Restoring Mayberry

The Girl

2012-02-13T04:10:00.002Z

The hardest thing is striking a balance. I want The Girl to learn the things that are truly important, not what her peers think are important. I want to encourage values not commonly taught to girls today. I want to prepare for the future I genuinely expect, and not what we are all told to expect.

On the other hand, a child learns from family, teachers, classmates, television and books, and those influences can complement mine and allow her a more normal childhood. Moreover, she is her own person – having a child is like getting married, in that you can influence the person you love, but cannot write them like an article. I bring my own lessons, and everyone else in her life brings theirs.

Now, going on eight years old, she shows a diverse set of influences. She plays with Barbies and ponies, watches CBeebees and Thundercats, and wants to marry Justin Bieber --- yes, he’s here too. She seems to get on with her classmates at the village Catholic school, and be a normal girl. At the same time …

***

She asked for a stay-up-late movie night, and when I asked what she wanted to watch, she said “Buster Keaton!” She particularly loves 1923’s The Balloonatic, in which Keaton fails in his attempts to impress the lovely Phyllis Haver. I think she likes the fact that Haver is a woman but competent at fishing, chopping wood and fending for herself, traits not common in female characters even today.

***

The Girl wanted to play school before bedtime, so I pretended to be the teacher, and she asked that I teach her more about the first animals, in what we call the Second Age. In the First Age of the world, I explain, there were only germs -- the Second Age came when the germs organised into the first germ cities – bodies, including ours. She loves the bizarre and oddly cute beings preserved in the Burgess Shale-- trilobites, wiwaxia and opabina – whose whimsical forms speak of God’s youthful experimentation.

“I’d like a cuddly Wiwaxia sometime,” she said. Maybe we’ll make one, I said. And is there such a thing? I thought. Of course there is. We’re not alone.

***

She also wanted to know more about how to keep valuables safe. Where do you think the best place to hide something would be? I asked.

“In a cow magnet!” she said. She knows that farmers here feed cows magnets, which are designed to sit in the cows’ stomachs and gather up all the bits of scrap and barbed wire that the cows unintentionally suck up with the grass. The resulting clump of metal sits in the cow’s rumen as long as the cow lives, and my checking this informs me that it’s called a pseudobezoar.

That’s brilliant, I said. Nobody would think of looking inside a cow. Of course, you wouldn’t get it back for a while.

“That’s okay – when I get it back, I’ll get supper out of it too.” She said.

***

She had reading to do for school, but she wanted to do it while pretending, and right now she’s into Victorian times. We talked about Mary Anning, the girl only a little older than she, who was the most skilled fossil-hunter of her age, and who meticulously uncovered the archosaurs embedded like bas-relief sculptures in the cliffs of the British Isles.

Then she pretended to be Princess Alice, daughter of Queen Victoria, arriving to inspect an Irish school in the days when Britain still controlled this land.

“You be the schoolmaster, Mr. Bogbroth,” she said. A very Dickensian name, I said, and explained who Dickens was and that it was his 200th birthday today. Could I get a more appetising name? I asked.

“Okay, the teacher can be Mr. … um …. Muntor,” she said, using the Irish word for teacher.

Okay, I said. As Schoolmaster Muntor, I introduced Princess Alice, and she read her school assignment to the invisible class before us. She then spun a story in which Princess Alice had gone lame, and Mr. Muntor, using pieces of his student’s desks and bicycle wheels, invents the first wheelchair.

What began as a stage aside during our in-character dialogue grew into a full tale, as she was carried by the momentum of her story. I put my role aside and observed her attentively, as I will one day do with her life: no longer the main character, but the audience.

Sunlit path

2012-02-08T07:24:00.000Z

The apse of my favourite cathedral.

Time Machine

2012-02-04T23:43:00.000Z

“I have a time machine,” said The Girl, holding up her tent.

We talk a lot about the way people lived in earlier eras, as we walk together and talk about the plants we see. I’ve casually explained that, whether in Denmark or Australia, a million years ago or a few thousand, people lived mainly by gathering wild foods, hunting, fishing, and – lately – planting and herding. We look at books to see how Egyptians built their houses or what kind of meals Romans ate.

What ages have you visited? I asked.

“A Long Time Ago,” she said, capitalising the words with her voice. “Back to the Way Things Were, in the Time of Our Ancestors.”

How long ago? I asked.

“Three years ago,” she said dramatically. “When I was four.”

Life was simpler then, wasn’t it? I said.

Photo: The Girl on a street in Dublin, on one of our weekend outings.

Dublin wall

2012-02-01T23:57:00.001Z

I work across from the Guinness brewery in Dublin, a cluster of massive 19th-century brick buildings with a maze of narrow cobblestone streets and alleys running in-between. It is perhaps not the cheeriest neighbourhood -- damp, pungent, with sunlight falling in thin shafts between the barrelhouses.

It does, however, have old cobblestone streets, wooden gates and horse carriages clopping by -- and, as we walked through the streets to lunch today, a teenager smoking a cigarette while riding a horse down the road. And, if I turn an unexpected corner, I come upon something like this picture.

If you can't read it, it says, in giant letters four metres up the wall, "STONE UPON STONE UPON FALLEN STONE," and then in the Irish language, "CLOCH OS CLON CLOICHE OS CLON CLOICHE LEATHA."

I'm not certain what it means, but I like that such a thing exists for its own sake.

Worms

2012-01-28T22:41:00.001Z

A few years ago the British government announced that, in a time when global hunger is increasing, one-third of food in the UK is thrown away uneaten. That is about three billion pounds a year wasted – a part of the estimated one metric tonne of waste per household per year.

Of course, everyone will have some kitchen waste – no one wants to eat the potato peelings or woody stems – but throwing it in with the rest of the rubbish is a ridiculous solution when there are so many allies happy to turn it back into soil.

At the same time, many people have another problem; they want to grow their own food, but have the thin, poor soil of many suburban housing estates -- builders’ waste covered in a thin veneer or topsoil and turf. To grow things properly, many people need to build up their soil with organic waste.

Fortunately, these problems can solve each other, and there are already volunteers ready to help in your neighbourhood. They will work hard for you 24 hours a day without complaint, they are experts at turning kitchen waste into great soil and they work for free. They are worms.

We got a wormery a few Christmases ago, when we were staying in a flat while we built our home. Moving to a home in the country made a compost bin more sensible than a wormery, but it worked well for us while circumstances demanded, and we recommend it for many urban and suburban residents. It came in an easy-to-assemble kit – the bin, a stand, an interior tray and – snug in a plastic bag with air holes – the worms. We lay them gently in the tray inside the bin, spread a bit of peaty earth, shredded newspaper and a bit of kitchen waste around them, and then let them settle in.

A medium-sized wormery can process several pounds of organic waste a day – that’s several pounds you don’t have to put in bins, wrap in plastic and put outside in the cold; that won’t take up space in the landfill; and that won’t worsen climate change.

When the temperature dropped, we wrapped insulation around the bin and placed cardboard over the top to keep them warm, and they seem to still be going. According to worm experts, they slow down below eight degrees Centigrade (46 Fahrenheit) and stop altogether below five degrees (41 Fahrenheit). The outside temperature can go five or ten degrees below that, however, and they can still be all right if the wormery is sufficiently insulated. If you live where it regularly goes below freezing in the winter, you can bring it inside or into the shed – a well-maintained wormery should not smell foul.

A few things are not suitable for the worms. They don’t like high-protein dishes like meat, cheese or beans, acidic waste like citrus peels, too much grass, or pet poo. A little bit of these things can be okay, but not much. Most wormeries also come with an alkali powder of some kind in case the compost gets too acidic, and I'm told that seaweed, crushed eggshells or fireplace ash will also help. You can tell if it starts to smell or if you see tiny, threadlike worms. The worms – called potworms in Britain – are harmless themselves, but an indication of a problem.

