Holiday activities

Two weeks ago I was on holiday on this sun drenched beach. A Greek island, Croatia?

These local residents should give you a clue -

- it was North Wales, just a few days after the floods a few miles further south. Fortunately the British weather can change quickly and we had great weather - for most of the week

The high tide comes to the door steps of the houses - so rising sea levels are soon going to become an issue at Porthdinllaen.

The area is great for canoeing and walking the coast patch - which this year goes the whole length of Wales. I did a 6 mile walk and caught the bus back, during which I only met 4 people. We live on a heavily populated island but if you make the effort to walk beyond the car park there are miles of beaches and coves with only sheep to share them.

Be the change you want to see in the world.....

So I am still fired up after the Transition Norwich event on Tuesday. In fact I am not the only one as I saw someone had painted a billboard in NR3 the next day!

I have been thinking about how everybody can make a change that can influence other people. At the event Elena spoke about how if we cycle to work someone will see us and it will encourage them to do the same. In fact I first started cycling to work when I asked one of the Art Therapists for a lift home because she lived in my street. 'Yes of course' she said 'but you do know I have a tandem?'. For some reason it seemed too late to change my mind and I found myself standing nervously by while she raised the seat from a child's position so I could sit on the back. We sped down St Stephens road by the old hospital and I was beginning to enjoy myself and forget that my hands were quite near her bottom when the seat returned to its original position leaving my knees up by my chest. Undeterred (and because I was too scared to say anything) we continued until we reached the North city. I looked at my watch and saw it had taken 8 minutes. The same journey takes about 45 minutes to walk and 30 minutes to drive at rush hour. From then on I walked or cycled to work having previously taken the bus occasionally.

When I walk I sometimes take my shopping trolley which if I have heavy things to carry. Its particularly important when going to green events as it makes you look all kind of holy in an environmental way. I nearly convinced someone I had made it but I did in fact put new wheels on which I took off a pram that I am almost certain had been abandoned.

I asked a bloke to take the photo after he found me trying to balance my camera on a garden wall.

I hope that I have influenced people into living more transitionally over the years. I know that many people have helped me along in my journey so far.

Sometimes Known as Lughnasa

The alarm went off at 4.30 this morning and I stumbled out of bed.
“It’s cloudy over the sea”, said Charlotte as we looked east from the window to the horizon.
“Is it worth going?” I said.
“We could go up the lane to the oak instead.”

But we always go down to the sea to greet the sun at the beginning of August for the station of the year sometimes known as lughnasa.

So we found ourselves getting dressed and going to the shed for the bikes. The sun would rise at around 5.15 and it’s a good 20 minutes’ cycle ride to get to the sea.

My sturdy old town bike doesn’t go very fast even along straight roads, and this morning I was struggling through the empty streets against the breeze. Charlotte zoomed ahead.

Forgot the bike locks so we propped them against the railings and headed over the dunes. There was a tent on the beach but no sign of anyone apart from ourselves. I collapsed amongst the marram grass and almost immediately the sun appeared - straight out of the sea, red and glowing in a less dramatic, gentler sunrise than last year’s. The whole morning was warmer too. Before I knew it Charlotte had stripped naked (a rare event in Southwold) and raced into the water. Meanwhile I went to visit some nearby wild fennel.

We have some grand fennels in the garden, but for aromatic intensity they are no match for these wild ones. You know how when you rub peppermint and smell it you can feel it in your mouth even without eating it (if you haven’t done that before give it a try). Well, that’s what these fennels are like; just the lightest brush against them with your hand permeates your taste buds somehow. And it feels like it’s cleansing your whole mouth. I never realised I was so permeable before I encountered mint and fennel!

So if you ever come across me brushing lightly against these plants in the wild rest assured I am perfectly sane – come and join me!

Cycling back home we saw a flock of white doves on the common and stopped to collect some fallen wild cherry plums in the lane. The light in the garden was limpid and another sunflower had just emerged. I have a feeling that ALL of the sunflowers I planted this year are going to be the new form I wrote about the week before last. Not that I’m complaining...

Pics: wild fennel sunrise; sea sunrise; me, (new) sunflower, rose - all Aug 2011

Going Green in Glasgow

The trials and tribulations of taking your green ethos to a new location

Every time I put my veg peelings into the landfill bin a little bit of my spirit dies, its a fight against my better instinct, but what can I do? When I first moved in I collected up a massive container full of compost, until I finally accepted the fact that I had nowhere to put it or take it to.

I moved up to Glasgow in mid May and I have been in my new flat for almost a month now. I do have a shared garden, but it doesn't have a compost bin and my logic makes me reluctant to make the effort to make a compost heap when no-one is going to make use of the resulting compost (I'm probably here for less than a year). I have tried to go and find local allotments where I could 'donate' my peelings, but to my dismay they are locked up behind big wire fences and although there are quite a few community gardens in Glasgow the nearest one is a good 15minutes cycle ride away. I do live right next to a wonderful country park and I have considered taking up guerilla composting, but that feels a bit more like being a civil nuisance than a responsible citizen. So the compost conundrum remains unsolved. I think it may end in a small compost bin in the garden, but I still have to organise it and reassure the rest of the tenants that it isn't going to smell/ attract rats.

As well as worrying about what you are going to do with your veg peelings, moving to a new city poses the challenge of where you are going to get you veg from in the first place. It didn't take me long to track down the wholefood shops in Glasgow and to go and check out what delights they had on offer. The discovery that one of them has an entire wall of herbal teas to choose from made me a very happy hippy indeed, especially the discovery of tulsi (holy basil) tea that I had discovered in Inverness on my Otesha tour last year and then never seen since.

Unfortunately though the fresh fruit and veg selection was not as exciting, although one of the shops has an entire greengrocers, so a good array to choose from, but it was not necessarily organic and very little of it was local.

Get a veg box I hear you say. Well I did! I found three different possibilities, but I decided which one to try out first (as they had the option of a UK box) and after sorting out all of the logistics I got my first box on Thursday! Its wonderful to have local, organic veg again, but its quite a bit more expensive up here than it is in Norwich. Its easy to forget how easy we get it in Norwich, being in the middle of a massive arable area. Scotland is rather more livestock orientated, which is not quite so good for a vegetarian...

