31>AWST

This piece has been sitting in my iWriter like cheese in a fridge. Not a good idea.
So I am posting it to be done with it.
Might wash my hands now...


'I have been ranting about August today in a blasphemous way.

What are the months? I felt them like there is a potentate who presides over each. A goddess of August. We are subject to her whims of weather, her emotional outbursts. In human form, she would be a large, blowsy woman, a bit lazy and prone to leaving things where they fall. I daren't look too hard in case she notices my attention and demands my head.

It has always been a difficult month for me: Well, perhaps it was endless heaven when I was young, so that 'always' means since I had a working domain.

August is the Month of Interference.
I used to fish an open boat off a shingle beach. When it was beached, safe above the tidal reach and anticipated seas, it attracted a keen, intrusive interest in August.
I would often leave the boat smeared with the detritus of lobstering, partly from tiredness, but also hoping that its rank, fishy smell might deter tourist curiosity. An August morning would often find its deck littered with lager cans and pebbles.
At sea, lobster pot ropes hung slack on the surface, prone to being cut by speedboat propellers, where curious visitors had lifted them.

It is an aimless month. In some European countries they wisely take the entire month off: declaring a Great Emptiness.
Of course that means ice-cream vendors and deckchair attendants are in full cry.
The painful truth is that this coastal economy generally is dependent on visitors. Well, it is heaven, so who are we to clutch it to our chests?

The winter is a peaceful desert though. The `Ber dynasty hold court there at first before the two `Ys supplant them. Both decree a more essential pace to things. A war economy. I like this.

August is an emotional month too. Laden with fruit and fat rainclouds, ready to burst. Drunken wasps, drowned butterflies.

 We would all be poorer without the arrival of any season.

 August though is the final,decadent crescendo of the Empire of Summer, the month of Visitor onslaught.
The Finale is August Bank Holiday: like the end of the crescendo in "Day in the Life" on Sargeant Pepper.
Psychic and physical Relief.

 Before the empty spaces blossom in the car park.

And the tumbleweeds of Autumn roll down down Market Street.'

30> Q

I showed a neighbour around my land  today, at least a bit of it. -That itself said to get on with the task of scything on further, to make a network of paths.

The garden's sequence of care distracted me before now, and beyond a certain date, the imperial power of the bracken was too much to take on. I felt overwhelmed.
It's dying back now, and there is a danger that it will take weak saplings down with it, burning them up in the heat of it's decay.

 I have just ordered some more trees    so have their homes to look for too: some silver birch, sycamore and elder. Have also been offered some other hardwood saplings free, which I want to plant in a way that acknowledges the giver. Coed Rachel.

The hardest thing with these new paths is working out how they will approach, and weave through the large rocks that stick out as natural, igneous megaliths on the steeper slope.  Its a hard physical and geomantic task. Needs a lot of clear space. Inside me.
My visitor also shone a light on what I have done,   acknowledging the dream in progress.

What webs we weave and walk gently through, feeling our connections and the alchemy of them.

The wind would be roaring outside if it wasn't smothered by mist. It is cosy in this hut. Like a large coat, that I never button up. There is no door, but the rug is hung up there tonight.


Have started storing my roots. Well my book says that I should, otherwise they get frosted or go woody.
I made a clamp for my beetroot last month and it was suspiciously easy.
I laid out a nest pile of dryish bracken, put the beetroot on top, big ones first, then covered them with a thick bracken layer.
I pried into it today and all is well.They were sprouting feebly: Vegetative life seems to be half habit...A cut log often sprouts leaves.
So will do one for the swedes now, well half the swedes. - it is just an experiment after all.


Fachongle is bursting with produce. We are in danger at the moment of living entirely on perishable rejects and gradeouts, while their chosen cousins sit smugly in sacks or hang like polished breasts from all possible beams.
We will need to get cannier about how we discern Surplus I think.



 We have SO much to learn, or to relearn,
as we work towards a Degree in the Bleeding Obvious .

29>Awsted Out

Got a lot of words, but no intent.

Too many. As if my metaphysical period is over and am in the wallow of decadent style; Donne to Dryden in a week or two.







Started writing about why I disliked August, and maybe have become infected by its shapeless confusion. A month of moulds and yeasts.


But I have no excuse now.
Its late September, and we are steaming full-speed into the dark and windy sea of tomorrow.
Bustles of picking vegetables and cutting firewood help define time.
People are juicing apples and stringing onions wherever I look.



