Race For The Prize

Ice on the glasshouse window on Tuesday morning forming gorgeous fern-like patterns

Pilsdon seems to have caught the competition bug. Whenever I glance at the announcements blackboard it has either an upcoming tournament calling for players or the current state of play of some ongoing challenge. So far it’s been limited to table tennis, darts, snooker and pool, but once we’ve tired of these indoor sports we’ll no doubt soon progress onto mud-wrestling, caber-throwing and morris dancing. In that order. Without a change of clothes.

Going into the snooker tournament I carried an unjustifiably heavy burden of expectation on my shoulders as this time last year I had somehow emerged victorious as snooker champion. This time however there are new residents who can actually play the game, and so I crashed and burned in the first round to the eventual second-placed finalist, who generously shared round his prize of a big box of Quality Street (though not the tobacco which came sellotaped to the lid). The competition winner received a trophy which all agreed looked nice but sadly couldn’t be consumed.

The competitive spirit has even entered the genteel Common Room, normally a place of fireside chats and tinkling piano. On Wednesday night I found myself there teaching the card game Canasta to eager participants who then proceeded to beat me and my partner which just goes to show how much luck is involved in the game. Although, as I pointed out the next day, there was no winner as we ended the game before they had reached 5000 points. Anyone who knows Canasta will attest to the fact that scores can swing wildly towards the latter end of a game. (Hmm, that competitive spirit seems to have infected me too.) Teaching the rules was made more lively by the fact that Wendy*, another volunteer, had been brought up playing a vastly different variant of Canasta which was apparently unique to her family, and yet every time I explained a rule that differed from her version she would exclaim in astonishment at how much easier and therefore less fun this game was than hers, and point out how the rules differed thus bewildering the poor learners.

Jenny, Roger and me. Can you guess which is which?

You might think that the gentle art of making marmalade was immune from any such bitter rivalry but not so here.  Last week we had bought a large crate of Seville oranges for this very purpose and so on Monday I recruited Jenny, Roger and Cyrus to help me make a big batch using 12lb of the oranges. That was too much for one pot so we split into teams of two, one pot each, and thus the competition began. Barbed comments were made about the thickness of the other’s peel-cutting. Later after the two pots of golden liquid had been poured into forty jam jars, there were jibes about how ours were setting better than theirs. There was even a hotly contested wager over the spelling of the word “marmalade” (Jenny was terribly upset when the dictionary revealed it is not spelled “marmelade”, and as punishment had to write it out correctly on forty labels). The end result however was entirely delicious. 

There was only one thing which could unite us and that was potatoes. It being Potato Day recently in Bridport, Pilsdon’s garden team made a special trip. Seed potatoes of many hues, shapes and personalities were on display in colour-coded buckets on trestle tables, behind which lurked the potato experts, doling out free advice to all and sundry. I fought through the crowds and bought ten Arran Pilot and ten Majestic for planting on my plot in Wales, while others selected different cultivars for planting at Pilsdon. Here at last we were united in our common love of the humble potato. Although once they’re planted I’m sure there’ll be a certain amount of friendly banter over how well each other’s spuds are sprouting.

Ice like stylised waves on a turbulent sea

*All names made up in this post.

Sweet Child O'Theirs

River at breakfast

There are not many circumstances in early 21st century life which afford the chance to witness every day the slow maturing and growth of a human infant, short of having your own. And the parents of young children are of course biased, not to mention sleep-deprived and frazzled from the unending battle of wills.  Nursery and primary school teachers only tend to spend a year with each set of little rascals.

Having a younger sibling is one way of seeing a child grow but often the age gap isn’t great. I was twelve years old when my brother was born so I can remember a fair amount about how the tiny ball of screaming unfolded slowly into a walking talking person, but of course I was far from being an adult myself.

Living in a community with a baby must be one of the very few other ways in our society that it is possible to see such a miraculous transformation day by day, over the months and years. I had been at Pilsdon just two months when River was born, in May 2012.  If you track back far enough in this blog you will find it happening. He is now nearly twenty months old and has acquired a vast range of skills, along with a fine mop of blond hair and a cheeky grin. Not only can he walk, he can climb onto a low table and wobble perilously until someone catches him. He has quickly learned the art of making his desires extremely clear and will brook no argument until they are fulfilled, no matter how inconvenient or arbitrary they may seem to everyone else.