Trains, planes and pedal power
Generally travel is further and longer in Glasgow than in Norwich. Glasgow is considerably bigger and quite a bit further way from, well, most places. I didn't have my bikes with me when I first arrived so the first aspect I explored was public transport and Glasgow does have a fairly awesome public transport system. It has one underground line that goes in a big circle around the city centre, which is pretty useful as it takes a good 30mins, if not longer, to walk across the city centre. And at only £1.40 a journey its pretty good value. But the subway is only useful if you are in the city centre and I live further out than that.

But here Glasgow gets one up on Norwich, it has the most amazing network of urban railways. Within 15mins walk of my flat there are no less than 5 train stations, on two different train lines with regular services into the city centre taking only 10minutes and costing only £1.25 off-peak single.

This makes me very happy as I have always preferred trains to buses and although there is a good network of regular buses around Glasgow that are pretty good value, they take a lot longer and you have to pay the exact fare. They will not give you change. So if you don't have the correct money with you then you just have to pay more. I think that this is a shocking, profit making tactic. Bus drivers are bad enough in Norwich, being unwilling to accept notes, even though ATMs only give £10 as the smallest denomination and therefore there is no easy way of getting smaller change. But to give no change at all? So I am kind of boycotting the buses out of annoyance at having already paid at least £1.50 more than the actual fares since I have been in Glasgow, as I didn't have the correct change at the time.

On a positive note, when I looked into going to visit my parents I was astounded to discover that it only takes 4 hours on the train, which is incredible as it is the same time as it took me to visit them from Norwich on public transport, despite it taking 2.5hrs to drive from Norwich and something like 6.5hrs from Glasgow! It is of course quite a bit more expensive if you buy your ticket on the day, but if you plan in advance a £13 advanced single is pretty good going for travelling almost 400miles. Unfortunately though longer distances mean more carbon emissions, so my transport carbon footprint is going to suffer :(

But I do finally have my low carbon vehicle with me, my wonderful bicycle. When I first came up I couldn't bring my bike, so I tried to get a cheap secondhand one to see me through until I could bring my others up. However, secondhand bikes are soo expensive up here. Where as you can get a bike in Norwich for a tenner (probably not a good one, but anyway) on Glasgow gumtree the cheapest bikes were £30 and they really didn't look that good. So I never did get round to buying a bike, instead I bought my town bike up on the train when I went down to move all of my stuff out of my Norwich house. Unfortunately the excitement was short lived as my poor little bike, who was brilliant for pootling around Norwich, wasn't up to the longer distances, hills and potholes of Glasgow. I need to replace the front wheel and get the gears working at the very least! So the bike saga continued.

Finally, success! I now have my more robust touring bike up with me as well and it is doing me proud. This week, Kristina and I took the plunge and decided to cycle from work back home, a distance of 6 miles. And it's amazing! A beautiful cycle along the national cycle network, following the river through parks and quiet residential streets and it only takes us 45mins! Thats faster than the train and so much more enjoyable. We were so impressed and enthusiastic that we cycled to work and back on both thursday and friday. This was however a fairly ambitious start and I am rather tired today from so much exercise all of a sudden!! But it is definitely worth it.

Transition times
Lastly, but definitely not least, I haven't found a lovely group of Transitioners in Glasgow yet who I can share my low carbon living attempts with. I think we are very lucky in Norwich to have our transition circles and such a supportive community of people trying to live differently rather then just focussing on projects. So I miss you all, but I am very happy to hear all of the wonderful things you are still getting up to.

I am having a marvellous time up here in Glasgow, but it is definitely a challenge to my low carbon lifestyle. I am finding some things are easier and some things are harder, but hopefully I can take inspiration from all we have achieved in Norwich and make some suggestions for enabling low carbon living up here.

Photos: The shared garden of my flat, a grow wild veg box and the view from my local train station.

How to get where you want to be

One of the problems of writing a blog and trying to impress your readers with promises of selling you car is that they not only read it but remember it and ask you if you have sold it yet. Well er no I havent. Its kind of broken from someone driving into it and now I have to mend it. But I havent been using the car much and experimented with taking my dog on the train last week. It was going quite well and Dotty had only escaped twice. But then on my journey home they replaced the train with a coach which wasnt allowed animals. So my dad had to drive me half the way home. But I did have the most wonderful time with my mum and the dog. They are both completely in the moment as you can see in the image.

Back to transport. When I am just walking round the city I dont need the car but sometimes it seems to take ages. So I took my bike to the local bike shop for repair and he sucked through his teeth and said it would cost £100. So I went on eBay and cheapcyle and freecycle ( got to be the ideal place to look for a bike!)and found some then in the mean time a friend lent me her bike.

So now I just have to work out the buses and I will be sorted. I love buses. I am thinking of getting one of those bus passes that you can get for the year.

I took a taxi the other day and the driver told me he had a picture of Boudicca on his back. I thought this was totally cool. Although he did think Boudicca was a man and changed into a dragon after dying. He took it quite well when I told him she was a woman. I didnt mention the dragon because I was less sure about that bit.

Back to Basics

In the beginning there were the issues of climate change and peak oil and how these affected different parts of our lives, from the energy we use and the products and food we consume, to the waste we produce and the way we get around. Then the economic downturn was added to the list of issues and Transition Norwich got creative and developed many amazing projects. We have come so far and achieved so much, but to fully appreciate this we thought we should look back and remind ourselves of where we started.

So this week on the blog we will be revisiting the issues we are facing and having a sneaky peek at what solutions Transition Norwich and other initiatives have found.

Photos: bikes and wind turbines (Sam White), alcohol and preserves and Sri Lankan vegetables

sex in the city

So I am living in a tower block.

Quite high up.

With a view of the Cathedral, some days.

Is it green though?

You can walk everywhere as you are so central. It is walking distance from the train station and the bus station. In fact it is walking distance from everywhere I want to go. You can stare out of the window at the cathedral. Or walk and see it.

There is an empty garage where people put stuff they dont want. I have so far claimed the following;

a chest of drawers

a broken umbrella

a bed (had to put that back as turned out to be a cot)

a brand new stapler

a kit to make a replica of your penis

If you are prepared to wait you could probably furnish a whole flat in this way. Previously there have been dining tables, sofas and gym equipment.

You cannot change the way the flats are heated. It is a communal boiler and the heating and hot water is set very high by someone in an office somewhere. Brian and John are two council workers who will gladly help you carry furniture or find your car keys (left in the toilets) in exchange for however much personal information they can get out of you in the time it takes to help you. There are communal washing lines which mainly get used by a man with lots of white vests and pants. I have become friends with some people on other floors and we exchange spare milk and eggs and gossip.

