A new season for Norwich FarmShare

As I try to, every few weeks, I juggled my work schedule and found space for a day off on the farm. I work part time precisely so that I have the freedom to do things like this. I phoned Tierney and said "Which day do you want me? I can do Tuesday or Friday" She ummed and ahhed and explained that there wasn't really anything for me to do.

Now if I was a gardener, I'd probably have worked this out for myself. Nothing much is growing, so there's not much weeding. It's the wrong time of year to plant stuff, and harvesting only happens on Thursdays (which mysteriously, I never seem to be able to take off).

I've got very used to eating seasonally over the last couple of years, but this growing seasonally thing took me completely by surprise.

There will still be plenty to do over the winter, but it will tend to be big occasional jobs, like putting up the polytunnel skin or cutting a door hole in the container. We'll put these days on our events page on the website and our facebook group. By the way, we could really do with a window and a door for our container- if you happen to have one going spare, please tell us! The plan is to make one end of the container much cosier for Tierney and our volunteers.

There is a little weeding still to do in the polytunnel to keep our winter salads at their best, and harvesting still goes on every Thursday 10.00-1.00 and we'd love you to come along any week you're able to, just let us know you're coming. It's much more likely to be raining and muddy, so come prepared!

With the change in both the weather and the veg we're harvesting, I find I'm eating so very differently to the food I was enjoying just a couple of months ago. Soups, tagines and big warming bowlfuls of veg seem just the thing now. There are recipes for seasonal veg aplenty on our website, do take a look. If you've got a favourite recipe, why not send it my way so I can add it to our growing collection?

As we go further into the winter, we'll also be maintaining our tools, servicing the tractor, arranging a quarterly general meeting to make sure our members have the chance to tell us how it is for them, and continuing with the all important job of telling everyone about Norwich Farmshare and how good it is. We still need more members to make sure we're a flourishing farm!

Building Resilient Trading - Economics & Livelihoods Group

Colman Opticians, which has been trading on St. Augustines Street for many years, and Junk & Gems, a new retro/antiques shop

Ever since I first proposed a visioning session on behalf of the economics and livelihoods group, I have been asked the same questions multiple times - why should Transition Norwich be interested in local economic development, and what do I hope to achieve by a "visioning" session in St. Augustines Street?

The first has a simple, but long-winded answer, which I won't be able to cover fully here, but I'll include links to relevant websites and videos. Essentially, a vibrant and cohesive local economy means that more products and services are accessible on foot or cycle, reducing transport carbon emissions and oil use; money is kept in the local economy, and its power to serve local people multiplies as a result; and the community is more able to face challenges together and respond to global shocks quickly.

Numbers 74 and 75 are both being redecorated and fitted out for commercial use, the latter as a hairdresser, the former unknown.

So what do we hope to achieve by "visioning"? Afterall, none of us are capable of noting a community's wants and desires one day and plonking it on the street the next. And to do so, even if we could, would, I feel, be denying the community the right to evolve its own nature and personality in accordance with all those who reside and work there (the reason why many New Towns and blanket developments have spectacularly failed to achieve strong communities).

What we hope to achieve is an ongoing conversation between those who live and work in the area, so that cooperation is at the core of what the community does and there is a common sense of what the area means to people, and what it should become. It is, I feel, the second question on the visioning questionnaire (see below) that is most important - What personality would you like the area to have?

Numbers 31 and 33 are both undergoing extensive work but will be open as commercial properties at a later date

With this information in place, we can start bringing together the people who might make it happen. If traders are concerned that a particular empty shop is having an effect on their business, then we can try to identify the owner, find an entrepreneur who is looking for a place to trade from, help identify grants which may apply to bring the property into good repair and then setup a traders' association so that new and old businesses support each other.

Now, this is just an example, and in truth, something which appeared viable may be found not to be, and alternative paths must be explored... but this is the entire point of the exercise - to explore what paths are there, rather than making the assumption that there are none and that empty properties will remain so forever.