 I have been back more to the forest, and restored my workspace there, with a new clear tarpaulin rigged like a berber tent over the sawbench and a fresh battery on its tractor. The garden is getting less attention. I spent the equinox there, so feel the autumn tidying has at least started. Some turned soil.

The bracken is backing off boiling all over my saplings. I have rescued some drowning, chafed and shrouded trees, but have come to love it despite this. It nurtures with its compost, as long as I too tend to the task.



I'm trying to be wisely spontaneous about where to be and when, partly by listening to the gentle call of a task before it becomes a scream, or thinking about it makes my heart sag with guilt. Its not just work places that nag for a visit. There are  about half a dozen sites that occur in my mind with firm regularity. They need attention, and I always come away feeling replenished, so its mutual.
Its shamanism. You have it too. There is a mix of letting go of intellectual commentary and predeliction, and embracing intuition and imagination, that is magic. Our lives are not ready-meals. The only reliable recipe is you.



And then there is myself. My body is feeling stiff and sore, so I have to listen to it when it gets stretched and painful, and try to give it a loving rest.
As long as I am doing the right thing, at the right time, there IS energy and time for everything.

But that's so rare, its more theory than practice.

I feel ready now. For whatever comes next. The mess of Summer is being flattened or stripped by this wind.

It's real again.

28>Feel Flows

I went down the old path to where I've scraped open a scoop in the earth to hold a seepage of spring water there. It's great. I only took a litre flask to fill, but could  have filled four.
It's sweet water, and makes me feel held by the land again.

My spring going dry made me feel very insecure.
It's interesting that the new source is on the old path that cuts down to the far corner, on the land's spine.
So I will be walking that way more often.

The other paths are getting crowded out by high bracken. I scythed a patch last week, and it's getting very wiry. Tough leathery stems.
After supper I intended to walk up to see my mother spring, but it had been raining so the bracken would have been  soaking.
Paths occur through usage. Places that we visit, for water or food or fuel, and places that we like to go to or through. The way that we walk on them imprints our energy.
I sometimes see words as acronyms, so PATH might be People And Their Habits.

When I first went to Emma's land, Tir Ysbrydol, I was struck by the intricate lacework of paths. Going there since, I have seen how they evolve. Some have gone, others have shifted, often in response to the slow walk of seedling trees out into the fields. Trees finding their own path...

It is interesting to see paths in towns, and notice which ones are real, and those that are unused.
People walk their own paths, and if there isn't one they make it.
Look in any retail park for this.
It might annoy the architect, and the contract gardener, whose dogwood hedge gets trampled, but human spaces are mutable. If they are imposed, they often get desecrated with graffiti.



I am on digger watch today .
We have a digger man  in the wet field, excavating a large pond and I am sitting here in case he wants advice. Really I don't know any better than him, although he has got a tendency to cut straight lines that needs checking. The thing is just happening. A giant water- being is being born.
My job is to pump out the brown soup that constantly tries to fill it.



This bottom land at Fachongle is a feast of springs.
I envisage a string of three ponds, fed by a strong spring near the house. Each will have a different character. This one is going to be the biggest and deepest. A home hopefully for carp.

I wonder what John Seymour would have to say. Much struggle has gone on over the years to drain this field
yet it's wetter than ever.
A heaven of ragged robin and flag irises.

A lot of water in this blog. And paths.
All going with the flow.

27>Source Two

 Am going deep today.

My back is calling me to take time, to take care, to take note,
so here it is.

I got armed up after a warrior coffee. with my bag, slung like my school satchel on my back, radio and scythe and secateurs.
Final objective, the Spring

Was waylaid by the garden and it's plea bargainers. Water Water, Weed Weed, Save Save, they shout.
I gave emergency medical care to my blotchy, withering Globe Artichokes. A mixture of text and faith and ignorance.

Then I followed my scythe up the bracken spilt paths to the spring.

I started reaching in, into that meagre pool of water, and dredging  out the peaty ooze.

I only came back here for a sieve and my bronze mattock, to clear deeper in.

I have had mint tea
No escape now,
Back up the hill.

I clawed out the sludge. Years of it. Pawed it off the well's bottom.
When it hardens down, I will plant mint nearby. Then I scooped out the remaining water.
As I worked, my head inside the springs cave, wafts of mist came from a clay wall on the right.
The base is scattered with chips of bluestone. Some larger pieces are embedded in the clay. Bluestone has long been regarded as having healing effects.
This is a sacred place.

I left the site like an urchin, my trousers stiff with mud.
Then I heard John Penymynydd chipping away. His stone song.
He is building a waterway for the stream that has got lost in the builders' chaos of next door.
We walked together to his cistern, and to see the stream that should flow further, onto my land.