So there you have it. Not really living off the land. No picking herbs from your garden to make tea or spending the weekend making a rainwater collector. However I can get rid of my car and not buy any furniture ever again. Or penis replicators.

I drive therefore I am

A year ago I made a pledge at a mental health conference to give up my car. To be honest I didn't really know what I was saying as the previous session had involved me massaging a girls hand (apparently this is a relaxing activity) and I was rather flustered.

Anyway a year later and this seemingly easily forgettable idea written on flip chart paper and hopefully now fallen down the back of a filing cabinet has been remembered by quite a few people who seem to relish in saying 'still got the car then?' whenever they see me.

Well as it happens they can stop their mocking because I am selling it. I have had the roof fixed. That was quite cheap and I got to keep the biro that was blocking the tracking system. Its been serviced and is ready to sell. Now I just have to deal with the grief. I mean this was the business. A soft top sports car. My midlife crisis car. I always felt like I could pull in this car. Should I want to although I never did test it out. It was actually quite hard to get out of in an alluring way being so low and the heated seats made me think I had finally wet myself.

Although the main interest was from children so that was a non starter. One day I laid in bed and heard some school kids saying ' oh cool! wow look at that!' I knew they were talking about my car and I felt a rush of pride. Then I heard one of the girls knowledgeably inform the others 'an old lady drives that'.

Of course I will have to actually GET places without the car. But since I have been living in a tower block in the city ( see tomorrows blog) I have hardly used the car. I walk everywhere. I go by train to see my parents (if you book in advance its actually cheaper than the petrol alone). I use taxis if I am tired and my bike if I can remember where it is. I also turn things down that I know I cant get to.

So anyone wanna buy a car? only owned by an old lady who hardly used it.....

Everything That Rises Must Converge

Today is the day of emergence when the ground springs awake and the winter turns. I'm writing this in Totnes at day break. There's a robin singing outside in the garden and I'm getting ready to take part in another kind of chorus. It's my third invitation: it came, like the rest, completely unexpected, when Rob Hopkins asked me to come and discuss the new Transition book (working title The Transition Companion), based on the Patterns Directory he and many others have been compiling on the Network for the last two months. People are converging from all over the UK to take part in this workshop (I'll be reporting on our meetings in our Transition Themes week later this month).

I met my friend Adrienne on the train at Reading and we talked non-stop about our respective initiatives. She told me about how the groups move and change, what kinds of extraordinary and diverse people are in them, how when she met Ben Brangwyn (whose house we are staying in) in Lewes in 2006 they both realised how massive Transition was going to be, how it is at that moment when you realise that it is the only thing that makes sense of the world, the only thing you want to do with your life. The breakthrough moment.

Gotta put that stuff in the book, I said.

It's the moment of emergence when the roots stir and the shoots move upward. Everything stored and consolidated in the winter comes awake. Through the mist the late sun burnished the green-mantled hills of the West, the old man's beard shone whitely, the hazel trees lit their golden candles. Under one of these hills so the legend goes, Arthur's warriors lie sleeping, hazel staves in their hands, ready to awaken when the kingdom needs defending.

There's a new mood in the land right now. People are waking up, I'm waking up, realising what lies at stake as things we took for granted are being taken away: our forests, our health service, our schools, our libraries. At Bungay Library we're having a Read-In this Saturday. Adrienne just took part in a Tea Party protest outside her local Boots (recently the high street store has become corporate and moved its finances off-shore, so now pays only 3% tax and is set to take over sections of the NHS as it is privatized). These are the kinds of moves we pay attention to in this blog, in the OneWorldColumn, in our conversations. It's important we realise this together. In a depressed low vibration everything disperses and separates. No one communicates. Nothing seems possible. A people who are alone and hopeless are easy to control and to sell consumer dreams to. In a high spirit of convergence, in the feeling of engagement, your energies, thoughts and feelings soar. The mood shifts, everything becomes possible. That's the real mood of Transition.

Gotta go now and get ready for that meeting. Take some of that mood with me. Have a beautiful day!

Photos: hazel catkins, Suffolk; tree protest, Forest of Dean.

Postcard from Madre Tierra, Southern Ecuador - Early '90s

Dear All,

As you can see, the view from the straw palapa I'm staying in here is beautiful. I've just been watching a condor circle high above the peaks. We're in the foothills of the Andes in Southern Ecuador in a place called Madre Tierra near the small town of Vilcabamba.

The journey took seven hours by bus from Cuenca to the north, which is much higher up, and colder. The bus was crammed with passengers and belongings and I thought at one point I'd be driven mad by the 24-hour salsa music the driver had on full blast. Then we started to descend. Banana and papaya trees began appearing. They became more and more abundant. I felt my body unwind with the warmth.

But it's not really the view or the bus ride I'm writing to you about. Nor the fact that Vilcabamba is famous for people who live to be a hundred years old, and for the San Pedro cactus said to hold the keys to eternity.

It's this place. Madre Tierra. I don't think I've ever been anywhere like it. You can't book in advance, so the bus drops you off and you walk up the hill in the warm dark past the sugar cane field twinkling with glow worms under a sky full of stars. I was nervous about finding the place packed. Where else would we go in the middle of nowhere? What if we have to SHARE with PEOPLE WE DON'T KNOW? Kitty, the Australian girl who told us about Madre Tierra in a cafe in Quito, told me "no worries, Mark, it'll be fine." (How come Australians are always so laid back?)

We arrived to a friendly welcome and were given a bamboo hut to stay in. Very elementary, a couple of beds, a rickety table, a ceiling light - with a wasp's nest built around it. WASPS! I've had a phobia of wasps since childhood. It took me a VERY long time to get to sleep.

Next morning I saw the other huts dotted about the hillside. On the balcony outside our hut there are coffee beans drying in the sun.

Loos and showers are communal and the water is solar-heated. It took me some time to get used to the low pressure (I've always loved a bit of a power shower!), but I'm slowly tuning in to the place. It's lovely to shower outside with my bare feet on the earth.

Every day at breakfast and dinner, everybody converges upon the communal 'dining room', a huge table set under a verandah, overlooking the valley. There you meet fellow travellers on the South American trail from all over the world, and watch rainbows dance between the mountains. The owners are Jaime from Ecuador and Durga from Canada, who live in a small house on site and come and talk with the guests at mealtimes. The wasps won't hurt you, they told me. And the coffee is seriously local. As are the awesome fruit salads of papaya, mango and banana, and the flowers in the huge pot of afterdinner tea.