One nice thing about a wormery bin is that most have a valve at the base for draining excess water -- “worm tea,” which is about the colour of tea and, diluted, is excellent for watering plants.

We’re slowly learning a bit about self-sufficient country life, but in all candour, it’s hard work. Most of us are inexperienced at physical labour and traditional crafts, and none of us are getting any younger. We would be well advised to accept free help wherever it’s given, and to cultivate a staff that will do some of our work for us.

Photo: Earthworm from Wikicommons.

Dublin at dawn

2012-01-24T21:28:00.000Z

Bridge over the River Liffey.

Day out with seven-year-old

2012-01-21T23:55:00.003Z

I have been enjoying chopping wood this winter; it’s wonderfully cathartic way to warm oneself twice. The Girl has been helping, waiting at a safe distance with her wheelbarrow, and then when I give the signal she collects the pieces, pushes the wheelbarrow to the house, knocks on the front door and asks my mother-in-law, “Did you order some wood, ma’am?”

****

On the way to the hardware store today, we played “Name the Animal.” I said I was thinking of an animal that was around until very recently – until humans -- was a mammal but had a shell like a turtle, and was the size and shape of our car.

“Glyptodont!” she said. Excellent, I said – I’m proud of you. Your turn.

“I’m thinking of an animal that says ‘Moo,’” she started – cows or puffins, I thought – “and it has wings” – definitely puffins, I thought – “and has no legs.”
Umm … says moo, has wings and no legs? I asked. A flying snake that does a really good cow impression?

“No!” she said scornfully. “A puffin!”

Puffins most certainly have legs, I said. All birds do.

“No, Papa – look closely and you’ll see they just have feet,” she said. A few minutes later people in the car park looked at us curiously, as we walked past arguing about how long legs have to be to qualify as legs.

****

The Girl rarely is without her Mama or myself in the evenings or on weekends, but tonight I was taking my wife on a date.

“You never take me on a date,” she said petulantly.

Really? Who took you to see Meet Me in St. Louis? I asked. “You did,” she said, trying not to smile.

Who took you to the panto? “You did.”

Who reads you fairy books? “You did.”

Who’s taking you to the library right now?” “You are,” she sighed.

Who do I most want to go with in all the world? I asked. “A certain me,” she said smiling.

Photo: The Girl and her friend exploring lichens in the bog near our home.

Glendalough

2012-01-17T07:30:00.000Z

Winter vitamins

2012-01-14T23:35:00.002Z

For thousands of years before refrigerators and packaged food, people across the world needed to make food last through the winter. Starches present no problem; dried, grains like wheat and rice can last decades. Protein can also be made to last; beans can be similarly dried, , meat can be salted, pickled and smoked, and of course animals can be slaughtered during the dark months. Vitamins, found in fresh plants and lasting only a short time in the body, present more of a challenge.

Luckily, there are several ways to get fresh vitamins all through the winter, first by fooling the vegetables, as it were, into thinking they’re not dead yet. This year, for example, we ripped our cabbage plants out of the earth whole, roots and all, keeping some soil attached. We removed the dark outer leaves and hung the cabbages upside down in our shed, and they kept for at least two months. A thin layer of leaves grew brown and mouldy on the surface, but once those were peeled off the cabbage was fine underneath.

We have also kept root vegetables in boxes of sand, which keeps the root alive and free from pests, and of course they will keep for a while without such measures. Many crops can simply be left in the earth until they are needed, and some are even better for it – we just pulled out our parsnips, as they are better when sweetened by frost.

After that, you can preserve fruits and vegetables in a medium in which fungus, insects and harmful bacteria don’t want to live. You can keep some fruit and vegetables in brine, away from oxygen -- salt pickles and sauerkraut. You can preserve others in an acid solution like vinegar, like sweet pickles, onions and chutneys. You can pour yeast into fruit or vegetable juice, and the yeast turns it into alcohol for us, preserving it indefinitely. You can preserve fruit or vegetables in a high-sugar solution, as syrup or – with pectin to firm up the consistency – jam.

All these methods preserve food that was grown in earlier months, but you can also continue to grow fresh food though the winter months. One method is to grow sprouts – not Brussels sprouts, but beans or seeds that have been soaked in water and begun to germinate into seedlings, as they would in soil.

Sprouting might be the only kind of kitchen gardening that almost anyone can do, almost anywhere. Growing your own food sounds great for rural and suburban landowners, but presents problems for urban flat (apartment) dwellers, renters, lodgers, squatters and prisoners – and more of us might find ourselves in one of those categories in the tumultuous decades ahead.

Sprouts, however, require no land, yard, garden, tools, infrastructure or practice. You can grow them for almost no money – a 500g bag costs me 1.60 euros, or about 40 cents per lunch. They grow in plastic bags, pottery, bowls or almost any other vessel. The vessels can be placed on a shelf, in a desk drawer, under the couch, in the boot of your car, in a closet a hole in the ground or any other cool dark place. The crops come to fruition in a few days rather than a few months, and can be eaten with no cutting, peeling, cooking or preparation. What I’m getting at here is, you have no excuse for not growing sprouts.

You can sprout the beans or seeds of most edible plants – I favour mung beans -- but avoid any plants whose leaves would be toxic, like tomatoes or potatoes. The details of how to sprout will vary depending on what kind of seeds and containers you have, but the basic idea remains the same – keep the seeds wet until they are a good size to eat. School-children are often told to let them lie on a wet paper towel, but I use plastic throwaway tubs from an Indian restaurant in a nearby town. The tubs have a sealable lid, and I poked two holes just below the lid on either end. The holes are high enough that I can submerge the beans in water, yet allow the soaked beans to breathe – plants need to breathe just as we do, and an airtight container risks creating dead and moulding sprouts.

In my case, I rinse the beans first, and then let them sit in a tub of water for about 12 hours or so – it can be as little as three hours or as much as 24, but 12 seems to work best for mung beans. Then drain the water and let the beans sit in the damp tub for the next few days, rinsing them at least once a day and preferably twice -- the beans need to be kept moist but not swimming in standing water. Every evening when I come home from work – and every morning when I have time before catching the bus – I fill the tubs with water, turn them on their sides, and let them drain. If you forget for a day or two the beans will probably recover, but tend to start growing roots, making them tougher and less tasty.

In addition to mung beans I recommend lentils, although they grow a day or two more slowly and I find them less tasty. I occasionally sprout the seeds of fenugreek, broccoli, alfalfa, or clover, but generally find them too expensive in this country for the small amount of sprouts they yield, and they run a higher risk of moulding before fully sprouting. I found larger beans a problem -- Adzuki beans were even slower and less tasty than lentils, and soybeans – the common sprout of Chinese stir-fry – has a tendency to decompose before there is enough living sprout to make it worth my while.

You can grow other indoor crops besides sprouts, however. Chicory, for example, makes a great winter salad, and can be grown in your closet. Start by planting chicory in your garden in spring, and letting its broad green leaves grow out all through the summer and autumn. These green summer leaves are edible, but left uneaten; you need them to slowly feed the root underneath.

Then, around November, decapitate the leaves off the plant, dig up the now-massive root, plant it in a bucket of soil and set it in the closet or other cool, dark place. Plant the top of the root even with the surface, and make sure the soil is damp but not soaking. Place another bucket upside-down over the first one to make sure it is kept dark inside.

The plant has spent all year storing energy in the root to grow more leaves in spring, and when placed in warm soil begins to sprout vitamin-rich leaves. The leaves will be white and with a milder flavour than green chicory, although still slightly bitter.

Ideally, you should get a full head of white leaves, like a small cabbage, in a few weeks. Our leaves weren’t so tidy – they came up at different speeds and looked more like an unkempt head of hair -- but tasted fine all the same. You should get a few crops of the chicory from each root, and if you grow many plants and stagger their crops you can have a continual supply of winter vitamins.

