something to do and someone to do it with

Many years ago I trained as an Occupational Therapist. It was the perfect job for me because I absolutely loved doing stuff. My childhood was filled with evening activities and as a result I had 'Grade 5 piano' and 'was a Queens Guide' on my CV.

At a recent interview I discovered that these things are no longer held in such high esteem, however they made me what I am today so I am glad I did them. As my life progressed I grew bored of achieving and entered a new more spiritual phase in my life where it was more important to do things with people.

The creation of the Magdalen Street Celebration has been a most amazing experience of working alongside wonderful people to create 'something for everyone'. What is great about working on a project is that it is free leisure time. If you go to the gym or join a class you are paying to sit (I think this maybe frowned upon in a gym but my experience is limited) in a room of people you may not interact with. Being part of a project you get to make jokes round a table, drink tea and leave with the feeling you are making the world a better place in some small way.

Everyone takes part according to what they can do. The lovely James knows about music and has organized some great bands for the day. Karen is super organized and has made a spread sheet of all the workshops and stalls and fitted them into the empty shops in Anglia Square. Stefi is mainly bossy so we just did what she told us to do but it meant that in a bunch of lefty liberals at least someone was in charge. Andy was behind the scenes creating amazing graphics to give the celebration its yellow-black-hand print theme. I attended meetings and made jokes mainly.

Oh, and applied for funding, invited the mayor and made 100 metres of bunting (with a lot of help).

The 2nd Magdalen Street Celebration is tomorrow, Saturday 1st October, 10am-4pm, all along Magdalen Street, Norwich, NR. Click here for map and details of activities, stalls and music. line-up

Please forgive me if I gloat a bit ..

I know that the Little Melton Village Show is not the most prestigious event in the vegetable growing world but I was very pleased to get a certificate in each of the six classes that I entered yesterday - I gave my prize winning cucumber to someone, along with its certificate. The tomatoes are really a Transition effort as both plants were grown from seed by fellow veg grower Jane and the seeds for the Black Cherry came from Sue, who is also in Transition. Someone told me yesterday that John Innes are currently researching black tomatoes as they have increased levels of anti oxidants - we are clearly in the avant-garde of tomato growers!

I always enjoy the village show and seeing what other people have grown. There is a spirit of friendly rivalry but no one takes it very seriously and most people just exhibit whatever is looking good on the day. It is also encouraging to see many children taking part and that the village allotments are very popular, both with people brought up in the countryside and with people working in city office jobs.

I'm now enjoying eating a prize winning pear!

Cold nights

Over the last week or so, it's been really noticeable that the year is turning. Nights are colder, the wind has a bite to it. The full moon has been hanging low and golden in the sky or swathed in an almost autumnal mist.

The birds that populate my own personal calendar are telling me this too. Swallows are just starting to line up on wires and today I saw my first jay on it's low swooping acorn flight.

Jays are amazing birds. They are bright beautiful crows, with that corvid cleverness. They're here all year round, but in the Autumn they are suddenly everywhere. Flying from oak to oak, they collect as many acorns as they can and cache them.

This, together with their big brassy voice, inspired their scientific name Garrulus glandarius: Chattering, producing acorns.

Each jay can hide between 3000 and 5000 acorns in a year. They play a big part in regenerating oak woodland: each time they forget exactly where they hid the acorn it gets a chance to germinate.

Now I've mentioned them, you'll see they're everywhere. Enjoy them.

Darkling Thrush

Some things you can't capture in a photograph in a time of fall: the scent of woodsmoke, the perfume of a quince, the sound of the sea roaring in the darkness, a sky with bright constellations, the knowledge that once this was the time of the reed, now sere in the marshes, which was gathered to thatch the rooves of houses. A time of shelter from the storm and of waiting.

It was a windy week: our tent blew down, our garden haven, and so I knew late autumn had arrived. I put my hand on the glass roof at 2am and felt the coming of ice. We ran into the darkness and fetched all the tender plants into the house. It's the bletting time: a time you wait for the hips and sloes and medlars to begin their sweet collapse. It's a time you wait inside as dusk comes and are sometimes surprised by the sound of a bird singing.