Most of the food is grown here in the gardens at Madre Tierra. It's all vegetarian, the cooks prepare it fresh every day (and eat what the guests eat) and any waste goes to feed the very free-range chickens and turkeys. The latter are glorious fowl who let you know audibly and with a proud display of tailfeathers just who has the right of way when you meet them on the path.

Last night we had a steam bath heated from wood gathered within walking distance. Several of us sat pressed together naked in the warm darkness of a small hut. We threw water on hot stones with a scented eucalyptus branch, breathed... and sweated! And got to know each other.

We're probably leaving tomorrow or the day after. But we'll come back whilst we're still in Ecuador. There's something about this place that tastes of the future.

(ii)
Suffolk, England 2011

PS: On that visit to Madre Tierra I got over my fear of wasps. It has never returned. You could call it sleeping with the enemy that turned out not to be the enemy.

PPS: Coming to think of it, I'm not addicted to power showers anymore either.

PPPS: I have not been to Vilcabamba since 1993. I'm not addicted to flying now, either. But I do love communal eating, flower tea, rainbows, cactus, condors, turkeys and Madre Tierra wherever I go.

Pics and Painting: Madre Tierra, early 90s, Visions in Ecuador 1993, all by me

Medicine People - Arizona 1994 - 2001

The sky island rises above the desert floor; a ring of mountains known as The Mules. The town within its rocky arms appears, at first glance, unremarkable: a collection of small wooden shacks scattered up a red hillside, down a gulch, with narrow steep streets, skinny metal staircases, a red-bricked main street with a few old-fashioned storefronts; an alternative cafe, a co-op store, a library with oak floors, a parking lot shaded with ash trees and desert willow. By the highway that winds through the mountains there is a “hell’s hole” where European immigrants once mined for copper; in the abandoned gardens the fruit trees they planted still grow - pomegranates, mulberries, figs. Everyone that lives here has been somebody somewhere else. One day they woke up in the city and the desert called them. They got sick, or cried too much, or had a dream, or like me, met someone on a film set who said it was funky place full of artists, full of thorny attitude.

There is something that calls you: in the luminous space that surrounds the border town, in the mineral mountains, in the prickliness of the people. Something that brings you to be tempered in the alchemical furnace of the desert. To gaze up at the stars that burn bright in the obsidian sky. Outside the thorn bush and cactus keep their independent positions in the flat lands and in the canyons. Keep your distance! they say to each other with their formidable spines. Stay out of my way! And yet standing amongst them you have never felt so together in your life.

For seven years 1994 - 2001 I came with Mark to this old mining town in the Chihuahua desert. We rented apartments, bought thrift store furniture and made friends with those fierce independent spiky people. This is a postcard and if I could put everything I loved about this place into it I would. But that’s for a book.

What I want to say is I learned a lot of things here I couldn't have done if I'd stayed in my conventional London life. England is a time place, cold and damp and saturated with ghosts and history, obsessed with form, always looking back. Arizona is hot and dry. It's all about space and opportunity and looking forward. My old friend Carol went into the desert when she was 40 years old. Everyone had left her and she had to start again. She sat down in the middle of nowhere and cried for a long time. Then she put her hands into the earth and her hands formed bricks out of the red mud. She built a house with those adobe bricks and then she lived there.

To start again you have to find a new point of departure. I had left the city and my old life and I had to learn another way and this is where I learned it. I learned medicine plants, I learned to live in a straw bale house without A/C or a telephone or a lock on the door. I learned to hold my own and come to my own conclusions about the empire, as I watched chain gangs working along the highway, when the sulphuric acid from the mine’s slag heaps stung my eyes, when I heard immigrant families running down the streets at dawn and helicopters searching for them, when I found young men standing in the garden, lost and collapsing with thirst and exhaustion, having walked and hitched all the way from El Salvador.

I learned from real hippies who had settled here in the 70s: flower girls who had come out of Haight Ashbury, artists who had walked away from fame in New York, who had spent ten years travelling in a bus across America, radical lesbians, activists, poets, the first permaculturists, the first people to build compost toilets and grow organic vegetables. People who had put themselves on the line and weren't going back. They were tough and bitter when I met them, living in rooms full of books with painted floorboards and a wood stove. And I spent winters and summers in those rooms in an old miner’s hotel, in an adobe roundhouse, in a yurt. I lived among medicine plants on the edge of the wild desert and I listened to their stories. They passed everything on. Everything that worked and everything that didn’t.

It was not paradise. It was an immense red land with an immense blue sky, where you could drive out down a road edged with sunflowers all the way down into Mexico and feel entirely free. But, of course, no one was entirely free. “Little roads not immune from grief,” Carmen used to call them. This was Apache territory, the last tribe on Turtle Island to stand against the white invaders. They lived in warrior bands in these sky islands like mountain lions, red bands tied around their heads, men and women smoking the rough leaves of wild tobacco.

What I learned from Arizona was about keeping a flame of a different world alive in spite of circumstances. How you do this without losing heart. How to endure alongside the earth and all its creatures. How to withstand the shocks of history and keep your humanity intact. To live a medicine life. How to wait in the long afternoons, to live without comfort or convenience. How to walk through the territory and not be afraid of snakes and scorpions, of flash floods or a bear or the border patrol asking you, what are you doing out here? How to look them in the eye and say:

Why officer I'm looking at a flower, what are you doing?
I'm looking at this scrawny stick because underground it has a vast reservoir stored in its tap root that can keep it going through this summer drought and tonight when we are sleeping it will unfold its white lotus-like flowers as it does once a year. And all the moths in the desert will be summoned by its extraordinary fragrance. I'm learning to be like that flower that some call Queen of the Night and the Apaches call Pain in the Heart.

When I returned to England I brought that medicine with me. It's a bitter medicine because it's got broken heart in there and shattered illusions, dreams that didn't work out and loss. But the medicine of the heart is bitter, because it's our experience that will really come to matter in Transition. Not just our obvious skills and abilities, but those some of us learned while we were out travelling in the far-flung places, on the road, waiting in a desert town for destiny to knock on the door.

Photos: Bisbee, Arizona and coral bean flowers; Mark and the San Jose mountains; soaptree yucca flowers; medicine jars with hop tree flowers and wild lupines.