This crop is not as widely applicable as sprouts, for to get the roots you first must have a bit of land and patience to grow the leaves through the year untouched and then see if you can get results from the roots. Also, I just learned this week to check your chicory regularly and harvest the leaves regularly; leave them for a few days, as I did, they can go bad quickly.

Still, the leaves are excellent as a thinly-sliced salad mixed with cabbage and celery, in a white sauce of either mayonnaise mixed with lemon juice or – if you want a lower-fat option – home-made yoghurt. You can add a bit of cumin or vegetable stock to make it more savoury, or dill and mint for a cooler flavour, depending on your taste.

We in the modern West have grown up surrounded by mountains of food – grown, picked, processed, preserved, cooked and refrigerated for us, and in such quantities that a third of it is through away uneaten, and obesity presents a major health crisis. Fossil fuels made this brief state possible, and now that we see their end on the horizon we must reacquaint ourselves with the more basic methods of getting nutrition -- ideally allowing more of us, not just to survive, but to eat well.

Top photos: Our chicory shoots this winter. Middle photo: Our parsnips we fished out last week. Bottom photo: Bean sprouts.

Winter branches

2012-01-07T23:49:00.000Z

Note the line of ferns growing out of them.

My Girl loves home-grown vegetables

2011-12-31T20:30:00.000Z

Shown here giving the cabbage a hug. Happy New Year, everyone.

Oiche Nollaig

2011-12-24T13:41:00.002Z

As we endure December's frenzy of obligations and expenses, I find it important to take time off with the reason for the activity – my daughter. So the other day we took a long bus ride to Dublin, to see a panto.

We never had pantos in the USA – certainly my spell-check keeps underlining the word as I write this – but they are a major event in every Irish childhood. A panto is a vaudeville-style play for children, short for pantomime, filled with songs, broad comedy for children, and double entendres and political jabs aimed over their heads at the parents.

The typical panto takes a fairy tale or other well-known story – Jack and the Beanstalk, Aladdin, Sleeping Beauty, even Robinson Crusoe. The story is adapted for the panto’s stock ingredients: a cute young couple in love, a bumbling old king or father, a man dressed as a middle-aged woman, a cackling villain and a group of backup singers. The villains are the real stars of any panto, singing the best songs and played by well-known media personalities here.

My daughter and a few hundred other children laughed at the slapstick, held hands at the scary parts, sang along with the songs and cheered at the end -- and when they asked for volunteers from the audience to come up and dance with the cast, I went up on stage at my daughter’s urging.

It was 4 pm and night when we emerged into Dublin again. We listened to the streetside musicians play whistles and spoons, and stopped in Temple Bar for fish and chips. As we walked under strings of lights that read, “Nollaig Shona Duit” (Merry Christmas), and she held my hand tightly.

“This is the best Christmas ever,” she said. “Don’t you think, Daddy?”

“So far,” I said. “But just wait.”

Photo: The River Liffey in Dublin at afternoon sunset. Oiche Nollaig = "Christmas Eve" in Irish.

Classic Cinema and Our Future

2011-12-19T22:32:00.002Z

Invited to a Halloween party a few years ago and at a loss for a last-minute costume, I put on my most raggedy suit, bought a cigar, applied three strips of greasepaint, and walked in the door as Groucho Marx. If you think you know where this is going, don’t worry – everyone else dressed in costume too. Unfortunately, I thought Groucho would be as iconic and recognisable as Elvis or Dracula, and not one of my educated, middle-aged neighbours had heard of him.

Of course we were in Ireland, where cultural touchstones can be different, but more and more North Americans, I find, have no familiarity with classic movies either. I rarely see them in my local DVD stores or libraries, with a few predictable exceptions: a John Wayne movie or two for elderly men, a now-colourised musical for women, and the inevitable Three Stooges. Exceptions like It’s a Wonderful Life loop endlessly in holiday marathons until they become white noise, no matter how relevant in this time of bank failures.

Perhaps this is understandable; most people these days find the conventions of black-and-white movies as alien as Kabuki theatre, familiar only from decades of countercultural spoofing. Many times I have eagerly attended the rare revival, from Dark Victory as a teenager to Metropolis last year, only to cringe when the dramatic scenes reduced the audience to horse laughter. Young people might do well to explore old movies, though, for as we enter a time of austerity they might turn out more relevant and prophetic than anyone realises.

I don’t mean science fiction films from that era, with their now-hilarious predictions of flying cars and domed cities. Nor do I mean recent science fiction, which in the 1970s took the same apocalyptic turn as our religion and our politics, until by now most rental stores have a single section for “science fiction/horror.”

In defence of Zombie Apocalypse movies, our society is facing some serious problems. We have built a world where almost everything depends on fossil fuels — cars, air travel, trucking, shipping, heat, electricity, plastics, and fertiliser. We use more fossil fuels every decade, yet their supply is limited, and many experts, including the U.S. Army, predict a crunch in the next several years. The coming decades will probably bring more outages and shortages, along with weirder weather and economic shocks, problems that will all feed on each other. Energy alternatives like bio-fuels, nuclear, wind and solar might allow us to live with the per capita energy of 80 years ago rather than 180 years ago, but nothing will spare us from having to make do with less.

Post-apocalyptic fiction, though, assumes everything will disappear, overnight, ridding the world of the people we don’t like and leaving us with all the world’s toys. The reality will probably be less horrific and cinematic; fossil fuels will probably abate over decades, and the greatest danger will be enforced simplicity for millions of people mentally unprepared for it.

That’s where movies come in – and television and other media, but I’m focusing on movies. Most of us spend most of our waking lives staring at glowing rectangles, and we weave our mental landscape of the world from media images like birds building a nest from scraps. When I read accounts of Thermopylae I still see 300, and even when I read Gandhi’s original writings I still picture Ben Kingsley.

For movies to help us prepare for our real future, though, it has to show us what such a world could look like, and neither Star Trek nor Zombie Apocalypse fiction help us show people struggling to pay the mortgage, irrigate the crops and hitch a ride to town. We do have thousands of movies that do show us this more limited future, though, because they were made in a more limited past.

Some films of the 1930s and 40s included Busby Berkeley-style fantasies, of course, but most had to show people a world they recognised, and in the details of backgrounds and dialogue we can glimpse a very different America. For one small example, take 1932’s Grand Hotel: Joan Crawford’s character eats only one meal a day, the most she can afford, while Lionel Barrymore’s dying character wants to treat himself to the finest luxuries the hotel can offer, “my own bathroom, like rich people.”

Or take the scene in 1943’s Tender Comrade where Ginger Rogers describes to Robert Ryan the kind of normal life they would have when he returns from the war: a garden where they could grow their own food, with chickens in the yard. It’s not the kind of dialogue we’re likely to see in a war movie today, but it should be. And when our soldiers return, they will have to rebuild their old lives, reboot their marriages and rediscover their children – a story Hollywood told well in 1946’s The Best Years of our Lives.

As another example, take King Vidor’s 1934 film Our Daily Bread: a young couple can’t pay their rent, and neither can most of their friends. They have inherited some land but can’t pay the taxes, for no one is around to cultivate the property. Someone realises the two problems could solve each other; they and their friends can move to the land, build a new life and split the profits from the farm.

I haven’t seen many films about working people trying to get health care — unless I watch 1938’s The Citadel. More people must care for elderly parents, but I don’t see many films dealing with the problems that causes, outside of 1937’s Make Way for Tomorrow. And has any recent film showed the down-and-out as heroes, as in Meet John Doe, The Grapes of Wrath or I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang?

