I don't do New Year resolutions. If you want to make a change then for god's sake just do it. Why wait until January to make a start on something that matters? So it's purely coincidence that this kind-of-journal is kicking off in January. As you'll see, the changes I've been making date back into last year, and I'm pretty confident they'll last longer than most resolutions do.
Why call this section "shifting"?
Well, "down-shifting" is the buzz-phrase applied to this kind of thing, but even if I don't know quite where I'm heading, I don't think down is the right direction. Just somewhere else.
What am I shifting? Well, let's look at the reasons first of all.
I've always been a well-meaning, greenish liberalish kind of guy. I'd argue that my lifestyle has been more sustainable and ethical than the vast majority for most of my adult life, but also I know that the practice has never quite lived up to the aspirations. I drove my car too much, I shopped at supermarkets too much, I bought too much stuff.
I've always lived a different kind of life, though. I spent seven or eight years working as a freelance writer, even though we couldn't really afford to live on what little I earned. My wife, Alison, and I never really down-shifted at that stage, we just failed to up-shift and continued to live at the poverty level of a typical student for several years.
But I drifted into a proper job, with salary and mortgage; we had the children, we took on responsibilities. Unless anyone looked closely, we would appear to be living the kinds of lives most people did.
So what has changed?
Moving to Brightlingsea in the late 1990s was one thing. This is the town where ordinary people turned out en masse ten years ago to protest about the export of live calves for the veal trade through our tiny port. There are artists here, and hippies, and just the kind of people who would rather do something interesting and live life properly than live like everyone else.
George W Bush changed things, too. It may seem melodramatic, but sitting back and watching GWB get re-elected to the most powerful position on the planet was horrifying. It shows what a dispiriting battle it is to try to develop a society that's fair and sustainable, rather than one that's blinkered and selfish and on a course to massive environmental failure.
I told you it would seem melodramatic.
But Bush's re-election nudged me over an important boundary. Back at the turn of the millennium, there was a lot of speculation about what might happen if the so-called millennium computer bug actually manifested. People talked about large-scale computer failure, and collapse of communications; even on a smaller scale, if the bug struck only a few places, we might have hit all kinds of problems with water and food supplies, power, and so on. I like to think I'm fairly rational about these things. I didn't think anything was going to happen. We'd been working on rooting out the bug for years before the calendars flipped over to 2000, and while there might be a few small glitches, I thought we would probably be okay. But even so, we bought in bottled water and tinned food. I judged that the risk may be small, but it was a significant enough possibility that it would be irresponsible not to have taken at least minimal precautions. So as it turned out nothing happened. But we were prepared. I think we did the right thing.
There's a point here, and I'm getting to it. When Bush got back in, I crossed that boundary. Not only did I think there was a strong possibility that climate change, pollution and resource depletion might happen and could have major consequences, for me the balance of probabilities had shifted considerably. Even as it starts to seep through mass perception that the tragedies of Africa are upon us, that they're just a sign of things to come, and that these changes are at least partly our fault, we have so much ground to make up if we're to actually achieve anything...
I think it's likely that things are going to change. I think we have some big upheavals in store. And I don't think western "democracy" and the mega-corporation capitalist status quo can move fast enough to stop it.
But I'm not giving up. My children will be living through these times. They all need to be equipped with the kind of skills most of us don't have: how to grow food, how to make do, how to get along with your neighbours.
Jesus, I've become a survivalist...
So anyway, that's one of my motivations: I want to live life properly, or at least, a lot better than I have been doing, and I want to do it in a sustainable way: both contributing to global sustainability and contributing to the individual sustainability of those I love.
Another reason: I'm a terrible procrastinator. Or, actually, I'm rather a good procrastinator. Since I was a kid, I've been a great planner, mapping out the things I would do one day, the trips I would make, the places I would live. I haven't done all these things.
I drive to work to do my day job at the University of Essex. There's a bus service, but it's just not so flexible and it more than doubles the journey time. I could cycle, but the changing and showering facilities are crap, and again, it doubles the journey time. I have all kinds of reasons for just getting in the car again. One day, I'll get more organised and cycle or go on the bus. One day.
One day, I'll make a more concerted effort to live life in a way that matches my views on sustainability. One day maybe soon.
