Karma day
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008Last Saturday, on a day which I have taken to calling ‘Karma day,’ two very wonderful things happened. The first was that I got an allotment. For those of you who don’t live in Brighton, this is astonishing. It was common lore amongst the soily and oily folks that I hang out with that the waiting lists had been closed down completely, only to be opened to community groups and possibly Gandi. It’s well known down here that the only way to get an allotment is to befriend someone with their own plot and then hope very hard that they die.
Receipt of this letter then sent me into a tailspin of indecision. There was a plot that I wanted very much… cast your mind back to raspberry season and the overgrown allotment with rampant fruit canes and greenhouses overflowing with vines… however, as far as I knew, this was still in the hands of a friend’s friend’s friend. Perhaps I could contact him and get him to hand it over to me, as he wasn’t doing anything with it? I tried to get in touch for a week with little success (you try getting in touch with someone three degrees of separation away from you), so on Saturday I trailed glumly up to the allotment site at 9am, ready to take whatever bramble-ridden offering I was given. The gate was closed until 11am so, fuming, I trudged back home again chanting, “you’re angry because you’re hung over, you’re angry because you’re hung over” (damn you 9% Kentish cider). Back I went at 11am and talked to some lovely old geezers in the allotment shop (open 11am-1pm Saturdays and Sundays). “I’m one of the people you sent a letter to,” I announced.
“We like promptness,” said one of the guys (it was 11am exactly)
“I came up at nine,” I said, “but you were closed.” Since school, I have never been able to rid myself of the habit of ingratiating myself with people in authority.
They showed me a map of all the plots that were free and I could hardly contain my excitement as they circled what looked to be the aforementioned allotment of my dreams. I walked down to the plot, and with help from another guy working on a neighbouring allotment, we worked out that the grapes and raspberries and acres and acres of bindweed could indeed be mine. I skipped back to the shop and told them which one I wanted. The guy smirked and said, “I thought you might want that one, well done for being here first.” As I was leaving (actually peeking in my new sheds and greenhouses), some other allotment hopefuls came wandering around with a map. I did my best supportive voice as I helped them to work out which plot was which. I’ve annotated our conversation with my real feelings…
“You’re looking for plot 39-1, are you [you tardy suckers. If you’d gotten out of bed earlier all these greenhouses and fruit trees and shonky wooden structures could have been yours]. I think it’s that one over there. This one here [with all the COOL SHIT on it] I just got [because I was here earlier than you]. You don’t know whether to get a half plot or a whole plot? I’d go for a half plot, it’s hard work [but clearly I can cope with it because I’m a superb gardener and also because I have a cunning plan to give part of it to my work colleague]. Good luck with your endeavours [you poor, poor, late fools].
My plans for my patch include planting unusual fruit trees such as medlars, and using the shed to store homebrew and some of my ever-increasing collection of bikes (I should start another blog about my many bikes). I also intend to keep bees, something that I’m not sure my vegan friends will be too happy about, but I’ll do it in the most compassionate way possible – not replacing the honey with sugar and only taking part of it etc. I’ll probably also read them bedtime stories and provide them with a little disinfecting footbath that they have to walk through to get in (I jest not, someone told me that this has been set up at some hives to protect against either varroa mite or colony collapse disorder). I need to do a whole load more research into the various ways that bees can get sick and die but I’m very excited about becoming an urban beekeeper. I somehow knew that I would be a beekeeper this year.
Marvellous occurrence number two was the appearance of oats in my diet. I got an email from Sarah Dixon of Pickle My Fancy blog. Sarah and her partner did a hundred mile diet for three months in 2007 in Richmond (not too far away from here) and turned me on to a number of different foods that I didn’t yet have in my repertoire. The most amazing of these was Pertwood Farm Organic Porridge Oats. Oh dear god, if you have had to live an oat-free life for three months, making pancakes for breakfast from a mixture that sometimes explodes (I had bad luck with fermenting pancake batter and hot water - more on this later*), you too would be on your knees with gratitude at the slow release energy dispatched by this hard-to-find cereal. A quick call to my insider friend at Infinity Foods and a pack of six boxes of oats were on order for me. I picked them up on Saturday and hugged them all the way home. When I got home I had a bowl of oats with honey , and raw milk and savoured their chewy golden flavour. I realised as I was eating that I had a person connection to all of the food. The honey was produced by the man on the allotment behind me (well, strictly it was produced by the bees on the allotment behind me, unless Shaun is a really special kinda guy…), the milk was from cows I saw once a week when I went to Middle Farm, and the oats were from Pertwood where a friend of mine goes to do maintenance at the kids’ camp.
