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Wednesday Oct 28, 2009

Heading East and remembering my roots

It's been a while since my last post as I've been battling Swine Flu, taking belated summer holidays and moving house. London is a transient place, but when I told the people in my Transition Town I was moving East they all tried to pursuade me to stay!

In fact the last time I saw them I was on my way to meet my new housemates. Jo and I visited my potential growing project to try and think up a solution to the non-progress that was being made. It felt like a handover: we spoke with the woman who runs some courses there and Jo realised that if she went straight to the owners of the site it may be possible to organise something concrete. In retrospect it needed someone with her rational mind and experience and she got on to the housing trust straight away.

Afterwards we met up with a family from Texas who wanted to start a Transition Town in Houston. They are faced with a city literally divided by a big freeway, between the rich and poor sides of town. It seems almost impossible to set up communities there due to the urban sprawl where every trip is a car journey to the centre of town and little satellite shopping districts are virtually non-existent. This is a stark contrast to London where pockets of communities mean people can shop and live locally without relying on cars.

We sat in the park and discussed the challenges of this before I said goodbye. This ties quite nicely with our meeting tonight on local transport. I'm really looking forward to seeing my old community again, they really started to feel like a family! As an avid cyclist and being anti-car it's also an issue I'm really interested in.

In the meantime I have to think about finding a new local community. A woman I knew from another environmental group recently gave me a web link to an umbrella group called Hackney Environment Forum. I've been trawling the website, which has a wealth of events in my area, and I've already decided to continue my food growing passion and volunteer in a tree nursery and edible forest garden project. If you live in London and you're interested in the environment a really useful site, which lists all the environmental projects happening around the city, is http://greenmap.london21.org.

I personally can't wait to get stuck in to some planting again! 

Posted by Laura ( 5:06 PM )
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Friday Oct 23, 2009

Baked Apple Meringues With Orange-Soaked Raisins

Phew! Well, after a few weeks of being entertained by members of the general public and waxing lyrical over depressed peacocks, I can confirm the latter part of October is turning out to be party central down at Heeley City Farm, with events and talks planned left, right and upside-down. This can only mean one thing: preparation, which roughly translates as: everyone running around like ninnys.

I’d barely had time for my weekly whinge about the weather, before I was sent scooting down to the South Yorkshire Energy Centre, where they were midway through Energy Savings Week and also midway through a mini-crisis.

I was pointed in the direction of a formidable stack of promotional literature and industrial-sized envelopes, all emblazoned with the addresses of local schools. The following Saturday was ‘Family Fuel Busters Fun Day,’ where people could drop in and make such delightfully random things as pedal-powered smoothies, recycled jewellery and draft excluders that look like dragons.

After swiftly bundling up the promotional material, I then had the UK’s postal system to contend with. Were the big, brown envelopes classed as letters, large letters, or packages? And what weight category did they fit into? (Besides the obvious, ‘darn heavy.’) Thankfully, Heeley City Farm had weighing scales and a strange, cardboard construction. I had to play post-lady and pretend to mail the envelopes through this odd creation, in order to discern whether they could slip “freely” through your average letterbox. After much um-ing and ah-ing, myself and three other members of staff decided that we didn’t have the foggiest (although we all agreed the packets were “really heavy” and were probably going to cost “a lot” to post.) So, it being the kind of icy-bright winter’s day that I have a particular fondness for, I offered to nip up to the post office and have the packets weighed, measured and pretend-posted-through-a-fake-cardboard-letterbox by the Professionals.

Of course, as soon as word got out that I was heading to the post office, I found myself battling against an avalanche of letters that everyone else on the farm needed posting. So, I procured myself a plastic bag, filled it with the tonne-and-a-half of said letters and set off for the post office. After groaning, huffing, and eye-rolling my way down a queue of near-apocalyptic proportions, I was rewarded in the best possible fashion when the lady at the counter enquired whether I wanted a receipt. “Oh, yes,” I said, grinning (probably a little inappropriately, given the I’m-just-here-to-post-a-few-letters situation) at being able to sound like I had an Important Job “then I can put it on my expenses.” The lady at the counter looked decidedly unimpressed, and I vowed to start wearing more Professional clothes to my volunteering, just in case such an occasion arose again (or at least to replace the neon pink laces in my trainers, with conservative black ones - that’d fool those pesky postal workers, for sure!)

Upon hopping back to the South Yorkshire Energy Centre, it became clear that mailing out all those leaflets had left the reception room downstairs noticeably depleted of informative literature. A quick root around in the filing cabinet, and I located all the master copies, nipped down to the main office and churned out leaflets giving useful tips on how to cut down your energy consumption, whether in the kitchen, travelling to work, or fiddling around with the thermostat at home. Of course, with energy saving and recycling being the themes of the day, I am happy to report all the photocopies were on recycled paper, and some of the leaflets were even printed out half the size, so we could fit two on one page! Environmentally-savvy indeed (although, after cutting the 110th leaflet in half, even my fiercely-held save-the-trees ethos began to shake a little!)

And then, something truly terrible happened. It was approaching home time and I was becoming rather fixated on the thought of mushroom lasagne for tea, so I began chatting to one of the Energy Centre workers to make the time-until-lasagne go quicker. Apparently, she ran healthy eating workshops and was due to begin another cycle in a few weeks’ time. Each session was two hours long; the first hour was for preparation and cooking, and the second was when the group came together and ate their healthy, home-cooked meal as a whole. Since I was photocopying pretty much everything in the Energy Centre except the desks and the biro pens, I inquired whether she needed anything photocopying for her course, while I was on a photocopying roll. She did. Tragically, half an hour before lasagne-time, what she wanted photocopying were recipes.