Another reason (I have lots of reasons, you see): my health. I've always had a dodgy digestive tract, but lately it's been worse. I tried cutting out wheat from my diet, just to exclude that as a cause, because I didn't really believe that was the problem. And it made a huge difference. I'm now part-way through a diagnosis of suspected coeliac disease. It's not exactly major, as illnesses go, but it can be quite debilitating and it would explain a lot of the problems I've had. I'm now on a strictly gluten-free diet, which is a bugger to stick to, but does have the benefit that I'm far more aware of what goes into my body. Almost any processed food has gluten in it, so it means that our cooking has become simpler, working far more with raw ingredients. I was never a great junk-food eater, in any case, but this just pushes me further away from processed food.
For twenty years I was a vegetarian, but I've recently started to eat meat again, if only to get a bit more variety into what I can eat. This shift wasn't as shocking as it might appear. I had sustainability reasons for not eating meat: meat production's so inefficient that we shouldn't rely on it for as large a proportion of our diet as we do. But I'm not eating meat every day, so that balance is still okay for me.
And I had concerns about the treatment of farmed animals. But these concerns apply to dairy animals, too, and I still bought milk and cheese. For me, going - and remaining - veggie was more a symbolic act of drawing the line: wherever you draw the line it can be demonstrated that you're a hypocrite, but the act of drawing it was important to me.
So now I eat meat, but only from ethical sources - preferably organic. Let's encourage good farming practices, rather than turning away from them altogether. Put before me an organic free-range chicken that's been counselled before slaughter and I'll tuck in as enthusiastically as anyone.
And finally, it comes back to my procrastination. I've been working like hell for the last few years, running a university web team and writing and editing in my own time. It takes its toll. I want my life back. I want a better quality of living and I'd really rather like to start enjoying that now, rather than working towards it as a goal for some time in the future.
Grand talk, but what am I actually doing?
Well, one thing, as I've already mentioned, is that I've redrawn that symbolic line. I want all the food I eat to meet my standards, so I'll eat meat if it's been properly reared, and I'll try to make sure my other food is well-sourced too.
We buy our fruit and vegetables from the greengrocer's at the top of our road. Most of their produce is grown on a small-holding, along more-or-less organic lines, about fifteen miles away. If something's in season we'll have it; if it's not, well, sometimes we still will, but increasingly we'll avoid the stuff that's been flown in from thousands of miles away.
I bought some apples from a Suffolk farm stall a week ago. They were wonderful. So unlike the mass-refrigerated and treated things you get in the supermarket.
The meat we buy, too, is local, wherever possible, and well-reared.
We're going further, though. We grow things in the greenhouse, and now, even though our garden is small, we're planning to dig a patch and grow our own vegetables. We've always tended to do this, with plants in tubs and odd corners, but this is upping the scale a bit. If things go well, we may even take on an allotment with some friends. And we're really quite taken with the idea of getting some hens.
We're also trying hard not to get sucked into the trap of buying the stuff we "need". An example: we've been in this house for six years and the kitchen is, quite literally, falling apart. Part of the top oven door came off ages ago, two of the burners on the hob don't work, and two cupboard doors have come off their hinges and are beyond repair. So we decided the time had come to gut the kitchen and have a new one fitted.
Hang on a minute... Why should we do that? So much waste, and why should we replace the old with all that industrially-produced stuff that would cost thousands? So I put out a query on the University small ads list and ended up with the offer of a second-hand cooker that needs a little work. So yes, we're going to strip out the old fitted cooker and the old broken units, but some of it will stay in place and will be refurbished in situ, and wherever possible we're using recycled materials and equipment. Our new work surface is going to be a recycled door. Some of the old cupboards are going to form the basis of the chicken house. It's actually quite an exciting project.
One pleasing development is the recent approval from management at the University that I can cut my hours to a three-day week. It means a significant cut in income, but a huge increase in quality of life. So this brings us back to the question of down-shifting, and in terms of finances and the conventional lifestyle, yes, that's what we're doing.
But in all other senses, no, we're not shifting downwards. We're shifting somewhere else. I'm not quite sure where, but I'm convinced that the journey is just as important as the destination.
It's just as well that I decided the journey was just as important as the destination, as we're still only in the early stages of setting out...
