A Blog

23.

I haven't been here for a while, I have moved over to FaceBook. Yes I know. But it is easier. my ageing PC struggles to update this website and FB is so much easier to use. So look me up over there if you are a FaceBooker.

22.

I have just discovered Ginseng!

I have tried it before in capsules and extracts and never really found it to have any effect at all. But I came across some real Korean root ginseng and it has had a massive impact on my life!

I am much more energised. I am exercising more, losing weight, I have given up smoking, I have even taken up rock climbing. I know, it sounds crazy but well, there we are!

I looked all over the internet for a supplier of Ginseng in root form and could not find one, So I had to import it myself. Inevitably this has led to a new business venture: http://shop.GinsengUK.co.uk. Go and take a look at my new shop. I am so excited about it.

Buy something and give it a go!

21

The Bubble.

I used to be a runner. At school in Lancashire I ran cross country. Pounding over hills, across rivers and streams, leaping from rock to rock, it was all about pace and balance, but there were also the smells and the sounds of the hill and its occupants. When I moved away from the hills the nearest wild country was further away and I became a cyclist so I could get there. When I moved into the city, cycling was too grimy and unpleasant and so I became a runner again. Then, here in Wales I rediscovered the hills and having ruined my knees through running on the hills I started to walk on them.

Walking and running are very different. I see more when walking, I relax more, learn more, go further and stay out for longer. Running created a kind of bubble around me, a small tight bubble that detached me from everything but the next step, the next breath, the next goal, even focusing on what I would do when I got home, what I would eat, what the next day would bring. My world contracted, my focus tight. Cycling was the same, all about targets. Now I see people further contracting their bubble by running with headphones on so that the natural sounds of the world are also excluded to them. But now for me, maybe it is age, maybe it is the activity that I choose but when I walk, my bubble expands and expands until there is no limit, no focus. I will often when out walking think briefly about something, perhaps my next target and so I set the map, take a bearing, plan the next leg of my route but then the route is long and I have time to let go once that is done and the bubble expands again. Targets are few, I carry what I need to eat, sleep, protect myself from the elements, cook and make myself comfortable should I need them. I use them just when I feel like it. I know how to find my way and find my way home. So targets becomes more whimsical, a reaction to the environment, to the weather, the the feelings in my body, to my mood, I will go to that peak, or that lake or that woodland, or just go home now. If I feel like stopping for a rest I stop and rest. It is so far away from running which to me is more like going to work. Targets, focus, pressure. What targets does a wild horse have, what focus does a river have?

In this expanded bubble are the sensations in my muscles, the grass, rock or water where I stand, the pressure on my feet, the resistance of my boots, the temperature in different parts of my body, my heartbeat and breath as usual but there is also the weather, the breeze and its force and direction, the sun or cloud and its meaning in terms of how the rest of the day will turn out, the animals, the insects and birds, the hills around me as far as the eye can see. There is also colour, some of which has meaning some of which is just enjoyable like the bluebells in the woodland. The dark cloud may mean rain, or the fluffy cumulus cloud which may hover above a peak. The deep dark green of a valley may mean vegetation growing by boggy ground to be avoided, or it may mean cooling waterfalls and rocks, the dark green of a hillside may be woodland giving shelter, coolness on a hot day and perhaps something to nibble on.

My horizon becomes blue with distance, my world expands and in this expansion I become happy, small, insignificant and connected. The rock and I are the same, the river and I are the same, the beetle and I are the same, the horse and I are the same, the hawk and I are the same. All unimportant travellers, yet all vital to the whole.

20

Travelling wouldn't be an adventure without the difficult bits, from the new and unfamiliar right through to the painful and life threatening. It is all travelling, just travelling, even when sitting there at home.

19

Walking

The big walk is begun!

I took a week off work and walked thirty miles of the Pembrokeshire coast path in two days, then I had to return home so I walked the Brecon Beacons Horseshoe. Four peaks one after another. It took me nearly all day to complete, other walkers will do this in about four hours. I am slower now, older, my heart and lungs have problems. I am sometimes laboured, slow but still moving. Both journeys with full 20lb pack.

I like to walk alone mostly. I may want to rest in the forest, just to be there, while if I had a companion they might want to make it to the top of the hill, eager to reach a personal goal. Or I may want to stride on ahead to enjoy the effects of hard physical work on my body, leaving my companion strolling behind, and then a feeling of selfishness makes me stop and wait, and so my stride, my rhythm, my pace becomes lost and confused.

A walk is always a spiritual, intellectual and emotional journey as well as a physical one. I have noticed that often my walk will start with anger. Anger at the junk that people just leave lying around in the wilderness, bottles, cans, the remains of fires. Anger at the signs of the selfishness and idiocy of my species. But it fades; the anger soon fades, especially as I get further away and my bubble expands. Oh I don’t set myself above them, I am one of them thoughtlessly taking the easy way, brutish and dim in my own ways, and as I remember this I promise to make some personal change and then I forgive myself and then, soon I forgive everybody else.