Tricky to catch River being still enough for a photo

Conversationally River is at the single repeated word stage, but he understands a lot more than he can say. Ask him “Where’s your eye?” (which to someone learning English must sound like a single word “Warezyoray”) and he points at one of his eyes. When his mum told him that they would be visiting his favourite friend “this afternoon or tomorrow” he burst into tears at the injustice of not being able to go RIGHT NOW.  And when I ask him what makes honey, he beams and replies “Bee!”, at which I pretend my finger is a buzzing bee coming to land on his nose. (As I taught him this fact, it gives me a kick to keep checking he knows it.)

Honey, or “Nummy” as he calls it, is one of his two favourite things, the other being tractors. It’s got to the point that we try to hide the honey jar behind other condiments on the breakfast table but this rarely stops him from demanding Nummy as soon as he is carried into the dining room. I fear for whoever first tries reading him the story of Pooh Bear and the honey pot, as he is not going to allow it to continue without the provision of his own honey supply.

From a very early age River has clearly been the active and rambunctious sort. Not for him sitting still quietly playing with bricks. He loves interacting with people, and at Pilsdon he’s got plenty of us to choose from. On a recent short break in Devon with his mum and dad, he apparently kept repeating “pee-pol”. He wanted to be back amongst the adoring masses. It’s true, everyone has a soft spot for him, it’s impossible not to. He is just so cute. And yet if he remembers something he wants or if he detects that something is being denied him, he can switch from angel to screaming blue murder in an instant. At this point he is smartly handed back to his parents.

River has chosen new names for many of us - I am “Nangyan” for a reason yet unknown (is it my name in Mandarin?), Peter is “Teper”, Lillian is “Ninny”, Michael is “Googol”. He has yet to wrap his mouth around three-syllable names such as Carolyn or Jonathan but when he does he will no doubt improve them in some way. Hopefully the names will stick.  

As I am planning to live in Wales from March I will be missing out on his turning into a Terrible Two and the ensuing fun. I can only hope that when I return, perhaps this wintertime, he will recognise me, smile, point at me and say "Nangyan!" 

River a few days old

(Note: Parental permission obtained for this blogpost.)

The Lion Sleeps Tonight

An ice sculpture I made 

We walked into the inky blackness of the vegetable garden leaving the lights of the house behind us and set the telescope down where the paths converged. Up above us the heavens glittered. As our eyes adjusted, the scene above became less black, more silver, as the fainter stars became visible and the long blur of the Milky Way appeared. I oriented the scope towards the planet Jupiter, the brightest object visible. The only sound was the whirr of the electric motor as I centred the small ‘finder scope’ on it, then a few fine adjustments to locate it in the middle of the main viewfinder. The greenish globe jerked into view, and as the others took their first peek there were gasps of awe. We could see the bands that bisect it, but the “red spot” (actually a swirling age-old storm bigger than the Earth) must have been on the other side. Four of its moons, no more than bright dots, formed a line, three on one side of Jupiter, one on the other. The largest of them, Ganymede, is bigger than the planet Mercury. Scientists in the 1600’s made their first crude measurement of the speed of light using these moons.

Recently planet Earth completed another revolution of the Sun, or it did if you happen to follow the Gregorian calendar. (The Chinese have to wait another 28 days before they get to celebrate the first day of the Year of the Horse). It’s customary at Pilsdon to celebrate this event with a candle-lit three course dinner, after which everyone gathers in the Common Room for The Quiz and an open revue session of song, dance, games and spoken word leading up to the midnight fireworks. It’s probably similar to how the Victorians had fun, with no TV or radio, and everyone offering something to entertain the group. That analogy perhaps gives the impression of a rather worthy but joyless occasion, whereas in fact the opposite was true. We were in high spirits, and all without a drop of alcohol!

A Penguin

Alcohol was in more plentiful evidence at the nearby Monkton Wyld community the previous evening (not that I could partake as I was returning to Pilsdon the same night). By a huge shiny dollop of coincidence, a large group from Machynlleth, mid-Wales, had decided to come all the way down to Monkton Wyld for a few days - and I knew some of them well from my sojourn in Wales this year.  So I was invited along to their animal-themed fancy dress birthday party.  I had no costume but realised that I could just shake out my mane and it was immediately obvious what I was. Some face-paint daubing later and I was a bona fide lion ready to mingle with the penguins, tigers, fish, dragonflies and amoeba (I was tasked with painting the amoeba’s face... not an easy commission, I’m sure you would agree.)