Later, he came down to my hut with a container of water.
I gave him a cabbage. We are learning simple, peasant ways.

After supper I went to see my spring. How it was recovering. The water is still like milky coffee.
I sieved a few leaves and bits of stem off the surface with my fingers .
Then I followed my pipe down, and siphoned it, until muddy water gushed out.



At least the garden has a supply again.
I must use it sparingly.
And hope for rain.

I will be drinking some interesting cups of tea for a few days.

26>Source One

I went for a cup of tea at John and Rosemarys' a couple of days ago. They live in Penymynydd, the cottage above here.
 John was concerned about his spring, or rather the fact that he shares it with a holiday cottage, that has just been renovated to include three bathrooms. The source is up on the mountain, across a sheep-ridden farmland, and he has to filter and treat it for ecoli.

He has a large concrete tank that holds a week's supply, which  secures them from occasional interruptions in flow, but has just had his granddaughter and family to stay, who each had three showers a day, and that has made him realise what the neighbours might use.
Urban habits do not encourage recognising finite natural supply.

We have had a dry year. The Spring was alarmingly so, but even since, the soakings and drizzles have done little but dampen the surface.

When I was back at Fachongle, with broadband access, I looked up whether I could download the films, Manon de Source and Jean de Florette, so that I could show them. Water and its absence dominate these brilliant French films.
The main character is an intentionally blocked spring that results in a death and heart-break.
This land feels as wild and peasant as that portrayed. No cicadas though, and a bit greener.
For now.

It wasn't on the iTunes store, so I looked to see if I could download a copy elsewhere. The only available source seemed to be a pirate Bit-Torrent. (Copious flow of information) So I gave up.

I left the tap on in the garden here last night. A mistake.
   So my first task when I came here this afternoon was to go up to siphon the pipe to my spring to restore the flow.

I was shocked to see that the water left in the spring is a meagre, muddy puddle.

I feel this knowledge resounding through every thought that I have now. One part of me plans future strategies like storage tanks. Another just feels completely shaky and insecure.

Who knows what is to come. Freezing, dry winters followed by late, dry springs maybe. That's what we have had recently.

There is an occasional stream, that flows onto the land, then sinks away into the ground. This land is porous.

I wrenched my back recently, and feel weak and wobbly from that, and now the lifeblood of my greater being, this land, is in jeopardy. So both my bodies feel challenged.

Maybe I WAS feeling a little too comfortable! 
Sixty and Smug.

Maybe there is a greater source, some deeper spring in my life, that I need to acknowledge.

And learn and to tap.

25>The Queen's Wad

The queen's wad gazes wanly from my wallet, giving a faint smile of encouragement for my enterprise.
It is hard to make a gentle living.
And seemingly getting harder.

We are all tied by fiscal strings to the outer world. However sufficient we become, there are obligations and services that require money.
Sawblades, seeds, shoes; making do can become wearisome.
Man cannot live on cabbage alone: let there be chocolate.

Children find it particularly hard to live within the cage of their parents righteous penury.

Words to do with caution and restraint seem archaic after fifty years of consumerism, but part of the pull we have felt back to the land has come from knowing this Great World Party of excess can't last.



But even if you step out of it, the traffic roars by.
I have never felt any lasting joy in disconnecting entirely from your mother culture.
It smacks of grim faced zealots, cursing outsiders for not undergoing equal hardship.

That dialogue called trade is where common values meet. Where we appreciate each others skills and sensibilities.
It is where we offer the fruits and rewards of an alternative lifestyle.

Wow, I feel almost saintly, put like that!

There is a continual need to keep a check on where your enterprise is being led, by the logic of scale, and the slaver of success. To keep that resonance between it and your life and the resources. In a Culture founded upon the principles of growth and increasing wealth.
I have seen simple woodcarvers ready to turn into ruthless tycoons when a big order beckons.

We try to make a living from simple acts of creativity.
But the irony is that most of what we offer as trade goods are hardly the staples of life. It may feed the soul or the imagination, but not the body.

As people become more cautious about spending money,  as they too become wary of excess, so we will feel it in fewer sales.




That is just how it is.
We are not an isolated elite.

This is part of a shared journey.

24>Great Unblinking Eye

Am trying to write. Its a lot easier than it was. I got jammed up with words at university. Stuffed full. But had no narrative for them to serve. It was painful I remember. Constipated and disconnected.
I got instead into the pure physical around me. The rocky shore, the hedgerows, the wind-blasted tops of hills. And sang to them. Simple, structured songs, enjoying the discipline of rhyme and breath.
I made up songs for my children, about potties and sweeties, and came to relish reading storybooks to them at bedtime.
 Words were winning a way back into my life.

