Eating for Tomorrow

I've been thinking about the future recently. More specifically, getting old, and what I can do to make my old age as healthy and happy as possible. Both my parents suffer from age-related ill-health, and I see at first hand how awful it can be. So I've been doing a fair bit of reading. Most of what I've read just confirms and reinforces what I know already. Eat good stuff, exercise, make sure you're not overweight, control blood pressure, keep active mentally, and you will reduce your chances of many of the horrors of old age such as dementia, stroke, and so on. 

Well I need to do something about it. I've put on weight in the last year, which has been a very stressful one, and am definitely feeling less healthy for it. I also have high blood pressure and have had for years, so I need to make sure it doesn't get any worse. So it's time to make a change for good. I want to be fit and alert in my old age and I owe it to myself, and even more so to my family, to do as much as I can to ensure that this is the case. 

First step has been moving towards a semi vegetarian diet. Eating loads of fruit and veg is shown to increase health and reduce the risks of so many age-related problems. We've always had a lot of meat free meals, in fact twenty odd years ago we were fully vegetarian. With the advent of more easily obtainable ethically and organically farmed meat we moved back to omnivorous eating but meat, although we do enjoy it, has not been an essential part of our everyday eating. Now I've made a decision to formalise how much meat we eat, and we have become weekday vegetarians. Well, I have. The boys have autonomy over their own lunches, as they eat at school and work. But Monday to Friday our evening meals are veggie. 

I've also done something I've been meaning to do for a while, and that's to join an organic veg box scheme. My purchasing of vegetables has been erratically green/organic/sustainable over the years, but I felt that it was time to make a commitment. So I went on the Riverford website and am now the proud recipient of a weekly box of fresh, organic, and seasonal fruit and veg. You know in advance what you're getting and can change your order up to a couple of days before delivery, so there's plenty if chance to plan meals around the week's delivery. And if I'm more organised with my planning, I shall save money, as fewer vegetables will end up on the compost heap because I haven't got round to using them. 

There are many reasons for buying organic. But the one that I'm focussing on here is the health issue. Strawberries, blueberries, spinach, apples, grapes, potatoes, apples, peppers, celery - all these are among the foods most contaminated by pesticides. And these are some of the fruit and veg that a) I use most often and b) are great at promoting health. It makes sense to buy them from an organic source. If I'm piling my muesli high with fruit in order to make myself more healthy, I don't want to be poisoning myself with chemicals at the same time. 

So, this is step one. Not a particularly painful transition, I have to say. Step two is a bit more tricky. I do like a glass of wine. And over this stressful last year we have found ourselves relaxing over a bottle of Cote de Rhone rather more frequently than we should. But alcohol is not only full of empty calories, it also has been shown to increase the chances of dementia, so this is another thing that we need to tackle. Unfortunately just going for organic wine doesn't really work for this problem!

The Love of Saffron Cake

This week I discovered Slow Food. Founded in Italy in 1989, the Slow Food Movement  is 

...a global, grassroots movement with thousands of members around the world that links the pleasure of food with a commitment to community and the environment.

In the fast modern junk food environment, Slow Food is the voice of calm reason and quality. We work to promote the greater enjoyment of food through a better understanding of its taste, quality and production.

Slow Food UK runs educational projects and has a local group network which promotes the Slow Food way of life at a local level. One of its campaigns is the Forgotten Foods Project, which 'travels the country collecting small-scale quality produce threatened by industrial agriculture, environmental degradation and homogenization.' As they point out, 'Those artisan producers who opt to swim against the tide of ‘fast life’ need [...] help in explaining to the public why their products are special and, usually, cost more to make than mass-produced counterparts.' Sounds like a great idea to me. And I was delighted to discover that one of their targeted foods is the Cornish Saffron Cake.

Now, the Saffron Cake is part of my childhood. Not only was I born and brought up in Cornwall, but my grandparents and parents, along with my uncle, ran a family bakery. Saffron cake is in my blood. Apparently, when I was about three I was asked what I would like for my birthday tea, and my reply was 'Bread and butter and sashron cake.' And it still has a place at my special-occasion tea table, nearly fifty years later.

There are various recipes for Saffron Cake. As far as I'm concerned there are four basic characteristics that it must have to be entitled to the name. It must be loaf shaped. The dough must be yeast-based. It must have plenty of currants and my personal taste is to have a good helping of sultanas and/or raisins as well. As my mother-in-law says, it's no good if it's a 'station cake' - one currant here and then you have to go miles to get to the next one! And it must be that deep fragrant yellow that you can only get by using plenty of saffron. I'm afraid that the Saffron Cake on the Slow Food website is far too pale for me: you would never have seen one as wishy-washy as that at Trethewey Bros Bakers!