I pass through that barrier of breathlessness and the quick ache that comes when my body realises that I am not just popping out to buy bread and tries to tell me not to walk today. I begin to forgive the morons because I am one of them, a powerless creature looking for some kind of certainty. And soon I am beyond this sphere anyway and I have given myself up to chance, no longer needing to feel any kind of control. In a forest or on a hill where only walkers are found. And then I begin to enjoy the air and the steady beat and the weight of my pack and suddenly the walk opens itself up to me and my body and mind start to harmonise and accept and with the acceptance of a long walk the anger fades and I begin to find something deeper, more harmonious, altogether better.

Later there is a kind of melancholy about walking alone, a loneliness that creeps up on me after about ten miles. The internal dialogue begins to quieten, becomes less insistent and a poetic solitude takes its place. A melancholy overcomes me that allows me to smile at strangers and I feel the self-awareness that has dogged and irritated me (and some of those around me) for most of my life begin to slip away. I smile at people, stop to chat with other solitary walkers. Easy and unforced. The bomp bomp bomp of my boots connecting me with the earth translates into the steady bedomp bedomp bedomp of my pounding and dysfunctional heart and that in its turn connects with the steady rhythm of air, flowing in, flowing out. Sometimes hard and fast as I climb or descend or speed up on the flat, sometimes almost nonexistent, imperceptible as it drifts gently, first in then out like a low tide when there is a half moon.

On a longer walk of between 12 and 20 miles, that melancholy too begins to break down and I become at one with the grass, the path, the trees, the other walkers, the lovers in the park, the accordion player outside the cafe. Then I breathe the same air as the sheep and the grass and the seals and the trees, from their mouths, lungs, cells and into mine and I become post-vocal, unable to find words, unable to form them and string them together in any way that makes sense. Feeling full of the most beautiful, astounding emptiness, wholeness, connectedness and, not wanting to nibble at its perfect edge with thought, intellect, communication or attention, I merely grunt if required and hope the other, should there be one nearby, will recognise my blissful state and leave me in such deep peace until eventually, inevitably the feeling begins to fade and the daily world and its meagre and petty concerns begin to take hold once again.

18

25 May 2010

The big walk is coming along. In fact it is next week, I have had to shorten it a little, in part because my fitness level is not what I would like it to be and partly because there are transport issues. So, the walk as it stands is reduced to three days. My target is to walk between the lighthouse at Strumble Head and the Cathedral at St David's in two easy days. And then, depending on how I get on, to walk for another day.

I am feeling ready to do this now. After I got my heart prob I thought I wouldn't be able to get up into the mountains again, but I have been up in the hills quite a lot for day walks over the last couple of months, in the Brecon Beacons a couple of times and more locally on the Taff Trail. I'm feeling ready to extend my range, so I will need to make overnight stops and that means carrying more gear. I have been gradually replacing bits of camping stuff with lightweight versions. So far my cooking gear, pots and stove have been replaced with superlight versions, my sleeping bag and crash mat, rucksacks and tent have all been replaced and I have bought some technical clothing that is extremely light and warm and from soaking wet will dry in half an hour.

I scrambled up this rock on the Pembrokeshire coast path overlooking Whitesands bay. You can see it in the distance in the second picture. I'm hitting my personal targets and it feels good.

I am back at my yoga class and it is helping me to get focused and a bit more flexible and confident for the bit of scrambling and climbing I am hoping to do.

17

07 May 2010

Output v Outcomes

In a meeting this morning it occurred to me that practitioners, good practitioners, ethical people who consider themselves part of this rich and colourful humanity and have a desire to help others, often appear to be doing things with clients, just because they can. It seems that they would rather do something with clients than stop and think about what really needs to be done. They seem to forget, in their haste to be busy, that stopping and thinking about what needs to be done is a vital part of their work, the hallmark of an effective practitioner in my eyes.

In this meeting I said in my usual cack-handed way that I was a very lazy practitioner, I think I used the words 'Bone Idle'. What I meant (and unfortunately did not go on to say) was that I believe in minimum intervention in people's private lives, focused intervention using leverage to achieve the maximum output with the minimum effort. In other words working with finesse.

There is sometimes a destructive competitive culture among people in the helping professions, 'look how hard I work' they seem to say, 'I care so much'. Sometimes the thought process seems to go: 'if I can do this to help this person, I must do it' so I see workers taking on more work than they can comfortably do properly, at a cost to themselves and I believe at a cost to their clients. I wonder about their motivations. Of course in many settings a high workload is forced on people, but the outcome is the same: a focus on output, rather than outcomes.

It is noticeable that some workers intervene with clients using tools and focusing on goals which seem to go far beyond their remit. They fill up all their time with interventions, lose their reflectivity and so end up doing lots of ineffective and pointless work at unsocial hours and burning themselves out into the bargain.

