|
|
Ok. I’ve been quiet because the last few weeks really have been a bit challenging for us.
And today, I bring you, a little ponder round some blogs, which may or may not lead me to some conclusions.
I love this heartfelt post from EarthMama, and I can so relate. However hard we work, it seems the bills stack up – and yet we too make lifestyle choices. What resonates particularly is:
“Sometimes, I just wonder what is a better way, and if there is a better way, how can one easily, quickly, and affordably get there? Is this some sort of universal shift calling us to a new way of thinking or living? Or is the key to this all acceptance, as it has been for many of the years before us; to struggle and be happy just to be alive?“
This is a question I ask myself all the time – other generations, certainly the wartime generation, thanked God for life, and carried on in the toughest of circumstances. Should we start to see the struggle as life’s great challenge? My parents and grandparents took on poverty and adversity, and almost appeared to enjoy the frugality, the dodges, the tricks and tips – are we become a nation of standers-by, who have forgotten how to revel in the game?
So is it time to start afresh? Jo at shapeshifting ponders the not-so-clean-slate handed to us at New Year.
“New year can appear to hand us a clean slate but it’s not easy. Those past hopes, wishes and visions can stick to us with guilt and shame and fear of failure. Unless we forgive ourselves for not seeing them through – or maybe just realise that it doesn’t really matter and not getting your Etsy store off the ground three years running does not make you a bad person – we will become more and more stuck in our own emotional swamp, while our belief in our ability to get out of it slowly fades.”
Now this certainly applies to me. I am still determined to get my garden growing, have a surplus to share via markets and maybe even the return of the box scheme – again. I’m thinking I might try congratulating myself on how often and how close I have come – how can I miss this time? It’s part of the struggle, part of the challenge – doing something extra on top of surviving is no throw away line – it’s a BIG thing – so a few near misses are just good preparation.
But towing this stuff around is cumbersome to say the least, and I’ve been reading Kindred of the Quiet Way – where a New Year post, made me feel a bit prickly.
“And I realised in a visceral way that hadn’t come to me before (though I’d known it as an intellectual proposition) that I could let go of the painful history that had soured and poisoned some of what we’d passed through. I didn’t need it any more. To retain it or let go of it was my choice.
So at the crossroads between the decade that has just gone and the one just beginning, I think I prefer the road to freedom. Goodbye to all that. I cut the ties of this pack I’ve been carrying, and it can roll down the hill into the sea. Eternity is only ever approached through the doorway of now. Eternal life has no yesterday and no tomorrow. The same is true of joy. The only access to joy is in the present reality of now. Nursing old grievances, the things that someone said and did, whether they meant to or not, is incompatible with joy.”
Wow. That’s some food for thought.
So… is it a new start, with a new acceptance of the challenge of survival? Is the slate to be clean, or still mired in all the stuff I’m carrying around with me? Can you expect shiny new black on your first attempt at wipe-clean? Or will it inevitably have that tell tale chalky layer of self doubt and old grievances – and hey? What if next year I come back and find myself challenging me to start really, really fresh – again. Because I feel like I got it wrong this year?!
Woah. I really don’t know. I think I should maybe get outside, and do some work!
*all bloggers are now, happily, quoted with permission!
Christmas in Wartime is covered by this informative BBC article.
Watching this video made me think of the Grumpy Guests at Cotswold Hotels who would like to silence our church bells. Like Hitler before them. I think they should holiday elsewhere, to be honest.
A couple of links to share this morning, to get us thinking about the sustainability or not of our own lifestyle:
This one about Peak Oil which has kind of slipped off even my agenda, and I was pretty hot on the subject.
And at least in part as a result, food prices are set to soar. So I think the time for chatting things over has probably come and gone, and the day has arrived to take some serious steps towards preparing ourselves for this.
I’ve noticed preparedness in the USA seems to be a determinedly individualistic affair – wheras in the UK it turns into Transition – I’m generalising but if you take a look at Rob Hopkins’ Blog, Transition Culture you’ll find some humdingers of discussions, whereby *in general* Americans take to the hills with a hand gun, and the British teach weaving and plant nut trees.
We’re pretty good at sharing. During World War 2, rationing worked incredibly well, considering what people had to get by on. It is – or was – in our nature to strike out for ‘fair play’. I don’t know how the ‘me generation’ would cope.
Instinctively, I prefer our model – not least because we’re so tightly packed, there are a very limited number of hills to head for, and you can’t really get far enough away from anyone that there is ultimately no risk of them nicking your cabbages and so on. Especially if they have a hand gun
So I’m for transition and co-operation. Anyone care to join me?!
A run down here from the BBC of what’s going on.