Its Halloween, my car has broken down in the woods

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and while waiting for help I have time to ponder some major issues.........

1.
Would it have been better to travel on the train? On the train at least I wouldn’t be left in the dark to be ravaged by the undead but on the upside I can take more luggage in the car. On the train I can write my blog as I am doing right now. I can also feel the warm glow which comes from being green even if it is forced on me by the garage not having my wheel in stock.

2.
Shall I try having no car for a while or even a car share? A friend has suggested it and I don’t use one most days. I have been walking and cycling everywhere just lately and getting quite fit. Also its so much easier to park when you haven’t got a car.

3.
What did they do before oil when faced with waiting? You probably wouldn’t send a messenger with a note to say ‘bit L8, CU when I get there’. How would you pass the time when you have no entertainment? Have we forgotten how to just sit and do nothing? There is a great saying that the Quakers have adopted ‘don’t just do something, sit there’. An event is coming up called just this day which is about spending some time on 24th November just doing nothing.

4.
Is it a good idea to meditate while parked on the side of the road? There is not much else to do when you are waiting and I know for a fact that Zombies can’t open car doors. So I decide that, yes, it can be done although the time passes more slowly.

Of course the moral to this tale is, um , dont start a blog without knowing how you are going write the last paragraph.


ps yes that is how I look, luckily I had just been to the hairdressers before my car broke down

Low Carbon Cookbook #2

Yesterday was the first time since the Spring that I put on a coat, as we set out to Christine’s for our second Low Carbon Cookbook session. The temperature was 6 degrees at half past four and as we boarded the train at Lowestoft I wondered aloud to Charlotte about the banana plant and lemon verbena we need to bring in before the frosts.

Across the Broads the sun shone through a huge whale cloud sending out rays like an announcement on the big screen. Two women talked intensely about their work as carers for old people with dementia, 'she doesn't know where she is' and 'he won't let anyone near him but me'. They spoke of bedsheets and cups of tea and the work seemed endless. The man opposite went through the papers of a meeting and occasionally closed his eyes.

We sat with our bag of vegetables, herbs and oils and I took a photo through the train window.

It was warm at Christine’s (even without the heating), and it got warmer as we set to pulling food out of bags and boxes, discussing where it had come from and what it was: Erik’s exotic prickly achocha and rainbow chard home-grown in Hethersett, Christine’s garlic and tomatoes from right outside the kitchen door, leeks from Norman’s market garden near us, a bunch of fragrant herbs Charlotte picked from outside our door, walnut and avocado oils past their sell-by-date we had been given by a local shopkeeper, sweet chestnuts gathered from Thetford forest, Norfolk potatoes, courgettes and flat beans from Norwich market's Follund’s Organics, nasturtium flowers, Cathy’s chard from Bungay’s Abundance of Fruit project. (Bee and Kerry arrived a bit later with (local) potato and parsley salad and a compote of garden cooking apples and blackberries, sweetened just by the fruit itself.)

Meanwhile we got chopping and decided to stir fry the vegetables. Christine hooked out an awesome old pan she’d bought in the 70s on an overland trip to North Africa and not used for a long time. Everyone was slightly asphyxiated by the chillis (from Norfolk and Suffolk) as they sizzled along with garlic, onion and ginger in the pan, but it smelt delicious.

Before dinner we sat down and placed more focused attention on the ingredients we’d brought and also talked about particular books and films we'd read or seen and wanted to share as resources with each other: Felicity Lawrence's incisive investigation into supermarket food Not On The Label, inspiring local food documentaries The Power of Community and A Farm for the Future, David Gershon's visionary Social Change 2.0 and Masanobu Fukuoka's pre-permaculture permaculture classic The One Straw Revolution.

We talked organic, vegetarian, meat, fish, freegan, industrial! And how we saw The Low Carbon Cookbook taking shape over the coming year, who would focus on what areas. The meeting was self-organising and relaxed, we covered a lot of ground and choosing our areas within the project was effortless. Oh, and the stir-fry, salads and fruit compote were delicious and really hit the spot. Even a year ago I don't think I would have enjoyed paying attention to the food I eat so much. It must be the company.

Pics: Preparing a One Planet Community Kitchen Low Carbon Cookbook meal, vegetables, salad and the old African pan; sun behind clouds across the Broads; Low Carbon Cooks doing practical research!

Zero Carbon Holiday

“It’s an attitude,” I explained to Philip in the lane, talking about tents and The Holiday.
“Ah,” said Philip, “Bonnes vacances.”

We're not-going on a zero-carbon holiday. We’ve put the tent up in the garden and are taking turns to sleep under the greengage tree, moored in the long grass sprinkled with wild carrot. It’s a good space inside. A mattress, a stool, a wooden box for a table, a candle, a coloured mat, a glass of water. In spaces like these you don’t need much. There is something magical about their containment. Yurt, shed, studio, tree house, den, cabanas with rooves of leaves and a communal kitchen down the hill. Thousands of tent-dwellers are having this experience right now in fields and festivals everywhere in England, as they listen to the wind move around their small shelters like the rigging of a ship, as they step out each morning, bare feet on dewy grass. Fresh air. Sunrise. Mist. Today it feels like everything will be all right.

Half of our diseases are in our heads, and half in our houses.
That’s what Andy told me. He was reading a quote from the writer and wildlife artist, Ernest Thompson Seton who inspired the Woodcraft Folk in 1912. Seton advocated living as much as possible outdoors in tune with the elements. When Andy came down last Friday with Ollie and Antony, we walked along the windy cliff edge and jumped in the rough sea, and then we came home and talked in the tent. The boys played cards and whittled sticks. I made tea. It started to rain, and though there were five of us and it’s only a three person tent, it felt just fine.

That’s what I mean about attitude. Everything gets pared down. You do what is necessary. And that simplicity brings out the best in everyone. You feel connected to the planet and to your fellows. Most of our lives we do what is unnecessary. We work to maintain an empire that creates massively complex earth-damaging, people-damaging systems - systems of technology, systems of commerce, of psychology, of addiction, power struggles. But, like our bodies, what we really need, is neither fancy dishes with extravagant ingredients, nor junk food with a hundred additives, what we hunger for is simple fare. What we long for are picnics and campfires, blackberries and wild greens, sitting under trees, swimming in the river, walking on the earth, sleeping outside with the stars above our heads.