This particular office has the highest turnover of staff in the organisation. I hope that by focusing on outcomes, and working with finesse I will be able to go on for years, helping more people, getting great satisfaction from my job and getting great outcomes by doing what needs to be done rather than by mindlessly doing everything that I can do and using every skill and tool at my disposal with every client.

Rant Over.

I have just been up this mountain in the Beacons and on the way back I nibbled on Wood Sorrell found growing in that pine forest. They used to make it into pies when there was no fruit around. Three heart shaped leaves joined in the middle. Very different to wild sorrel with its much larger arrow shaped leaves but tasting very similar. The battery on my phone went flat so there is no picture of the wild sorrel I found in Pembrokeshire.

I have been walking a lot, foraging for wild garlic, sorrel and pennywort, and getting fitter.  Below is a picture of wild garlic that I collect from nearby and have been using in soups and omelettes. There is a little left in my freezer but the allotment veggies are coming along nicely now and foraging will be more or less over until the autumn when I hope to go looking for mushrooms.

16.

23 March 2010

I was talking to somebody close to me this morning, she seemed down and I asked her about it. She said that she was feeling that she wasn't living the life she wanted, she had taken a couple of wrong turnings in life and didn't know what to do about it.

When you take a turning you don't usually choose to take the wrong one, at the time it is just a turning, and usually you take it because you feel that it could be the right one.

I suggested that she not think about them as wrong turnings, but just as turnings, and plan to make more turnings that would seem to be going in an attractive direction. I felt that thinking about them in this way would help her to feel more positive, more focused on solutions rather than problems, feeling happier. Looking forward instead of back.

The past is written, the only thing you can change about it is how you look at it, and how you look at it depends on where you are now, where you are looking from.

The future is wide open.

I avoid thinking about the past and focus on the present and to a lesser extent the future. Probably because big chunks of the past were very very dark at times. That has given me a dark streak in my personality. If I think of events as bad I get sad.

In the past I worked for years to try and understand why things had been so bad and realised that it was all just random and had no meaning other than people trying to cope and gain some sense of control over their lives with limited spiritual, emotional and financial resources.

I decided to take control and drive my own car. Now I look at the scenery where I am, and as much as I can I watch things unfold around me. And I know that if I take a wrong turning, that's okay. This is my trip and the journey is the thing, the end point is just death.

15.

17 February 2010

Get happy, do more stuff, live longer.

A few things came crashing together today that prompted me to start writing. The first thing was in a trade magazine, Drink and Drug News (DDN) where I read this:

“… a focus on misery and pathology is misleading and largely self-fulfilling.”

Dr Martin Seligman

The article goes on to outline the traditional way of working with problem drug users and people with mental health problems. Traditionally professionals try to overcome the problem by exploring the problem and its impact. A much more helpful and powerful intervention is to explore the kind of lives that people want to live and to focus on positive futures. This frees people to use their own strengths to address the barriers to achieving those preferred futures.

Good solution focused practice, but the bit that really caught my eye was this:

In a 2003 Dr Seligman conducted a study of 180 non-smoking, non-drinking, non-drug using novice nuns. The study was based on the assumption that nuns are pretty consistent and have a fairly standard kind of lifestyle.

The novitiates had written essays which were analysed by researchers who did not know how long the nuns had lived. It was discovered that a massive 90% of the most cheerful quarter were still living at age 85. Just 34% of the least cheerful quarter were still alive at 85. Seligman's study concluded that the amount of positive feeling in the nun’s essays was the only thing in the essays that would predict how long they lived.

Happier people live longer.

Then I received an email from Susan Evans, a student social worker, somewhere in the UK who has read my book ‘The Barefoot Helper’. In a totally unprovoked act of kindness she emailed me a picture for my office wall and included a link to this site: www.helpothers.org. Take a look and enjoy, and perhaps give a simple gift of a smile to somebody else. Thank you for making me smile Susan!

Somehow from there I ended up at this site run by a think tank, the New Economics Foundation (nef): http://neweconomics.org/ which again really pressed my buttons. Crashing around randomly on that site I came across a section called ‘Five Ways to Well-Being’.

Here’s part of the intro: “In 2008, nef was commissioned by the UK Government’s Foresight Project on Mental Capital and Well-being to review the inter-disciplinary work of over 400 scientists from across the world. The aim was to identify a set of evidence-based actions to improve well-being, which individuals would be encouraged to build into their daily lives”

They identified five evidence based ways to well-being. The research evidence is available to download on their website. Take a look at the site for a full picture but I could not resist ripping them off and posting an outline here. Forgive me nef for copying your stuff, it was just too good to keep to myself. Ask me to take it down and I will.

Five ways to wellbeing:

Connect …

Connect with the people around you. With family, friends, colleagues and neighbours. At home, work, school or in your local community. Think of these as the cornerstones of your life and invest time in developing them. Building these connections will support and enrich you every day.