Numbers 5 and 59 are both boarded up and in need of some love and care, but number 5, with its prominent position with plenty of pavement space at the bottom of the street gives it loads of potential! The owners are not known.

I thank those who have sent back their questionnaires with their answers and will be getting in touch soon to share any analysis, but if you're interested in the future of St Augustines Street, it's not too late to get involved! Just answer these questions (with particular focus on b!):

a) What shops/services/facilities would you like to use/see locally?

b) What personality would you like the area to have?

c) What particular changes would have a positive effect on your life/business?

d) What would save you money, resources or wasted time?

e) What do you or your business have to offer to the development of the local economy in terms of premises, time and/or expertise?

You can email your answers to me at simeon@simeonjackson.co.uk

All photos taken by me.

Bringing to Share - Communications and the Low Carbon Cookbook

Welcome to our Transition Themes Week #9, our regular round up of Transition Norwich groups and projects. It's been a full-on month for Transition communications. As well as coordinating this blog and putting out our monthly bulletin the comms crew have also been working on a deadline for the Transition Network's Social Reporting Project where Mark, Kerry and I are writers and editors.

Last week I went up to the Festival Hall to take part in the Network's Project Sharing Engine and become one of the "alpha" testing team. Several webmasters from different initiatives are helping roadtest this innovative on-line sharing platform that will allow initiatives to disseminate their myriad projects across the globe. At the moment anyone can log their project by going directly onto the main site, where it is kept much like a library. The Sharing Engine will enable people to not only file copy via a widget on their own website but also to connect and cross-reference with others. It will become a vast interconnecting web and storehouse that will enable Transitioners to see the full range of activities and glean information and inspiration. So the meeting was as much about creating a dynamic social infrastructure as it was a technical exercise.

Not that computing skills were absent. At the start we had to say how tecchy we were in terms of numbers on the scale of one to ten. I have to say I did not feel very alpha at this point as several wizard 10s are on the team (including the Networks own technical co-op - Jim, Chris and Paul) as well as the project's mastermind, Ed Mitchell (8), the Network's new webmaster, Laura (9), and the Newsletter's editor, Mike (7). Where your zeta (2 1/2) reporter did have something to offer was editorially. Unlike the other initiatives most of TNs active members are also bloggers, either for our news blog or on This Low Carbon Life. Most of us regularly file copy, take pictures and create the necessary feedback loops for a resilient and connected collective.

One of the challenges in Transition is for people to actively report back on what is happening on a daily basis within the initiative. There are usually one or two people that are key communicators, but lacking other contributors the momentum for regular collective communication does not happen. One of the reasons we have the very non-tecchy Blogger system is so everyone can upload copy easily (the Network uses the far cooler Drupal). By running community blogs and contributing daily posts the rhythm of the enterprise carries people forward. This was one of the main topics we discussed in our break-out groups. When many people focus and participate within a shared enterprise everything becomes much easier and more fluid. These are how grassroots and diverse systems self-organise and create strong networks.

This has certainly been the case with the recent Occupy Movement which we'll be reporting on this week, along with other on-the-street reports: Simeon on the St Augustine's visioning (Economics and Livelihoods), Helen on the Magdalen Street Celebration, Elena on FarmShare's potato day, Ruth or Steve on Transition Hethersett and Kerry on Social Justice.

And in the spirit of the Sharing Engine here is a precis of the Low Carbon Cookbook project I wrote about last week as a social reporter in our Food and Health week. It is excerpted from the main piece what is going down in my kitchen is going down in the world which you can read here:

Low Carbon Cookbook

I am standing with a giant tea pot in my hands on a cold November day, listening to Tully Wakeman from East Anglia Food Link at Sustainable Bungay’s Growing Local! conference. He's telling a packed hall how 70% of grains grown in East Anglia are for animal feed, how “local” pigs are fed on rainforest soya. He’s talking about peak oil and modern agriculture, how in the future we will have to learn to eat less meat and less dairy, a far simpler fare. This is it, I am thinking. This is The Project.

