Occupying the House with the Cat

“I just read you were alone with the cat and thought I’d give you a ring,” said Josiah on the phone. Nick had picked Charlotte up in the afternoon and they’d gone to Occupy Norwich for the night.

“Ah the value of twitter,” I laughed. “I didn’t sound sorry for myself, did I? It was very tongue in cheek. The cat’s gone out now too!”

It is ten to seven in the morning and I am typing this in bed. Outside it’s raining slightly, there’s a light mist on the fields in the grey dawn and it suddenly feels like November. The cat has come in from the night, bounded around the house, washed herself and jumped from the bedside table onto me knocking over pens and pencils and making it as hard as she can for me to get to the keyboard.

So that’s where I am. I have a list in front of me of the things I’ve been considering all week for these posts but it's the Occupy movement that keeps occupying the space! Two pieces really stuck in my mind, one about confronting the demand to always have to have demands; and the other Erik Curren's on how it's not just the bankers we need to be looking at but also Big Oil.

In a few hours Charlotte will be back from her night on the streets of Norwich. She’s coming with Tom, who’s interviewing us about This Low Carbon Life and Transition Norwich communications as part of a short film he’s making for the 3rd birthday celebrations on the 15th of this month. And I've got stage (or film) fright.

So I need to get the house in order and myself prepared. I’ll let you know how it goes in Part 2 later...

Part 2 Later

Well, that wasn't so bad. Tom arrived with Charlotte and his two small daughters and he filmed us talking about communications and the blog. In fact it was really good fun. Tom's a sympathetic director who told me my performance nerves were a good sign - it meant I cared about what I was doing - and who really lets you be yourself. Although I am slightly worried that second cup of coffee will have made me come across like a mad professor on acid.

Meanwhile the girls and the cat happily occupied the bed together, whilst Charlotte and I took it in turns to read them stories so Tom could film.

Haven't spoken with Charlotte yet about what went on at Occupy Norwich last night. I'm busy finishing this post and she is attending to the Social Reporting project. But she'll be writing about it herself next week, either on the One World Column or for This Low Carbon Life's Transition Themes week. Watch these spaces!

I forgot to take photos of our filming session with Tom, damn! But here's Nick and Charlotte by the garden tent just before they set off yesterday for a more concrete sort of tent experience!

Warning this post may contain knots

For the last 5 months I have been creating a mammoth woolly to celebrate Norwich pride. It has been an amazing project. Why? Because the council let us hang is on the balcony at city hall? Because it is made of a million stitches and is over 30 metres long? Because the EDP printed a picture of it and lots of other pride stuff despite being a 'family' paper. No, none of these things. What was amazing was that hundreds of people came together to make something happen. People from all walks of life. People who would not normally associate. But they wanted to make something. There was a drive to create, to knit, to commune. There is something so simple about sitting round a table and making stuff. Friendships have been forged, alliances made and lots of people have rekindled their love of knitting.

The only problem is what to do next. Knitted dishcloths anyone?

Self in Transition

Transition is . . . getting to do things you might not have done before. Last month Charlotte and I met John and Carol in Norwich and went to see the documentary, Food, Inc. and John asked us if we would write some sleeve notes for his band's demo CD. So that's how I found myself writing my first music review and I include it below as the last piece of this set.

It's also dealing with the transitions we have to make inside. From being self-obsessed with a fixed identity and biography, to being open and fluid and able to cope with change. From living circumscribed, defensive lives where we only know People Like Us (or Below or Above Us) to relating to and treating each other as equals because we're all in the same boat on the same planet in a very uncertain time.

How are we treating each other?

Reduced To Clear - The John Preston Tribute Band
“We’re not really background music,” John Preston told me last autumn on the phone. We were discussing arrangements for his band to play at Transition Norwich’s first birthday party, which I was helping to organise. I thought that meant they were very loud, which John assured me was the case. But they could tone it down and be as acoustic as possible according to the event and venue.