When I was a full-time child, I had had an ambition to be either a poet or an ad-man: a coiner of slogans. I didn't mind which.
So my next creative word format made sense, as I devised names and descriptions for the things that I made: Safe but exciting handles for customers to grasp.
Then came the internet, and websites, that ever shifting quicksand of possibilities. Many creative lives were squandered there.
An appendage to my website of my wares was called missives, and was where I started to formulate and express my ideas. I remember them as being rather dense, angry works, as I struggled  to work out how to get out of the cage.
Then there were the online forums: Sanctuaries for bores and obsessives and fanatics, sporting silly code-names and a tenuous grasp on sense. I soon fled from attempting expression there.

Emails themselves were a great way to dare new ways of writing.
A wet evening would all too soon be gone composing one.

Now there are the social network formats, the tribal email.
And this wonderful, pure form of vanity publishing, the Blog.

Maybe nobody will read this one.
Potentially, everyone in the world, with online access, COULD.
And I don't have to care.
There is no box of poesy going dusty under my bed.

Because that idea- that larval flow of thought has been expressed. It is hardening now.I am done with it;
Can move on.
For that cage I was trying to escape from, was myself.

I remember my father's terse, wise observations on things.
They were a scaffolding that kept him sane and good in an unjust  and devious world. But they became an impregnable castle, a citadel in which he eventually imprisoned himself.

We are elaborate creative plumbing.
There are many modes of expression: sex, paint, gossip, clothes, gardening, violence, politics, an endless list.
But we NEED to express.
If we don't, our bodies will. An implosion of tumours and cancers and ulcers.
If your guides are on your case, they will offer you a chance to break your patterns with a few timely disasters.

As you convalesce or lick your wounds after a break-up or break-down, you have been given a chance to ask Why? And to explore and try to express both the pain and the answer.
You are on a unique, and special journey.





So, praise be this screen. This unblinking eye.

   

23>Gardentalk

 It's strange to be sowing again.


Patches of bare earth are appearing in among the great garden greenness.
If I had seedlings ready, they could go happily straight into that warm, cultivated ground, but I think I was too transfixed by the burgeoning growth of my crops last month to think ahead.
I am proving to be an extreme gardener though: planting as early as I dared in the Spring in my enthusiasm, and now in late July.
We had a couple of damp, dark days last week that felt like the Autumn. Literally, I felt it in my bones, as an ominous ache in my thighs.

 

The dread of Winter must be an inherited squirrel instinct > Look to your woodpile and where to store the potatoes, it says.
We invest such a deep store of expectation in The Summer that disappointment is inevitable. Our childhood is stored there, gilded in sunshine, along with the flowers of early romance.
Idylliotic creatures that we are.
As I remember, the summer was often wellies and waddingtons games, rather than basking on the beach.
A good, moist tilth though, and one the slugs and weeds have been waiting for.
One reason not to plant late crops is that they won't be ready before the weather gets too cold. What is ready, huh?




There is an underlying assumption that plants have to be large to be worthwhile. This is true in forests too.
I see it as The Big Willy syndrome; a relic male oversight of the living world that favours largeness as a symbol of prowess.
To this end, trees are spaced to optimise growth, towards a day of reckoning when they are 'mature'.
I have come to appreciate coppice and smallwood use as a more harmonious treatment of many woodlands.




Now I see similar male dogma rooted in the garden. The allotmenteer competing to produce prize leeks.
I like to eat delicate leeks, the size of a pencil. I grew some onions from seed this year, and got lovely dense billiard balls of onion which I prefer to big ones.



As I pored over gardening books, I saw a picture of some onions grown clustered together. They looked so snug.
Then I read that turnips can be planted this way, sowing about four seed together. (The turnip is a vegetable that has escaped from the tyranny of size, having had a renaissance as a tender salad crop).



I tried this and it works well. They do seem to grow better this way.
So I am looking at what other roots would benefit.

Planting in clumps rather than lines makes so much sense. Just like us, plants, for the most part, like to live in community.
I have been planting my ash seedlings close together. Part of that is because it's a windy site. I don't expect or want to get high single-stem trees there, but anticipate healthy coppice.



Ash seedlings in the wild grow as thick
as grass, yet somehow glean themselves, without any sign of pain, of surplus trees, as the group grows in stature. They grow as a cooperative organism. Ashitude. They are the ultimate republican tree.