Give …

Do something nice for a friend, or a stranger. Thank someone. Smile. Volunteer your time. Join a community group. Look out, as well as in. Seeing yourself, and your happiness, linked to the wider community can be incredibly rewarding and creates connections with the people around you.

Keep learning …

Try something new. Rediscover an old interest. Sign up for that course. Take on a different responsibility at work. Fix a bike. Learn to play an instrument or how to cook your favourite food. Set a challenge you will enjoy achieving. Learning new things will make you more confident as well as being fun.

Take Notice …

Be curious. Catch sight of the beautiful. Remark on the unusual. Notice the changing seasons. Savour the moment, whether you are walking to work, eating lunch or talking to friends. Be aware of the world around you and what you are feeling. Reflecting on your experiences will help you appreciate what matters to you.

Be active …

Go for a walk or run. Step outside. Cycle. Play a game. Garden, Dance. Exercising makes you feel good. Most importantly, discover a physical activity you enjoy and one that suits your level of mobility and fitness.

nef publish a set of postcards with these five ways printed on them. Here again is the link to the nef site: http://neweconomics.org/. The evidence is there as a free download.

They have lots of very interesting stuff on their site including this:

A guide to commissioning children’s services for better outcomes

A big big thank you to Susan for Connecting … and for Giving …

I also want to say thank you to David Lemmon, another Barefoot practitioner who sent me a lovely email and says that after reading the book he got a great new job and - get this, he did a stand up comedy course! Thanks for giving David. You made me feel good.

An excellent day, I am loving this!

14.

29 January 2010

Oyster Mushrooms, Woodpeckers and Velvet Shanks

I finished work early today so I went home, got changed and went foraging in the woods. Autumn is the traditional time for collecting mushrooms but in the winter there are two lovely edible varieties that survive, if you look hard enough. I found a fantastic crop of Oyster Mushrooms growing on a dying beech tree I collected some and left plenty. I'll have some for breakfast tomorrow and the rest I have sliced and hung up to dry. In the shop this big basket would have cost a mint. I also found some Velvet Shanks, sweet brown and tiny mushrooms which grow on just about any old tree stump. They are now in my freezer, I was accompanied by a woodpecker while I was out but couldn't see it anywhere.

I am collecting stuff for my long walk and have decided that as I will not be staying on campsites but sleeping down wherever I am when it gets dark, I will not take a tent, I'll be using an ex-army bivvy bag and a tarp. This fits in nicely with the philosophy I am adopting for the trip, which is: walk until I need to sleep, sleep and then walk again.  Lowest impact, lowest visibility and moving on as soon as I have brewed and eaten in the morning.

05a

13 January 2010

Workload sometimes mean that I have an office based day and on those days I can walk to work as I don't need my car to go driving all around the city to visit clients. Those walking days are very special to me. Here is what it looked like on my walk to work today:

13.

05 January 2010

Worries about the Long Walk

This long walk project is really messing with my head. I wonder if I will really do it. I have done a lot of walking and a lot of camping, on my own and with others. Yet for some reason this scares me. I'm not 100% sure why. I keep examining my reasons for doing it, in the past I would have just done it but now I keep questioning myself.

I don't think I am afraid of getting ill. I have to go to work while I am ill and do a complex and sensitive job so I know that I can walk. I will need new kit and this is causing some resistance because, lets face it, stuff is expensive. A lightweight tent for instance is about £300! I need a new sleeping bag too, a reasonable down backpacking bag starts at about £100. So I have a bit of resistance about that. I am a social worker so money is tight. I have an overdraft, credit card debts, a daughter about to start Uni and a wife who would love to go on holiday. We have not had a holiday in years. I feel selfish about spending that amount of money on myself, to do something alone.

I am guessing that maybe most of my fear comes from being alone. Ten nights is a long time, I have not spent that much time sleeping alone since I was about seventeen. The last time I spent that amount of time sleeping alone out of doors was when I was homeless when I was sixteen. I think that is where my fear lies. There is nothing more beautiful than waking up on a mountain with the sunrise, and watching the clouds lift while the kettle boils. No feeling more wonderful to me than just being outside and watching the sun go down, feeling the fresh air on my face as I drift off to sleep. It is beautiful and ever so lonely. Warming and cold. Comforting and so so sad. I seem to have used the word 'alone' rather a lot. Like I say it is messing with my head.

I think that I need to go and sit on the side of a mountain on my own for a while, with a quiet mind while it all just sorts itself out.

12.

28 December 2009.

A Long Walk

I have been thinking of doing a long distance walk, backpacking, wild camping. I am planning a ten day expedition, maybe walking the Pembrokeshire coast path from end to end. Or doing a cross country from west coast to east coast.