I found this young thrush in the road. He was still warm, without a mark on him. Newminted from a spring nest in a summer hedgerow. I held him for a moment and laid him under a blackthorn full of sloes. Two long-tailed tits came and danced around us.

That's something else you can't photograph. The pain in your heart when something is gone. A beautiful singer who won't sing his mistle song, his great joyful sound in a time of elegy and loss in the woods. And Winter's dregs make desolate/The weakening eye of day. In a land where thrushes are fast disappearing. In a world that is fast losing its songbirds and its poets. On a day when you struggle to pick up the camera and go into the lane and picture the colours and shapes of those things you write . . . . and yet you go. Because something inside you won't stop loving the world, no matter what weather comes. It's a covenant we made with the earth when we came here, a long time ago.

Bird in the hand; rosehips in the lane; Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy

My Armistice Day

Featuring photos from my walk along Mousehold Ave and Gilman Road on a very windy, rainy Armistice day and a poem that I wrote this week reflecting on the need for a transition in our territorial, competitive culture and on inter-personal communications generally - including my own...

Leaves in Autumn

A bonfire of colour in the trees

The heralding of a turning tide?

A bonfire of vanities is what we need

Otherwise, otherwise...

Are WE those trees?

Or are we branches?

Or are we leaves?

Are some of us nuts?

Or maybe seeds?

And who's to judge?

And who lets be?

Watch who wields an axe,

Careful more, an axe unseen,

The rasping of a saw,

Unkindness in asides,

Assumptions, judgements, more,

How to deal with "difficult people",

Whisperings of war...
Paint them into corners,
If they don't reach for the door,
Gather all your forces,
And bash them to the floor.

The bitterness on my own lips,

Do I swallow and ignore?

Are the sufferings of someone else

An irritation to endure?

Another person's weakness

A reason to abuse them more?

Another's gifts or fortunes

A reason to abhor?

How to deal with your nemesis

Without a bloody war?

I ask myself:

Whose work will I do for what and why?

And who lays down my law?

Pics: Head on collision - crashed cars on a transporter on Mousehold Avenue,
'Slow' before the corner on Gilman Road

Autumn - A rotting time of year

At this time of year, nature gives us a lesson in recycling. All those leaves falling to the ground are stores of nutrients being returned to the earth to be slowly released to feed the seedlings that will grow next year. The fungi that work unseen to break down dead wood, now send up their fruiting bodies.

Nothing is wasted and the cycle can continue for ever - evolving over time to become more sophisticated. We can learn a lot from trees!

Autumn is also a time of harvest and I'm still munching my way through a stock of apples and pears.

On cold nights I shall be thinking about the hedgehog that nested in my flower bed. This did not seem very secure or dry so I have made a cover for his nest and packed it with extra leaves. I look forward to seeing him in the spring!

Elegy in a City Graveyard

There's something indefinably elegaic about an English churchyard in the autumn.  The peaceful drift of falling leaves, like swirling flakes of burnished metal.  The gentle wind through naked branches, the distant call of birds.  The colours a mark of the end of the summer; the gravestones a solemn reminders of our own mortality.

Not that the girls give a monkeys about any of that.  What they want to do is jump in the fallen leaves and kick them all over the place!

Being out and about in the autumn is one of the great treats of living in England, and the seaside in autumn, to my mind, is far more beautiful than in the height of the summer. Wrapped up warm, you can't beat the bracing winds, gorgeous waves, fabulous cloud formations.  And lovely chips too!

(pics: Bowthorpe Cemetary, Norwich.  Southwold, Suffolk)

The Cosmos is Still Here

So far this Autumn there have been no frosts and some of the flowers we take for granted in the summer are still out as I write on this blustery, wet November day.

In the house: This passionflower (Passiflora gracilis) is the only annual in the genus. Normally the green fruit, which you can see forming here, turns a beautiful bright orange. It's late this year, so I'll have to wait and see.

In the garden: The Cosmos is still out. It's been flowering for months, alongside Mexican wild marigolds (Cempoalxochitl - flower of the dead).

In the field: Corn Marigold. Small November suns. Soon the farmer will put sheep in this field and the marigolds will disappear by the end of the day.