So to plant trees to their ultimate young adult spacing is to rob them of their childhood.
To conscript them into an army.
Social control patterns reminiscent of an earlier time.



Let your trees live in tribes again.



Set your vegetables free!

22>There was one.

There was one.

     A blog.

I'd thought about what he'd said and what I'd said, and so on and then there was a lesson .... There endeth the blog. Amen.



It was going to be about the difference between living in a world order based on human certainties, with everything contained by cerebral understanding, and this faerieland that I choose to live in, full of intuition, seemingly fed by intelligent, often mischievous, nonhuman interventions.
I find containment enough in belief in a wise and benign universe.

My world is littered with exotic graffiti.
Everything has meaning.
Bus tickets picked out of puddles in the street, Shop signs, snatches of speech, car numberplates, chance meetings, irksome feelings. Thoughts that won't go away:
It's all pure and meaningful information.

 
Its all useful. Meant to happen. To you.

Dolphins cavort and crop-circles sprout shouting "Lighten up! Enjoy it! Life is Good...
We are given opportunities to learn as we live with every breath, every second.
THAT is how good life is.

Maybe I am living in a bubble of idiocy.
A delusion. I need to worry more.
Terrorism, Ill Health, Accident, Penury>
Our Culture is a Class A Fear user.
So no wonder we feel life is empty without it.



Should I feel that I am delusional unless there is something dark ever clawing at the door, and that various human initiatives such as Parliament and the Law, are guarding me? Unless I feel lethargic and in need of instruction or entertainment.

I could go and buy grey slacks and hunch my shoulders and assume that other people were in control and get irritated when a bus was late and write a letter and wait for a reply that never came and get cancer or an ulcer and decide to die in a hunched and irritated way, though hanging on stubbornly because part of me knew that I'd missed the main event.

As if we think that we are tied to bit-parts in some soap-opera, but are actually freelance angels.



 Scrumple that script...

Write your own

New AngleLand

We live in a Rightest Society.

I speak as one of the Sinister, the Un-dextrous, the left aside, Left handed.

A rightness that even extends into the shape of things: the Right Angle.
The Square that dominates our living spaces.

The Rect-Angle, the Reich,
Full Square it sits in front of me as I type.



The machine age has been it's glory days though. Its clean-cut, mass-produced standard lengths and panels do not fit anything but clean-cut, mass-produced items.



I heard, in one of those magpie radio moments once, of a company who, knowing that they would be making different things as time went on, simply called themselves Straight Lines.
Straight implied honesty and openness. Lines are the fruits of a conveyor belt production system...
In a patriarchal era, a straight back expressed dignity and self worth.
 In these New Age times, it is seen as the essential posture to connect Earth to the Cosmos through our bodies.  They share the same root, in understanding that we thrive by valuing our own paths.










The major disillusion with the cold logic and aggressiveness of the machine age that flowered in the 1960's expressed itself in adoration of tribal, and circular structures. The tipi, the Round Table, the dome.



They symbolised flow and completion, a consciousness that embraced all, after a century of driven tunnel-vision.
(I sometimes wonder if this was partly due to marijuana replacing alcohol as the drug of choice.



Ethnic shelters and clothes captured imagination, as their use of local, natural materials implied an intimacy with the Earth that urban life had chosen to shun.
This was more than a moment of dilettante world weariness.
Practically, it has effected the basic values of global trade.

Personal identity now factors in a sense of tribe: Often threatened or lost.
This is expressed in rites, diet, clothes, domestic space, and aspiration.



This challenges the Box. That suburban packet we come from.

The right-angle has lost its certainty, its righteousness.


                  right?

Transition Sans Ghost Towns

What are towns?
Lots start with a Goldrush of some sort, a Klondike moment. Coal or Iron or the Railways or Wool, or some mix of such materials with a timely input of human genius.
That boom wanes or moves on. What is left is a honeycomb of redundant buildings, peopled by memories. Life goes on as a mutually supportive set of habitual rituals.


Others are planned.
Nucleations were a key part of the feudal fabric that the Normans established. The classic village, with it's pub, church and Green, is Norman in plan. Before then, a  village was often a scattering of dwellings, each with its own precious plots in between, and no obvious centre.

Their strategy for supplying the string of castles that proclaimed their power was to lay out an enclosed townstead and invite loyal victuallers to settle there.
That often meant excluding the local populace.
Towns such as Aberystwyth and Newport, Pembs, which I only pick out as I know them both well, are still more markedly exotic and English than their hinterlands.

Other designed towns more recently were planned to absorb the overspill of people from degraded city precincts.