A Fish

Over the next two days, four of my friends from the group came to visit me at Pilsdon and were given the grand tour of the site, a welcome opportunity to show them my winter home and chat about plans for next year. It was good to be able to link for the first time my Welsh world with my Dorset one. And somehow the thought of returning to my caravan in March seems less daunting now - I have friends up there waiting for me to return.

'Tis The Season To Wear Cardies

A Christmas selfie

It isn’t often that one’s vocabulary is challenged and broadened by a Christmas jumper. Often the only challenge such a gift can provide is how to remain convincing whilst affirming how much you like it (not the case this time as I actually do rather like this natty black and white cardigan - thanks Mum!) but concealed within this one is a small white label whose red text reads: “DUE TO THE NATURAL STRUCTURE OF THE KNIT A CERTAIN DEGREE OF PILLING WILL OCCUR”. 

This left me a little nonplussed. Was it a typo, and they meant “PILING”? If so what was going to pile onto what? Would I be crushed? I suppose it would depend on exactly how heavy “A CERTAIN DEGREE OF PILING” would be. A little more accuracy wouldn’t have gone amiss.  But if not a typo, then what does it mean to "PILL"? Surely it can’t refer to the consumption of the little medicinal capsules we are so prone to lobbing down our gullets at the slightest head-twinge or gut-gripe? It was hard to see how the structure of my jumper could affect the quantity of paracetamol I’m about to consume.

A quick internet search put me right. It means “BOBBLING”, a word that presumably didn’t carry enough gravitas with whoever it is whose job it is at the fine company of Bench to come up with the warning label messages. I am guessing that this is someone different from the person who was able to write “Music and laughter is the lifeblood of our consumers, and us too” in the ‘About Us’ section of the Bench website. I imagine that that person would choose the word BOBBLE over PILL.  

Along with millions of others, I spent this Christmas with my family, up north. To be clear, my family did not have millions of people stay over. The millions all went to be with their respective families, in-laws and out-laws, and that’s just as well really as it would have been difficult to get everyone to agree which channel to watch. In fact we seemed to spend more time playing miniature table-tennis than watching TV, which in our minds at least helped to offset the heavy calorie intake and got the adrenalin pumping almost as much as a good bout of University Challenge.

Pilsdon's Christmas tree in the Common Room

If it’s the season to be merry, it’s also the season to be thankful, and I am profoundly grateful to have both a loving family, and a warm and welcoming home in the shape of the Pilsdon community.  There are many who have neither. 

If you needed a reason for Pilsdon to exist, you need look no further than the two young guys who turned up here separately last Friday. Both had come to a crisis in their lives and both could easily have ended up on the streets during the horrific weather of the last few days, had they not been referred to Pilsdon by social services. 

Initially they were offered a weekend which was then extended to the full Christmas week, and both of them are now applying to become residential guests as they realised how much a sojourn at Pilsdon, removed from the temptations of drugs or alcohol, could help them put their lives back together.   It certainly puts my pilling worries into perspective.

The Great Indoors

After the uproar inadvertently caused by my blogpost last week which prompted an unprecedented number of comments (three plus my replies, so far), I feel I ought to tone it down a bit today and steer clear of any potentially hazardous topics or who knows, I might jeapordise my very existence at Pilsdon. One of the tree-hugger lobby might decide they’ve had enough and decide to do something they might regret (or worse, not regret). Besides, I have had a request from a faithful French follower of this blog to expand on the subject of Pilsdon’s glasshouses which, if I can steer clear of any mention of the three birch trees that are growing dangerously close to the back of the large one, should be pretty safe ground. Here goes.

Broad beans and lettuce in the large polytunnel

Pilsdon is well endowed with indoor growing space. There’s the large glasshouse (40' by 16') which featured in last week’s notorious blogpost, and next to it is the big polytunnel (50' by 20') which a whole team of us re-skinned, re-doored, and laid down concrete paths in the spring of 2012. Tucked away on the other side of the orchard is another polytunnel (65' by 12'), narrower but longer than the first, and then there are two small greenhouses which we use for raising seedlings until they are ready to be ‘transplanted’ into the soil somewhere (either outside or in a polytunnel/glasshouse). Seedlings are often started off in one of two electrically-heated germination cabinets in the potting shed; we use nine or twelve-celled plastic trays filled with sieved peat-free compost from the local garden centre and carefully (or recklessly, depending on who’s doing it) pop a seed in each cell.