The Low Carbon Cookbook did not start straight-away. It began after a meeting between bakers, farmers, researchers and Transitioners to discuss how to create the Norwich loaf. It began after working with my friend in Transition, Josiah Meldrum, on three issues of Food Inspiring Change about local food projects and then on a treatment for a book called One Planet Community Kitchen (now roots shoots & seeds). It began after Tully inaugurated Transition Norwich’s second phase – the start up of the innovative Transition Circles, neighbourhood groups which looked at personal carbon reduction in all aspects of our lives - home energy, transport, food, “stuff” and waste.

It began after many of us had catalogued and recorded our downshift experiences in the TN blog, This Low Carbon Life, from baking bread to the Norwich livestock market, from eating roadkill to the health hazards of the global food business. It began in September 2010 after a fortnight on Transition Food Patterns that catalogued many of the local outlets, market traders and community gardens that make up a Transition food infrastructure, including the CSA that has now become Norwich FarmShare.

The Low Carbon Cookbook group have been meeting for over a year now, paying attention to dishes and produce in the way Mark was describing in respect to land and medicine plants on Monday. Most of us on the project have been part of the Transition Circles and trained as Carbon Conversation facilitators. We're cooks and growers, writers and academics, vegans and meat eaters, some of us constrained by chronic illness and allergies. All of us are highly aware of the ethical and political choices we are faced with everyday and vote with our forks, as Michael Pollan famously advised in the documentary, Vanishing of the Bees.

Josiah introduced our first Low Carbon Cookbook meeting at The Greenhouse with a talk on the history of co-operatives. We began the project by conducting a mapping exercise known as Deconstructing the Dish, speaking about its provenance, energy use and our memories around the different ingredients. My own was the humble dish of fava, first eaten on a Cycladic island in Greece, aged 19.

We have held kitchen conversations over a seasonal, local, organic, freegan, fair-traded, foraged meal each month since then. We have met in each other’s houses, in Jo's raw food neighbourhood café, The Nectar, at Norwich’s weekly FoodCycle, looked at key ingredients and tools, recorded and photographed all our sessions. We have considered all aspects of the industrial food system and how we can break out of it, how we can restructure, relocalise and most of all radically change our relationship with food.

The aim of the project is to compile (and publish) an A-Z on all subjects you need to know to eat as sustainably as possible within our present distribution systems. Here is a small taster:

Allotments, Beehives, CSAs, Dairy, Eggs, Foraging, Germination, Hungry gap, Industrial food systems, Jam, Kitchen Conversations, Land Grabs, Milling, Nourishment, Organic, Palm oil, Quinces, Rocket stoves, Storage, Tortilla, Umi plums, Veg boxes, Water, Xylitol, Yellow peas, Zero Waste.

It is built around a collection of Bring-to-Share recipes we have been cooking up for the last year and also a growing list of vegetables, wild and foraged plants. It contains resources: documentaries such as Food Inc and The End of the Line, books like Felicity Lawrence's Eat Your Heart Out! and Masanobu Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution, as well as local food sources. In short it helps create the atmosphere, conviviality, intelligence and connection that is intregral to a low-carbon culture. It is our hope that by providing this kind of practical and philosophic blueprint, other Transition initiatives might compile their own regional cookbooks with local resources and dissmeninate them eventually via the new Project Sharing Engine on the Network.

Looking forward to linking up!

Photos: Alpha group at the Festival Hall (Mike Grenville); engagement group break out; occupy group en route to St Paul's (Ed Mitchell); Indian spices in a Mexican molcajete; deconstructed dishes by Elena of Norwich FarmShare and Gemma of Ripple Food Co-op and Transition Ipswich; dandelion tea and toss it in 24 leaves salad; anti-GM potato demonstration in Norwich; roadside stall; Food Inc poster and still; remembering sunflower and marigold seeds (CDC and MW)

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!

More News From The Engine Room - Transition Network Social Reporters

I first published the post below, News from the Engine Room, on the Transition Network Social Reporting blog.