It seems strange to base a movement to return us to a more resilient, local supply economy on such a motley bunch of remaindered buildings.
 True Transition should surely stem from Earth based initiatives, not towns.



The Norman infrastructure was not limited to towns. The Domesday Book was essentially a stocktake of taxable assets. From this reckoning, existing settlements were allotted distinct parcels of land sufficient for their needs and to pay a tithe to the Church, and meet taxation demands from the Crown.
These are still evident, as present-day parishes.
Obviously some have been lost and others have become urbanised.
But the basic structure is still valid as the basis for a network of ecoparishes.

These could be presided over by the ecological equivalent of a parish priest, whose initial aim would be to ensure the parish has a secure base supply of food, fuel and water. From this, a strategy to make tradable produce could grow. The autonomy of the parish leader would help his patch develop a distinct set of tradegoods.






Parishes could be monitored and taxed for their emissions and rewarded for maintaining ecological reserves.

Ideas and problems could be shared with other parishes through Internet networking.

Rural and urban parishes could 'twin', providing a ready market for one, and a refuge and sense of connection to the Earth to the other.



I have been bouncing this idea around in my head for more than a decade, and it won't leave me. I like the idea of a priestlike status for the leader, both to restore a local distinctiveness, and to bypass the petty wrangling that beset local politics.

Democracy is not a cure all. In some arenas it results in the torpor of the norm.



But the principal appeal is in it giving status and true worth to rural communities after generations of being seen as straw-sucking clod hoppers. The pastoral myth is over. Lets start the pastoral reality




Ooh Aarh.

Pestilence

Pestilence
I had forgotten about earwigs.
There was one curled up in my kitchen roll this morning. The blend of shock and annoyance that they elicit on discovery is their hallmark.
Where will the next one be?
I know people who make me feel like this too. This is the time of year they turn up as well.

And rats. They are getting outrageous.
We have hens and ducks, compost heaps and woodpiles - so provide food and accommodation. But have cats and dogs as an amateur policeforce. The Casual Arm of the Law.

But the rats.  Their behaviour is getting out of hand.
We see them in daylight now, fearless.
They are terrorising the hens, who are highly strung anyway. Now they have started felling and stashing the broadbeans. That is taking the Piss.

What should we do? They have overstepped the mark.
The consensus is that we should talk to them. Well, we are of hippy stock.
Within this debate is a whole spectrum of opinions, that probably reflect our personal pain rather than an effective strategy.
Some of us feel that signalling our feelings by setting traps or poison might add weight to this message. Well they don't have to take the bait, do they.
They are obviously in their power, so have the choice.


Is this a perverse fusion of New Age and Tory philosophy?

I like this line of thought. It implies that some of our protective feelings might stem from projected victimhood.

Maybe I should regard the Rat as a noble opponent.
The hunter/ trapper instinct in me is very strong at the moment.
I caught two lobsters yesterday so feel like a real Human Being.


And Rabbits. The quiet nibblers on things.
Luckily the grandmother of most of our cat tribe, Lyra, has a taste for them, and passed that on to her kittens by feeding them warm ones. So the vegetables are safe. Ish.

They are noticeably on the increase on the land generally though.

Even the blackbirds are behaving like serial burglars at the moment, bombing round the garden, drunk on the juice of the berries they are plundering.

Generally, there is a sense of profusion after a challenging Winter, as if Life Forces have been jolted into a new vigour.
I have really appreciated this Spring and Summer. Every day of it.
We are alive.

Maybe only the fittest survived. The fittest earwig.

The strongest midge.

The healthiest rat.



The happiest human

some links

http://www.seafishingforfood.blogspot.com   my fishing blog

http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk simon fairlie's pertinent magazine


http://thescytheshop.co.uk  where to get your scythe

http://implementations.co.uk bronze tools

http://valeriane-leblond.eu/Valeriane_Leblond/Valeriane_Leblond_%28art%29.html

http://driftwooddesigns.co.uk

Expialidoshus

Expialidoshus Infectious

Reading 'The Land', an occasional magazine about land rights, shows individual conflicts with Planning Authorities in a wider, cultural light.

Deep-set fears of travellers and incomers, of folk with strange beliefs and different aspirations well up.
European cities have been ever wary of the next horde from the East.

At a three day enquiry about Emma Orbach's strawbale huts in North Pembrokeshire, arguments were essentially about what facilities defined a dwelling, and it's extent.
As water was collected in jugs from a nearby stream, and the compost toilet was set discretely in a hazel coppice, and these resources were shared by three huts, the prevailing middle-class model of independent units just wouldn't equate.
It was even suggested that the definition of a dwelling might include hot running water!
- Tell that to any cottage-dweller up until the 1960's.

