archive for March 09
Friday, March 27th, 2009
Mouse has got into a habit of yowling around 5:30am, the sound carrying through both doors from the living room, to wake Matt up and get him to go and feed her. I can’t hear it, but it annoys him enough to have to go and silence her with food. Bad Mouse! He’s determined not to be controlled by a mangy old cat though, so we’ve shut both doors securely tonight.
She’s going through a plaintive noisy phase, so I think I’d better take her to the vet soon. She might be warning us about another oncoming bladder infection.
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Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
Many of us are reading Andy’s blog from Japan. He is an avid writer, but it looks like he may have hit some kind of danger zone!
Had an epic blogging session yesterday, then slept really badly having nightmares in which I had to blog everything before I did it.
How cool is that?
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Monday, March 23rd, 2009
Matt invented a nice new cocktail last night… it’s got a good bitter citrus pre-dinner tang to it.
Tangerine Dream
75ml freshly squeezed tangerine juice
25ml Manderine Napoleon
25ml Juniper Green gin
5-10ml Rosehip syrup
5ml Campari
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Tuesday, March 17th, 2009
Matt and I were at the BFI this evening watching Winstanley, an excellent 1975 film about Gerrard Winstanley’s Digger commune of 1649. It’s the 360th anniversary of the Diggers this year.
The Diggers were agrarian anarchists inspired by Winstanley’s writings and actions, it was just after the Civil War, Charles I had been executed, and England must have felt pregnant with political possibilities. Winstanley argued that the earth “was meant to be a common treasury for all, not a private treasury for some”, and he inspired a very practical egalitarian communal living, stressing the value of hard work and self sufficient dignity over accepting social inequality and charitable handouts.
His philosophy was thoroughly rooted in christianity, but with a good focus on the “republic of heaven”, heaven created in the here and now by the common people, as opposed to a far off heaven promised by the priests and landowners as a reward for a lifetime of poverty.
Priests lay claim to heaven after they are dead, and yet they require their heaven in this world too, and grumble mightily against the people that will not give them a large temporal maintenance. And yet they tell the poor people that they must be content with their poverty, and they shall have their heaven hereafter. But why may we not have our heaven here (that is, a comfortable livelihood in the earth) and heaven hereafter too, as well as you? … While men are gazing up to heaven, imagining after a happiness or fearing a hell after they are dead, their eyes are put out, that they not see what is their birthrights, and what is to be done by them here on earth while they are living.
This sparse, black and white film portrays this short lived and very English revolution really well. What is particularly striking is the weather. There is lots and lots of rain, and mud and dirt, and hard work. I came away with a strong sense of a movement that was rooted in the cold wet realities of the English climate, nothing glamorous or romanticised about it, pulling together in poverty and hardship to build these communes on scrubby patches of common land, facing the clean wealthy disdain of the propertied and professional classes.
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Thursday, March 5th, 2009
I’ve been cycling through Premier Inns over the last few days. Glasgow to Newcastle to Wakefield: Premier Inn all the way. It’s strangely comforting, the same bland spacious light rooms each time, the same soulless pseudo-pub attached, same beds, same bathrooms, same mini tubs of UHT milk (“it tastes like real milk!”), even the eternal car park view from the window. The thing is, when you’re in a hurry, on business, and you really need reliable access to the internet every evening, these places are incredibly useful. They do a very good bowl of porridge for breakfast too.
There are some small variations: the Glasgow Premier Inn overlooked a splendid dark grey stone graveyard, a great counterpoint to the brittle brightness within. Here in Wakefield where I sit brooding in front of my mirror and laptop, we are located in the ‘rhubarb triangle’, a small 9 square mile triangle of land where only a few decades ago, 90 per cent of the world’s forced rhubarb crop was grown. The Premier Inn’s concession to this glorious circumstance of climate and history is to serve a few tubs of low fat rhubarb yoghurt as a breakfast option in the morning.
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Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
How about that. Cadbury’s have suddenly announced that Dairy Milk is to go Fairtrade by the end of the summer. They sell 300 million Dairy Milk bars every year, this will triple the amount of Fairtrade cocoa coming from Ghana. It will also bring the Fairtrade mark into every newsagent across the UK.
At a stroke it has transformed the economic and political landscape around my job. It’s interesting for me working where I do at this time, and weird.
I thought I would feel happy about this, but I don’t. I actually feel a bit sick about it. Like I’m witnessing a big glacier moving inexorably forwards and I’m not sure what it’s going to crush.
Fairtrade is a means to an end, and that should be to put real power in the hands of producers, and make global trade and food systems sane and just. The massive concentration of market power in the hands of large corporations is part of what is wrong with the global food system. I don’t think that having the chocolate market in the UK entirely dominated by three companies (Cadbury, Nestlé and Mars) can be part of a vision of long term structural change, even if all three committed to 100% Fairtrade transactions.
This move will increase UK Fairtrade sales by a fifth, it’s a huge development and will enrich and empower farmers across West Africa. But while these big players bring mass mainstream reach to the movement, they never push the progressive frontier forwards, they are not interested in opening up innovative new ethical markets, they are not genuinely committed to producer ownership and participation in their core business. So it’s important that they do not damage those who are the catalysts of real change.
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