Both party and band went down very well on the night, and amidst all the event managing and doing a set myself with Andy, I found time for a bop to JPTB’s very danceable groove. I was aware too that some interesting lyrics were going on, occasionally catching the dark murmur of It Costs The Earth or In Village Life.

But whilst I saw at the party that the band clearly had style and presence, it was only when John sent me their CD Reduced To Clear and I sat down and listened to it that I got a feeling for what he’d meant when he said it wasn’t just background music.

The music itself has a strong seventies punk feel to it with occasional rhythm and blues and even classical elements. And you feel you’re in good hands with the musicians, whether it’s John’s deep, clear vocals (you can hear all the words) or Les Chappel’s solid, earthy drums. Carol Hunter, the band’s keyboard player, is classically trained and her plaintive, slightly offkey riffs bring a quirkiness to the tunes which match the wit of the lyrics beautifully. Listen out too for Mark Fawcett’s splendid guitar solo on Bad Mood.

The melodies are catchy but not so much so that you ignore the lyrics. I grew up in the seventies when punk was born and I have fond memories of X-Ray Specs, for example, with their clever songs about supermarkets, advertising and genetic engineering. But it’s one thing being fifteen and listening to a fifteen-year old oracle, a cipher almost, raving about consumerism and identity crisis, and quite another being forty-something and hearing it from a maturer, more experienced artist. In the times we live in now, every consumer choice we make really is costing the earth and most of us are aware of that on some level. And it’s that level that these songs speak to.

In I Believe (which is also a great dance number), there is an almost Zen-like sense to lines like “I believe in myself, though I don’t know what it is.” Here is the ego clinging to its idea of separation with this belief in itself, this ‘insubstantial self’, which can’t allow for any uncertainty, because that would “be the end of me.”

“If I can’t win the conflict then I quit!” begins I Resign. Here again the ego who will be nobody if it can’t be Caesar. And “I hope I’m really needed, and not just superseded when I go.” Who hasn’t felt like this at some point in their lives? Or even a lot?

And yet isn’t this ‘insubstantial’ ego when it’s bound up with consumerism on a mass level precisely what has put life on the planet under such great strain? These are the kinds of things that listening to Reduced To Clear provoked me into thinking about.

There is more I could say about The John Preston Tribute Band, but it’s probably best to get hold of the CD and listen (and dance) to it yourself.

Pic: Me in a spiky mood coping with change after shaving off my beard by accident

Coming Into Play

When the blog crew decided to try out a three day writing week, I suggested blithely that maybe we could take a cue from the last person’s post and write from that . . . luckily, I start my day with Kingfisher toothpaste. Mint, fennel, flouride free.

Fennel I reckoned was a good place to begin. A sun-loving, golden headed plant, tall, feathery, growing in great fragrant bands down amongst the East Anglian dunes, where in high summer I go collecting its spicy seeds for curry dishes and a cooling and drying medicine tea.

Everyone’s talking seeds in Transition right now: Jane’s planting for the Allotment; Erik in "zero-sweaters" is sowing a packet a day to keep himself in vegetables all year; Mark and I are planning our Herbs-for-Resilience Toolkit. At Sustainable Bungay's core group meeting on Tuesday we discussed our Mayday Give and Grow Seedling Swap when all those resilient veg and flower seeds will have sprouted. Today I’m off to see Becky at the Greengrow co-operative in Ilketshall St Andrew, where they are turning a big arable field into a market garden and apple orchard. I’m giving her a hand with setting up some press and publicity. Put everything on a blog, I'll say . . .

And then just as I was about to do a whole seeds thing, Jon posted another blog. Churches and birches! And I had to change track, towards the invisible worlds. Luckily there’s another part that fennel plays: one that's not so well known. Giant fennel from the Mediterranean once formed the Dionysian thyrsus, the staff that spearheaded the Mysteries. A procession that led down into the seedstore of the earth where the mysterious life-in-death, death-in-life process was revealed– a celebration that was performed for thousands of years in all corners of the earth.

That’s the story that plants tell us. Life works because of the connections you can’t see with your day-time eyes, because of what happens underground.