The Saffron Crocus
Picture Credit

It's interesting that such an exotic and expensive spice came to be so much part of the culture of a small rural society in one of the farthest corners of the UK. From Medieval times, though, saffron was grown in Cornwall, and production was still going on in Bude in the C19th. Saffron is the dried stigma of the Crocus Sativus, and it takes about 150 flowers, all harvested by hand, to produce just 1g of the spice. No wonder saffron is incredibly expensive - in fact, there is a commonly held myth that ounce for ounce it is more expensive than gold. This isn't quite true, however, as current gold prices are around £30,000 per kilo, whereas saffron is only £4,500! Still - pretty expensive. My mother remembers my grandfather keeping the saffron in a shiny metal box in the bakery safe, because it was the most precious thing on the premises.

Of course all this reminiscence about Saffron Cake meant I had to make one. So here's the recipe for the cake I made this weekend.

Saffron Cake

1 tsp dried saffron (real saffron threads, not 'saffron powder' - and don't skimp!)
125ml milk
500g plain flour
pinch of Cornish salt
1/2 tsp dried easy action yeast (real yeast would be more authentic, but harder to get)
250g chilled butter
250g caster sugar
130g currants
120g sultanas (or raisins. Or you can use all currants)

Heat the milk in a small saucepan until it is just boiling. Drop the saffron in, give it a stir, cover, and leave steeping for as long as you can, overnight if possible. Obviously of you're leaving it overnight, put it in the fridge! I left mine for about four hours and that was fine - it was lovely and fragrantly golden by that time. Alternatively you can do it my mother-in-law's way, and steep it in a small amount of boiling water, then make it up to the required volume of liquid by adding milk the next day. She also recommends a pinch of salt in the water to intensify the colour.

Cut up the butter into small cubes.

Sieve the flour and salt, and mix in the yeast. Add the butter, and either rub in, or food-process until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.

Stir in the dried fruit.

Warm the saffron-infused milk again, to about hand-temperature, and pour it over the mixture. Stir it in, then use your hands to bring it all together into a soft dough.

Turn out the dough onto a floured surface and knead gently till it is smooth. Don't be too rough - it's not like bread.

Place the dough into a buttered 1kilo (2lb) loaf tin (or two 1lb tins which is what I did), and leave in a warm place to prove. It won't rise much - it's not like bread, it will have a denser texture - but it should rise a bit. 30 to 45 minutes should do it.

Cook in a pre-heated oven (180C/350F/Gas Mark 4) for 45 mins to an hour. It should be golden verging on brown and have risen more. I took mine out a bit early, and it was slightly too doughy in the middle, so I would recommend you check carefully. I didn't do the skewer test, so it's my own fault!

Place on a cooling tray in its tin, and when it's cool enough to handle, slip out of the tin to finish cooling.

You can serve it spread with butter, but to be honest, this recipe is so buttery it doesn't need anything other than a cup of tea on the side. And even though it could have done with five more minutes in the oven, it was lovely!

Sorry - forgot to take the picture of the whole thing!

Happy tea-time! And if you're interested, there's a Saffron Cake post on my poetry blog too, complete with poem.

The Power of Naming - Our Relationship with Nature

I'm not bad with the names of wild flowers: I know my campions, stitchworts, foxgloves, ragwort, periwinkles and many more. And knowing the names of things seems to make them closer to me, to create a personal link. It's no coincidence that so much of myth and story-telling is concerned with the naming of things. Adam gave the animals their names. The power of naming is deeply embedded in Greek mythology and the lore of witchcraft. In Ursula le Guin's Earthsea books, knowing the 'true' names of things gives the one who knows power over those things, and it is very important to know one's own true name. In the television series Doctor Who, the true name of The Doctor is his most important secret. The real-life mathematician Alexander Grothendieck put special emphasis on the way that naming things can give us a way of gaining cognitive power over things (and he was talking about mathematical concepts) way before we understand them.

Knowing the names of things can create a powerful relationship. If you know the name of something you are linked to it in a more specific way. You somehow own it. And 'owning' it in this conceptual sense need not be a bad thing. If you own something, aren't you more likely to look after it?