Garlic and broad beans in the big glasshouse

Stuff we only tend to grow indoors: tomatoes, aubergines, sweet peppers, chilli peppers, i.e the real warmth-lovers. And stuff we normally grow both indoors and out in the fresh air: cucumbers, courgettes, french beans, runner beans, squash, pumpkins, beetroot, carrots, and more.  We have recently tried melons and okra in the polytunnel but neither were a great success. 

After harvesting, all the soil indoors has manure or compost dumped on it and dug in - Pilsdon is fortunate in having a constant supply of muck from our cows and pigs that we let rot down over a year or so.

Another view of the glasshouse - the dormant vines just visible at the back

Each year we plan what goes where. To keep things simple, what gets sown in the large glasshouse and polytunnel are simply switched each year as they are both of similar size. So in 2013 the large polytunnel had the french & runner beans, garlic, squash, cucumbers, okra and beetroot while the large glasshouse had the tomatoes, aubergines, peppers and early potatoes. This two-year rotation hinders any veg-specific diseases building up in the soil, although normally a three or four year rotation is recommended (we practice a four-year rotation in our four main outdoor beds). The glasshouse also has two beautiful one-year-old grapevines at the back, one for white grapes and the other red, whose recent brush with death for the sake of a couple of trees is dealt with elsewhere. Bill sows whatever he feels like in the other polytunnel.

It also pays to squeeze in an extra harvest in the spring by sowing indoors in the autumn - the extra warmth and shelter allows some veg to grow successfully throughout the winter. So in April and May this year Pilsdon were eating loads of delicious fresh broad beans, cabbages, cauliflower and spinach that I’d sown the previous September (I missed out on eating them by moving to Wales in April, sadly). The over-wintered broccoli and beetroot didn’t yield so much.  This autumn we were a bit late but even so we have serried ranks of broad bean plants pushing their way into glory, three stately rows of garlic, some directly-sown spinach poking their noses up and in the small greenhouse some young cauliflower (27) and cabbage (36) in celltrays, not mature enough to go in yet.

The 'small' polytunnel, currently with green manure growing (field beans and mustard) that will be dug in to improve the soil

None of our greenhouses or polytunnels are heated. In the depths of last winter I had to prop most of the broad bean plants up with sticks as they were flopping over in the bitter cold, but they all survived. 

Winter is a good time to carry out those maintenance tasks that are so easy to put off. The concrete floor in the big polytunnel allows easy sweeping and a cleansing with water. The big glasshouse windows need a good clean with a long-handled mop (ours has a jet attachment to direct water on at the same time). Any broken panes are replaced (we had a couple blow out from a small greenhouse during last month’s big storm). Rips in polytunnel plastic are taped up. I’ve heard of people fumigating their greenhouses with a sulphur candle to kill all fungal and bacterial nasties but that’s generally not an option for us as there’s always some crop or other in there.

Now to sit back and wait for all the angry comments to flood in from those offended by the idea of killing fungi...

Battle of the Plants

Sunrise at Pilsdon

There is a war raging all about us and very few of us know about it. Even those of us living in the countryside where the fighting is the most intense are on the whole blissfully unaware. We can idly gaze at a landscape of wooded dales, bubbling brooks and verdant fields and believe that it is the very essence of peace and order, where the very opposite is in fact the case. We are looking at a battlefield. The combatants? Trees and plants.

OK, I’ll admit the action isn’t exactly Spielberg, but the long slow struggle is nevertheless real and deadly serious. The life of each tree or plant is at stake. The competition for the vital resources of sun, water and soil is intense.  Different species have their own strategies for survival, but all are bound by the same obvious constraint - they cannot move from where they were born. Wherever fate placed them, they have to make the best of it. 

Trees and grass are mortal enemies. When trees grow to maturity the sun won’t reach the ground beneath.  And in your average wood you are witnessing a race for the sun between trees themselves, as they try to out-grow each other to put their topmost leafy branches above the others. Some tree species such as beech and holly are ‘shade-bearing’ in that they are tough enough to cope with cover from taller trees, but many others such as oak, ash and chestnut demand the light and if they don’t get it, they don't thrive.

