Human Lifestyle

Up early, as had to be getting going soon after 9am for an appointment, and had an achy neck...the sign of a good gig last night!

Gathered a couple of sacks of compost, to swap for logs, and loaded up the trailer with this, the wrecking bar and fork. I headed over to the other side of town, I thought I'd memorised the route but I missed the turning and had to ask a local who had a map. I soon found Tara's house and she showed me her back garden and told me her vision for it. She trusts my knowledge when it comes to gardens (don't know why!) and I told her that in my view, her vision was do-able. We've known each other for a while but haven't seen each other socially for a couple of years.

Part of her vision is a vegetable patch, currently part of a lawn of couch grass surrounding a large block of concrete which once held a washing line. I'd offered to help break up or remove this concrete. Hence the wrecking bar. So I got busy excavating around the offending lump and dug down until I reached the base, about a foot down, and then I started to lever it up, Tara pushing down on the bar and me inserting bits of broken concrete slab which she conveniently had available. After a bit of time we had the thing out of the hole, and the hole full of bits of broken slabs and half bricks. The lump of concrete was about 2 feet by 2 feet by a foot deep, and I was unable to break it up other than to chip some bits off the edge. I gave up as my hands started to blister. We had lunch, a veg stew, baguette and nutloaf, very nice! We spent a bit of time sorting through some beech hedge offcuts, which provided me with a trailer load of fuel and a green bin of compostables for the Council compost system.

I had to get back as I had other things to do; 4 cheques to put into the building society, a York in Transition cheque to give to the Council re the Mansion House Alternative Energy event in October, and then to Alligator to pick up a lot of not very nice sacks of materials which had sat far too long, and were 'fragrant'.

Home to get them into two tumblers with lots of shredded twigs, and then a bath, as I was going out tonight and working tomorrow. Lovely to have a bath with the gas not kicking in at all, a 100% solar heated bath. Gill wasn't happy with the stuff I'm bringing home, and if I'm to do it, it needs to be regular as it gets horrible quite quickly. I guess my ankle being broken might have affected my collections a bit, but that's no excuse really.

A quick bit to eat and then cycled over to Lord Mayors Walk to St John's, where I'd booked two tickets to see Satish Kumar's lecture called 'Soil, Soul and Society'. Gill didn't feel like going, so I offered my spare ticket to Ivana.

As one would expect in a small city like York and such an inspirational speaker as Satish Kumar, I knew lots of the attendees and it was good to see some old friends, and newer ones!

Satish Kumar was born in India and in 1962 he heard about Bertrand Russel's 8 day protest walk from Aldermaston to London, his response to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the lunacy of the nuclear arms race. He decided he couldn't just let this situation happen, and thought he ought to walk to Moscow, Paris, London and then to Washington to protest about the madness which was/is the nuclear weapon situation.

On the way out of India, crossing the border to Pakistan, a friend wanted to give him money and food, but Kumar refused, as he was determined to do the whole journey without money, and just accepting whatever nourishment was offered. On the way to Moscow, he met a couple of women who worked in a tea factory, who offered him and his friend a cup of tea. Because of their support of his mission, one of them had a bright idea.... and gave him 4 boxes of tea, saying they weren't for him, but for each of the leaders who had their finger on the nuclear button. She asked him to pass on this message: 'If you are about to push the button, please just stop and have a cup of tea and think about what you are about to do.'

So, Kumar walked to Moscow, Paris and London, delivering the tea and message, and in London met Russel, who bought the travellers a ticket to New York on the Queen Mary.

Another unfinished blog post... I WILL write out my notes as this meeting was excellent, but not now.

Woken by shouting downstairs... the testosterone levels in our two boys are obviously getting higher. I went downstairs in my dressing gown and sat silently and groggily inbetween them, and my presence seemed to reduce (not stop) the aggression.

Gill took them to school and as she left, my delivery happened... a Scheppach Rotary Soil Sifter, for speedily riddling compost, which is the most labour-intensive part of the composting process which is easily mechanised. It hasn't got a big motor, it's electric but our supply comes from renewables, so on balance, I'm happy to have got this machine. I signed for it and took it to the garage to put it together... which took a couple of hours, the instructions were less than comprehensive. However, by midday I had done it and checked that it worked, although everything's far too wet at the moment to do anything with it now... perhaps in a week or two.

I did my emails at lunchtime and got a nice thank-you from the Castle Howard person for my info on compost interpretive boards. I'll have to visit the site where she got the original info ( a WRAP website apparently) and if they go on about earwigs in compost heaps, I'll have to put them right, as I've never found them in an ordinary compost bin... perhaps in a pile of dryish cardboard and sticks, but not a working compost pile!

Gill got in from Art having done a re-creation of Michaelangelo's David, minus willy... not sure why she didn't put this in! I don't think it was significant.... well the real David didn't have a significant one, so it's not missing much! I actually just found out that the exercise was to learn to draw a figure with accurate proportions, and Gill didn't get time to finish him off!
(hahahahaha!!!)

I got the boys back from school, they're exhausted at the end of the week and it was a slow cycle home for the younger one.

Just before shop-closing time I cycled down to Martin's and picked up a sack from them... and also the wholesaler had savad a pile of stuff... infact no ordinary pile of just a few sacks and boxes, but about 4 boxes and several sacks, including over 60 golden delicious apples, 20 pineapples, 5 butternut squashes, celery, leeks and lots more, none of which would be acceptable to his customers but more than acceptable to me. Got the feeling that I used to have whilst working at the Council Skip Site (then on Foss Islands Road in 1999) that I was so lucky to be able to get all this free stuff, but what a freaking wasteful world we live in, and I'm doing my best to reduce it, but it's just a drop in the ocean, as how many wholesalers are throwing away tonnes and tonnes of this kind of stuff? A kind of duality of feeling lucky and virtuous and sad and angry at the same time.

The evening was good food-wise, Gill made a salad platter with about 10 different items on it, including some home-made pickled onions I made about 3 years ago and have just surfaced after a cupboard tidy out.

The evening was good too, family-wise, as we asked the children to watch a lovely telly programme with us, about Satish Kumar's experiences of Dartmoor. Getting the kids to watch this was part of our 'Strengthening Families, Strengthening Communities' homework, which asked us to explore something 'Spiritual'. I dislike the word spiritual as I have no adequate definition and cannot easily get my rather literal head around the concept. However, the commentary by Satish was as close to spiritual as I can imagine, and the kids managed to watch all of it, although the youngest was also looking at his 'Beano' comic! We had a very good conversation afterwards about the 'homework', it was very moving and lovely.