I came to see the National Park Planning Authority as successors to the Normans, re-enacting old feuds with the native woodland Welsh.

However, the love and care that Emma showed for her land, and it's impact was far nearer the wider aspirations of greater government.

The arbiters in the end were to be those modern priests in our damaged Eden, the ecologists.
But Ecology is a broad church. The ones who checked out the Roundhouse's impact on it's surroundings were real hair-shirters, who seemed to work on the premise that any impact was deleterious, even a walked path. Also, they declared Tony Wrench's timber use to exceed his supply > as if any rural woodworker was ever likely to have owned the land his trees came from!
Eventually some sort of sense prevailed, through the intervention of a more pragmatic and observant local ecologist, who saw the fundamental truth that the diversity and lack of damage on their lands was due to their loving presence, not despite it.
But until then the removal of a few discrete Eco huts in the Clydach Valley occupied the attention of the National Park as if western civilisation was at stake.
Cultural defaults constantly colour our attempts to be objective..

Each planning case involves another set of appellants and officials. Another set of legal technicalities.
But the urge to live back in some closer connection to the Earth is the common front.

The ludicrous data demanded of the Lammas project was epitomised by Paul Wimbush with his wheelbarrow stacked high with papers. Even now, residents are being stressed by time limits on their legal obligations; hardly conducive to a happy and creative settlement.

It does feel like there is a Dementor energy that seeks to stifle joyous, creative impulse amongst us: That whole 'jobs-worth, health&safety, insurance, precedent, 'what- if- everybody- did- that' line is it's toolkit.

Dreams get sanitised. Control for it's own sake. Authoritism.
We are all potentially guilty of it - one of those inherited abusive patterns.

I don't feel there's any hope of making things really different under continual official scrutiny.
There is a balance to strike. Everyone of us and every location is different. It's good to be discrete, but not to feel furtive. If the fear of being discovered becomes overwhelming, is the lesson not to invest such emotional capital in a structure?
Your path should lead to being strong and clear in your own power.
Any anger, victimhood, or righteousness will weaken your voice.
So does rejoinder in technical terms.

Speak a simple truth from your heart and all is well.

Compromise, and they are on you like a pack of ravenous wolves...

xxxx
john
xxxx

Here comes the Betony!

Abundance versus Scarcity

    Abundance versus Scarcity


Which is it? Is the Earth a place of finite and diminishing resources? Or is she a cornucopia, a horn of plenty.
The way you regard her is key to how to treat her, other people, and yourself.
This discrepancy lies deep. The Garden of Eden is a symbol of profusion, but one we were, supposedly, exiled from. The Church taught that Man had dominion over all the fruits of the Earth, a teaching that encouraged over-exploitation.


 

Yet the Norman feudal system, with which they colluded ( taking their 10%), inflicted a state of perpetual sufficiency upon the rural poor.
Perhaps the experience over many generations, of hardship and enforced frugality, instilled in us a collective sense of impending famine.
It is certainly in the interests of rulers that their governance is seen to be protecting us from such a fate.

Any tally of present-day Global resources shows a dangerous depletion and degradation, to the point where market panics and actual conflicts occur with increasing frequency.

Yet my observation is that when you tend a piece of Earth with care and love, it can produce a superabundance.



Last century, after forty years with two states of total world war, governments were so traumatised by the scarcities that had resulted, that they sought to secure supply-chains.
This was the time when the deep oceans were scoured by trawlers, farmlands worked on an industrial scale, and forests converted to exotic monocultures.
-When the centralized command ethos of wartime was focused ruthlessly upon natural resources.

Thus the worst depletion of the Earth's bounty ever was initiated by a sense of scarcity.

Is the trauma that we are engaged in actually the Result of the centralisation of our food-chain?



I have noticed that if I am niggardly with things, if I hoard them, some flow is curtailed; I get little back. That's true right across the spectrum, right through into the world of ideas and emotions.
So abundance starts with you!
With that goes faith in the Earth's willingness to support you in return for your love and respect.

Honestly, it's worth checking the bedrock of your beliefs before you potentially put yourself outside the Pale of mainstream expectations.

14>The Burgher Kings Are Dead

The way stuff is sold has never been so varied and volatile.