Anyway, back to my knowledge of wild flowers. We were out walking in the country lanes, and came across a plant I'd never known the name of. It's very common around here, and I'd always assumed it was some kind of innocuous nettle, as there is some similarity in the leaves. In the spirit of unleashing the scientist in me, I thought I'd better find out what it is. So I have.

Garlic Mustard
Alliaria petiolata

It's called Garlic Mustard, and is nothing to do with nettles! Actually it's a member of the mustard family, but its garlic-like properties are noted in its Latin name, alliaria meaning 'resembling allium'. You can even use the leaves in salads to provide a combined mustard and garlic flavour.

Just a few yards down the lane, we came across something I had always (coincidentally, considering the name of the plant above) thought of as wild garlic. However, talking about it to my family walking companions, I realised that there were two different plants I had classified in my mind under the same name. Which one was actually wild garlic? Or were they both?

Three-cornered Leek
Allium triquetrum

And so, back to the trusty wildflower guide I went. It turns out that although this is sometimes referred to as wild garlic, it is more usually called Three-cornered Leek. It is closely related to the other plant I had in mind, though, which also goes by the lovely name of Ramsoms. Like Ramsoms, the three-cornered leek is completely edible, and tastes (and smells) a bit like spring onions. So I wasn't wrong, calling it wild garlic, but I wasn't quite right either.


By now I was looking very closely at the plants in the hedges and banks we were passing, trying to name as many plants as I could. This small blue-flowered plant is a very familiar one, and I tried several names on it, but none of them seemed quite right. It wasn't a type of violet, or a bugle, or a speedwell, or any of those small blue flowers. So what was it?

Ground Ivy
Glechoma hederacea

It turns out that its name is one I know well, but have always misapplied. This is Ground Ivy. Not an ivy at all, but a member of the mint family, the Lamiaceae. It is also known by the wonderful names of Gill-over-the-ground and Creeping Charlie. Like the two plants above, it is edible as a herb or a salad ingredient, but it was also used in beer-making before hops were substituted,  and is still used in herbal medicines as a remedy for colds and diarrhoea. Apparently, it can even be used in cheese-making as a substitute for rennet!


So, three new names for me. In fact, many more names, with all the variations. And isn't it interesting how these plants all have the names of other plants in their own? Names which describe relationships that are beyond the biological. And now I know their names properly, when I meet them again I can greet them as friends, rather than nameless faces in a crowd.

In his 2012 TEDxExeter talk, the writer and environmental campaigner Tony Juniper suggested that it would be a very valuable thing for the environment to introduce a Natural History GCSE. I think this is a fabulous idea. And it should be a compulsory subject, even if taking the exam wasn't obligatory. When I was at school in the 70s, there was a subject called Environmental Studies. I have no idea what it involved because only the people who couldn't manage the 'academic' subjects got to do it. I feel that says a lot about where the disconnect between the environment and the average person might have arisen. Knowledge creates relationships. Knowing the names of the plants in the hedgerow or the fish in the sea, knowing their lifecycles and their place in the Earth's ecosystems makes us more connected with them. And if we could create that relationship between people and nature from an early age, we would stand more chance of bringing up committed stewards of the Earth and its resources.

Easy to Find: Three Good Things (Day 5)

It's so easy to find three good things in nature at this time of year. Plants are just bursting out everywhere. Birds are filling the sky with their songs. The days are getting longer and warmer. This challenge would be harder, but perhaps more creative, in the short wet days of winter. January would be a good time to do it: it's always so grim, with Christmas over and Spring so far away, the weather still getting colder and wetter, and that feeling that the fresh start you're supposed to have made is just going to be such drudgery and tedium.

But in May, it's easy. I don't even have to walk out of my front door to find three things. Whilst still lying in bed, I can hear the birds warbling and trilling as the grey light of dawn filters through the curtains. I go downstairs and open the sitting room curtains, and I can see a blackbird nesting in the climber outside. Where ivy has started creeping over the window I can see the rough brown protrusions it uses to adhere to the glass.


I haven't got any photos of these, though, so as an bonus, here is a picture of some ferns trying to be seahorses...





Three Good Things (Day 4)



Cow Parsley or Queen Anne's Lace
Anthriscus sylvestris

Cow parsley. One of the plants of my childhood. Each little floret of cow parsley has one petal that is larger than the others.  It's part of the carrot family, and grows up to a metre tall. The verges and hedges are full of it around here at this time of year, bobbing and swaying in the wind.