The kitchen: well, we've made a start. We've refurbished some old shelving units, which we can use for storage. We've restored the area around the sink, rather than replacing it all, and clad the grotty old work surface with pine. Rather than replace the rather ugly tiles behind the sink, we've painted them. So one tiny area of the kitchen is actually looking pretty good. The next stage is to start removing the old units, which will get under way soon. I use the word "soon" in a very non-specific way here.
The garden: great progress here, probably because I left it to Alison and the children. They've dug out an area of the lawn so that we can grow vegetables. It's only small (about two metres by three), but we're confident that we can get a lot out of it, and even if we can't, at least what we do grow will be good quality. Daisy and I planted tomato, leek and lettuce seeds in the greenhouse. It's good to be growing things again.
Lifestyle: I'm back on a wheat-rich diet again. In order to be tested thoroughly for coeliac disease I have to make myself as ill as possible by eating the very thing that causes my problems. For three months. It's working. On a brighter note, from the end of this month I'll be a part-timer. This is the part of our "shifting" exercise that's definitely down-shifting: down to a three-day week in my day job; plus a significant drop in our income. In theory my writing income makes up for this cut. Even if it doesn't, we decided that the improved quality of life would more than compensate for, well, not being able to buy stuff. I can't wait. I feel as if I've been flogging my guts out for too long now, and I need some space to relax and spend more time doing family things. Of course, I'll just spend the extra time writing, but what the hell, I'll cling on to the illusion while I can.
I had the best of intentions... The days are lighter, the weather has been unseasonably mild and sunny, and I found myself thinking it's time to dust the bicycle off and start cycling in to work - not every day, but when the weather's okay and time allows.
But the return to eating a gluten-rich diet has knocked me back a bit. Lovely as it is to be able to eat bread and pasta again, and not to have to worry about reading all the labels, I've been feeling rotten. The thought of getting on a bicycle just doesn't appeal, when any activity that might disturb my innards is best avoided.
And then I catch myself wondering if I'm not just being a little precious about it all. Last year I was much worse, and I still managed to cycle and go running, although perhaps not as often as I'd been doing before. I don't know...
I decided to have a go at Global Action Plan's "How Green Are You?" test this afternoon. The results would either salve my conscience or give me a kick where I deserved it. It tests you on a range of criteria, grouped into Energy, Water, Waste/Shopping and Transport. Turns out we're not doing too badly: a score of 72%. The average of those taking part is 60%, while values given in the different sub-areas (which I assume are values for the "normal" population) are more like 15%. I think I should have scored marginally higher, but some of the questions were a bit odd (like asking you whether you re-use all paper, just after asking if we recycle paper - if we recycle it, we're not re-using it, are we? and short of making a lot of papier mache there's not a lot of use for old newsprint, other than recycling, although we do use some in the garden).
So I can rest on my green laurels and not worry about driving into work tomorrow instead of cycling. Oops ... it's not meant to work like that, is it?
Things never move quickly, do they? But I suppose one important lesson of this shifting business is to let things happen at their natural pace and enjoy each stage. So we have seedlings in our tiny vegetable plot: some salad leaves, some radishes, and the potatoes just poking through. We have half a dozen leek seedlings ready to be planted out in a few weeks. I'd anticipated more, but we were using up the remains of an old seed packet and germination wasn't great. In the greenhouse we have four different kinds of tomato, and some more advanced salad leaves (we ate the first of these a few days ago). In the conservatory we have peppers and aubergines coming along. Not bad for a small garden.
Work on the house is slow, too. The kitchen has been delayed while we try to find someone to tackle the electrical work we need. It's getting a bit more pressing now, as we have people visiting in a couple of weeks...
And I re-panelled one wall of the conservatory, where rats had got in and constructed a lovely nest in the wall cavity. The rats have moved out, after a visit from the man from the council, and now everything's clean and sound again. I know they won't have gone far, as there are stables next door (yes, even though we're in the centre of town), but living in the conservatory wall is just a little too close for comfort.