In the wild: Yarrow (in front) and Wild Carrot (behind). Daucus carota is the ancestor of our familiar vegetable. When the elegant flowers with their bloodred central spot turn to seed, they take on the appearance of birds' nests. A true beauty.

Coming home: Charlotte carrying a huge bunch of spinach from our neighbour David, who picked the leaves from his garden. "Those Cosmos will turn black when the first frosts come," he said. "Then you'll know what to do with them."

Pics: All taken 9 November 2010 by Mark Watson

Autumn splendour

Welcome to our Autumn Photoblog.

The first picture is of incandescent oak leaves in the low afternoon sun. The second is of my dear little Carnival Squash, grown in the garden I share with an elderly neighbour. It grew from a tiny seedling kindly given to me by Rose from Transition Bungay at our TN plant swap back in March. In the background are a self-seeded chrysanthemum, a geranium called Mexicana Tomcat which I bought purely for the name, an aubretia which I grow for the bees and a shamrock which grew originally in my Greatnan's garden.

Walking Home

“I didn’t turn to wildlife because I was bullied and oppressed, I turned to wildlife out of love, and love helped me in a bad time, as love will. But love is far more than comfort. There was more than mere escape here: there was meaning, purpose, beauty, and especially, love. I reached these things through the power of the wild world and through the power of my imagination. And so far as I was concerned, the two things were indivisible. (Simon Barnes My Natural History)

I hadn’t walked in a long while. One time in my life when we first came back to England, I walked everywhere. Down the coast, through marshes, across heaths, along empty country roads, tangled green lanes. Through long afternoons, at sunrise, in the night under stars, in the rain and snow, my feet following the tracks of deer and pheasant. I was walking myself back into the land, immersing myself in bird, tree, flint, the ancestral feel of things.

Sometimes you walk to connect yourself with a place, with your own creaturehood. And sometimes you walk when you don’t know what to do. Where am I going? What am I doing here? Is there any meaning to our existence? What does the planet feel about all these statistics we make about the future?

Somewhere along that walk you’ll find something that will answer those questions. It might be a small thing. And yet it’s a key that opens the door.

“What make are they?” he asked.
“What make?” I said, and laughed. They’re not machines, they’re animals! Red deer.

We looked, the two men and I, at the group in the field. The deer looked at us. They were young males and occasionally two would rise up and spar elegantly with their hooves, in that famous heraldic pose you see on coats-of-arms.

“Have you heard them roar?” I asked. I was about to say “you have to experience the deer rutting before you die,” but hesitated. They were already old.

As autumn comes the red deer of Britain gather in the forests of Suffolk: at Tunstall, Dunwich, Minsmere, Iken. As dawn breaks and the mists rise the stags meet in the clearings under the birch and pine, carrying their antlers aloft, to decide who should be running which territory. The sounds of their contests rumble through the land. To hear that primordial sound is to remember everything about wild things.

I write this because as equinox approaches some part of us, unmoored in the summer, comes back to earth. As I emerged from the tent (where I’m still sleeping) into the dark early morning, I noticed Orion glittering on the horizon and the owls calling down the lane. The dew was cold on my feet.

Where am I going? I am walking home. What am I doing here? I know the names of things. Is there any meaning to our existence? Ah, more tricky. Only if we remember that everything tracks back to the ancestors, to the shape of the wild world. What does the planet feel? What do you feel when people talk about you as if you are not there?

The men had been friendly. We talked about deer and the heath (we were at Dunwich, eight miles down the coast). But when they were gone, I turned my attention back to the deer. The deer are what I remember. Walking the bony track of white sand. The bees among the heather, the colour of the rosebay willow herb, the long curve of the beach, the crab shell in my pocket, the light on the river, the ropes of wild hops around a telegraph pole, the lilt of the water swimming, the taste of salty samphire in my mouth.

There was once a Jesuit who gave up his monk’s cell and walked instead into the mountains. His name was Anthony de Mello. De Mello wrote that nothing human can touch us where it really matters. We let our whole lives be shaped by the people who we think should love us completely and tell us we matter, and yet they cannot. Because no one can love us until we love ourselves and that Self is something mysterious, indefinable, ungovernable, Other that we can only reach in our own inner solitude, in the depths of ourselves.