New ferns unfurling

I always think it's magical, the way ferns uncurl into magnificent leaves: they look almost like small animals. Sometimes you will find a clump of them on the hedgerow all facing in one direction, looking a lot like a gang of expectant meerkats.

Ivy-leaved Toadflax
Cymbalaria muralis

There is masses of this growing on a wall in the lane outside our house. It propogates itself in an unusual way. Before fertilisation, the flower stalk is phototropic, and moves towards the light. After fertilisation it reverses this tendency and becomes negatively phototropic. This results in the seed being pushed into cracks or dark crevices where the conditions are right for germination and growth. Amazing!

Three Good Things (Day 3)

The song of a cuckoo - the first I've heard this year.

The colour of very new oak leaves -  a soft ochre.

The way daisies close up in the rain.

Three Good Things from Nature: Holes in the Ground

After yesterday's mini resolution to connect more with the natural environment by noticing and noting, I spent some time on Monday looking at holes in the ground.

The question I asked was: What lives here?
I don't have answers, but after a bit of research, I do have some ideas.

3 - 4cm diameter, in flat ground.
Mouse, rat? Seems quite big for a mouse. Possibly a weasel?

About 2cm wide, in a low bank.
The dead laurel leaf was partly obscuring the hole until I moved it.
A deliberate attempt at camouflage?
Mouse or vole perhaps?

Three holes, each less than 1cm diameter, in a low bank.
Probably made by ground bees.

It took me about ten minutes to find these three different animal homes. Not much time out of my day to take time to connect, to notice, to take note. And doing so gave me real pleasure.

Noticing and Noting Nature: The Experience of Being Alive

I love Twitter. I love the way it gets me reading such interesting things, blogs and articles I would never have found if I'd just been surfing the web all alone. Last week I was quite unwell with a double whammy of a throat infection and a chest infection, so the old attention span was, at the best, minimal. But Twitter is great. 140 characters - I could manage that! And browsing through my Twitterfeed I found links to two articles that made me think. Both were concerned with the way we connect with the natural world, and how this can be beneficial to our health and well-being.

The first article was by by Adam Frank, an Astrophyicist at the University of Rochester. On the 13.7: Cosmos and Culture website, Adam talks about how we lead such busy, frantic lives that we miss out on the experience of actually being alive:

In this permanent state of hyperventilation, the issue for us all is not stopping to smell roses. It's not even noticing that there are roses right there in front of us. Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of religion, hit the core of our problem when he wrote, "People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive."

Adam's answer to this problem is to make time to seek out your inner 'scientist', the scientist you were when you were a child, when you noticed stuff all the time, and asked endless questions about the way things are. When you were so close to everything that it almost seemed part of you. This is how you start experiencing being alive again:

This is where it begins, with simple act of catching seeing the smallest detail as an opening to a wider world of wonder and awe.

He suggests a walk in the woods is the best way to find that world of wonder and awe, a walk where you open you mind to what you can see. He suggests counting things (trees, petals), listening attentively, noticing patterns, colours, shapes. And it doesn't need to be a passive activity -  he suggests climbing onto a branch of a tree to get a different perspective, taking notes, making drawings.

It struck me very forcibly, though, that he wasn't just describing the inner scientist. He was also describing the inner poet. Isn't that what poets do? Notice things? Look at things differently? See the patterns and the strangenesses? Write them down? It certainly is. Adam Frank says that although not everyone can be a Scientist with a capital letter, they can be a scientist. And I say, in the same way, everyone can be a poet.

Look closely at a dead tree stump.
Why is some of it rotten and crumbling,
while the rest is still strong?

The second article that I came across, by Applied Psychologist Miles Richardson in Finding Nature, is very closely related to this idea of finding your connection to life in close attention to nature and its infinite detail. However, it goes one step further by suggesting that connecting to the natural world will make people more likely to want to live in a way that promotes environmental sustainability. To quote from the Finding Nature website:

The first finding nature research paper was published Februrary 2013 in the Humanistic Psychologist and is available online. It explores the rewards of nature that can be found in a familiar semi-rural landscape. The case-study paper informs current quantitative research which will explore practical ways to connecting to nature in the local landscape, which is more sustainable and fits better with the everyday lives of many. As an emotional connection to nature predicts pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour, the work presents a simple first step towards more sustainable human behaviour through a connectedness to the local landscape; so that, for once, our own well-being might lead to natures well-being.