Humans often meddle with what grows where, normally for very good reasons such as to grow crops for food, or to manage a woodland. Being aware of the relative needs of each plant or tree for light, nutrition, warmth and water is vital for the success of either enterprise. The idea of companion planting, i.e. growing two species of mutually beneficial plants next to or literally amongst each other, often relies on one growing and maturing faster than the other so the first can be harvested before the other species is troubled by lack of light.

Pilsdon's large glasshouse

Birch trees at the back

The conflict between tree and cultivated crop came to a head in Pilsdon’s garden this week, and brought head to head the opposing philosophies of tree-hugger and gardener.  There are three birch trees growing quite close to the back of our large glasshouse, and I pointed out at the weekly garden meeting that their roots were now reaching into the soil inside the glasshouse, competing with the young grapevine that I had planted a year ago. My suggestion, to fell the nearest of the three trees, raised the hackles of all those present who consider native British trees sacrosanct, particularly since Pilsdon apparently has very few trees to call its own. The counter-suggestion, to uproot the vine, buy a new one and plant it at the other end of the glasshouse, seemed calculated to produce a similar amount of annoyance in me, and succeeded. After a group inspection of said tree, and long and heated debate of a scale only matched by global summits on climate change, a compromise agreement was finally reached.  The tree would remain but any of its roots heading into the glasshouse were to be cut.  

Trench warfare

A day later I carried out this savage task with spade, fork and saw. The grapevine can now grow unhindered and since the tree roots were not large the hope is the birch will not be unduly harmed. I hope that a few years from now, Pilsdon residents will clink together their glasses of grape juice and raise a toast to the saviour of their vine who rescued it from an early and ignominious demise.

If You Should Go Down To The High Street Today

If you are feeling hug-starved, you could do worse than join your local Greenpeace group and don their polar bear costume on a busy late-night-shopping evening with a sign around your neck saying “Free Bear Hugs”. I know what I’m talking about, I did exactly that two days ago in Bridport. Not because I was feeling particularly hug-hungry, before you all start to take pity on me, but because I was helping on the Greenpeace street-stall and the job fell quite literally on my shoulders.

Immediately I was transformed from a hairy man to a hairy bear, and was quite amazed by the throngs rushing up to me to get their hug. We’re not just talking children here. I had the whole age spectrum from tots to grannies. I had to hug low, hug high, hug wide and narrow. I hugged a whole troupe of teenagers in one go. Even the occasional grown man stepped up for a hug, usually accompanied by a throwaway comment such as “not often you get to hug a polar bear”. And this was all before 7pm - any later and I’m sure alcohol would have driven far more into my white furry paws.

The polar bear is of course just a sympathetic emblem of the true awfulness of what is happening at the top of the world. The entire Arctic habitat is slowly disappearing, melting into the sea. Not just polar bears but narwhals, seals, Arctic foxes, snowy owls and many other unique creatures face oblivion in the wild. And the Great Arctic Melt itself is an emblem of the climate disaster unfolding everywhere, as the world’s average temperature inches upwards. 

You might think humanity could solve this issue as we are, we like to think, pretty smart as a species. There are (at least) three big problems though:

1) The disaster is unfolding extremely slowly. Our attention span is too short. Three years ago the British PM could say that he wants his coalition administration to be “the greenest government ever” and expect it to win votes. Now the vote-winning policies are about easing the cost of living and environmental issues are slipping down and off our government’s agenda.

2) The cause of the warming is the very thing which makes our lives comfortable and which the globalised economy is driven by (namely, oil and gas). To completely remove our dependence on fossil fuels and switch entirely to renewables is a mammoth undertaking that would require all national governments to work in tandem to change the way everything works. Our corporo-democracies are unfortunately not up to it.

3) Fossil fuel companies have enormous resources at their disposal and have become adept at using their wealth both to lobby governments to allow them to continue extraction and exploration, and to quietly fund climate-change deniers who muddy the climate debate with half-truths and outright lies. When someone tells you that you don’t need to deal with the huge mess in front of you because it’s actually all ok really, the temptation is to believe them.

So is it for nothing that I hugged half of Bridport in a furry suit? Well at least I felt needed for a while! And maybe a few more people are reminded how humanity’s actions are impacting our planet. Change can only come when enough people stand up and make themselves count.