The idea is a bit scary, not the walking bit or the camping bit, those are things I deeply value, but the idea of doing it on my own. I know that when I have camped on my own in the past I have started to get lonely very quickly. I am not used to sleeping alone and although I do love to spend time alone regularly, I need lots of space and silence, I have always sought the company of others at night. So this is a challenge for me. I have always been able to walk reasonable distance and when I was younger could walk maybe 20 - 25 miles on a good day. Today a good walk for me is about 10 to 12 miles. I am older, have a heart condition and I'm a little overweight. But getting slimmer and learning to deal with my condition. That is the basis for the walk really.

When I got ill I thought my life was over, my masculinity gone, my future collapsed like a telescope. But I am coming to terms with it, I still feel very ill sometimes but I am learning how to live with it. After spending two years getting back to something like a normal life it is time to take the next step, to do things that I want to do, things that challenge me or scare me. I can't ride a motorcycle any more because when I have an AF attack I cannot concentrate and that is fatal on a motorcycle. But I do like risk and I like to be physical. Hence the walk. So I have started working on my fitness. On Boxing day there was still thick ice and snow on the ground, and I walked about eight miles. Yesterday I filled my rucksack with weights and walked ten miles. Today my legs and my feet hurt, in a good way. So later on today, after the traditional post-Christmas breakfast of bubble and squeak, I will put on my pack and take to the trails.

This morning I woke up with the idea for a Hippocratic Oath For Social Workers. Read it here

11.

Wednesday 14 October 2009

Meditation

I have been asked to write a review of a book on Social Work and Mindfulness for a Social work Journal. I suppose I was asked because my book 'Barefoot' is on that particular subject. An interesting exercise it has sparked off a whole train of memories for me. Some years ago I was a practising Zen Buddhist and my thoughts about mindfulness have sprung out of that practice. I did practice for over 20 years, sitting and meditating. I stopped meditation as a regular sitting practice about five years ago when I found that I didn't need to do it any more. I was outside my office, looking at the estate down the hill and experienced the same joyous connectedness that I did when meditating. And from that point I stopped sitting in meditation. Recently however I realise that I have become disconnected again and need to get back into practice. I am becoming dissatisfied and grumpy with life. So I resolve to get back into active practice. If you are interested in what Zen Buddhism actually is, here's a page that I stole from the Web and edited down.

10.

Thursday 08 October

Quinces, Blackpool and Fireworks

 I have spent the last three days dealing with quinces. I have just this minute finished making the last few pots of Quince Jelly and have sat down with a coffee to plan the rest of my day. I am off work until next Monday. Yesterday I was making Membrillo (quince cheese) I had some with my supper last night and the flavour is truly intense. So the top shelf of the fridge is now stocked with four big jars of Rhubarb and Ginger marmalade, 4 jars of Membrillo and three jars of Quince Jelly. I need to put a stop to the preserve making for a while. The freezer is full of raspberries, beans and various leaves and there are several pounds of dried beans and about three sacks of potatoes along with the odd onion, garlic bulb and so on. There are turnips, celeriac, parsnips, chard, sprouts, onions, garlic, scorzonera, brocolli and various other bits and pieces growing on the plot.

Well I got back from Blackpool on Monday, there and back by train of course. Blackpool was depressing. Even Kate couldn't find anything to buy. I used to live there years ago. My parents had a guest house for a few years when I was a child and it has some happy memories and some terrible ones. I also spent some time there when I was homeless in my teens, I slept on a shelf under the Central Pier. I went back to have a look at it but they have done some work on the construction and the shelf it isn't there any more. I left my alarm clock there when I moved on. It had rusted up in the space of a couple of days.

I felt that I needed to take a look at the place and lay some ghosts. They are well and truly laid and I do not need to go back there again. When I came back I felt a strong need to walk in the mountains, somehow to get clean.

The picture is one of the Illuminations. They are nowhere near as good as they used to be, very old fashioned and cheap looking. There was however a fantastic fireworks display and that was the reason we went on that particular weekend. Blackpool hosted a international fireworks competition with shows from Australia, France, China and some others. China won. I love fireworks and in the past have spent hundreds of pounds on them, the most expensive single firework I ever bought was about £120.00.

9.

28 September 2009

A day of reflection.

Incidents at work have prompted me to do a personal audit, to think about what I want to do with my life, what is important, what my values are. My workplace is full of politics at the moment, everybody seems fragile. It feels that nobody trusts anybody and everybody feels hard done by. It is very depressing. So before I got drawn into it ... well ... after I noticed that I was being drawn into it. I decided that I needed to get back to basics and explore what I believe in so that I know what my position is. Just so I don't forget, here it is:

The bottom line is that I want to do no harm if at all practicable - this is for me the most important rule of all. This is very big.

If I do have to be employed, and I do, then my role has to be ethical. It has to be right and useful and helpful. I have no interest in power, I do not trust power nor those who use it, I do not want it for myself nor do I want other people having it over me. I have no interest in competition. But I will fight to the best of my ability if it is right and if it is winnable. I can do this job for other employers.