And maybe for the odd weekend, maybe for two weeks of the year, if we are lucky, we get to live this life we were constructed to lead. We call it holiday. But maybe it should be recognised as sanity.

If we could get a taste of that simplicity, that outdoor existence, and value it above everything, our lives would be much happier, We would be less stressed and less conflicted. But we would have to look hard at this indoor life first: these houses and our heads full of complicated nonsense – and find ways to deconstruct them. The houses are demanding and expensive. They suck up energy and time, need constant cleaning and decorating. They are full of machines that need servicing and replacing. Sometimes in our Carbon Conversations a feeling of hopelessness would come into the room. It felt out of our hands. It did our heads in. As if the lifestyle were running our lives, rather than ourselves.

Big house, big head, small world.

Last August Andy and the boys came and put their tent up in the garden and their visit sparked off an idea. Maybe there was a way we could chart this carbon cutting journey we were embarking on together (then called Transition Norwich 2.0) that would treasure all our small independent moves. This Low-Carbon Life was born. My first regular blog post (The Reality Business) in November was written from this tent. Since then, like some of my fellow bloggers, I have completed a year of reducing my carbon emissions by half. Done a cycle of Carbon Conversations. We’ve looked at electricity bills and car logs, swapped stories and useful tips. Now some of us are moving outside: we’ve started to dig gardens, chop firewood, swap vegetables and clothes, organise wholefood co-ops – working to create a culture that is stronger than the allure of the energy-sucking pleasuredome.

Where do we go from here? One thing I’ve realised: this attitude is a good place to start, where life does not feel out of our hands, or hopeless or ignoble, the place the poet calls:

A condition of complete simplicity
Costing not less than everything
We have to start where we feel things are all right. Where we are valued for what we do. Small tent, large universe.


Andy, Ollie and Mark (and Anthony) playing Go Fish in the Tent (rescued last year from Latitude Recycling point); Sustainable Bungay Summer Picnic; Mark taken by Andy at Covehithe.

End to End Tour - Third Otesha Log

As we departed Exeter after a fun filled weekend, we headed towards our next destination, Beaford arts centre in Northwest Devon, a leisurely 40 mile ride with some cheeky free cream teas and biscuits for one lucky team along the way apparently. My group missed out on that little treat but I was content with a quick 10 minute snooze in the sunshine after lunch.

Arriving at Beaford, we were all delighted to find hot showers, dorm rooms with beds for all, in amongst beautiful grounds. Here we performed to our largest audience yet; 100 children from three local schools. We were blessed with sunshine so spirits were high and the whole day ran fantastically. In the morning we made tetra pack wallets in the ethical fashion workshop and planted seeds in the grow your own workshop. We felt the children really engaged throughout the day and came up with some fantastic ideas and questions. This has to be one of the most inspiring aspects to our trip for me, getting to talk to young people and being constantly surprised by their knowledge and enthusiasm for the issues we’re talking about.

Tiverton was next on the map, a slightly trickier route with rain from the moment we set off in the morning to about 7.30pm when we arrived, typical! It was a fairly dramatic journey from start to finish, with me skidding to a halt on the cycle path with the bob the trailer in tow. Ouch! Back on the bikes again, a little further down the track we found a hysterical (laughing) Ellie and Beth after rescuing Sarah and bike from a little dip in the canal, as if we hadn’t got wet enough with the rain throughout the day! Luckily only wet panniers and a soggy Sarah were the result of that escapade! As the day turned to night we had been well and truly fed by the cooking team we all crashed out in our hosts barn at Abbotsford farm. An early wake up call by the resident swallows, a bowl full of cold fruity porridge and we were ready for a day of conservation work exchange with BTCV. We shared our Banana chain game, along with a banana dance much to the volunteer group’s bemusement! Then we all got to work, clearing a footpath through woods on the edge of Tiverton, thank you to the BTCV volunteers for such a fun afternoon of lopping and chopping!

To Bristol next and epic 80 mile ride ahead of us….oh and guess what it’s raining!! (by Liz 28th July )

End to End Tour - Second Otesha Log

It's time for the second journal entry and the Otesha LEJOG (Lands End to John O’Groats) tour is now in full swing. Yesterday we descended on our third school – the Maynard school for girls in Exeter – and we definitely made an impression on the girls there. And this is what this week’s journal entry is going to be about – the children that we have met so far. However, first we would like to send out a massive hug and well wishes to Olivia (a tour member) who took a nasty fall on Tuesday and fractured her collar bone, so has been unable to continue on tour with us. The team is very upset about losing one of our ‘family’, but there are rumours of an ‘Olivia doll’ that can join in on team photos and we are all very much looking forward to seeing her when we can hopefully rendezvous further up the country.

The last journal entry gave an update on our first in-school session and, despite the traumatic experience mentioned above, the second school day (in Coads Green, Cornwall) went remarkably well. The play kept the attention of a class of 4-6 year olds for its entire duration and the popularity of the Tupperware rap (an amazing song in the play) was well and truly established. With the little ones audience participation is the key, but trying to say your lines while 25 children continue to try and suggest sandwich fillings for you is quite a challenge!

Then commenced a lot of slightly disorganised running around games, a grow your own workshop where they planted broad beans and covered themselves in soil and an energy workshop where we were all impressed by their knowledge of what uses energy. As a whole we have been impressed with just how knowledgeable the children are and how quickly and easily they grasp the issues and embrace the actions they can take to help make a positive impact on the world.

Our school yesterday was quite different with much older children 10-13 years old. They had also already broken up for the summer so had come in especially to see us (so pressure to perform well!). Due to their age, it was really difficult to get much reaction from them during the play, but the transformation throughout the day when we had done some workshops with them was incredible. They really started to open up and join in and we had some fantastic conversations with them. It was lovely to see. We had just swapped play roles before the performance so it was fairly improvised at times, but it went down well and we had assurance that no-one noticed the ad-libbing!

The workshops we did with them were about Fair Trade (using bananas as the example – it is after all great fun to pretend to be a banana!) and ethical fashion where we spread the knowledge of how to make wallets out of Tetra-paks! Both of the workshops went brilliantly and it is an amazing feeling when you talk to some of the children afterwards and they tell you all of the things that they are going to change as a result of meeting you. I had one lass telling me that she was going to make sure that her parents only bought Fairtrade bananas. All of these little impacts put together are the Otesha way of changing the world. As we say in the play ‘together we are stronger’.