To most people I talk to these days, old movies seem hopelessly corny and unrealistic – and obviously some had dated references, poor dialogue, or simply have not aged well. Their depictions of African-Americans appropriately offend modern sensibilities, as does the sight of white actors playing ethnic roles. I don’t recommend them if you’re trying to quit smoking, either; even in The Citadel, one surgeon hands another some cigarettes, saying “they’ll calm your nerves.”

Classic films also treated courtship and language with a gentleness that seems strange to us today, now that our mass media have spent four decades celebrating every new broken taboo as a victory against The Man. Are films with graphic sex and gore, however, more realistic? Is that what your life is like?

In fact, movies of the 1930s and 40s, despite their innocent image, show a grimmer world than we are used to seeing. Frank Capra’s movies have become synonymous with Norman Rockwell Americana, but their bright moments were powerful because they were surrounded by darkness, their decent characters – John Doe, George Bailey — framed, harassed and pushed to suicide and madness.

Ironically, I grew up with old movies because of this misconception; for conservative Christians in the 1970s and 80s, classic movies made safe entertainment, so my brothers and I grew up knowing Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Stewart the way other children know rappers or wrestlers. We passed every supper with trivia contests, with games our parents and grandparents had created. In one game we were given two actors – say, Charlie Chaplin and John Wayne – and had to link them with the shortest possible number of co-stars. These days I’m sure someone has a web site and algorithm to tell you instantly, but we had to calculate on the spot that the answer was one: Paulette Goddard.

Yes, it’s the Kevin Bacon game; years later a bunch of college students patented it, marketed the idea and gained fame and fortune. No, I’m not bitter.

In another game, which we called Rotunda, we started with a film and two co-stars – say, Claude Rains and Jimmy Stewart – and then each of us took turns bouncing through co-stars, from Jimmy Stewart/Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story to Cary Grant/Mae West in She Done Him Wrong and so on. The goal of the game was to make your way back to the first actor you named, but to anticipate several moves ahead, so that only you, and no one else, would reach the crucial link to Claude Rains.

This love of movies stayed with me over the years; I worked as a film critic for a newspaper chain for a while in my twenties, which sounds like a dream job until you realise how many bad movies you need to sit through. Depressingly, I found that the quality of movies has deteriorated over time; take the best films of any year, and they do not outweigh the products of even a single month of, say, 1941.

Of course such a sweeping and subjective statement will not match everyone’s tastes, and of course film technology keeps improving, each decade bringing a new kind of animation, CGI, 3-D or some other way to wow us. Few films today, though, seem to rely on great stories; they have become spectacles, as silent movies were, rather than well-written plays. Moreover, any one of them cost enough to make a hundred films like The Thin Man or The Maltese Falcon, even accounting for inflation. Few filmmakers today, rolling in wealth and with the godlike power to create whole worlds onscreen, do as much as John Huston or Woody Van Dyke did with a cardboard set.

And this brings us back to living on less. When the Great Depression hit, movies shifted away from the big-budget fantasy spectacles of the 1920s into more modest and realistic fare. In part they were responding to the demands of newly invented talkies, but also to the desires of an increasingly desperate and politically radical America. Hollywood saw an intellectual movement – imagine! – of writers and directors determined to tell useful stories by and for ordinary people. American films have never been more well-written or resonant than in the 1930s and 40s, because they have never been more gently and consciously populist.

Such ideals drew accusations of Communism even then, and some of those writers and directors did become entangled in the misguided intellectual causes of the 1930s. “A surprising number,” though, write authors Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner in their book Radical Hollywood, “came straight out of Middle America and made their choice on old-fashioned moral grounds.” There is a reason old movies are so sentimentally cited by Glenn Beck and Pat Robertson as symbols of a better America, and why the growing neo-conservative movement in the 1970s asked an old B-movie star to be their figurehead.

Movies and other media have become spectacles again, and as we move into something far greater and deeper than a Depression, I long to see well-written, idealistic stories about regular people coping with the long emergency.

I want to see films for all ages, devoid of hip countercultural irony. I want to see low-budget teleplays in which today’s equivalent of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland put on a show to raise money to build allotments in the old park, a new series of Dead End Kids movies in which modern versions of Tommy and Milty cajole the neighbourhood association to allow pigs in the vacant lot.

With a future this severe bearing down on us, movies might seem like small potatoes; if we do face a future of widespread poverty, of course, we should all attend to fundamental human needs, and save the old lady rather than the Mona Lisa. But few things can stick in the thoughts of masses of people as well as movies and television; when I referred to a “Star Trek future” or a “Zombie Apocalypse,” you knew just what I meant.

And they are one of the last things we do in community. I took my seven-year-old to see Buster Keaton’s The General at a rare showing yesterday, and while she chuckled when I showed her clips on YouTube, we had tears in our eyes laughing with an auditorium of people. It felt like a good football game or a revival tent, with waves of emotion rippling over a crowd, and for a brief moment in the darkness you are reminded that we’re all in this together.

Originally published at Front Porch Republic.

Neighbour's thatch house

2011-12-18T23:52:00.000Z

Father Christmas, homesteader

2011-12-11T01:14:00.001Z

This time of year, my daughter has one favourite story: Raymond Briggs’ Father Christmas, the story of Santa’s rounds on Christmas night. It’s one of my favourites as well, if for different reasons.

In this graphic novel, silent but for a few grumbles and greetings, there is no Ms. Claus, elves or secret toy-industrial complex. Father Christmas, here, is an old man living in apparently contented solitude, dutifully venturing out yearly to make his deliveries. He endures storms, fog, sleet and high winds across the world, complaining the entire way and occasionally strengthening his resolve with a drop of liquor.

Such an unsentimental portrait might sound depressing, but it makes Santa more human, and more comprehensible to my daughter, than the usual laughing caricature. Briggs makes him a hard-working man performing a service we value; Briggs could easily be showing the daily routine of a miner, a fisherman or a farmer. At one point Santa passes a milkman also making deliveries, and they exchange pleasantries without stopping – and even on Christmas morning, the milkman must make his rounds as well.

What I particularly like, though, is that Santa seems to live on a homestead. He starts his morning by using the outhouse – at least, it’s a toilet outside in the shed -- and gathers hay for the animals. He is pleased to find two winter eggs from the chickens, and has breakfast with tea. He puts coal in the small stove, similar to the one we use to burn our bog turf. You wouldn’t be surprised to see a vegetable garden or greenhouses out back.

The book doesn’t say where he lives, although children here believe Santa lives in Lapland, in Finland, rather than at the North Pole as American children do. From the tea to the Christmas pudding, though, it looks like working-class Britain in the mid-20th century, the “deeply conservative land” that David Kynaston pieces together from diaries in his impressive Austerity Britain. It’s the Britain G.K. Chesterton or C.S. Lewis might have recognised, the life an old man might have lived in Britain when the book was written in 1973.

Father Christmas and Austerity Britain would seem two very different books, but they both focus on the similar cultures, eras and intimate details of living – supper, chores, schedule. Minutiae like this bring earlier eras to life in a way most histories miss, and offer a casual vision of an austere but civilised world that we would do well to revive.

In a small room Father Christmas sleeps under quilts, in long johns, with a hot-water bottle, for heat was precious. The bed-stand looks of rough wood, as though he carved it himself, and on it he keeps his teeth and a wind-up alarm clock. He puts talc powder under his arms instead of modern deodorant. The concept of a carbon footprint was decades away when the book was written, but without adding anything for flying reindeer, Santa’s would be close to zero.

As he makes his rounds, we see English farmhouses by moonlight, and my six-year-old points out the details she recognises --- bicycles, water barrels to catch rain from gutters, sticks crossed in the garden for peas to climb. Sometimes Santa has to crawl out of the stove, for people cooked with wood or coal and the oven went to the chimney.

That world was already fading when Father Christmas was published in 1973, and the encroaching modern world seems to confuse Santa. He struggles to find entry into a caravan – a trailer or mobile home to Americans – and he gets tangled in someone’s television antenna. We wondered about things like this as children -- how many of us had ever seen a home with a chimney, much less a sleigh?