I want to be a force for good in the world - I want to be the best therapist that I can be, I want to leave the world a better place if at all possible. I have no interest in moving away from working with clients. I am very good at it. I would rather devote my working life to developing a deeper experience and competence in what I do. The research evidence shows that what I do changes peoples lives for the better. I want to continue to do that. I have no interest in making a name for myself or promotion out of what I am good at.

I do not want or need anxiety or stress. It is not necessary. If it gets too uncomfortable I will need to walk away and find another employer who will allow me to do what I enjoy doing, or find a way of doing it without an employer. I want to enjoy my work. I want to enjoy my world.

I have to focus on what is important to me. I can focus on my need to be mindful and become the best therapist that I can be. The only question left, is who will be my employer? Will it continue to be the same? - change is all around.

Now I have got that sorted out I am going to do something far more important, like finish the washing up, make dinner for Kate and the kids and then start to prepare the quinces that I picked yesterday.

8.

27 September 2009

I have just been to the plot to pick beans for drying, to weed around the leeks and to transplant a cherry tree to make space for blueberries. I dug up some comfrey roots to give to Sophie and sorted out some runner beans for her new garden.

When I came back I picked the quinces that had just ripened. They grow in Menna's garden next door. In the summer I gave her a pile of rhubarb which she said she loved and she said that I could pick her quinces when they were ripe. Well today they were ready to be picked.

2.8kg. I am going to make Quince jelly and Membrillo. If you have never tried it, Membrillo, also known as quince cheese is a fantastic ... what, well almost a chutney. You slice it into cubes and eat with cheese, or spread it if you have a strong spreading hand. Or whatever suits your fancy. Kate bought some home a few weeks ago, a tiny pot not much bigger than an egg cup, it cost her £4.00! she was using it in sauces and with cooked dinners. I can't wait to get in the kitchen, unfortunately Kate is in there making dinner at the moment. I already have about 4lbs of blackcurrant jam that I made in the summer and some rhubarb and ginger marmalade, and about 7lbs of raspberries in the freezer so it will not be long before I need more storage spaces. On the other hand our shopping bill has more than halved so nobody is complaining. We are eating fantastic fresh food and saving tons,

Kate and I are off to Blackpool next week, I grew up there have never been back, Kate has never been there so it will be a real experience for her.

Here's a picture of my mandolins.

The frogs are now real frogs, hopping around the plot.

7.

15 July 2009

I have a week off to build a new shed. The one on the plot leans a little more to the left after every storm. It is starting to get scary. I have dug up some of the spuds that I planted and they are excellent, the broad beans are picked, podded and drying in the sun. I grew them from seed that I collected last year. This year I am also collecting Kale seed. I made a pond and another allotmenteer gave me some tadpoles in the spring. Some of the tadpoles are now little frogs.

My sunflowers have opened, you can see the runner beans in the background and I brought Carrots and Lettuce back for dinner:

I must take some more pictures. The Brussels Sprouts and Parsnips are looking fine and we have been eating lots of salad leaves, plus chard, new potatoes, onions, rhubarb and beetroot. Last week I picked blackcurrants and made about four pounds of jam. I have been eating home-made jam on home made bread for breakfast.

6.

15 March 2009

In the Allotment

I walked the two miles to the allotment at ten this morning, spent the day digging and planting and cultivating the soil and walked back at 4pm, exhausted, aching but happy. A beautiful day, the raspberry canes are starting to come into leaf, the kale is starting to turn to seed, the magpies were running between the rows looking for seedlings to nick. Today I planted carrot seeds, sunflowers and marigolds, scorzonera (I've never grown that before), Jerusalem artichokes, strawberries and fennel seeds. 

The Broccoli and Spinach seeds I planted three weeks ago are coming up nicely. I have still got loads more to plant and beds to prepare. I planted garlic in deep frost on January the first this year and it is now shooting out of the ground - I had to hack my way through about four inches of frozen earth to plant it. Saw my first butterfly of the year already today. Hope we don't get a frost. I planted Asparagus the week before last, 25 crowns. On the following Monday there was a thick frost so I am a bit worried about them. Hopefully in the next few months I will see some signs of growth. I won't be able to eat any of that crop for three years!

5.

07 March 2009

Here's a few websites I have been enjoying lately:

You're all gonna die!

Falafel, sex and other things best left unsaid

Current moon phase

Pundo 3000

Gardening as an anarchist plot

4.

17th Feb 2009

Gardening and Anarchism

I was in the allotment this morning, before I went to work, planting seeds in paper pots I made out of newspapers. Another lot of Broccoli and some Spinach. Then off to work. They are in the window of my shed ready to get a flying start.

