating all others as homicidal maniacs means that I have thankfully only had a handful of bad spills requiring hospital treatment. Some, however, are not so lucky as the list of names at Messenger Memeorial shows. Unknowingly until today, I happened upon the scene of Sebastian Lukomski’s accident minutes after it occured and was in the area when London cyclists staged a Critical Mass protest later and distinctly recall thinking how easily that could have been me.
On a lighter note, all this is quite pertinent because Bike Week 2004 starts tomorrow in the UK – so join me in digging out the bike, pumping up the tyres and heading off to a local event near you – like these run by Tower Hamlets Wheelers.
* One of whom later became SWMBO.
Enjoying an afternoon of baking (as you do) whilst listening to Kath Melandri and Eddie Nestor presenting a Mayoral Election special on BBC London 94.9. Whilst I am waiting for the dough to rise, I am online with my friend emma the sys ad and she has just pointed me towards a hilarious collection of overheard conversations on b3ta.com. Off to knead me buns…
Many thanks to m’learned friend Jason who just pointed out that my Atom XML feed was not updating. This advanced form of literary self-critisism was brought about by careless path editing when moving the whole shebang over from MT.
Just heard that Ray Charles has died.
Little did he know it at the time but Ray played a key role in the courtship of SWMBO and myself many moons ago. Not long after we started seeing each other, I was very keen to get hold of a copy of Ray Charles’ version of the classic ‘I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now’. SWMBO had never heard it so, as we walked through Covent Garden heading for the then new Tower Records megastore at Piccadilly Circus, I sang it to her in my own inimitable style. To this day, she refers to the occasion during which, in an eclectic set, I also busked my way through several numbers from Sinatra’s Songs For Swinging Lovers. Whilst I heard every soaring note of Nelson Riddle’s orchestration of the Capitol Records classic, I suspect the theatregoer’s in St. Martins Lane thought someone was strangling cats. For younger readers who are not familiar with Ray Charles, he’s the blind music store guy who does a great musical cameo in John Landis’ movie, ‘The Blues Brothers‘. If you haven’t heard of The Blues Brothers, you won’t get much else on this blog.
I’m not the biggest football fan going. In fact, as a staunch rugby fan, it is safe to say that I am unable to name more than two or three players in England’s Euro 2004 squad. Having said that, my daughters play football and frequently watch ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ so we do sit down to watch big internationals as a family occasionally. What we don’t do is festoon our windows with ‘England’ flags and play the old and wearisome ‘Three Lions On A Shirt‘ supporter’s song by Baddiel and Skinner. Loudly. Very, very loudly. Seventeen bloody times. Like our upstairs neighbour did this evening, like he always does when England play an international. With breaks for getting beer from the fridge, flag adjusting and sofa trampolining, he managed to string this homage out to over an hour and a half. All this rather marred the bucolic charm and rustic serenity of tonight’s episode of the excellent Britain Goes Wild, the BBC’s fortnight of live and recorded programming on our indigenous wildlife. The educational and entertainment value was rubber-stamped when my Dad, a dalesman by upbringin and former county council countryside officer, called to check the kids were watching and stated that even he had learned something new watching the shows. Believe me, admissions like that are as rare as osprey sighting in London.
As I have mentioned in the previous incarnation of this blog, I took up running a month or two back and have been building up to participating in the Chris Brasher Memorial 10k run. On Sunday, and by way of a change from pounding the roads of the Isle Of Dogs, I chose to run circuits of Victoria Park instead. As I ran, I took in the sights and sound in this most English of settings and as I did, I found myself pondering on the changing essence of England and Englishness, now that we are a part of an internet-connected global village. Thinking this a great idea for a blog piece, I made my way home only to discover (whilst leafing through the The Guardian’s Review section in the smallest room) that this very topic is covered in Timothy Garton Ash’s new book Free World: Why a Crisis of the West Reveals the Opportunity of Our Time. In the extract in the paper, Garton Ash describes an England that sits in a limbo between four competing elements, Island, World, Europe and America. I see the push and pull of these elements every day where Starbucks sits awkwardly alongside Ye Olde C15th Coaching Inn. I see it in the youths outside my window who measure their credibility in term of the latest footwear worn by their South Central counterparts but manufactured by less fortunate peers elsewhere in the world. I see it when we happily scrabble for authentic Mediterranean peppers that have been blast-chilled and flown in overnight but turn our noses up at a locally grown Cox’s Pippin because it has a slight blemish. As I see it, in our rush to embrace the easy, the convenient, the new and the bland into our daily lives, we seem only too happy to ignore or discard the cherishable, the unique, the valuable and the worthwhile. As Garton Ash relates, ‘there has been an England, and a people who have called themselves the English, continuously since at least 937’ and yet we seem more than happy to abandon this heritage to assimilate the worst the world has to offer rather than the best. The piece continues with the observation that ‘the historical connection between “world” and “island” is direct and simple. The world has now come to the island because the island first went to the world’. As the world flocks to England’s shores in forms many and varied, we seem to readily embrace the very worst excesses of globalisation and uniformity that the multinationals have to sell, whilst we fear and shy away from the cultural diversity, shared experience and new horizons that individual migrants can offer.