We have all loved working with the children so far and it really does give you hope for the future that they do all care and want to make a difference. That's it for this week folks, stay tuned for the next entry. (Kerry & the rest of the Land’s End to John O’Groat’s team)

End to End Tour - the Otesha Project - First Log

During the months of July and August resilient TN blogger, Kerry Lane is cycling with the 17-strong Otesha crew from Land's End to John O'Groats. In our Bike Week last month she described how she came to be spending her summer cycling sustainably up and down the hills of Britain with 17 fellow volunteers. At the end of August she'll be posting a special Low Carbon Life report of her epic journey. Meanwhile here is her teammate Thalia writing for the Otesha website. . .

When thinking about what to write for the LeJog 2010 tour it was really hard to fit in all of the amazing things which Hanna, Jo and the team managed to fit into training week!

Our journey to Sancreed, Corwall and ‘Plan-it Earth’ (a small, sustainable farm and our home-away-from-home for training week) was up one very steep hill…. the first of many. One of the first things we had to accomplish was to get to know our new ‘family’ mainly through lots of games, which made us feel a bit like uninhibited little children. The ’serious’ endeavours of creating a ‘food mandate’ (a shared agreement on how the team would eat for the duration of the trip) and the community roles (the responsibilities that we would take on as a team) went smoothly and allowed us to form a common idea of how life will function over the next two months.

We decided through consensus decision making to eat a completely vegetarian (and largely vegan) diet, to buy local goods as often as possible, and when not possible, to buy Fairtrade imported products (especially chocolate). We decided on all of this as a reflection of our commitment to reduce our impact on the environment and promote social justice.

Other activities included learning vegan cooking from some amazing volunteer chefs (Rosie and Iona… thanks guys!), yoga and outdoor showers, lots of learning about environmental issues and group dynamics, and everything we could ever want to know about two wheels from the mad bike scientists Pete and Dave (who we are all in love with, the boys included).

We also did a lot of work on the Otesha Play. We re-worked the scripts, created new characters, voices and scenes to give us some ownership over the final performance, which we will be giving to schools and communities at stops throughout our tour. In a few days time, team members began to blossom into characters such as Jamie Oliver, Simon Cowell, a ’Banana Pirate’ and a rapper who sings about the wonders of Tupperware. After a week of practice and rehearsal we gave our very first performance to a small school tucked away in a little valley not far from Land’s End. We were rather nervous but everything went well and the kids’ lovely eco suggestions to us included such brilliance as ‘recycling flat hedgehogs’ and considering the ‘ethics of factory produced Fairtrade products’ (these were coming from students age 4 -6 six!! Pretty impressive huh?).

At last, to finish the long week of training, we had our first team cycle….. a trip out to the famous ‘Land’s End’ on a rocky prominence overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. After some photo opps, hugs and (of course) a bit of shenanigans, we set off again for Plan-it Earth and a team party before departing for the tour. 16 miles and 1 performance down… 1000 more miles, 18 performances, lots of adventure, and thousands of people to reach out to still to go…

We couldn’t be more excited!!

Thalia & rest of the Land’s End to John O’Groats team

Otesha team discussion; Kerry's bike resting before the big tour; spelling it out at Land's End

Travelling Light

I’m taking two books along with me this Summer as travelling companions. Although I’m not actually going anywhere.

First though, what do you do if you’ve got conjunctivitis in the summer and you want a natural eyewash to clear and soothe your eyes – and allow you to see properly to read!?! If you’ve got Agrimony growing anywhere near you on an unpolluted roadside, then you’ve found your plant. A golden-spired lemony-scented member of the rose family. Make a tea from the aerial parts, let it cool down and bathe your eyes with it regularly. I know because I’m doing it at the moment. And it works beautifully.

But if you don’t know agrimony, how do you recognise it? You need the classic guide Wild Flowers of Britain and Northern Europe by Richard Fitter, Alastair Fitter and Rosemary Blamey. My 1996 Collins edition is the very first plant guide I ever bought and I still refer to it whenever I come across a plant I don’t recognise in my wanderings. Both illustrations and plant descriptions are clear and straightforward and the whole book, including the size, has a very friendly feel.

Getting into wild plants (and I was in my mid-thirties before I really got going, although that’s rather a long time ago now!) completely revolutionised my relationship with the places I was in. At that time I travelled a lot and so I’d buy a flower guide for wherever I was visiting. Now I rarely travel beyond Suffolk and Norfolk and one of my biggest delights is the discovery and rediscovery of the native wild plants right here at home. But wherever you are this summer have a look around at the native flora along the lanes, by the roadsides, in woods and waste places, outside your house (or tent, caravan or hotel). And don’t forget your guide.

Like Jon, I’m also taking a poetry book along with me down the lane this summer. Flora Poetica – The Chatto Book of Botanical Verse (2001) is full of treasures from all times and (English-speaking) places. All the poems are arranged according to plant family and Lignum Vitae by Edward Baugh from Jamaica is the final one in the book (the ‘lignum vitae’ is the creosote bush, Guaiacum officinale, classified in the Zygophyllaceae). It perhaps just beats Seamus Heaney’s The Haw Lantern as my favourite. I’ve tried to find a weblink to this poem to no avail, but Norfolk libraries do have two copies of Flora Poetica for rental.

In the poem this ‘wood of life’ speaks through Baugh about resilience in the face of the ‘final carry-down artist’ who’ll ‘lock down/ this town and scorch the earth till not/ even lizard don’t crawl’. The tree will survive and bloom, and even though

‘…Sometimes I feel my heart
Harden, … I not going nowhere, my root
sink too deep’


Wild Flowers cover; Flora Poetica cover; Wild Morning Glories and Marigolds in Mexico 2001 and Viper's Bugloss near Ely, Cambs 2002 by Mark Watson

Zero Carbon to Copenhagen

I was in a state of despair about climate change. All the science said we needed an extremely rapid transition away from fossil fuels in order to avoid it spiralling out of control in a runaway greenhouse effect. We have never made such a fundamental transition in society before.

Or have we? War! That is the key. America made its first tank seven months after Pearl Harbour. We can do the same again, only making wind turbines instead of weapons. Nothing stops us from making the transition except lack of political will.

The first edition of the Zero Carbon Britain report detailing how we could go zero carbon in 20 years was published by the Centre for Alternative Technology in 2007, and that year, at their members' weekend, I asked Zero Carbon Britain project director Paul Allen if we could do it quicker than 20 years. His reply - yes we could, but the public wouldn't accept it 'because climate change isn't as visible a threat as Hitler'.