The big development this month is the arrival of two hens. The oldest, Margo, is a Light Sussex - white with lovely black feathering around the back of the neck and tail. She's nine weeks old, and likely to start laying eggs within a month. The youngest, and a bit of a thug, is Barbara, a Buff Sussex about six weeks old. As you might guess from the breed name, she looks like Margo, only with a buff background colour, rather than white. We picked them up from a lovely little farm in Suffolk, with the happy assurance that if, by any small chance, one of the hens turned out to be a cockerel we could go back and swap... Margo is definitely a hen, but I've been looking closely at Barbara, and I think there's room for doubt there - the neck feathers look a different shape to Margo's, more pointed, which is one way of telling... We'll have to keep an eye on things. Several of our friends are planning to get hens this year, and I quite like the idea of having a stud cockerel to take round and serve all the hens of Brightlingsea, but I rather think our neighbours will be less keen on the idea of living next door to a cockerel. Particularly first thing in the morning!
The names Margo and Barbara? Yes, they're the characters played by Penelope Keith and Felicity Kendall in The Good Life. It seemed appropriate. I wanted Tom and Barbara, but we thought Tom might end up with a bit of an identity crisis. Although, if one does turn out to be a cockerel, perhaps that would have been more appropriate.
The birds took to their new home very well, which was a relief. No matter how much you try to get these things right, you still worry. Until I saw the two of them in there, I wasn't convinced I'd got the dimensions right, but as it turned out it couldn't have been much better: there's plenty of space for them to grow into. The plan is that they'll have the run of the garden a lot of the time when we're here, but I'm also aware that we'll be away at times, and their quarters need to be big enough to leave them in while we're not here. It wouldn't really be fair to ask someone to look after them when they're completely free-ranging.
The thumbnail pics below link to larger images, where you can admire the skilful way the hen-house incorporates parts of the old kitchen cupboards.
One further decision we've taken is to make some more compromises between the low-impact ideal and the practical. We're going to spend some time in Scotland this summer, which naturally involves plenty of travel. In addition to that, at the start of the trip I'm going up ahead of the family to spend a few days in Glasgow. To fit this in I either take extra leave and pay a fortune on the trains, or ... well, I nip over to Stansted and get a cheap flight. I still haven't quite decided, but everything's pushing me towards the flight. In any case, we've decided to make it a carbon-neutral holiday, so we're going to work out the carbon debt generated by the flight and the driving, and then pay for trees to be planted to compensate.
We're going to take this further, too, and each year perform the same calculation for our car use and pay for more trees. We should cover heating and electricity, too. I still intend to cut down on car use, of course, but I think this carbon-neutral approach is one way of taking responsibility for our actions without living too parsimonious a life. What I also intend to do is to double our tree payments each time, so that we're not only covering our own carbon debt, but that of some other family that couldn't care less.
It's not a solution, of course. I haven't done the sums, but I just don't believe everyone can burn all the fossil fuels they like as long as they pay for trees. But it's a smug middle-class way for some of us to at least feel we're doing something, and as a contribution it can help as part of a bigger picture.
In other areas, we're continuing to do pretty well. We shop at the local farmers' market, and benefit both from the feeling that it's a sustainable approach and we get really good food. And we shop at the local grocer, butcher, fishmonger, etc. We very rarely set foot in one of the bigger supermarkets, these days, and even then it's usually for something specific rather than for a big shopping trip.
Keeping track of the finances is difficult though. I don't think it's actually more expensive using local shops - from experience and from studies I've read, it seems that some things are more costly and some things are a lot cheaper. But I think there's probably something in the mind-set that lends itself to spending too much: you just pop out to the shops when you need to, rather than having a weekly shop, and I think that's where there's the tendency to over-spend. All those little decisions add up. Added to this, now that I'm part-time in the day job, we have less money coming in, so we need to crack down a bit.
It's good though. The lifestyle suits me, the quality of life so much better. It's Monday and instead of being in the office at the university, I'm at home. In a minute I'll check on the hens. Then I think I'll get my bike down and maybe go out for a ride along the sea-wall. And later, a few hours' work on the new book. I could get used to this.
Yes, I wrote here last month about our doubts concerning one of the hens. We've now been forced to rename Barbara Jerry, since s/he started crowing to greet the new day...
He's developing lovely long tail feathers and a thick red comb. His crowing isn't even terribly loud or raucous. But despite his many charms we can't keep him - not in the middle of town. We'd never get away with it once our sleep-deprived neighbours worked out where all the noise was coming from.
So the way we're looking at it is that we've given Jerry a pleasant few weeks in our back garden, and then he's going back to the farm where he was born. And we'll be replacing him with a hen. We hope.
We'll be calling the new one Barbara Too, and watching her very closely to see if she shows any of the signs Jerry showed...