Pudding recipes.

The recipes came complete with pictures of said puddings, and with scrummy titles, such as Baked Apple Meringues With Orange-Soaked Raisins; Wholemeal Apple And Blackberry Crumble; Baked Pears With Maple Nut Sauce; and Rhubarb Coffee Cake.

After twenty minutes of keeping my eyes firmly averted from pictures of Cherry Almond Scones and Banana-Spice Cookies, and a quick session of folding flat-pack ‘Heeley City Farm Events’ sheets into handy, take-away leaflets, it was time to head home. But not before nipping into the farm café and grabbing a slice of chocolate cake before I left, which possibly wasn’t the lesson I should have taken from photocopying all those ‘healthy, low-fat dessert’ recipes, but I’m going to attempt to make Baked Apple Meringues With Orange-Soaked Raisins at home this weekend. Just to balance out that chocolate cake, you understand…..

Posted by Jessica ( 6:50 PM )
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Monday Oct 12, 2009

Peacocks Do The Funniest Things

After my last blog turned into something of a 'Random-People-You-Meet-While-Walking-Around-A-Farm-With-A-Hammer Say The Darn-dest Things' I decided that the only logical course of action, was to do an animal-based instalment.

Now, I know it's hard to believe, but before I started volunteering at Heeley City Farm I had no idea what a hormonal peacock sounded like. During the mating season, peacocks flare out their beautiful, brightly-coloured tail feathers in a timeless, regal and elegant display - and then emit a sound somewhat like a bag-full of ill-tempered cats, only with added notes of strangulation, distressed infant, and honking goose.

For the past month, it seems I've never been more than ten metres away from the farm's resident peacock. And, it seems he's never kept his beak shut for longer than ten seconds. There was initially something comical about the sight of him honking furiously away with tail-feathers at full-mast, while his peahen lady friend went quietly about her business, completely oblivious to his display. However, his angry-feline-meets-car-horn tones quickly began to get on my wick.

Then, one day I arrived at the farm and couldn't quite shake the feeling that something was amiss. I clicked and tapped away at the office computers for a while; I shredded; I helped one of the teachers devise an educational, recycling-based board game for her afternoon class; and still I felt out of sorts. And then it dawned on me: it was too quiet. With a sinking feeling that life was about to become far too Hollywood Tearjerker Movie for my liking, I looked out of the window at the duck pond, where the peacock had spent many hours happily making a racket.

There was no peacock.

Before the wailing strings could start up in my head, I glanced to the left, and there were the peacock and peahen, in a brand spanking new enclosure directly next to the pond. After breathing a sigh of relief that life wasn't as melodramatic as the movies, I realised that the peacock's silence had a moping, teenage quality to it, and was instantly smarting with indignation. I'd have sold my Facebook account for a place of my own (as in, my own house, not my own cage) and there was that ungrateful bird, sulking, when he'd just had his own private cage handed to him on a plate! I fumed to my nearest member of staff (while stressing that it wasn't the cage I was jealous of, but what it represented) who then told me that I shouldn't be so harsh on the poor, throwing-a-strop peacock, because he was depressed.

Why? Well, the peacock was depressed because he was missing the ducks.

It turns out the ducks and the peacock had been involved in a dysfunctional friendship that had culminated in all five ducks leaping onto the peacock's back and hanging on while the peacock spun around, trying desperately to shake said ducks off. Naturally, my heart sank to have missed this spectacle. The peacock's insistent honking, in turns out, had not all been aimed at impressing his lady-love. It had been partially the result of increasing tensions between him and his flatmates. I felt slightly guilty for all those times I'd winced at the racket and shot him irritated looks. While living in halls at university, I'd made a fair old ruckus if someone used my milk, or didn't wash the frying pan properly - but at least my flatmates had never attacked me en mass, leaping onto my back and forcing me to spin around to try and shake them off, shedding fist-fulls of feathers in the process! Although, one did have a habit of using my cooking oil, which was equally annoying.

Thankfully, the farm's anti inter-species-bullying radar was far more acute than mine, and they'd removed the peacock and the peahen from the duck enclosure pretty sharpish. Apparently, problem solved - but, in life nothing is ever simple. Ever since, the peacock had been subdued, moping around and being uncharacteristically uncommunicative. The ducks too, had been acting out of sorts, and had taken to lying next to the new peacock enclosure, bills thrust through the bars and beady eyes turned mournfully towards their favourite frenemy.

While the moral of this story could be: 'you don't know what you've got until it's gone' or 'you can't live with some people, and you can't live without them,' it could equally be 'don't honk more than you absolutely have to, or else you may just end up being separated from the ducks you were honking at, only to discover you were enjoying the drama, and now you're stuck with the peahen, who's actually really boring.'

Thankfully, I can report that both birds have since settled into their new home. The ducks no longer spend hours standing sentinel and are back to splashing happily around, and the peacock has even started honking again. The peahen is still oblivious to everything the peacock does; and I'm back to having a peacock-induced headache. Good times.

Posted by Jessica ( 1:13 PM )
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