The whole story, of course, made more sense when it was gaining popularity in the 19th and early 20th centuries; most children were familiar with sleighs or lumps of coal, and hung their stockings by the chimney anyway, to dry. The oranges we received in our stockings were meaningless to us in the 1970s but precious to our forebears; they were from exotic lands. In “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” Mama was in her kerchief and I in my cap because the houses were cold. Children a century ago would not have found such details cryptic, any more than they would stables and mangers.

Today it might seem like that world has been completely forgotten. As we inched up the energy needle, our mainstream culture abandoned most of its traditional holidays -- Midsummer, Candlemas, Twelfth Night, May Day and many more – and swelled Christmas from a night to a shopping “season.” Christmas movies and television increasingly portrays Santa’s “workshop” as an assembly line, while news pundits annually track the spending numbers like telethon hosts.

Yet people can’t completely forget a more traditional world this time of year, not amid so many traditions. It is at this time of year that modern people are most likely to attend a church, visit otherwise distant family, cook their own food, knock on the doors of their neighbours and other once-commonplace actions. It is the time of year when people are most likely to sing, and sing songs meant to be sung by ordinary voices together. Even the black-and-white movies often replayed this time of year, while not as old as Christmas trees or "Greensleeves," hail from the simpler foothills of the energy needle.

When we take pleasure in these things, we peek through cracks in the wall of stress and excess and see another, older world on the other side, and realise there is another source of comfort and joy.

Girl by the old castle wall

2011-12-07T23:37:00.001Z

Back from London

2011-12-05T23:17:00.002Z

Attended a conference for my day job.

Saw The Mousetrap.

Stayed in the Hostel of the Surly Russians.

Ate an amazing coconut soup from a Malaysian restaurant in the West End.

Had coffee and blood pudding in Soho.

... and most importantly, fulfilled a lifelong dream: visited the Natural History Museum.

More soon.

Top photo: Back street in Kensington. Bottom photo:Underground station.

Drying

2011-11-28T22:45:00.001Z

Say “dehydrated food” and people think of army rations or those little pills people eat in science fiction, but you probably have many dehydrated foods at home already. All grains are dehydrated, for example – rice, oats, popcorn – along with powdered grains like flour or cornmeal, and grain products like pasta. Most beans and lentils come dried, as do staples like salt and sugar. Most people also are familiar with raisins, sultanas, sun-dried tomatoes, dried herbs and, of course, tea. You can dry all kinds of food outside of these, however, and it remains one of the most effective and efficient ways of preserving food through the winter.

Vegetables can be dried, even those parts we don’t ordinarily eat fresh. Broccoli, cabbage, carrots, parsnips, kale – all these can be dehydrated and saved indefinitely as ready-to-go soup ingredients. The dried vegetables can also be ground into powder and mixed into soup or bread, adding to its nutrition. Meat is difficult to dry in this climate without a dehydrator, but if you have one you can make jerky, a source of protein that can last for months at room temperature without spoiling.

Dehydrating food saves money, allowing you to spend cents on what would ordinarily cost several euros (or whatever currency you use). A can of soup, for example, has more salt than you need in your entire day, is exorbitantly expensive for the amount of nutrition you receive, and costs perhaps three euros. On the other hand, you could keep enough dried vegetables in your pantry for months of soup, all for no money and a little effort, with no salt, no chemicals and plenty of nutrition.

Herbs can be dried, of course – basil, oregano, thyme and dozens of others. Other plants can be dried for teas – nettles, dandelions, mint, and chamomile. To dry them be sure to pick them when they are fresh and already somewhat dry – that is, not after it’s been raining, which is not easy in this country. Then shake off any moisture, pat them off with a towel, tie a string around the stalks and hang them in a cool dry place like your pantry. Don’t hang too many at once or the herbs will just go yellow without drying properly, as parsley did with me this year. If you can get your hand around the thickest part of it, you should be fine.

Teas can be made from almost any dried edible leaf, flower or fruit, but a few are particularly well-suited: clover, dandelion, bramble shoots, nettles and sage all make good teas. Mint, fennel, dill and anise are good for stomach problems, while chamomile flowers are good for relaxing before bedtime. You don’t need to make just one kind of tea – take a variety of herbs and mix them together, perhaps with a bit of honey or fruit juice. Remember that you generally need a lot of leaves to give boiling water taste and colour, compared to black tea.

Every autumn most people will have a glut of excess fruits and berries around them, most of which will go to waste. Dehydrated, however, and they can last the rest of the year – apple rings, blueberry raisins or whatever you like. If you have a dehydrator, you can also dry mashed fruit into fruit roll-ups. All these make nutritious sources of vitamins through the winter, and a dessert-like snack for children.

To dry apples, cut out the core and then slice the fruit half a centimetre thick. To slow the oxidation that turns the fruit brown, you can dip them in lemon juice first or place the slices with a candle in an upside-down jar – the candle will go out, but all the oxygen in the jar will have been removed. Then you can hang the apples or set them on a lightly oiled tray in a ventilated area if it’s warm and dry, or – more likely here in Ireland --- over a fire or in an oven set on low, with the door open slightly.

If you need a dehydrator, there are some available online for around 50 euros and up, and if you use it regularly it should pay for itself in short order. To use a food dehydrator to dry fruit and vegetables you want to select produce of good quality, as overripe produce might not work well. Cut them into similarly-sized pieces, as this will ensure that everything dries evenly. Some people find it better to blanch vegetables in boiling water for a few minutes first – check what your dehydrator recommends, and then experiment.

People have been preserving food as long as they have been eating – drying, fermenting, pickling, smoking – but in the last few decades people have abandoned all these in favour of one device: the refrigerator. Fridges and freezers remain handy, of course, but they have limited space, require constant electricity and cost money, so we might find it worth our while to remember how to preserve food in other ways if necessary.

Note: My job is sending me to London on business later this week. Will post more when I return.

Ha'penny Bridge

2011-11-23T07:23:00.000Z

Across the River Liffey in Dublin, taken the night we saw Juno and the Paycock.

Will post more soon.

Riding through town

2011-11-16T21:33:00.000Z

A loss for all of us

2011-11-15T13:07:00.000Z

Scholars at the Irish non-profit Feasta have talked and written thoughtfully about the Long Emergency since the 1990s, long before the term was invented or most people had heard of the concept, and for years its most prominent spokesman was Richard Douthwaite.

His book The Growth Illusion criticised our exponential expansion twenty years ago, at the moment when it was perhaps least fashionable. At a time when few people had heard of peak oil or climate change, and they were mostly wrestling with apocalyptic fantasies, Douthwaite wrote engagingly about the economics of the Long Emergency, considered how we could transition to a stable world, and worked hard to engage the public and government officials.

I hear echoes of his prophetic ideas when I listen to Chris Martenson, John Michael Greer and Dmitri Orlov -- the last of whom I saw speak with Douthwaite at Feasta's 2009 conference in Dublin. I don't know whether any of these people were inspired by Douthwaite or came to the same ideas independently, but regardless, Douthwaite was a man before his time.

He died yesterday, and we will be less without him. Thank you for everything, Mr. Douthwaite.

Bulding in Dublin

2011-11-12T22:54:00.001Z

Able Hands

2011-11-07T23:08:00.003Z

When my neighbour brought his horse to the farrier – horseshoe-fitter, pronounced like “carrier” – I sat in to watch and learn, and the farrier seemed happy to answer my many questions. He looked like a teenager, with a face you’d expect to see in a drive-through window, but he wrestled the stallion’s legs and shaped the hot iron like a man who knew his business.