Now, as a person who is rushed off her feet, trying to keep our own economy on track, what I can’t understand is the fuss and complaining, strikes even in some places, about this most necessary of dirty jobs. The nation is in deep trouble. Pull together. Yes you might have to work for less, but you’re lucky to have a job.
Well spoken, articulate, capable women on the radio, whining that maybe their ‘children’s services’ will disappear. Run your own playgroups. We did. And they were better than the target obsessed sausage factories the government have taken over.
Wailing and gnashing of teeth over the old folk. Well look after your own grandmother. My mother looked after two, and wouldn’t have seen them go into a home, ever. Join a voluntary group and help out in your neighbourhood. I keep hearing people proclaiming that youth clubs will be closed – well my Guide Unit won’t, nor our Brownies, nor our Rainbows, nor the Youth Action Group in the village because we never gave them to the government in the first place.
Guess that makes me a fan of the ‘Big Society’. I’m actually just a fan of getting on with it and hushing the moaners.
 Look, we can cut back on ballpoint pens. Have a couple of mine.
Well, fuel shortages in the 40s – money shortages in the 2010s … much the same result – wrapped in a blanket, knitting a balaclava. I kid you not.
The balaclava pattern is from the Daily Express Wartime Needlework book, even!
When hard times strike, I recommend knitting – it’s time consuming, you can do it with a rug wrapped round you, and ultimately, it produces another layer.
Win / Win situation if ever I saw one!
Looking for a photo of a 1940s fete, I came upon this
courtesy of Heritage Plus.
It reminded me of fetes of my childhood, and of something that is now missing – the fancy dress parade. How well I remember, my dear mother who was not much of a seamstress, dressing me as Robin Hood, in head to toe green and red crepe paper, over white vest and knickers, with a crepe paper covered toilet roll quiver for my gladioli stick arrows. It rained. I don’t really need to say more, do I?
Simply everyone joined in with the fancy dress, it was a highlight, and yet today, it is absent, or limited to the very young.
And that this wonderful photgraph should have been taken in Grantchester – a good excuse for a burst of a favourite poet, evocative, heart rending Rupert Brooke, reminding me never ever to take for granted my blessed homeland. How very, very fortunate we are to live in such a spectacularly beautiful, gentle, forgiving old place.
The Old Vicarage, Grantchester
(written at the Cafe des Westens, Berlin, May 1912)
- Just now the lilac is in bloom,
- All before my little room;
- And in my flower-beds, I think,
- Smile the carnation and the pink;
- And down the borders, well I know,
- The poppy and the pansy blow . . .
- Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,
- Beside the river make for you
- A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep
- Deeply above; and green and deep
- The stream mysterious glides beneath,
- Green as a dream and deep as death.
- – Oh, damn! I know it! and I know
- How the May fields all golden show,
- And when the day is young and sweet,
- Gild gloriously the bare feet
- That run to bathe . . .
- . . .
- Ah God! to see the branches stir
- Across the moon at Grantchester!
- To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
- Unforgettable, unforgotten
- River-smell, and hear the breeze
- Sobbing in the little trees.
- Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
- Still guardians of that holy land?
- The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
- The yet unacademic stream?
- Is dawn a secret shy and cold
- Anadyomene, silver-gold?
- And sunset still a golden sea
- From Haslingfield to Madingley?
- And after, ere the night is born,
- Do hares come out about the corn?
- Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
- Gentle and brown, above the pool?
- And laughs the immortal river still
- Under the mill, under the mill?
- Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
- And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
- Deep meadows yet, for to forget
- The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet
- Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
- And is there honey still for tea?
Rupert Chawner Brooke (1887-1915)
(Don’t suggest you read the rest of it if you’re from elsewhere in Cambridgeshire, and proud of it!)
Today is the day of the Village Fete, and Garden Club Show. Could be the 1940s, right? Well, we’ll see!
Although classes for runner beans and giant onions have changed little – I wonder if the baking classes took place in wartime? I’ll have to do a bit of research.
Not yet though, or my cottage loaf won’t be baked in time to enter!
Update: My bread won first prize, everything else came nowhere, but it was a lovely afternoon, and all the produce is sold off for charity, so all in a good cause.
So my good friend Ali was saying, it’s a bit of a pain, really that we have been doing all this austerity, frugality, self sufficiency stuff for years, and now it’s for real and we’ve got to carry on doing it whether we like it or not.
Whereas, those who have been living the high life for the last decade, revelling in materialism, buying all that stuff, well, they’re ready for it. It’s a nice new challenge. What fun, lets eat cabbage.
She’s right. But on the other hand, it is exciting, because we’re ready. We’ve been practising.
It’s pretty scary, I don’t know how many of us really understand how tight things are going to be – even if like me you’ve watched hundreds of hours of The Waltons but it’s equally great, because it’s Our Time. If we hadn’t been doing this for years, we wouldn’t have the skills, or the knowledge to pass on.