This nationwide blog, created by Ed Mitchell and Charlotte Du Cann during the summer and launched in September is based on our own This Low Carbon Life. Like the Norwich blog, there is a daily post - today will be the 49th - and like ours too it's full of great writing, variety, poignancy and humour. It's the place to read firsthand experiences of transitioners from all over the UK.

From Omagh (Northern Ireland) to Heathrow, Artist's Valley (Wales) to Glasgow and the Black Isle, Lewes to Bungay and Norwich, Totnes to Lancaster to Dursley near Bristol to Finsbury Park, we're talking from behind the transition scenes about what it's like to be in the thick of it, full-on, night and day. We're talking about:

bad hair on vital communications days (Marella)

the ethics of squatting and revitalising vacant land (Joe)

permaculture on a (very low) budget (Ann)

the practical struggle between the values of transition and the norms of society (Kerry)

control of the land and the islanders of Eigg (Catriona)

going locavore - finding and eating food from where you live (Adrienne)

a low carbon cookbook for transition times (Charlotte)

transition as social permaculture (Jay)

the joys and sorrows of putting on the 'big picture' (Caroline)

feeling the fear and growing things anyway (Rachel) and

community building in an urban edible landscape (Jo)

So here's mine from the Communicating Transition theme week:

NEWS FROM THE ENGINE ROOM (Mark)

When I signed up to contribute to the Communicating Transition theme this week, I thought writing it would be a cinch. I should know by now after years of 5am starts (with prep beforehand) and hours wondering whether I'll be able to string more than one intelligible sentence next to another, that cinch doesn't come into it.

But hey Transition is just about getting together with others within the context of global peaking fossil fuels, climate change and economic downturn/ instability/crisis/chaos and systems meltdown and building community resilience, isn’t it? About responding to these things as individuals and as social and planetary beings. About working together on parallel infrastructures whilst the present dominant global industrial one breaks up. About finding alternative ways of inhabiting the planet to the business-as-usual one. And having some fun (hopefully) at the same time. What's so hard to communicate about that? We all GET IT, don't we?

The problem comes when you start trying to define communications or transition as one thing (or when I do). They are such multi-dimensional affairs. They are ten thousand things.

Today I'm going focus on practical communications and talk about the blogs and websites we've developed in Transition Norwich and Sustainable Bungay as part of creating the alternative media Joe was writing about on Monday.

Communications are the flyers Marella wrote about yesterday, the visits Charlotte spoke about the day before, the phone conversation I had with a farmer’s wife recently who told me top-down agricultural bureaucracy ignores the actual lived experience of people, like herself, who have lived on the land all their lives and know it intimately.

Providing an outlet to give voice to our experiences of being in (and going through!) transition as it happened was what originally inspired This Low Carbon Life. This was a Transition first.

Charlotte, together with Andy, a graphic designer and Jon, also an ex-journalist, pooled their editorial experience and created this community blog (on Blogger) in October 2009. Since then about twenty bloggers, of all different backgrounds and ages, have written between us more than 650 posts on everything from the low carbon growing, cooking and sharing of food to downshifting in style to reducing fossil fuel usage to half the national average. Many posts take a good, considered look at the bigger picture: reconnection with nature, politics, the industrial food system and inner resilience, whilst others explore the kinds of people we are becoming/need to become as we navigate the times. We also take our own photographs.

As well as the regular writers we feature crossposts from fellow transitioners in other initiatives and guest slots on transition-related themes. We meet every three months, sort out the rota and decide the topic and theme weeks for the coming quarter. We keep in touch with each other via a googlegroup in case someone wants to swap days or forgets to post. Charlotte and I both look at the blog daily to check photo and text alignment and I proof the copy. But we don't edit the content, it's a no censorship blog. Everyone’s voice remains free to be what it is. It’s a bit like a feral choir.

The structure of This Low Carbon Life is also what Ed and Charlotte have used to develop this very social reporting project we're all now engaged in.

As I write this I feel like a Transition Communications maintenance engineer: I spend a lot of time caretaking! As well as This Low Carbon Life, I co-produce the monthly Transition Norwich News bulletin and the quarterly Sustainable Bungay newsletter. I use the word co-produce because none of us do any of these things on our own (even though it sometimes feels like that at 5 in the morning, or when someone who's NOT DOING THE WORK dismissively remarks "you missed a comma there" or "you need to get your marketing sorted. I've never heard of...")