His van folded out like a tackle box, with rows of hanging tools and a miniature forge like a barbecue, and when the shoe was ready he kept the stallion calm even when the hot iron caught its fetlock on fire. He told me he apprenticed for four years to learn his trade, and when I asked how quickly someone could learn the basics, he said, “Four years.” No shortcuts.

Once young men like him were normal; crafts and craftsmen whose callings – smiths, wrights, thatchers, tanners, millers and coopers -- survive only in surnames. Each town had its own set of craftsmen, known to everyone and identifiable at a distance by their clothing.

Nor would the farrier’s age seem unusual decades ago; children apprenticed from an early age, learned a skill for several years, and entered the world as craftsmen at an age when teens today are looking sullen in a corner of a mall. Only today do we assume that everyone must spend their prime years bored, warehoused and indebted.

Of course, most people did not attain such rank, but most people of any rank had a palette of survival skills unknown to almost any modern person. Farmers with little money or formal education would have known how to deliver a calf, weave a basket, butcher a pig, keep bees, shear sheep, turn autumn fruit into wine or spirits, make hay and silage, forage for wild plants, dig the peat bog for winter fuel and coppice trees on a timetable that stretched across the generations.

You can see such casual knowledge on display in, for example, cookbooks from a century ago, which began recipes with instructions to “pluck, draw and wash” birds before cooking, or to first “prepare the sheep’s head in the usual way,” assuming this was something any idiot could do.

A world of craftsmen creates an economy alien to modern Westerners; instead of cheap belongings meant to be thrown away quickly, goods had to be made durable, to be fixed, recast, re-forged or re-sewn over and over. The mountains of trash that rise outside our cities did not exist then, nor did the Texas-sized garbage patch in the Pacific, for few goods were thrown away.

Such an economy had few corporations or anonymous transactions. Writers from a century or two ago described recognizing particular barrels, nails or saddles as we would recognize someone’s handwriting, and the craftsman’s reputation hung on the quality of their work. When everyone knew where products came from and could identify the makers of the superior and inferior work, they could reward the hardest-working and most skilled craftsmen with their business – what used to be called capitalism, before the word came to mean the system we have today.

Today, of course, we drive long distances to buy underwear and palm pilots made to last a matter of months and be thrown away. We never meet the Third-World workers – possibly slaves -- who make such products, nor the crew that shipped them across a planet, nor the truckers who delivered them to a store larger than the Hebrew Temple. Few craftsmen remain in this world, and those that remain are often elderly hobbyists. Our modern system won’t last forever, though, and we know a world of craftsmen can be sustainable for centuries -- because it was.

I asked what work there was for a farrier these days, and the young man said he had more work than he could handle. Few people in Ireland or the USA can say that these days, as the people have less need of marketing managers and web designers. But horses, he pointed out, will always need shoes.

Photo of US farrier Pete Cote at work, by William D. Weisenburger Jr., EdD. Used with permission from www.wdwjr.com.

Published at Front Porch Republic

2011-11-04T19:05:00.000Z

Front Porch Republic is one of my favourite online publications: both agrarian and intellectual, both ecological and conservative, both worldly and spiritual. It reminds me of a more Republican version of The Sun or Orion magazine, the kind of magazine Wendell Berry would write for.

Now it's pubished an article of mine, found here.

Day with Seven-Year-Old

2011-11-02T10:21:00.000Z

I took the week off and took the opportunity to spend the week with The Girl. This morning, as I jogged along the canal and The Girl rode her bicycle, we kept a lookout along the hedgerows, and occasionally one of us shouted and pointed to the other.

“Look Papa! Sloes!” she said, pointing to the small oval leaves of the blackthorn tree and the black fruit hidden in its recesses. She knows we make sloe gin, but the few trees we have seen are thorny as their name, often deep in brambles and rose-vines, their fruits high and inaccessible. But we stopped on the road and looked up, and saw branches covered in plump sloes just out of reach.

“I’ve got an idea, Papa!” she said. She got on my shoulders and stripped dozens of sloes from the trees, dropping them as I caught them in my shirt.

Later that day, we talked about the fact that the puffins on our shores moo like cows – because they just weren’t comical enough – and we decided it would be sweet if puffins and cows can talk to each other. Cows would never know how to swim in the sea or fly over cliffs, but puffins could tell them what it’s like, and cows could tell them about the green fields the puffins might never see. On the other hand, The Girl pointed out, if they are from different parts of the island, they would speak differently, although she allowed that a puffin could learn to speak with a cow accent.

After I read to her from The Phantom Tollbooth and tucked her in bed, we got to talking about what letters would taste like. We both agreed that A would taste like maple syrup, and The Girl seemed very sure that K would be crunchy and bacon-flavoured. When I brought up the letter T, we both responded at the same time - - dry, salty crackers. I suggested M would be chocolate, but The Girl seemed quite certain it would taste of plums and blueberries. Finally, we put different words together and tried to imagine the flavour combination.

Hallows Eve

2011-10-31T12:18:00.002Z

The more we learn to live with the seasons, the more old holidays make new sense. Halloween is the midpoint between the equinox and the winter solstice, or Christmas; it marked New Year's Eve in traditional Ireland, when the nights grow truly long and dark, when the skies grow dim, and when we first feel the bite of winter. It is the day when it seems most appropriate to remember loved ones that have died, as we do in our house, a bit of gravitas to go with the trick-or-treating of children and the blithe gore of the media.

Six weeks after Christmas, the midpoint between the Christmas and the spring equinox, is Bridget’s Day here, Groundhog Day or Candlemas elsewhere. Six weeks later is the equinox, and the first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox is Easter. Six weeks after the equinox, halfway to the summer solstice, comes May Day, once widely celebrated in the USA.

My more devout friends back in the USA resent hearing the astronomy behind, say, Christmas or Easter, believing it distracts us from “the reason for the season.” I understand – they are flooded by a culture that exploits holy days to sell people more things they don’t need, and they want to protect their children’s innocence and preserve the day's meaning. I get it.

In purging their lives of the shopping-mall culture, though, they inadvertently throw out some of their oldest traditions. The holidays celebrate the cycle of creation, and the religious commemorations were placed there because of the season, not the other way around – the birth at the turn of the year, the Resurrection at the season of new life. The seasonal markers do not supercede the holy days, but precede them, forming the architecture of our years.

In the same way, I know many sects who worship in bare rooms and plain churches, and I’m glad it works for them. But the best religious service I have ever seen took place in an old forest near us, by candlelight. A crowd gathered under the canopy of trees whose lives stretch far beyond their own, in a tiny patch of what was once first and greatest of cathedrals, one that covered much of the world.

I’m not the most pious person in the world, but when my Girl and I walk through those woods, every visit feels like a Sabbath.

Jefferson sloth

2011-10-27T13:22:00.003+01:00

My Girl in Dublin's Natural History Museum, nicknamed "The Dead Zoo."

The Girl was enjoying her swivel chair. “These chairs are a great idea!” she said.

Do you know who got the idea for a chair that swivels around? I said. “Who?” she asked.

It was a man named Thomas Jefferson, I said. He was an inventor, and was one of the founders of the country I come from. He wrote the letter that declared us to be a new country, and he wrote it in a chair like that, that he built himself.

“I’m his biggest fan!” The Girl said.

Because of the chair? I asked.

“That, and because he must have been named after the Jefferson sloth!” she said. She loves sloths, and loves hearing about the big ones that were common in North America until humans arrived, the ones that could look in your upstairs window. We draw pictures together of the world as it was until recently – the sloths and the thylacines, the moas and the great eagles.

It’s even better than that, I said – he was a scientist, and the Jefferson sloth was named after him. She looked awestruck.

“He must have been amazing,” she said.

Here Comes the Rain Again

2011-10-26T05:58:00.000+01:00

I took this photo of the River Liffey two years ago, when it was twice as wide as usual. Ireland saw unprecedented flooding that winter, and some homes had to be abandoned.