On other fronts, I'm still undecided how to get up to Glasgow in August: the convenience and cheapness of a budget flight makes that likely, but I'm still looking at the rail option to see if I can afford it, and fit it into the timetable of where I need to be when. Closer to home, my oldest son, George, has been playing a very active part in setting up a campaign to make his school a Fair Trade School. He's only fourteen, and his energy and enthusiasm for putting something like this together are phenomenal.
I've had the last couple of weeks at home, taking leave from the day job in order to get my head down and do some serious writing on a new novel. It's gone well, and I've loved the lifestyle: time to do serious work, but also to walk kids to and from school and to do all those other things like cooking and pottering about in the greenhouse that I never manage to do as much as I'd like.
This really is the life.
Time flies, and all that. The hens are doing well, and keeping us in eggs; we've eaten plenty of veg from the garden, despite it being such a small plot.
I was given the all-clear for coeliac disease recently, which is great, although I'm still in the same position: wheat (and probably barley and even oats) makes me ill, so I do my best to avoid it.
The dilemma about how to travel to Scotland was resolved on the side of sustainability, you'll be pleased to hear. I decided against flying, and instead took a long, and very pleasant, train journey up to Glasgow. It required an early morning start, but if I'd gone for a plane I'd still have had to start early to get to the airport check-in in time. The rest of our family holiday did involve a lot of miles in the car - Orkney's a long long way! - but we'll be trying to make that as carbon-neutral as possible, as we're doing for all our travel. The holiday was fantastic: Orkney's unlike anywhere I've been before, and I'd love to get back up there some time.
Okay, let's have an end-of-year audit, then. How are we doing?
The aim: live by our principles rather than just talking the talk. This means trying to find a lifestyle that is as sustainable and ethical as possible, and trying to improve the quality of our life at the same time. If us lot are to have any hope in the future, we need to learn how to live life properly. All of us, not just the idealistic and committed.
In short, I think we're doing pretty well, although I have this nagging feeling that we could be doing better.
We very rarely set foot in a supermarket these days, and when we do it tends to be for something specific. Wherever possible we buy food that has been produced locally, in as sustainable a manner as possible. We eat meat again, after twenty years as veggies, but only where we know how it has been treated.
We grow food in the garden; our hens keep us in eggs (although not in the winter, when they take a break); we've even been harvesting fruit from the hedgerows to make wine. We could certainly grow a lot more if we took on an allotment. My concerns about this are (a) the amount of time it would take, and (b) that we would stop buying the good locally-produced stuff in nearby shops, removing our contribution to keeping that part of the local economy viable.
We've cut down our car use drastically. I use the buses to get to and from work these days and when it's not so cold and miserable I'll be cycling again.
We've also opted to pay for some carbon-replacement. We do use the car, we do use electricity and gas, and we're not likely to stop doing these things, so we make the calculation of how much impact in tonnes of carbon this has and try to offset this by paying for trees and other green energy projects. That approach is used far too readily to salve middle-class consciences, I know, but I think it's a worthwhile thing to do when you've already tried to cut down your impact first of all.
We get our electricity from a so-called "green" tarif - the RSPB Energy scheme. It's notoriously difficult to assess the merits of these schemes (electricity generators have a legal requirement to get a proportion of their power from sustainable sources, so there's always a danger that "green" schemes just feed into that instead of achieving anything extra). But in a recent assessment the Guardian seemed to think the RSPB scheme was pretty good, and at least it's generating money for the RSPB, too.
What could we do better?
We could grow more food. We could get rid of the car altogether. We could invest in better home insulation. We could, for that matter, avoid travelling altogether, but then part of our reasoning is that we want to live a sustainable life within society, rather than withdrawing from it!
I'm sure other things will occur to us, and we're always learning. And when we do, I'll write about it here.
Offsetting your personal carbon debt is a tricky subject for all kinds of reasons.
The idea is that you work out how much carbon dioxide emission you are responsible for and then do something to make up for it. That 'something' could mean planting trees (or rather, paying to have them planted on your behalf), on the principle that during its life a tree will lock a certain amount of carbon in its wood. If the tree ends up being burnt it will release that carbon, of course, but if it has been planted in a properly-managed woodland it will be replaced, so as long as it's an extra tree when first planted, it will cancel out a portion of your carbon debt. Another approach is to pay for energy efficiency schemes: as long as your investment in a scheme is extra, then that money will cancel out some of your carbon debt by preventing someone else's emissions.