I suppose the original format was the Market, often an annual or seasonal event, where livestock and other agricultural commodities, including farm servants, were haggled over.
These were often the origin and life blood of a town. A public house and a yard sectioned out by hurdles was the nucleus for many a settlement.
High street shops were the more permanent successors to  temporary stalls. As 'respectable' ratepayers, shopkeepers came to fear, scorn and try to limit more casual trading activity. 'Fly pitching' became an offence. This attitude wasn't universal of course. Pubs and cafes thrive on market days, as do specialist shops.



The arrival of larger chain-stores  served to magnify the drawing power of the High Street.

It was when our social geography started to factor around the car that
its demands for parking space, and the impact of its congestion made out of town retailing an attractive alternative.
The retail outlets that evolved were larger versions of the in-town department stores, which then were often closed down. No imagination was needed: retailers just had to copy the American model; the world's first car-driven culture.
 Entire malls of shops, with banks and cafes and, above all, free and abundant parking were built on the periphery of larger towns.
Goods within were centrally sourced, and increasing from newly emerging distant industrial sources.
The chance of there even being a procedure whereby anything local could be sold there was slight.
Our role of the purchaser became essentially passive, walking through aisles stacked high with unrepeatable bargains to choose from, rather than daring to ask for particular things that we knew we needed.
We became Consumers. Milch Cows. Mouths on increasingly obese stalks.

The out of town manifestation of the grocer was the Supermarket.  Different ones competed for key sites and sought presence adjoining smaller and smaller towns. They would even agree to build schools and libraries in order to acquire a council's approval for a development. An increasingly intelligent and adaptable cancer..

Although the big supermarkets preside over most purchases of food now, there has been a noticeable resurgence in interest in local, more personal suppliers.
The main expressions of this is in street markets.



Supermarket supremacy is further challenged by internet shopping, whereby a retailer need have no physical retail presence to offer a rival service.
Once a company gets to a certain size, it's principal aim becomes immortality. Survival.



It is unlikely that the major Oil companies' main trade in fifty years time will be in oil.

 So the supermarket chains are morphing into myriad forms to weather the rapid changes in retailing. In-town convenience stores, cash&carry supply to independent shops, and  local internet shopping are growing.

Big Organisms are by nature, homogeneous.
The Earth is best served locally.
Amen.



I foresee the day very soon when supermarkets host a local farmers market instore, thereby being seen to support local produce and initiative.

Both retailers and producers embrace the semblance of the small, the local,  the friendly, and the personal.

The logistics of scale and production can breathe a clinical sterility over what started as a creative and exciting venture.
When you see one of your favourite brands get taken over by a faceless multinational company, it feels cold and predatory. Often it is done stealthily, to avoid this reaction.

 The trade in brand names is global.



An old trick was to give a brand a homely human face: Captain Birdseye and Mr Kipling loom out of my childhood. Celebrities now imply that some of their charisma will rub off on us if we buy from their signed ranges.

The plain fact is that if you buy something from a big store, it will have come from a big producer.

Of course there are co-operatives of farmers etc, but the discipline and sterility of that big contract will come to infect their whole business model. The arena of large scale retailing is rapacious and ruthless. The resultant agricultural landscape is a plastic desert, served by migrant slaves.

The only way to sponsor small scale land-use and artisanship is to buy from
outlets of similar size and outlook as their suppliers.
Don't kid yourself otherwise.



Farmers Markets are our most successful model of this. Town councils are coming to welcome them as a way to breathe new life into soulless, failing shopping streets.

They though, like any other shop format, can become hidebound or trapped in self imposed restrictions.
 They all tend to favour the local, but some restrict this to food. This is small minded and does not reflect a belief in a truly vibrant rural economy.
Some will only allow, say, one baker or jam-maker.
Such a market will soon fail.
-Both customers and producers need choice and change.  New people deserve a chance to start.
As they become more established, they can innovate. A space held open for a visiting stallholder from outside the catchment maybe. A space for a supplier with a genuine relationship to a third world source perhaps.

Markets must not become hidebound. Otherwise customers drift away. And then the suppliers follow.



I hope that their success and acceptance means that the lid is off.
Shops and Garages with spare frontage could host a covered table and a couple of hopeful artisans.

I am considering a more feral form of trading, from my van in a lay-by.
The visitors, who are the ones with the money, come in cars.

Is there something intrinsically Dellboy about this? Are we still imbued with deep-rooted town burgher propaganda? A nation of small shopkeepers indeed, defending their frontages against all comers.






We are new peasants, trying to negotiate a living with a new Earth, and have to be brave and claim our pitches.

Trade is a holy, and equal exchange.

 And money at its noblest, is a universal token of appreciation.

It's only shit if you treat it so,