It’s extremely hard to get a job right now, I know because I’ve been trying, but like so many others, I’m restricted by school terms and times, and the fact that I haven’t worked for anyone else in 15 years. So while I’m still planning on launching my box scheme I’m also going to be planting a lot of herbs, which I hope I’ll be able to sell on a small scale.
Using them is one of my passions, and today I harvested sage flowers, which I put into sage flower bread and sage flower yoghurt. Working on a herb recipe file, which I’ll be making available. Sage flowers are beautiful, pretty blue and highly scented, exuding hot volatile oils on a day like today.
Also put up some sage flower oil.
Looking for some nice bottles to store some up for Christmas presents.
Right now, there is a body of opinion which says, the earth is getting hotter, and that climate change is attributable to the actions of man. Our greed, our consumption, our lack of restraint, has caused us to rape and destroy our planet home.
Then there’s another body of opinion, which says this may possibly be tosh. That in actual fact, what is happening is just happening, and nothing we can do will change it. The earth will self regulate.
Then there’s another body of christian opinon, which says man cannot be causing global warming, since God is sovreign and He is bringing the earth close to it’s demise, as He prepares to bring about the new heaven, and the new earth.
Now, this was a bit distressing to me, when I first heard it, because I had to admit, I liked to study things environmental. I was doing, no am doing, no hope to soon be continuing, no WILL be completing, a degree in Environmental Studies with the OU.
I took English, Art and History to A level at school, because I was good at English, and because I was a girl, and because that’s kind of where I ended up. I even started in humanities with the OU – because, well that’s what I did.
I was forty five years old, when I realised, I was actually a scientist. I love learning about intermediate technology. I love studying energy use, and cropping patterns, and solving global issues locally.
Today, in quiet prayer and contemplation, hoe in hand, sun blazing on my back, I had a great and beautiful revelation.
Is it us? Or is it Him? Is it really a threat to our future? Or just a blip?
I don’t care. It doesn’t matter.
To serve and love a sovreign God who created something this awesome, this beautiful, is to protect it with your last breath, and to cherish and nurture and create and defend with every ounce of joy and courage and dark, crumbling earth you possess.
If it ends, I only pray it will end with my garden bursting with fruit, and food, and love. And that when He returns, He finds me hoe in hand, or pink watering can, tending beautiful, fecund food. Dancing, with tears in my eyes.
Well, our general election is over, but we don’t have a new government.
I would have liked a definite outcome, and David Cameron would have been my choice, but in the current historic circumstances, I just hope a coalition can be arrived at before too long.
What is certain is that whoever forms our next government, the measures which will have to be brought in, to try to sort out our economic situation, are going to be grievous.
Austerity is not something we are used to. Even those who, like us, have been through both voluntary and enforced poverty of a kind, have lived in a generation of plenty. We don’t really know what austerity is.
Nella Last in Nella Last’s Peace spoke of how post war austerity was worse than war. While the nation had a common enemy, and was being pushed beyond its natural limits, there was work to do.Every day, women put on their bright lipstick, ‘dodged’ meals together out of next to nothing, and went to their work, both voluntary and paid.
They had a sense of purpose and were needed.
Once the war was over, and the austerity measures set in, depression soon followed. The slog seemed so long, so hard and so unjust – this was victory?
I’ve talked to my sister about the post war period. She was born in 1942, so can’t really remember much about the war, but has clearly etched memories of austerity. She was one of those children who did not know what a banana was, and didn’t meet her father til she was two and a half. It can’t have been easy, either the living as a single parent family, or feeling half starved all the time.
I do honestly believe now, that this is what we have to come. I do pray we’ll be as tough, resilient and cheerful as our 1940s counterparts.
My suggestions to help gear up for the inevitable payback.
- If you don’t grow your own veg, start now. However small or large a scale.
- Don’t look at it as a fashion thing, see it as survival. If you have room, an allotment for example, start getting good at growing carrots and onions, as well as frilly red lettuce. Or, if necessary, instead.
- Learn to mend. If you have time, learn to sew, but definitely learn to mend.
- Better yet, learn to alter garments in size and fit.
- Learn to cook from scratch, it’s honestly not hard, and think about your expectations, and those of your family – consider being grateful for a square, balanced meal, without pretensions to fashion or glamour.
- Settle in for the long run. We can do it.
- Take a leaf out of Nella’s book – in and after WW2 women wore bright lipstick, plucked their eyebrows, and made an extra effort to make sure clothes fit well, and generally present a morale boosting appearance, not just for themselves, but for the country at large. I’m not a red lipstick girl, don’t know about you, but we have got very lax about our appearance. Lets go feminine!
- Smile. Lets all smile.
|
|