All well and good, but you can see from my description above that there are already some questions and provisos involved. The investment has to be extra and not something that would have happened anyway; you have to be confident that your tree will be looked after and replaced if it's ever removed. And so on.
Another cautionary note was sounded a few weeks ago when there was a lot of UK press coverage of a report that pointed out that trees actually emit methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas. Tucked away in the depths of these reports was the point that the amounts of methane emitted, when compared to the amount of carbon locked up, were negligible, but hey, if you add up all the methane emissions of the world's trees and ignore all the carbon-locking it makes a good green-knocking story. So that's not really a cautionary note, then: the net benefit of tree-planting hugely exceeds any negative impact, but it's another cheap dig that we'll be fending off for years to come.
Back to the point... It's often argued that carbon offsetting is just an easy way to salve middle-class consciences: you can still jet to the Caribbean and drive your 4x4 on the daily school run as long as you plant a few trees. I'm in complete sympathy with that argument: I don't see carbon offsetting as the answer to the unsustainable excesses of western lifestyles. If everybody took the tree-planting approach to counter the damage they caused we wouldn't have enough land to plant all the trees on!
But it's certainly part of an answer, a step along the way. While we're in transition towards a low-carbon economy, anything we can do to make a difference has to be good.
We should all be minimising our carbon emissions first of all, rather than cancelling them out. But when we've insulated everything we can, when we've switched everything off or down and modified our travel patterns, our lifestyles are still the cause of substantial carbon emissions and that's where offsetting plays its part.
When we first started to do this, I looked around for the best way to offset our family carbon debt, and it wasn't easy to find a good solution: one that was clear, easy to use, and where we had confidence that it was genuine. Here are some of the options I found:
Climate Care - they have a carbon calculator, and allow you to invest in tree-planting and/or energy efficiency schemes.
The CarbonNeutral Company (formerly known as Future Forests) - the choice of celebrities, with a lot of experience in the field.
Woodland Trust - not specifically a carbon offsetting service, but they've had options for you to support tree-planting schemes for a long time now.
Oxfam Unwrapped - also not truly a carbon offsetting service, but among the gifts you can buy are fruit trees. Each fruit tree won't be as big as a forest tree, so won't offset as much carbon, but because it's providing food and/or income to people in the developing world you can be sure each tree will get the best possible care, and will almost certainly be replaced at the end of its life.
Another complication is that it's hard to work out your exact carbon debt, but that's not really a problem: this isn't an exact science. Try a couple of different calculators and feel responsible for the worst figure they produce. Or you could even calculate the debt of someone you know would never even consider modifying their ways and pay for their debt, too. Why not?
We ended up buying 50 fruit trees through Oxfam Unwrapped, and also making a donation to the Woodland Trust for tree-planting (choosing the latter because it's a charity, so they can claim back some of our tax to top up the donation). This goes way beyond our own carbon debt, and our middle-class consciences are well and truly salved for another year!
After a lifetime of voting for the Green Party wherever possible - only straying when tactical voting for someone else might actually achieve something, or when there was no Green candidate - I finally joined the Party this year. And started going to meetings. And ended up agreeing to stand for Colchester Borough Council in the May elections...
So,
here I am: the official Green Party candidate for High Woods ward. We're putting
up candidates in every ward in the town, which is an achievement in itself.
And it even seems reasonable to hope for one or two councillors this time round.
On the one hand, I'm hugely positive. Green politics (which is about far more than "just" green issues) needs to be part of the mainstream: it needs to be as much a part of the thinking of the traditional parties as it is of the Greens. A strong Green Party presence goes hand-in-hand with the greening of the rest of the political spectrum. It's good to be playing my small part in this movement, and I'm hopeful that the green view is ceasing to be the crank's view.
On the other hand... well ... isn't it rather depressing that while global tragedies like human-induced climate change are well established as scientific orthodoxy there is still so little green thinking among those in power? We're still in a world where Tony Blair can jet around the planet telling other countries to get their climate-change acts together whilst at home his government is completely failing on that very issue. We're still in a world where the Green Party would see the election of a handful of new councillors in May as progress, rather than a woeful indication of human shortsightedness.