Richardson, M., and Hallam, J. (2013). Exploring the Psychological Rewards of a Familiar Semi-Rural Landscape: Connecting to Local Nature through a Mindful Approach. The Humanistic Psychologist, 41(1), 35-53.

Read more: http://www.findingnature.org.uk/
Create your own website for free: http://www.webnode.com

The first finding nature research paper was published Februrary 2013 in the Humanistic Psychologist and is available online. It explores the rewards of nature that can be found in a familiar semi-rural landscape. The case-study paper informs current quantitative research which will explore practical ways to connecting to nature in the local landscape, which is more sustainable and fits better with the everyday lives of many. As an emotional connection to nature predicts pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour, the work presents a simple first step towards more sustainable human behaviour through a connectedness to the local landscape; so that, for once, our own well-being might lead to natures well-being.

Richardson, M., and Hallam, J. (2013). Exploring the Psychological Rewards of a Familiar Semi-Rural Landscape: Connecting to Local Nature through a Mindful Approach. The Humanistic Psychologist, 41(1), 35-53.

Read more: http://www.findingnature.org.uk/
Create your own website for free: http://www.webnode.com

The first finding nature research paper [...] explores the rewards of nature that can be found in a familiar semi-rural landscape. [...] As an emotional connection to nature predicts pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour, the work presents a simple first step towards more sustainable human behaviour through a connectedness to the local landscape; so that, for once, our own well-being might lead to nature's well-being.  (1)

So far, so good, you might say. That makes sense - indeed it might be considered stating the obvious. (Although research has proven that the 'stating the obvious' response is often fundamentally flawed!) However, Miles Richardson is going one step further. As part of his new research project he has released an Android app which aims to 'measurably increase people's connection to nature'. The app tests how connected people feel to nature before they begin using it, and then encourages them to note three good things in nature each day for five days. This can be written notes, or a photo, 'be it the song of a robin or the first buds of spring'. After five days it measures how much more connected the user feels, and encourages them to share their notes and experience via Twitter. And this is part of a greater research purpose. To quote again:

Developing a closer connection to nature is great for our wellbeing and our attitudes towards conservation, but users are not just helping themselves: by opting in, you can take part in a study of people’s interactions with nature run by researchers at the University of Derby, helping them to find the best ways to encourage people to connect with nature.

At present there is only an Android app, but if it takes off, an  iPhone version might be forthcoming, and the researchers are also working on a web-based version with email prompts.

I thought this was a brilliant idea, incorporating the technology that has become so embedded in our lives to help people make a connection with nature, and thus encouraging them to become more positive about caring for the environment. And it linked so nicely to Adam Frank's article about practising noticing, that I decided I'd incorporate a version of both into my life and this blog, despite the fact that I don't have an Android device.

So yesterday, the first day I really felt well enough to go out of the house, I took a little walk around the garden and the village with the purpose of noticing and noting three good things in nature. I took photos, and chose three good things to share. Here they are:

An enormous fallen willow branch,
on a pile of wood waiting to be logged.
So full of life that it is shooting after being cut.

Apple blossom.
Foreshadowing the fruit.

The amazing angles and shapes of thistle in the hedgerow.
Spiky fractals.
Eccentricity and concentricity

Of course, I'm lucky. I live in the country, and I feel pretty connected with nature already. But I don't always pay close attention. And I don't always make time to look and notice. So this mini resolution to note three good things a day will help me to experience what I have. 

And I believe that anyone can do it, whether they live in the country or the city. Nature is everywhere, from the breathy cooing of pigeons on the rooftops, to the lone dandelion forcing its way through broken concrete, to the smell of the rain on dry ground. There's even a word for that last one: petrichor. So, let's make time to go out and notice it!

(1) Richardson, M., and Hallam, J. (2013). Exploring the Psychological Rewards of a Familiar Semi-Rural Landscape: Connecting to Local Nature through a Mindful Approach. The Humanistic Psychologist, 41(1), 35-53

All photos © Sally Douglas

Missing: Two Valuable Abstract Nouns. Please Search Sheds and Heads for Any Trace.



Photo: Sally Douglas



In my poem 'Winter Children' (the full text of which is below), I wrote about children whose 'abstract nouns have been taken out like teeth'. I was thinking about how, without the ability to talk in abstractions, we are less able to think outside the now, outside the immediate experience of ourselves. In other words, we are made less human. I've been thinking a lot recently about two particular abstract nouns that seem to be missing from many people's vocabulary and actions at the moment. Those nouns are: compassion and empathy.