I am an anarchist at heart. My family were engineers, miners, soldiers, railwaymen and so I learned pretty young to be a socialist, around us there are wealthy people who get wealthy by exploiting poor people. Also around us there are poor people, who keep their employers in riches while taking risks with their own physical, spiritual and mental health just to survive. I once worked in the South Wales Valleys and remember a middle aged miner on a respirator in a tiny terraced house. The house was unbearably overheated by free coal graciously given by what was then the National Coal Board. He was waiting for industrial injuries compensation and had been waiting for years, his life destroyed and put on hold by capitalism. Even now I see workers exploited and bullied by employers, even employers who should know better. As a social worker a manager once tried to make me lie in the witness box and when I said that I would not lie I was told I was committing professional suicide. That team manager is now an Operational Manager. I am still a social worker.

Power corrupts, people with a little bit of power crave more, it is a mindset that runs through our system and it is dangerous and damaging. Currently we are looking at employing a manager for our team, I believe that we do not need a manager, we need a power sharing system so that the whole team has a stake in the success of our organisation. It's a small team with some deep and broad ranging skills, the manager's role could be split very effectively among the team, with each individual having special responsibility for a part of that job. Perhaps employing and mentoring a new team member to add to the mix instead of a manager who would merely dilute our personal skills. I won't get very far with this, we have not even got the money to employ somebody yet but people are already staking claim to the role, it is dividing the team. People crave power and fear the unknown.

I won't be applying for that job should it arise. I am more interested in working with clients, changing the world one human step at a time. Plant a seed, watch it grow. Self reliance, personal responsibility and sharing resources are anarchist attributes. And as a social worker that is what I espouse. Click here to read more about anarchism.

3.

01 February 2009

Beta Blockers, Folk Band and Gardening

Ooh, it is a long time since I have been here. In fact I forgot all about this page. Health wise things are much much better. I'm off the beta blockers and on Flecainide which has done away with lots of the nasty side effects. There are still a  few but nothing too debilitating. I built a shed today. This morning there was just a slab of crazy paving, this evening there is a shed! (not the one in this picture - this is my other shed).

It took me six weekends to level the earth, lay some sand and cement and top off with broken paving slabs, and one day to build a shed. For some reason hard exercise helps with my AF. I think that my job, being sedentary and stressful has taken its toll on my health and I need to be outdoors and physically active. We are doing lots of alterations to the house so needed a shed to store the mountain of stuff that has ended up in the garage. We are ripping out the garage to create a spare room and putting in a funky heating system with a wood burning stove and solar water heater. We are being Hippies in the City and trying to be as independent as possible.

Since I last wrote here I joined a folk band ... and left it again, couldn't stand the depressing music they were into, the mandolin playing is coming along great. For Christmas I got a big zoom lens for the camera (that I won for having the worst office in the world), and a GPS to help me avoid getting lost when walking in the Beacons. The allotment is coming along well, kale is cropping well and I am looking to making some lovely soup with Kale, Broad Beans, Tomatoes, Garlic, onions and Basil all grown on my own plot. I was down there yesterday and the spinach is coming back and the rhubarb is starting to bud. I planted some Garlic in January and will plant some again in the next few days if I can get down there. Sprouts are coming on nicely as is the purple sprouting broccoli. They should be cropping well by the spring.

In November I was digging over the beds that I hadn't touched, I manured them and covered them in plastic sheeting to keep the weeds down and let the worms do their miraculous work of incorporating all the manure into the topsoil. By March, when I get my seed potatoes it will be ready for me to plant them. New potatoes and maincrops I think this year. I am hoping to get about five sacks of spuds from my three potato beds.

Last year we were growing and eating broad beans, runner beans, potatoes, kale, spinach, rhubarb and raspberries. This year there will be all of those plus apples, sprouts, onions, garlic, broccoli, tomatoes, blackcurrants and I think a few more odds and ends.

I hope to be totally self-sufficient this year in potatoes, garlic, onions, raspberries, spinach, broad beans and runner beans.

Tesco won't get a penny from me.

2.

23 June 2008

The allotment is coming along great, especially as I have only had it a few months. I was going to write something about food and vegetarianism again, something about how eating meat was harmful to the environment, but then I thought what the hell, I know it, you know it, I will just go and eat instead of writing about eating.

First blog.

08 June 2008

Me, last year, before the heart problem - big beard and newly shaved head.

Ego made me do it, write a page just about me and my garden. Who is it for? -  Me I suppose. It's a page, to help me to reflect on what's happening in my life. Sometimes I write something here, leave it for a week or so, then delete it. I have always kept notebooks, sketchbooks with notes in them, now I do it here. It's personal, private ... and public.

Today I went to my allotment, decent food is very important to me. That is one reason I avoid going away from home for my work, I keep getting asked to do conferences and training events, I cannot abide mass catering and won't eat processed food at home, I don't see why I should lower my standards. I am very, very picky about restaurants and prefer to cook as much of my own food as possible. I am a lifelong vegetarian, I am almost vegan as I minimise my intake of dairy products. It is important to me that I know what is in my food. I won't eat food that has animal products in it, stuff like gelatine, whey protein, honey, various colourings and so on.