As the Guardian article points out, England was the cradle from which the modern notion and model of ‘human rights’ grew through the centuries. It is for this reason particularly that I, and a good many others it would seem, find it abhorant that the traditional notion of English and Englishness are under constant threat of misappropriation. This misappropriation is being stealthily but steadily carried out by those who use terms like English and Englishness to describe a country and a state of being that excludes others who do not fit a prescribed racial blueprint. I suspect many flying the flag of Saint George from their windows or mini flagstaffs on their cars around these parts, see the Euro 2004 competition as ideal cover for overblown statements of national pride and anti-elsewhere behaviour. Sadly, I witnessed just such an expression a short while ago, when I broke from writing this to collect the kids from school. I was in a line of parents exiting the school building, walking behind a tall shaveheaded white man in the now seemingly ubiquitous uniform of the masses, the England football strip, trainer socks and expensive white trainers. When the Bengali mother ahead of him failed to hold the door long enough to allow him to barge his way through, he rammed the closing door hard with the buggy he was pushing, presumably to cause it to hit her. When he failed to accomplish this, he swore, tore the door open and set off to pursue the unwitting woman across the playground. Upon catching her up, he rammed her heels extremely hard with the buggy and loomed over her, thrusting his beflagged chest and tattooed arms towards her and leering as if to challenge her to complain. Sensibly, but sadly, she turned and quickly moved away. Just as when some of those round these parts used the well-worn but hollow ‘protest vote’ argument to defend their voting in a BNP councillor in 1993, the cross of Saint George seems to be a flag of convenience, with it’s symbolism open to interpretation, depending on the circumstances.
Billy Bragg talked on the subject of ‘the England flag’ on Radio 4 earlier this week, in programme looking at the concern over possible football hooliganism in Portugal during Euro 2004. He recently participated in a march in Malmesbury where there was a single racist marching in opposition, waving a flag of Saint George. Bragg said that he wished that he and his fellow marchers had had the foresight to also carry and wave flags of Saint George, as this once simple action would have helped reclaim the flag from those who seek to use it as a symbol for their own ends. Whilst I agree wholeheartedly with this and think the idea has genuine merit, I will not be flying the flag at home or in the car. The thought of someone seeing the flag, looking at my close-cropped hair and assuming the worst is just too awful to contemplate.
Title from Vivian Stanshall’s Sir Henry At Rawlinson End.
Today, for the first time in ages, I exercised my democratic right and cast a full five votes in three separate elections;
the vote for the London Mayor
the vote for the London Assembly
and the vote for London’s MEPs
For postal voters like me, this was no easy task but londonelects.org.uk provided a handy 18-step guide to help me put crosses in boxes, fold ballot papers and seal envelopes. Elsewhere on the londonelects.org.uk, there are interesting presentations like At The Polling Station and The Lifecycle Of A Vote.
Before making my mark, I reviewed a wide range of material in order to ensure that I was aware of all the issues. Of all the information I devoured, I have a particular soft spot for the
Pointless Pledges that Danny Baker‘s listeners would propose, were they in the running for Mayor Of London. These some real crackers include filling up the new Swiss Re building in the City with liquid and turn it into a giant lava lamp and breeding a giant hamster to run inside the London Eye.
Meanwhile, SWMBO mentioned the ‘pay it forward’ principle earlier this evening (more of which later if I can bear it) and this reminded me of a recent phone call from my Dad. He rang a few weeks back to ask which way we’d like him to vote. Confused, I asked him what he was on about. He said that he wanted us to advise him on how we were voting as he wished to vote the same way. When I asked him why he simply stated that, in the twilight of his years, he preferred to use his vote to benefit us and the children, trusting that we’d be voting sensibly for ourselves, our fellow wo/man and the planet. We don’t always see eye to eye but his integrity and his concern for others always holds my respect.