So, how do we make it visible, and how do we get across the idea that we need a new world war, a war on climate change? Then I heard a report on the evacuation from Dunkirk on the radio - the flotilla of little ships which crossed the North Sea and picked up the British army from the > beaches of Belgium in the darkest days of the second world war, a war we eventually went on to win. It's the sort of inspiration we need (though it might not exactly enthuse peace campaigners, and, as the German Green MEP Sven Giegold said when I explained it to him "This will not go down well in Germany!").

So, the idea of the zero carbon caravan was born - groups of people would travel to the Copenhagen climate summit - our last chance to prevent runaway climate change - without using any fossil fuels, cycling on land, and sailing in a flotilla reminiscent of Dunkirk over the sea to Europe. Tall ships would bring people from all over the world, from America, Australia, New Zealand. Thousands of cyclists from all over Europe would converge on Copenhagen. On the way they would collect information on how to go zero carbon to present to the delegates at the climate summit. Worldwide media coverage would have the delegates trembling, millions of people the world over would be demanding they sign a treaty which would save the world from climate catastrophe ...

Well, we all know what happened. Copenhagen was a disaster. But I did make it there, (starting in Wales on August 14th, finishing in Copenhagen on December 5th) though not with the army of people I had imagined, and I didn't get nearly as much media coverage as I hoped for. But I did get on TV three times, and had a few radio interviews, and got in lots of local papers. And I visited some really interesting and inspiring examples of the things people can do to get closer to the > zero carbon living which is both possible and preferable. And I did manage to collect these examples together and put them on a couple of datasticks, one of which I presented to Ingrid Nestle, the German Green Party MPs' spokesperson on energy economics, and the other to Colin Challen, who was at the time an MP and chair of the All Party > Parliamentary Climate Change Group (sadly, he didn't stand at the last general election, because the constituency boundaries in Leeds were redrawn and they lost a constituency, and he lost out to Ed Balls in the Labour Party selection for the seat).

Lastly, I met a truly amazing person called Kim Nguyen, who made my > journey from Wales look insignificant, as he cycled all the way from Australia http://www.rideplanetearth.org/. Not only that, he managed to organise rides all over the world just before the climate summit. And this year we are working together, organising rides all over the world, finishing with zero carbon concerts, to show both people and politicians that, not only is a zero carbon world possible, it's also much more fun - the people stopping it are those with vested interests in the fossil fuel industry, and it's time we took them on.

We're also working with 350 http://www.350.org/(who are campaigning for an > eventual carbon dioxide concentration of 350 ppm maximum) and 10:10 http://www.1010global.org/ (who made The Age of Stupid, and are now campaigning to get people to cut their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010), joining in the Global Work Party carrying out practical actions to cut carbon emissions by starting preparations for the zero carbon concert events, doing things like building bicycle generators. So, if anyone from Transition Norwich wants to join in, please get in touch by visiting http://www.zerocarbonconcert.org/. And spread the word to everyone you know. Because maybe, just maybe, we can still rescue the world from runaway climate change, and it isn't too late after all.

Chris Keene

En route to Copenhagen: Klimahaus at night and with students, 6 November 2009.

Let's Hear it for Pedal Power!

Hello, I’m Tom Foxe, and my cycling travels haven’t taken me very far yet - holidays along the coast of Holland, in Southern Ireland and the Isle of Man. Mostly I cycle to and from work in Norwich, about 5 miles a day. I became interested in bike-powered gennies (short for generator) about 10 years ago, through the internet. There are dozens of bike genny sites and lots of clips on Youtube.

My first genny was the hub of a Rutland wind generator, the white disc behind the bike above. It powered a 12 volt sound system. A battery kept the system going while riders changed over, and when people pedalled, the genny kept the battery charged. Most people generate about 50 watts easily. This will run a 100 watt sound system at medium power.

The first (2003) Human Dynamo system was very basic – microphones + mixer + keyboard amplifier, but it sounded great and people loved pedalling the bike to power the system.

The folk group Seize the Day played in Chapelfield Gardens, Norwich last Summer using the improved Human Dynamo system. We used good quality P.A. speakers and it worked so well, some people asked if we could please turn the volume down? We obliged of course.

People have asked me how a bike genny compares with mains electricity, and what can be powered by it? A one-person genny can only be used in limited situations, and cannot compare with mains electricity power-wise. In a recent TV programme the makers showed that to boil just one electric kettle (typically 2,500 watts) it took 30 or 40 people pedalling to produce enough electricity!

So what good IS a bike genny ? Well, being limited, it makes us think about using less – smaller and more efficient devices, and switching things OFF when not needed. This is a useful mindset to develop as Earth’s oil supply runs out. They now make powerful LED stage lights and Data Projectors which use 1/3 the energy of filament lamps and last many times longer. As oil runs out, unreliable mains power supply is very likely, so a backup system of batteries and bike gennies will be very useful. It will allow us to power some lights and also some important audio-visual devices independently of mains electricity, at least for as long as someone is able & willing to pedal!

Also, because of the dangers of mains electricity, outdoor public events using mains power have more red tape involved and insurance cover is more expensive. For these events, low voltage systems are much safer, cheaper and less hassle.
Having attended a bike genny workshop in May, I found there is a big demand for them - it was booked out 6 months in advance and people came from far afield, many from Transition Towns. It was a great workshop, but a no. of people doubted if they would actually get around to building their own genny afterwards.

So I decided to run a workshop in Norwich, where people will build and take away their own genny. As a bike lover, ex-electrician and electronics engineer I feel well placed to deliver this workshop, which will focus on Safety, Building the Genny and Applications.

The non-profit workshop, 1-5 p.m. Sat. 25th September 2010 in Norwich, provides a new Turbo Trainer, 250 watt generator, 12 volt battery and other parts, and costs £120 (significant reduction possible for cyclists with own turbo trainer) . For comparison, a commercial pedal genny, the Gazelle costs £100 and produces just 15 watts. There are 12 places, no special skills/knowledge needed. Mail tom7railway@yahoo.co.uk for full details.

The workshop will be followed by a Pedal Power Party (6-9 p.m.) to which Transition Norwich people and others are invited. This will feature pedal-powered lighting, cinema, live entertainment and that rare creature, a disco that doesn’t hurt your ears!

Tom Foxe