Yesterday we feared the same thing again, as a month of rain came down in a single day. It took one of my co-workers five hours to get home, and apartment buildings and a shopping mall in Dublin were knee-deep in water. Luckily, the rain seems to have abated for now.

Around the corner from my office...

2011-10-24T22:43:00.001+01:00

... they were shooting a movie about the making of the Titanic, to be called Blood and Steel. The men on bicycles were apparently extras who rode around between takes.

While the cars and coats obviously date from a century ago, many men still wear the same caps and ride bicycles down the same cobblestone alleyways. Other parts of Dublin sport 21st-century glass buildings or 1970s slums, but these streets have changed little.

The Girl

2011-10-21T18:44:00.001+01:00

The Girl had the sniffles.

“Why do I have to get sick?” she said.

Because some germ or virus made your body sick, and your body hasn’t kicked it out yet. Which do you think it is? I asked. “Virus,” she said.

I suspect so, I said – when you get sniffles, a cold or flu, it’s usually a virus. That’s good news because your body can usually get rid of them on its own over the next few days. The bad news is that’s all you can do – there’s no medicine that gets rid of a virus for you. Which one do you think is smaller? I asked.

“Viruses?” she ventured.

Right – they’re so much tinier than germs.

“Are they alive?” she asked

That’s a fantastic question, I said, and it doesn’t have an easy answer. They’re so tiny they barely qualify as alive, but they cause a lot of trouble.

“How do they get into my body?” she asked.

They sneak in, I whispered. Remember how your red blood cells are lorry drivers, carrying oxygen to your cells? They’re all queuing up in your blood like cars in traffic, and a virus barges into the queue.

“They’re quite naughty,” she said.

Luckily, I said, you have white blood cells too – you know what they do?

“They’re Gardai! (police)” she said

Right, I said, and they pull up alongside a virus and tell it to pull over, and arrest it.

For the next half hour her sniffles were forgotten: We took turns pretending to be white blood cells (police), waiting on the shoulder of the blood vessel (road) watching for viruses (speeders) who’ve slipped into traffic, and pulling them over and checking their license, complete with sirens and bullhorn effects.

Vendors

2011-10-18T22:03:00.005+01:00

Twice a week vendors line up on the sidewalks of Dublin near my office, their tables stocked with anything from beef to makeup to laundry detergent. Every so often they call to passers-by, something like “Fresh bread for saaaaaaale” or “Everything is two euuuuuro,” using the same C-to-A-sharp singsong that Americans use to sing “Air baaaaall” at a basketball game, or that Nelson Munz uses to taunt “Ha-Ha” on The Simpsons.

I don’t see the Dublin vendors enough to know them, but the Farmers' Market near our home is very different. We go there every Saturday morning, and while we don't know everyone's names, we know their faces and they know ours. They know what kind of sausage The Girl likes for breakfast, they give us their spare meat trimmings, knowing we can make use of them, and occasionally they collude with me in creating a surprise for my wife.

Last Friday my wife and I saw the play Juno and the Paycock at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre the night before, and I described it to a vendor while buying sardines. The vendor, who I had seen regularly for years, turned out to be a theatre buff, and told me about the play's history, and how its then-controversial treatment of the Church and the IRA caused riots when it was released.

We pass and smile at the same people each day, only occasionally learning their private passions, or realising how much they can teach us.

Gleaning, wine and jelly

2011-10-16T22:33:00.003+01:00

Five metres of hedgerow outside our home, with crabapples

Twelve years ago, when I was a newspaper editor in St. Louis, I used to stop at the local bagel shop before closing time and rescue all the bagels they were throwing out. Then I would ride my bicycle home through the city streets, with my bag of bagels slung over my shoulder like Santa Claus. The shop had a bit less of a rubbish bill, and my friends and I saved money on bread -- I hadn’t learned to bake yet. Despite what people imagine, as a newspaper editor I made about the same money as a fast-food worker, and valued the extra three dollars or so not spent on bread.

Also, I have a healthy aversion to seeing things thrown away --we use discarded plastic tubs for sprouting, old pickle jars for storage, and the tops of old soda bottles for funnels. If I could have found enough people to share the gleanings with, I would have preferred to go to the bagel shop every day, just to make sure no food went to waste. In my 20 years in the workforce I have often collected the coffee grounds and banana peels from my office rubbish bin when no one is looking, and brought them home to compost.

Haws from hedgerow

We don’t live near restaurants or city rubbish bins anymore, but we do have rows of hedges, all of which are sagging with fruit and berries this time of year. Most of them rot on the vines or are eaten by birds, and since we feed the birds through the winter, we can take our share in the autumn. A few weeks ago I decided to see how much I could glean from a five-metre stretch of hedgerow, along with some orange peels a co-worker discarded at the office. To preserve them over the winter, I wanted to make them into wine and jelly.

Most humans in history made wine and beer, not as hobbies or micro-brew startups but for survival. Before every home acquired the sterilised waterfalls of our taps, many people often had only lake or river water to drink, which carried serious diseases at a time when there were no doctors and the average lifespan was about 30. Letting yeast ferment vegetable matter drove out most other microscopic life, making water relatively pure without the cords of firewood needed to boil everything.

Thus, alcohol was a major part of life in earlier eras, offering water, calories and vitamins. Medieval Britons, for example, were estimated to drink four litres of beer a day; I am told that the teetotal movement of the 19^th century, which encouraged people to drink tea instead, actually caused malnutrition in rural Britain.

Boiling haws

This explains why ancient religious texts have an otherwise head-scratching preoccupation with booze; Sumerians had prayers to remember beer recipes, characters in the Mabinogion drank bowls of mead and even the Koran offers believers wine in Paradise. It also explains why so many forms of alcohol had names that translate as “water of life” or some equivalent – “whiskey” is “water” in the Irish language, from that very phrase. Jesus turned water to wine, used wine containers as metaphors for human life, and promised his followers they would drink with him in heaven. St. Paul actively urged Timothy not to give up wine altogether, but to mix a little with his water. None of this sounds strange to Irish Catholics, but has caused no amount of interpretive calisthenics for the teetotaller sects.

These days, for many Westerners, “wine” refers only to grape wine and “beer” only to brew from barley and hops - yellow in the USA, often black in Ireland – but you can make wine and beer from almost any edible plant and some inedible ones. I have seen recipes for wines from oak leaves, squash, parsley, and all manner of common plants. In the past year I have made wine from nettles, the stinging weed that grows profusely here; from elderflowers in June, and from our August crop of meadowsweet, a weed that grows along the canal banks.

This time of year hawthorn leaves fall to expose the bright red berries – haws -- covering the bare branches. Haws taste mealy and unpleasant raw, but they make an excellent wine like sangria, and as they were the most abundant fruit in the hedgerow, that’s how I used them.

First I poured six litres of water into a large pot, and brought it to a boil. I dumped in two litres of haws and two halved lemons, waited for it to boil again, and turned the heat off. I stirred in a kilogram of sugar slowly until it dissolved, and waited for the liquid to cool to blood temperature. Then I poured it into a cleaned and sterilised bucket and added red wine yeast, and when the liquid had cooled all the way I set the bucket in the larder.

Fermenting in bucket

Over the next week I checked the bucket periodically; it was bubbling away slowly as the yeast turned sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. After a week or so I sterilised a carboy – a large jug with an S-shaped valve on the top – and strained the wine into it, mostly so I could get my bucket back. If you are making wine, you should consider buying a carboy for storing your wine during the weeks or months that it still might build up air pressure, before you pour it into conventional wine bottles.

After pouring the wine into the carboy, I was left with about two litres of sweetened and slightly alcoholic haws. I combined these with several other hedgerow fruits I had not bothered to use in the wine -- rose hips, elderberries, blackberries, sloes and crab-apples – along with orange peelings rescued from the office rubbish bin, and made compost jelly.