We have to do what we can, right through from the personal level to anywhere we have influence, but we're still a long way from living in a world where ideas of sustainability and fairness are central to all decision-making, rather than the stuff of add-ons and gesture politics.
For more, see my interview on Anna Tambour's blog.
So: election day on 4 May.
The Colchester Green Party is full of energy and ideas, but we simply don't have the numbers to cover the whole town with a full campaign, so efforts were very much targeted for these elections. In the main target ward, we came a very strong second - particularly creditable given some last-minute panic campaigning by one party claiming the ward was a two-horse race (the Greens not being among those two horses) and that Green supporters were urging Green voters to switch to one of the "big" parties. I haven't met a single Green who was recommending that, but I have spoken to Green voters who - if they'd lived in that ward - would have switched their votes to the "big" party as a result. So: it was an effective ploy, but a shame they descended that far...
We also picked up good results in other wards, with a 22% in one of them, and beating Labour in almost half the wards. In my own ward, I trailed in 4th, with 4% of the vote. However, my ward was the only one in the town with a strong local community group: the defending councillor was part of the High Woods Group, and he romped in with over 1000 votes - take them out of the equation and I actually had a high percentage of the remaining votes, but still in last place... Politicians will put a spin on anything!
Nationally, Greens picked up, at latest reckoning, 14 seats which, on the one hand, is a quite admirable success. On the other hand, you can't help thinking how pitiable we all are if the Greens can only celebrate a handful of national gains. At the count it really was visible just how entrenched we are in traditional politics: people aren't going to do anything about sustainability until they're really confronted by the issues on a personal level. Is it really the best we can hope to achieve to pick up a few more seats here and there at each election?
The count itself was quite a fascinating experience: the level of organisation of counting twenty separate elections, the logistics of it all. The atmosphere was strange: the small groups like the High Woods Group and the Save the Bus Station group were really friendly about it all, as were the Lib Dems we spoke to. At times, though, I was reminded of being in the crowd at a football ground: the testosterone, the aggression, the triumphalism. At the count for the one Labour-defended ward, for a long time there was a line of Labour supporters standing over the table, leaning forward on their knuckles over the tellers, blocking the way to any other observer: it was like a rugby scrum - the rudeness and hostility was quite remarkable. But for the most part, it was interesting, and the people I spoke to were friendly and rather fatigued.
I came away from it feeling both dismayed at how far removed the people around me are from the issues that we should be tackling, and enthused to carry on doing what I can to make a difference. And knackered.
A couple of weeks ago we spent a large part of the day at a drumming performance: three African drumming bands playing in Brightlingsea, with my younger son Ed playing with them most of the time as well (he really is good). Great day. The event was raising money to bring the Elikem drummers over from Ghana in the summer. A lot of the drums were actually made by Elikem themselves, the drums now being imported on fair trade terms by www.elikemdrums.com
When I got home and let the hens out I saw that Barbara had a nasty gash on one foot: she was limping badly, and kept pecking at the wound, making it worse. I think she might have been spooked by the thunder storm that morning, hurt her foot on something and then spent most of the day pecking at it, making it worse... So, for her sins, she's spent the last two weeks wearing a plastic collar to stop her pecking at her foot. Poor bird: not the smartest of creatures, she kept stopping, noticing this plastic thing around her head and trying to back away from it, running and stumbling backwards around the garden. We didn't laugh. Much. All better now, though.
This month we finally got our hands on a second garden! We've been in the process of buying this plot of land, a couple of streets from our home, since the spring, but these things are never speedy.
It's not a huge plot - about 8 x 25 metres - but plenty for us. It was completely overgrown when we took it over, so what could we do but have a gardening party? So on a lovely sunny Sunday, we set up a couple of barbecues, prepared lots of food and took plenty of wine and beer and Pimms over there, then settled in for an afternoon of clearing and digging. In all, twenty or so of us gathered to do the work. Lots of progress was made - so much that we were able to plant out lots of vegetables the next day - and, more importantly, we all had a lovely afternoon. This really was a great way to start off.
Since then, we've been keeping on top of things and it's been good to see our plants establishing themselves. We're not really expecting to produce much there this year, as the serious digging and clearing will need to be done over the winter, but it certainly looks as if we'll be getting some produce from this new garden before too long.