What has happened to these two fundamental qualities upon which a caring society must be based? I read the news each day and find myself despairing at what's going on around me. Government rhetoric, trying to justify cuts in the benefit system, is demonizing the vulnerable: the sick, the disabled, the lone parents, the mentally ill. With the help of the Daily Mail and similar papers, they are using the language of divisiveness to warp people's perception of each other, by casting people in the role of the 'other'. You're either a worker or a shirker. Never mind the fact that most people on benefits are not playing the system, in fact the larger proportion of people in receipt of benefits are actually in work. They are labelled as shirkers, as idle layabouts sleeping away the day, spongers who are 'doing' the rest of us out of our rightful wealth. The Daily Mail even ran that shameful front page suggesting - no, not suggesting, declaring - that the welfare state causes people to become controlling bullies who are liable to murder their children. 

What message is this sending to our society? To our children? That the haves are somehow more valid, more moral than the have-nots? That we should always think the worst of people? That the needy and vulnerable somehow deserve whatever's coming to them? That if life has kicked someone in the teeth, hey, let's join in the kicking?

And on the other side, we have people gloating and celebrating over the death of an old woman whose power was taken away from her over twenty years ago. Yes, the death of Margaret Thatcher is an occasion to look back and assess the impact she had on this country, on individual people in this country; to condemn or descry by all means, to object to the pomp and expense of her funeral, but to - almost literally - dance on her grave?

I don't care what she did, and how much one might disagree with her, or what damage she did to swathes of society: public gloating and rejoicing does not have a place at her death. It didn't have a place at the deaths of Osama Bin Laden or Hitler either, but at least those people were killed when they were actively doing great harm. Margaret Thatcher had been out of power for over two decades. In the end she was just an old woman with dementia whose family rarely visited.

So what message is this revelry and gloating sending to our the children? To the rest of the world? That we should hate. That we should rejoice in hatred. That we should cherish revenge. That we do not need to have any respect for our own self control when it is in relation to people with whom we disagree, or we feel have wronged us. So, where will we find ourselves next? Having a party because the woman next door who annoyed us a bit has been killed in a car crash?

There are so many ways and means available here and now in the C21st to express one's opinion. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, have all opened up an avenue for individuals to have their say. But, unfortunately, and in part fuelled by the divisive rhetoric coming from Government and the Daily Mail section of the media, whipping up hatred seems to be the mode of the day. And when it becomes acceptable to do this, any target can become fair game to somebody. Foreigners. Women. Gay people. Disabled people. People with mental health problems. Muslims. Christians. Jews. The driver who cut you up at the lights. The woman who always leaves her push chair in the hall.

Other people become dehumanised: they are not 'me', therefore they are less important than 'me'. If we don't exercise the basic human quality of empathy, other people appear less human to us, becoming just ciphers, only as real as the characters in a tv soap. If we don't feel compassion for those less fortunate, we become less than human.

There are two sayings which the government and large swathes of our society would do well to take on board:

Don't judge another person until you have walked a mile in their shoes

and

There but for the grace of God go I.

So please, if you find some stray compassion or some discarded empathy locked away in the shed, starving and shivering, or under a woodpile, or at the back of a drawer, please let it out. It's needed by a lot of people out there. They've lost theirs.

--------------------------------------------------

Winter Children

The winter children
wheel and arc
above the stuttering hinterlands of the city
their faces flattened by the air.

The winter children have faces of damp clay
mean as pinch-pots
features unformed as creeping dunes.

Their words are unfixed guttering.
Their cry like herring gulls on yawling winds,
like fingernails on glass.

What are these winter children
whose skin is damp tissue,
whose eyes are thumbprints,
whose hands are brittle with lime,
fingers red and scaled like feral pigeons’ feet;
whose abstract nouns have been taken out like teeth?

Prised from a pomegranate husk
in the inverted dark
the children of winter now razor the skies
like angels without souls:

clay doves
shedding pieces of themselves upon the rubble,
never closing splintered eyes
even when the dust falls thick as ash.

Sally Douglas

From: Candling the Eggs, Cinnamon Press, 2011.

Cows on the Road, Milk on the Table



Healthy Cow and Calf. Photo: CIWF



Milk has been worrying me a lot recently. And cheese. And yoghurt.

I was driving along the country lanes on my way to pick up my son from the bus stop in the next village (yes, we're very rural here - there is a a bus stop in our village but buses themselves are as rare as hen's teeth) when I found myself behind a herd of cows. They don't walk fast, cows, in fact they don't have any sense of urgency at all, so I had plenty of time to have a good look at them. And frankly, I was appalled.