Transition Norwich News is also a community Blogger-based website. A crew of 15 people from the various groups and projects in the initiative upload their copy each month and we organise it and make sure the calendar is up-to-date. The bulletin is edited and sent out to all TN subscribers (yes, I know Network, we call it that too) with links to the news items and latest This Low Carbon Life posts.

Sustainable Bungay's newsletter is likewise a collaborative publication with people from the theme groups sending in copy to Charlotte (editor), Kris (designer) and myself (sub) which we then collate, typeset and publish both online and in a printed version. The latter we distribute to Bungay library and local shops and services. This works well for people who do not have internet access and adds a physical dimension to SB’s presence in the town.

In early 2010 Josiah set up Sustainable Bungay's website using Wordpress and showed us how to publish posts about SB’s activities - both announcements and write-ups of our events. It's a shared thing. We each have a password and we write when there’s news to report, whether it’s about Give and Take Day, Happy Mondays, Bungay Community Bees, Film Nights, the Library Courtyard Garden or the Give and Grow and Abundance events. The great thing about it is you can see the thumbnails for the recent posts on the home page so all the projects and events are displayed.

For intergroup communication we have a googlegroup and speak to each other on the phone when the emails just get too much. Never underestimate the power of giving good phone!

I realise there is so much more to say about how we communicate transition: by word of mouth, by tweeting, by meeting, by Green Drinks, at community events (our own and others)... Here's a picture of Lesley and Kris arranging the new SB display boards at the All Under One Roof event this July.

Down in the engine room it's sometimes hard to see where all this is going. Is anybody out there reading me? Is the message getting through? I can't tell. But I think it's key in transition that we're as consistent as the mainstream. That we keep the rhythm going. That we keep writing, reporting and photographing. Every quarter, every month, every day.

Pics: Preparing the Transition Norwich monthly bulletin down at the community centre; Transition Norwich Bloggers on the Bench August 2011; Transition Norwich 2nd birthday poster October 2010 by Andy Croft; Notebook from The Sea Kale Project by Charlotte Du Cann; Josiah holds his daughter Iris AND shows me how to upload posts on SB's website; Lesley and Kris arrange the new SB display boards, July 2011

So I'm a Transitioner, am I?

Thanks to Mark, who's allowed me one of his blog spots this week. I realised that since joining the bloggers in April, I have only really been posting during theme weeks, and consequently have been limited in what I could write about, so in this post, I hope to convey a bit more of a personal take on what transition means for me - a bit of heart & soul, if you like!

I'm 26, and a recent masters graduate. Like many recent graduates, I haven't got a full-time job, and the prospects of getting one, at least within my field of study (Architectural Engineering) remain dim, as even rapidly expanding companies seem to demand at least five years of relevant work experience. I'd be slightly more bothered about this fact, however, if a 9-5 graduate position in a consultant engineering firm was really going to fulfil my desires and ambitions for life. Whilst it would be great to have a regular income and the opportunity to develop my skills, I can't bring myself to pine about my lack of formal employment, not whilst the reward for such effort would be the opportunity to join the consumer society, ravishing the Earth with each new gadget, branded item of clothing or trip abroad that I liked the look of.

Being underemployed has given me the great opportunity, which I have embraced wholeheartedly, to think about the effect that I have on the environment, on society, and on our economy. When you have to consider what each pound that comes into your care is going to be spent on, lest you fall short at the end of the month, you get to appreciate its effect.

From August 2010, when I bought my car, to August 2011, when I sold it, I kept a record of all the journeys I had made, how much it was costing me, and what the journeys were for. This exercise alone taught me a lot, and gave me a new perspective on transportation, and on accommodation. Since I was living 16 miles out of Norwich, in a village with no public transport links whatsoever, the car was a necessity, but after thinking about it, was living 16 miles from Norwich a necessity? The answer - no. So now I live in Norwich, sans car, and paying approximately the same amount each month for the privilege, not to dirty oil companies, but to a dear friend and landlady, whose value, to me, is far greater than any international corporate conglomerate could ever be.