It felt so wholesome to be eating this interconnected food that that’s all I did for a week. Oats, milk and honey for breakfast and dinner (I skipped lunch). Give me a break, eh - I got busy, my friend was in hospital and people were visiting from Australia and err.. Blackburn. I started worrying on Wednesday that I was feeling dizzy while lying in bed (quite an experience, let me tell you). That would be because I hadn’t had any protein for a number of days. Ooops. I’ve always been an over-eater so experiencing a lack of essential nutrients has been a new experience for me. When I don’t eat properly these days, I don’t make up the deficit in biscuits, as I used to. I just don’t eat! I’ve all but stopped snacking, as to snack, you have to make the snack from scratch which kind of removes the pleasure you might get in, say, inhaling a Kitkat. After the strange week of being dizzy, I’ve decided to mend my ways and make doubly sure that all the major food groups, vitamins and nutrients make an appearance in my diet (with the possible exception of vitamin B12, but I haven’t got a tingly tongue so I don’t think that any harm has been done yet).
Last week apart, I’ve never felt healthier than I do at the moment. I’ve lost nearly two stone since I started and really feel all glowy and positive. I’ve started calculating how much energy I am going to need to do a particular activity and adjusting my diet as required. It’s all very different to how I was say, a couple of years ago when I was doing my PGCE. I would come in exhausted, take five minutes to cook some stuffed pasta and then crash out still exhausted on the sofa before dragging myself upstairs to plan lessons. One other thing that I have noticed is that you don’t realise how much food you require for a day until you have to take the whole lot with you. I recently went on an overnight bike adventure and at least a third of my panniers were filled with food. I’ve discovered that boiled eggs are brilliant cycle adventure food – they’re not going to get squashed and go slimy, they’re full of protein and they’re quite small. Unfortunately, there’s a limit to the amount of boiled eggs you want to eat.
rules the other day. It’s not as bad as you might think from this sheepish confession. I drank Harvey’s Best Bitter (many pints of) in the pub. This might not seem such a terrible thing – Harvey’s is in Lewes (the next town along), they use 100 mile ingredients… but they also use yeast and probably other things (sulphites?) in their brew. I have to admit that this is the lunatic edge of the project that has always made me crazy. There are lots of nice local wines and ciders and beers, but brewing requires all sorts of non-local ‘catalyst’ additives like the ever present yeast and sulphites.
James and Alisa – from 100milediet.org – have always included such foods as allowed, but I wanted to be 100% down the line. I would eat nothing that wasn’t totally local. This hasn’t really been a problem until it came to booze. Booze almost always has such things added. The only stuff with nothing added was very few types of cider and perry. I’m REALLY bloody bored of those few types of cider and perry! Also, sitting in the pub drinking pints of water one after the other was starting to affect my social life (though it was probably doing some good to my liver and kidneys). I wanted to do this project to bring me closer to people, not to distance myself from them. Thus, from now on (or at least from the first, illicit, pint of Harvey’s on) I’m now allowing yeast and sulphites. This will make a great difference to my ability to get rolling drunk and it’ll mean that I can drink wine in France when I go there next week. I justify my actions by saying that it’s ridiculous to have such amazing local products and to not be able to enjoy them.
* At a recent stay at my friend Oliver’s, I took some pancake batter in a jar to have for breakfast. Unfortunately it was quite hot and I didn’t refridgerate it, so it may have fermented slightly. I couldn’t get the top of the jar off (because it was filled with gas) and Ollie suggested pouring hot water on it to remove the lid. I duly did this and the whole damn thing exploded. The glass didn’t break, but pancake mixture went everywhere - up the walls, on my face, in my hair, in the sink, in the kettle. Ollie just stood there with a gleeful look on his face saying, “your food is always so exciting!”. I wish I was better at physics (and possibly chemistry).