There were cows which were covered with sores all over their rear ends. Cows with large, unpleasant and very uncomfortable-looking growths on their undersides and hindquarters. Cows whose rears were completely caked in runny excrement. Cows with udders so swollen with milk that they looked as if they might burst, but with so little flesh on their bodies that it looked as if their bones were on the outside of their skin. Cows which could barely walk: several were badly lame in one leg, some were having problems with more than one. They looked unhealthy. They appeared to be in pain. They looked horrific.

Photo: CIWF

Of course I was trailing the slower cows of the herd. Maybe the rest of them were gambolling along at the front, full of the joys of the season, sleek with health and content with their lives. But even if they were, the poor laggers weren't. And it wasn't just a couple of unhealthy cows I saw - there must have been more than a dozen I could see which had something wrong with them.

These were dairy cows. These are the cows that provide the milk that most of us drink every day. How can we live with the fact that our milk might be coming to us as a result of such animal misery?

Compassion in World Farming has highlighted the following areas of concern:

Lameness, Mastitis and Infertility

Milk is heavy and a dairy cow may be carrying several extra kilos of milk in her udders. This can force her hind legs into an unnatural position, making walking difficult, and can result in lameness. It can also make standing and lying down difficult and uncomfortable.

Mastitis is a painful udder infection that is prevalent among dairy cows. In a herd of 100 cows in the UK, there could be as many as 70 cases of mastitis every year on average. Housing cows for long periods can also increase the prevalence of mastitis.

Infertility among high yielding dairy cows is increasing. It has been linked to stress, poor body condition and the demands of high milk production on the cow’s general health.

I could see all of this in the cows I was following. The report goes on to talk about housing and diet. I don't know how these cows were housed, but I suspect that they weren't in green fields all the time, and this was causing some of the issues with lameness in the feet. And as for diet:

The diet of high yielding cows often has relatively little fibrous content and is inappropriate for their type of digestive system. This leads to acidity in the part of the stomach, known as the ‘rumen’. This can lead to acidosis and painful lameness from laminitis.

These cows looked as if their diet wasn't at all suitable for health. A healthy cow will produce healthy cowpats, not be caked in its own excrement.

What Can I Do? What Can You Do?

Buy Organic milk, cheese and other dairy products.  Organic standards require dairy cows to have access to pasture during the grazing season. They require cows to be fed a more natural diet with plenty of roughage. This promotes more sustainable milk yields.

If you can't afford to buy Organic all the time, buy it when you can. Look out for producers that have been awarded the Good Dairy Award for higher welfare in dairy farming. Or products that have the RSPCA's Freedom Food logo. Don't be taken in by the idyllic television ads. Life isn't like that for most cows.

Ask your retailer about the grazing practices of their milk supplier. Even if a supplier is not organic, it can still have the welfare of its animals at the heart of its production. Yarty Valley Dairies, for instance, supplies milk to our local shop, so I can feel confident about popping in for a pint on spec. The farm is not organic, but the welfare standards are high.

Tell your friends and family. People often buy things unthinkingly. Just raise awareness. But don't make them feel guilty. If someone is struggling to make ends meet, as many are in the present economic climate, they are not going to thank you for insisting that cows are more important than feeding their family.

And look at these happy cows, filmed by Compassion in World Farming. Healthy cows, dancing in the fields - something which those cows I saw couldn't even have attempted to do.

Happy Shopping

A year ago, along with my daughter Natasha, I went to my first TED conference: TEDxExeter. I came away full of enthusiasm and inspiration, fired up by ideas from speakers as disparate as Bandi Mbubi who talked passionately about conflict minerals in the Congo, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall who told us the story of his love for fish, and Satish Kumar whose message was about the interconnectedness of soil, soul and society. And two talks in particular - those of Nic Marks and Mike Dickson - addressed how we measure and achieve happiness. Nic Marks had cited some research carried out through the UK Government's Foresight Programme, in a study called Mental Capital and Wellbeing, which concluded that the happiness of individuals can be increased by following five simple guidelines. These are :

Connect
Be Active
Take Notice
Keep Learning
Give

One of the many things which had me thinking hard as I came away from the day was this idea of connectedness. Technology and social media allow us to be so connected in global terms, but we are not always so connected to our local community - in fact, this global interconnectedness can mask the lack of local contact. I FaceTime my sister in the Middle East, keep up with family members far and near via Facebook, and am in contact with writer friends all over the world, but I realised that I didn't have much social connection with many people in my immediate vicinity.Yet connecting in one's local area can have so many benefits, both for the individual and the community. How to start doing that more, though?