When we realise that self, we realise that we did not come to love each other in the way we think we should, but something else entirely. We came to love our own nature, and that nature could only be found in the patterns of wild nature itself. This is not a nature that is accessible in any other way than with our own being - our own presence within its fabric. It is not something we can own, or control or manipulate, or put in our gardens on show, or use as a resource. We can only find it it by being at home with its Otherness.

It is a question entirely of relationship. Indeed as love always is.

Sun, Southwold Denes; mushrooms, Minsmere Woods; bell heather, Dunwich Heath; samphire, Walberswick Marshes

On the Road (without a Car)

On World Carfree Day (Sept 22) I cycled cross-country to meet the Transition initiative, Sustainable Bungay who were celebrating the day by cycling to a pub called the Geldeston Locks on the River Waveney. Just as we set off to meet them Mark dropped his bike and buckled a wheel. “I’ll take the bus,” he called out to me as he wobbled down the lane. “How will we get back?” I yelled back. “I’ll ring Graham and Nicky!” he shouted as I pedalled on resiliently into the autumn wind.

15 miles later I met everyone by the Buttercross. It was, perhaps, the most beautiful evening of the year. The sun had been roaring all day and had gone down in a blaze of glory. The moon rose over the hill, the land lay tawny-coloured and breathing in the twilight. Warmth rose up from it as we cycled down the back road to Geldeston from Bungay, through the mill and down the track to the Locks Inn. Occasionally a car would stop in the lane startled by this sudden line of cycling people, laughing and talking, as wheels bumped over stones and veered into hedges.

At the Locks we were scheduled to meet the Zero Carbon Caravan, a group of cyclists making their way from Wales to Copenhagen for the Climate Change talks in December, entirely without fossil fuel. En route from Norwich however they heard they had lost their passage over the sea from Lowestoft and had been diverted to Dover. They had to make it in three days (“Three days!” exclaimed Margaret, one of SB’s veteran cyclists, “Do they know the hills in Kent?”). So we had our regular monthly Green Drinks and when it came to go instead of returning home we went back with Graham.

When I say went back what I mean to say is we canoed back down the river. Graham climbed skilfully into one canoe with the bike, and Mark and I climbed rather less skilfully into the other. We pushed off from the shore, there was a rushing sound as the boats entered the stream and then suddenly we were gliding out into the star-filled night. Great shapes of trees rose beside us - ashes and willow – as we moved by. The water brimmed right to the edges of the land and the stars and the branches glimmered in its dark surface that was as smooth as a stone. There was space everywhere as meadows water and sky merged together and in that space it felt as if a door opened. For a moment I didn’t know where or when I was as we paddled softly down the Waveney that could have been the Mississippi or the Amazon.

It was the moment of autumn equinox, the moment the light of summer cedes to the dark of winter. In that full-on mysterious planetary encounter I realised why all of us came out of our way to meet each other in Transition, in spite of all its difficulties and heartaches, why we took pains to cut carbon and struggled up hills to travel across the sea in a sailing boat. You give something up because you love the earth, and the earth gives you something in return. Something, if you thought about it, you were born to experience.

The next morning I helped Graham gather hazelnuts from his abundant red cobnut trees and as we patiently shifted through leaves on our hands and knees it occurred to me I would never have spent a long and (equally abundant) breakfast with him or canoed down the river had we driven our car.

So this week a month later I went entirely car-free. Being car-free in a city is not hard but in the backcountry where I live it’s tricky, especially at night. It’s one hour by foot round-trip to the Library (where I use the Internet) and four bus rides to collect my veg box and shop. Nevertheless I walked everywhere: mapped the neighbourhood for apple trees, picked the last damsons and blackberries, witnessed the gathering of starlings and jackdaws and the turning of the leaves, and met and talked with people I had not seen for months and would never have encountered had I taken the car. The discipline of a week was good, just like having that day was good. Because that way you start paying attention – paying attention to the things that really matter about being alive, right now on the earth where we all live.


Left: Chris Keene of the Zero Carbon Caravan in Ludlow

http://www.zerocarboncaravan.net/
http://www.worldcarfreeday.net/