This move alone, though, does little to satisfy my thirst for peace of mind in terms of my impact on the world. I don't just want to have a not-negative effect on the world (and no doubt I'm still nowhere near that, at least ecologically), I want to have a truly positive one! I want to see more than our society just coping with the challenges imposed by the economic system and ecological limits of this world: I want to see a transformation! I want to be part of that transformation, and I want our society to thrive! This cannot be done just by ditching the car and using a bike. It's a much wider scope - a scope which Transition is the only movement/organisation that has the courage to look at in its entirety, and why I am proud to associate myself with it.

It was so inspiring, for me, to attend the discussion meeting after Nicole Foss's talk on the financial crisis, where the challenges of our modern world were being faced from so many different angles. Our civil liberties being undermined in the name of international security, producerism being the driving force behind consumerism, government cuts skirting round the only sector which deems them necessary. And at the core of it all, being our own media with our own vision (rather than that given to us by "The Media") as the only solution which can carry us through the challenges ahead.

So, when I cut up my Natwest credit card, and transfer any remaining funds which I still hold with them away, I'm not just taking action because it's what I want to do — in fact, by doing so, I lose out on £1000 worth of interest-free overdraft amongst other graduate "benefits" — I'm also making a statement to anyone who cares to listen - that investment in tar sands, arms trade and other destructive projects is wrong; that massive bailouts should not be coupled with increasing executive pay; that I want any savings I hold to be available as loans to small local businesses, rather than only to national or international chains with no interest beyond this quarter's profits; that I stand in solidarity with the millions of people who agree that the 99% of the people of this world pay the price for the extravagance of the 1%, and are protesting all over the world (including in Norwich) to bring about the changes required to correct this.

But in the end, I'm not the type of person who will just stand here shouting about what I want until someone else comes along and sorts it out for me. I'm a doer, and may every action I take transition to a world that is better - ecologically, socially and economically.

Images: my graduation; cycling in Norwich; Natwest credit card - cancelled.

Banking for Children

G said: “Daddy, I don’t want to go to school; I hate school.”

“Why, G?” I replied.  “You always have a lovely time at school.  I wish I was at your school.”

“But it’s so long.  I want to be at home.  With you.”

“But I wouldn’t be at home with you.  I’m have to go to work”

“Why, Daddy?”

“Well, because we have a mortgage to pay.”

“What is a mortgage?”

“Well, a mortgage is how we pay for our house.  A house costs a huge amount of money to buy, and so a bank lends us the money and then we have to pay it back, and also give the bank money in return for lending us the mortgage.  Eventually, you pay back about twice as much as you borrow.”

“What!!  That’s really greedy!  Greedy banks!  I hate banks!”

Now that was an interesting conversation.  Are the banks greedy?  Well, in terms of lending me money to buy a house, I’m not sure.  What would I do otherwise, where could I get the money together to buy a house if not through a mortgage.  I’m not independently wealthy, so have to go to work, which means I have to live somewhere, and I have to pay the gas, electricity, council tax etc etc, as well as the mortgage.  I don’t live in a huge palace, yet the mortgage takes up a considerable chunk of my income.  Although I enjoy my work, and am lucky enough to work for a good company that looks after me and is flexible in balancing my work and home needs, at the end of the day, at the end of the day, I only work because I have to.  I have a responsibility to my family to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

So I've willingly put myself into this Faustian bargain because I want to own my home, yet I'm limited in my lifestyle by the enormous cost of housing, and the fact that wherever I look, the banks want a huge amount in return for lending me a mortgage.

It's a difficult thing to explain to the under-fives, how the economy works, and how our lives are shaped around that economy.  Imagine then, the trouble I'm going to have explaining the intricacies of the global debt system, and all the things that caused the recession.  But these are things they're going to have to understand if they're going to avoid the mistakes our generation have made.