On our journey back home, Natasha and I decided that one thing we could do was to make more of an effort to shop locally rather than unthinkingly buy everything at the supermarket, even if the 'everything' at the supermarket was Fairtrade and organic, and the local produce might not always be. If through our custom we were supporting local producers it would help the local community, and that was a way of connecting with what was happening in our neighbourhood.

And, as a way of connecting more directly, I decided to volunteer to work at our local community shop. This was quite a scary decision. Whenever I went into the shop I felt like an outsider, despite the fact that we have lived in this village for over a decade. Everybody seemed to know everyone else, whereas I only knew a few people. And being quite a shy person, I found this rather intimidating - my fault, not anyone else's. However, one person I did know was one of the two shop managers, so at the Village Jubilee Street Party, I plucked up my courage and volunteered. I'd just been made redundant so I had some time on my hands, and it was a perfect opportunity to make that move towards connecting.

The Village Shop is a community-run enterprise, owned by the members, managed by committee, and staffed by volunteers. It has been running for nearly twenty years, so was way ahead of the Ambridge Community Shop in 'The Archers'! It's a great resource, stocking all the basics, plus locally produced meat, milk, bread, pies, cheese, the famous local Otter beer, local apple and speciality juices, homemade cakes, honeys and jams, handmade cards. Anyone who is a shop member can sell produce, which means that in the summer there is a great selection of veg and salad. There is a Post Office, dry-cleaning service, prescription pick-up service, and much more. And it stocks a range of Fairtrade items too! It really is the very model of a modern community shop. Of course, it relies heavily on the fact that there are people in and around the village with the time to do stints as volunteers. Until I suddenly had rather more time on my hands than I was expecting, I would have struggled to find the time to help out. However, if I had, I would have been a lot more integrated in the community!

Although, due to a series of unforeseen events I wasn't able to start working there as soon as I'd planned, I now have a regular shift on a Friday morning. I have yet to do a session without making some kind of mistake on the till, but I guess I'll  eventually get the hang of simultaneously chatting and pressing buttons. Because, you see, the chatting is also part of the job. Every week I meet new people, and the lovely Val, who is in charge on a Friday morning, makes sure I'm introduced.

I'm already feeling more connected. I feel good that I'm supporting the wider range of local businesses that supply the shop. I've met more local people. I'm giving my time. And yes, it has definitely had a positive effect on my mental well-being.

Of course I'm not doing all my shopping at The Village Shop - it hasn't quite got the range for that, and doesn't claim to. But the cakes are 'to-die-for', and I've met the woman who makes them! How's that for being a happy, connected shopper?

TEDxExeter - Ideas Worth Spreading

Ever seen a TEDTalk? If you haven't you should.  And tomorrow, I'm going to see some in the flesh at the TEDxExeter conference 'Living the Questions'. If anything can help one live a good enough life, it is exposure to brilliant and inspiring ideas.

Here's one to start you off:

Finding What's Lost

Last year I lost something. I lost poetry. I didn't read it. I didn't write it. I felt it had let me down. I hated my own book, felt that it didn't say what I had wanted it to say. It all felt false and self-indulgent. And by extension, all other poetry felt that way to me. It wasn't real to me any more. I tried writing fiction, but I couldn't stick at it - I didn't think I could justify the indulgence. My notebooks were full of shopping lists and phone numbers, notes from phonecalls and meetings with healthcare professionals and social care organisations and charities. There was no poetry there for me, no stories - at least, none I was prepared to share, even with myself, no narratives I wanted to explore, because I didn't want to explore what truths they might reveal. My mental space was so full - there was no room. And my day was too full, as well - what time I had was not there for the 'self-indulgence' of writing.

But just over a week ago, a post turned up on my Facebook Newsfeed. It was from The Poetry School, and was about NaPoWriMo. This is National Poetry Writing Month, and the challenge is to write something every day of the month of April. I really don't know why, but I decided to do it. There was nothing to lose. I hadn't written anything for so long, I would make the time. It was only for a month. And it didn't matter if I wrote rubbish.

I'm now eleven poems in, and have found how to write again. I'm even pleased with some of them!

Sometimes doing something on a whim can be a good thing.