Only artists these days go down into the dark places. Because writers, musicians, performers play with the unknown. Face the music, dance on the edge. Only if you are in play, in a state of creative chaos where limits are broken up, can any new solutions emerge. Trouble is we’re living in a world where the dominant hegemony insists Powerful People have got it down and are In Control. It's been that way since civilisation began.

Yesterday some of us artists-in-Transition went to our second rehearsal for the Low Carbon Roadshow in Tom’s garden. We're planning to do something for the Earth Hour on Saturday. When we first met at the Norwich Arts Theatre none of us knew what would happen. We found ourselves enacting the future, imagining who we might be in 100 years from now. What our messages might be for ourselves in the present. 2110 appearing in 2010.

Climate change and peak oil mean that the future is not going to be that present individualist story we live by no matter how many times the Powerful People repeat it. “We’re making it up as we go along!” as Tom said. Most people feel pressured to conform to this old narrative (or it’s the end of the world for you!), creative artists can’t help following a different drummer. They know that the future is embedded in the present, and every move we make now affects what follows in our tracks.

Somewhere in their bones they remember that ancient plant story and know that time in fact is not quite as linear as historians and politicians would like us to believe, nor is matter as concrete as some scientists tell us. That’s why creators are inventive, fluid, tricky. Appearing only when they need to. Making it up as they go along, with a few ancestral tricks up their sleeves. They are holding the door open for something else to happen.

What kind of future do we want?

Which way do we want the show to go? A tragedy that ends in fallen kings and queens, a comedy that ends in a round dance, a medicine show which restores our lost connections, or a mystery play where the plant that sustains us emerges from a fennel seed, like the sun?

On the Low-Carbon Road to the Roadshow: catching a bus for the First Rehearsal, on the train to the Second. Polytunnel at Greengrow, Open Day, April 10, 10am-3pm. Ilkeshall St Andrew.

So you need a poo and there is nowhere to go what do you do? Find out below...

Last summer I was commissioned to make a film for a care farm that was being developed in Northern Ireland. One of the projects being made was a compost toilet. The farm now has pigs and chickens all being farmed organically and with the potential for people with health problems to benefit from being there. I know I had a great time and met some wonderful people. We all worked really hard and in the evenings we went to one of those Irish theme pubs they have over there. Sweet!

If you want to view the film in a higher resolution go to Youtube
www.youtube.com/watch?v=37svfHC6sWg or type in helenofnorwich

www.growingconnectionsproject.org.uk

the only green in the village

Last year I had a vision in a transition meeting that the area around Sewell park (by Blyth Jex School and the Whalebone pub) could be like a village. This would mean that people would shop locally and recognize people in the street and generally it would be a happier, greener place to live. Since that vision a number of things have happened;

• The florist said she felt the area becoming more greener and has started wrapping her flowers in bio-degradable material
• The owner of a successful independent cafe in Norwich is looking to open a new place in the area
• someone put up a directional sign between the pub and the church and this led to the 'carols in the pub event'
  
• The local NR3 group, reskillers, and the congregation of Christchurch new catton ran a Green Christmas fair ( opposite the pub/church sign) - see previous blog
• the Norwich wellbeing group that meet in Sewell are looking at doing some research in the area on community wellbeing
  

So next time you have a vision or a dream, don't dismiss it and think you have eaten too much cheese. Watch it grow and work towards it.

The title of this blog comes from little Britain, the only gay in the village, and of course the joke was around the fact that the village was full of gay people but he thought he was alone! I have realized that there are loads of like minded people on my doorstep and I don't have to drive to a meeting to meet them. I can just walk about and find them in the park, pub, greengrocers, butchers, need i go on?

the carols in the pub story:
www.eveningnews24.co.uk/content/news/story.aspx?brand=ENOnline&category=News&tBrand=ENOnline&tCategory=news&itemid=NOED11 Dec 2009 14%3A30%3A41%3A177

and lo! a star appeared on the roundabout by the puppet theatre....
as it is coming to epiphany I thought you might like to see a photo of this star made from foil takeaway containers on the inner ring road....