Why? Well for me it is partially about violence. Flesh produced for eating is created by violence. I don't even like violent films or books, not because I find them upsetting or frightening as people have sometimes liked to assume, but because they add a bit more violence into the world, every violent book, every beef burger, every leather sofa is a vote for violence. They add violence to the world, normalise it, make it more acceptable, make it a regular part of our daily lives. That's right, I am a hippy!

I am not afraid of violence, in some respects much of my life has been very violent, I used to be in a bike gang and I have been in knife fights and gang fights, I have taken my share of beatings both as a child and a young man, I have had surgery a couple of times and maybe ten motorcycle accidents and continued to ride, so I am not talking from the basis of cowardice or fear (although I am ashamed to be a coward about a lot of things). And sometimes violence is undesirable but necessary, take the second world war for instance. But eating flesh isn't necessary, depicting violence for entertainment isn't necessary, a leather sofa isn't necessary and to me none of them are desirable.

This feeling about violence extends to my relationship with my planet. I hate to pollute and that's another reason I don't travel far to conferences and training events. I also happen to think that very often they are not necessary. I used to travel to conferences, stay in hotels away from my family, eating crap food and drinking with colleagues, and after a few years of this I realised that I had learned precisely nothing from them, they started to look purely like opportunities for academics to build their reputations. They can be useful, but reading the research is more useful, and technology should make them redundant.

I won't use chemicals on my garden and I never use aerosols of any sort. When I go on holiday I prefer to go by train and boat if I have to travel any distance, the journey itself often being the holiday. You get to meet more people that way and enjoy the scenery. I wear organic clothing where possible and I try to wear clothes that are made as close to home as possible, good quality traditional stuff made by craftspeople rather than in sweatshops, even if they cost ten times as much. I also buy second hand clothes off Ebay. I camp in a canvas rather than a nylon tent (see pic) and when I can I cook by fire in preference to a gas canister. It is all about choices, ethics and responsibilty. Even on the allotment I brew up using a Kelly kettle and burn twigs. I recycle and compost and re-use when possible. I choose to play acoustic rather than electric instruments, and so on. An old bathtub I found will become a pond on the allotment and when there are frogs in it they will eat the slugs.

I'm growing a whole load of organic vegetables and fruit, and everything is coming along nicely. I am already eating the spinach and rhubarb that I have grown and should be self sufficient in potatoes, onions, broad and runner beans, spinach, kale, raspberries and a few other things. Rhubarb Granita made with Gin for pudding tonight! Delicious! I will need to get a bigger freezer to store it all.

Yesterday I bought a Bouzouki, I already play the mandolin (see pic on the left) and mess around with a bass guitar. I am learning a few Irish tunes.

I recently had a problem with my heart, Atrial Fibrillation and was treated with catheter ablation, basically burning away some of the electrical circuits on my heart. Not very pleasant. I have been on Beta Blockers since.  I stopped taking them over a period of about two weeks because they have some nasty side effects. Anyway about a fortnight after I had stopped taking them altogether I had another attack of AF that lasted two days, my heart was beating about 200 bpm and missing a great number of beats, going crazy basically. I went straight back on the pills as soon as it started but it didn't stop. In the end I got really fed up of it and went to the allotment thinking I would do some heavy digging as a 'kill or cure' luckily it cured and after about fifteen minutes of hard digging sinus rhythm was resumed! (Luckily).

I never thought that I would be the one to get ill. But I suppose I am lucky to have made it this far. I have been homeless, slept rough and lived in a squat . I have worked on a fairground, I have been a cook and a welder in an oil refinery. I have done some seriously dangerous stuff on motorbikes. I have written off two motorcycles and been in a house fire and two car crashes. I have taken chemical substances designed to put dogs to sleep and sedate horses. I have been beaten battered and abused and so I guess I am pretty lucky to make it to 51.  I don't mind a bit of pain, what does bother me is being restricted, feeling so unfit, breathless and unable to do the things I would like to do, somehow it makes me feel less, less able, less of a man.

Digging is really working for me. A day digging and weeding followed by a few hours of mandolin playing and a decent meal is a perfect day. I have opted to avoid using power tools on the plot. So every inch has to be dug by hand, I use an azada, a kind of cross between a hoe and a spade. A kind of right angled spade, you see Africans using them on TV. Miles better than a spade, faster and easier on the back. I wouldn't be without it.

I'm still getting chest pains, especially when I am stressed, and really bad pins and needles in my hands and fingers, and restless arms and legs, drives me mad sometimes, exercise is the only relief, so I am working my arse off, and getting fitter and slimmer in the process - which is nice!

Reading a book on herbalism today told me that angelica was good for AF, just ordered three plants off Ebay for the allotment.

I do Social Work for a living.

It puts food on my table.

What I do, and how I do it effects how I feel.

I want to do it better.

A Hippocratic Oath for Social Workers

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All material is Copyright Mark Hamer 2006.