Tag: government policy

Back in the kitchen honouring the rituals

Madame was once teased by her brother in law when she was in her pre-teens that her innards would turn yellow if she ate piccalilli. – the pickle which represents one of the dishes that came back with the soldiers and civil servants of colonial India (cf curry etc) and became a fully naturalised dish. It’s not to everyone’s taste of course, and it can be a bit fierce depending on how much mustard you include, but the combination of leftover veg from the season; diced cauliflower, little onions, beans, green tomatoes, carrots and courgettes bathed in a golden yellow sauce of cornflower, turmeric, mustard, sugar, honey and vinegar is a terrific way of using up the waifs and strays from the garden or the allotment.

The problem, every year, is that we haven’t quite finished last year’s. In fact we still cook as if the Potwell Inn has just been featured in the Guardian. We have a lot of stored food; probably more than the two of us will ever be able to finish up. The concomitant problem is that every year entails a frantic hunt for empty preserving jars and lids. The lids are important because the industrial acidity of pickles and chutneys can eat into them – so generally we use Kilner jars and renew the rubber rings, or the Italian Bormioli jars which have coated rust proof lids. Over the years we’ve amassed quite a collection of different sizes and every year we top up supplies of lids.

In the cupboard stores today we found masses of tomato sauces; passata; damson: plum; blackcurrant and redcurrant jams; bramble jelly; dower house chutney; green tomato chutney, and various experimental preserves involving figs; peppers; beetroot and anything else that manage to cling to a tree until the autumn. I think we might be channelling the grandparents and my mum, who, as the alzheimer’s took hold would go shopping and just come back with half a dozen tins of spaghetti hoops which had lodged in her failing memory. She was a fine cook in her day.

Live as if you might die tomorrow and farm as if you’ll live forever

Farming proverb.

Preserving is one of the great pleasures of autumn and early winter. Today Madame and I sat either side of the kitchen table chopping vegetables in companionable harmony. The deep winter feels less of a threat when the cupboards are full and the sheer pleasure of it led to a conversation about the allotment and whether we should keep it on after such a difficult season. The decision was reached in ten seconds (Yes!) and was followed by a discussion of the seed order and the decision to get a garden shredder to lessen the load of composting the waste. I think we’ve permanently turned our backs on bonfires to reduce our carbon footprint and so we’re going to spread the shredded waste as a mulch over as many beds as we can.

Retrospectively the season was desperately hard work, but come the end we grew a lot of food; picking the last crop of green tomatoes yesterday. I guess as we get older and creakier we can at least replace some of the manual labour with battery powered tools and raised beds. There’s one job that will have to wait for a day or two – Christmas cake and puddings.

Back home from Cornwall I was able to sort out the computer problem with the (eventual) help of a WordPress Happiness Engineer who just emailed and said “do this – 1,2,3”. Music to a non technical ear. We seemed to jump from summer to winter in the course of 175 miles although the heavy rain has cleared during the afternoon and the sun is shining. We’re due the first named storm of the season on Friday just in time to celebrate the Government’s batshit crazy decision to drill for gas which will do everything to damage the environment and nothing whatever to make life easier for us. The economy, is not the same as a mountain or a river it’s not an object it’s a concept; and whilst you can’t change the height of a mountain or the course of a river with clever arguments, you most certainly can change a concept by thinking clearly, formulating your aims and evaluating the best way of achieving them. If the earth is on fire, alternately with being underwater, we can decide what sort of world we would prefer to live in, formulate the best way of organising the economy to achieve it, and get on with it.

Crown Prince squashes and a couple of pumpkins – one for the grandchildren

Dancing around the mulberry bush

Salisbury market stall – a few years ago.

I don’t seem to take many happy families photos or snapshots of the pier at Weston Super Mare – in fact I think I’m a bit of an old stick in the mud or, perhaps, all those church teachings about it being sinful to enjoy anything threw some switches in my DNA and I just can’t help myself. Of the thousands of photos on my computer the vast majority concern plants, flowers and locations. They’re all catalogued and recorded and tidy – although anyone who’s seen my workspace will insist that’s a barefaced lie but it’s not – it’s industrial strength masking!

Anyway, personal reflections aside, there’s another photographic category that’s extremely important to me because of the way I work. Almost every piece I write begins with a photograph. I can’t do the ‘eyes meeting across a crowded room, stuff; I’m an intensely visual kind of person. I can remember in complete detail the appearance of a woman in a summer dress that was no match for the cold wind across the churchyard as we buried her dad. I remember the goose pimples on her exposed arms and how they seemed to express her lostness at that moment. I can’t imagine making written notes about the things I see – I just take photos, thousands of them. and they are my aides memoir. Over many years the technology has come to my rescue and now I can make notes with a very small Olympus camera and also with my phone. I remember standing on the bank of the Gloucester Sharpness canal one day alongside the collection of scuttled barges there and thinking how wonderful it would be to be able to unite pictures and words in a computerised internet form with powerful search capacities so readers could create their own path through the pieces. When I first had the idea it would have required technical expertise I just didn’t possess and technology that didn’t yet exist, but nowadays it’s easier. I take my photos, recall the moment and write the story of it. The photo is the starting point for the story that sits at the centre of a human mind at a particular place and time.

So when I sat down to write today we’d just finished packing away the emergency stores we’d bought at the behest of the (UK) government in case of shortages. It’s a sensible enough policy for a very temporary fix but whilst we filled the boxes with tinned food and pasta I wondered where were the signs of government policy concerning the risk of disruption through climate collapse, oil wars, organised crime and hostile governments . You’d have to be quite old to remember the government “Protect and Survive” campaign during the Cold War which urged us to whitewash the windows and sit under the kitchen table eating tins of corned beef as the nuclear bombs fell. A perfect example of the reliance of politicians on our gullibility to get them off the hook.

But we didn’t just pack the stores today; we also discussed seed orders and what we’ll try to grow next season in the light of inevitable shortages in the supermarkets. We discussed water storage again to help during the droughts which are now inevitable. We investigated getting a fitted mesh cover to the polytunnel to reduce sunlight by 47% and keep the temperature down. We talked about our diet and how we could be more self sufficient . We ordered bread flour in bulk and we sorted through our own stored food – this year’s tomato crop was severely affected so do we have enough of last year’s tomato passata and sauces to see us through until next summer? We need to revise the plan for the allotment and attempt to develop more shade through some judiciously planted taller trees, and we need to keep pressing the Council to improve security on the site because the amount of thieving has greatly increased. Food disappears from our plots, and even disappears from the charity veg boxes that we support, whilst the Government maintains a Trappist silence on the global climate issues and the chickens come home to roost.

Inevitably then, I searched the Photos library for inspiration and it brought to mind all those choppings and simmerings, crankings of the passata machine and other evidence of our semi peasant life at the Potwell Inn. I also remember how the head of ceramics at Farnham College got into terrible trouble for asking a female student if she was strong enough to lift a bag of clay during an interview. It was certainly tactless, but not on the scale of the question Madame was asked when we were interviewed together at Falmouth. “What if you get pregnant?” We need to expect governments to find ways of tackling the hard questions, formulating the right policies and acting urgently on them. We need the courage to evaluate whether they actually work rather than looking good on the headlines; but what all of us seem to do is dance around the mulberry bush, stick our fingers in our ears and sing “la la la” while the politicians throw elderly peaceful protesters into prison for daring to question their cowardice. The point of the metaphorical photo at the top of this piece is – as the proverb suggests – that you can only make pigs’ ears out of pigs’ ears!