Just as wine allowed people to preserve water before fossil fuels, so jelly allowed them to preserve vitamin. I have written about how older people around here gave people home-made wine or jelly as gifts, a custom that seems a twee bit of etiquette today but once constituted deposits in an unspoken community bank. Like wine, it keeps for years or decades; we just opened a jar several years old, and it was still good. Unlike wine, jelly seems not to have been widespread until a few hundred years ago, until the slave trade made sugar affordable enough – all the more reason to stock up now.

To define our terms for a moment: Jam, jelly, marmalade and syrup are juices and possibly bits of plant matter mixed with enough sugar that they become unpalatable to bacteria, and sealed to avoid being eaten by anything else. Jam retains the crushed fruit, while jelly has its fruit bits strained out. Marmalade is made from citrus, and its taste has bitter notes from the pith. All of these require pectin as well as sugar, a naturally-occurring compound that solidifies the liquid. You can make jam or jelly from most edible fruits and berries, along with vegetables – any vegetables in theory, but I have only seen it done with rhubarb, turnips and beets.

Other ingredients: Orange peel, crab-apples, elderberries, blackberries, sloes and rose hips

You can preserve fruit juice and sugar without pectin, as a liquid syrup in bottles – we did that last year with elderberries, and mixed small amounts of syrup with water to make juice in winter, or with sparkling water to make elderberry soda.

Most fruits don’t have enough pectin themselves to set jelly, but apples do – one reason jellies are often made of apples mixed with some other fruit, and why the crab-apples made an important ingredient. My mixture was about 40 per cent used haws, 40 per cent crab-apples, and about 20 per cent assorted other fruit and berries – the office-bin orange peels, the used lemons from the wine mix, and rose hips, elderberries, blackberries and sloes from the bushes. Some fruit you need to use sparingly; sloes, for example, have quite a sour and astringent taste, and I mainly soak them in distilled spirits to make sloe gin, but I had a few left over.

I chopped the peelings roughly, and chopped the apples in half; you don’t need to slice out seeds or pith, as it will all be strained out before the end. I then piled the fruit – hips, peels, sloes, rinds, zest, berries, whatever – into a large pot, poured enough water over it to slightly cover the fruit, and boiled it for about 45 minutes.

When it was done boiling, I let it cool and poured the mixture into a smaller pot through a strainer – some people like to strain it through muslin or cloth to make sure they get rid of all the tiny bits, but I’m not worried about that. Then I put the smaller pot, filled with strained liquid, onto the stove and turned on low heat.

As the liquid warmed, I slowly added sugar, stirring until it was dissolved. Following various recipes I added 400g of sugar per 650 ml of liquid, and waited for the frothy bubbles to subside in the predicted 10 minutes or so. In practice, I probably used more sugar than I needed, as the haws were already sweetened, and the froth never fully went away after 45 minutes, but the jelly seemed ready anyway.

To see when the jelly was done – again, following recipe instructions – I dribbled a bit of it with a spoon onto a cool plate, and waited for it to harden. My initial mistake was holding it too near the hot stove, so that it never hardened completely – once I realised that, I could measure it properly. Once it seemed to have hardened, I pushed the drops with my finger, and when it wrinkled, I knew it was done.

The total cost of this was about two euros for 1.5 kilos of sugar – a kilo for the wine, plus about half a kilo for the jelly -- plus the minimal cost of heating the stove for a short time, and not counting the initial investment of the carboy or yeast. The experiment resulted in about six bottles of good wine and two jars of jelly, vitamins suspended for an emergency.

When we do things like this, we act as modern gleaners, the subculture of people who gathered the waste left behind after the harvest. Gleaners held an accepted place in most cultures, and Leviticus 19: 9-10 ordered people to leave part of their crops behind for them. One of the most famous paintings in the world, Millet’s “The Gleaners,” depicts them at work in rural France, and Agnes Varda’s documentary The Gleaners and I show such scroungers working in old ways and new, gathering grains in fields or rubbish in cities. Today we live with mountains of waste no other peoples imagined, and many people could live well learning to glean.

Stand behind a restaurant or supermarket at night, or look at berry bushes or weed fringes in season, and you might see our gleaners at work – freegans, greens, preppers and itinerants of all kinds. They wear your old clothes, fix your old toaster, and eat the pre-sliced carrots that the supermarket keeps under plastic and argon. If we have resource shortages and mountains of rubbish outside our cities, it is because we don’t have more of them.

The ongoing stumble

2011-10-10T23:55:00.006+01:00

Houseboats on the canal in a nearby town

When I moved here several years ago, Ireland seemed a charming mash-up of a landscape: medieval towers, straw roofs and horse-carts alongside modern suburbs, shopping malls and traffic jams. It had also just won a survey of best places to live in the world, an island boom town.

My wife, however, was returning to a home she did not recognise. The Ireland she grew up in, in the 1970s and 80s, had been one of the poorest countries in Europe, with a lower per-capita GDP than some African nations. Not all her neighbours had electricity or indoor plumbing, and many had a self-sufficiency that Americans associate with their 19th-century frontier.

Fifteen years ago, however, an influx of computer companies made this island nation -- with half the population of the Chicago metro area -- the planet’s top exporter of software, and it jumped from being one of the poorest nations in Europe to one of the richest. Everyone sunk their money into houses, and villages dating from medieval times suddenly acquired vast tumours of modern development. Immigrants flooded into the country following the jobs – mostly former Soviets – until one out of every ten people in Ireland were foreigners.

About 100 metres from the houseboats.

Three years ago, the global economy “crashed,” although that sounded too absolute and final for me, like a doomer fantasy; I preferred “stumbled,” implying that after the stumble, might stabilise for a while, but we could still fall further.

Fifteen months ago I wrote an article for Big Questions Online, describing why my neighbours here in Ireland might be better prepared for recession than many other Westerners. I mentioned that people had strong ties of family and community, that public transportation was widespread, that some homes and even schools and hospitals had kitchen gardens. Few here imagined that the boom would last forever, or felt devastated when it ended. Most importantly –unlike in my native USA -- two generations still alive remember how to live comfortably in Third World poverty.

Eleven months ago Ireland’s government effectively went bust, and asked the European Union and International Monetary Fund to bail them out. During those tense weeks everyone went about their regular routine as usual, but everyone checked the new updates and talked about whether they would have a job, a bank or even a government the following week. For better or worse, however, the country received its bailout, the banks were saved, the mass protests in Dublin remained peaceful and the basic infrastructure – hospitals, police, buses, electricity -- continued running. Local stores ran out of milk and other staples as everyone stocked up, but there was no crime wave and no panic.

Ten months ago an angry populace punished Ireland’s main political party – in power for most of the history of the country, including the boom and bust – by turning it into a third party overnight. What had been the country’s second-and-third-largest parties took power in a coalition, and previously fringe groups like the IRA-linked Sinn Fein surged in votes and power.

Abandoned car in the Wicklow Mountains

The new leaders have been able to do little, however, except greet US President Obama and Britain’s Queen during their historic visits; the country remains locked into its bailout agreements, and continues to muddle along in a recessional limbo. Watching this drama, close-up but with foreign eyes, brings home several lessons, which might be useful for other Westerners facing their own crash.

First of all, almost all change looks slow when it’s happening. Ireland’s boom seemed sudden to my wife, who was living abroad, but for my neighbours every day was normal, and only looking back did the changes hit them. Younger generations, meanwhile, find it difficult to believe that middle-aged Irish walked miles to school barefoot in all weather, or wove their chicken coops out of straw.

The same principle works all the way down, which will be a threat and a mercy for all of us going that direction. The world around us seems as constant as the faces of your loved ones, until an old photograph brings home how much has changed. Middle-aged people might recall flying thousands of miles on holiday or going to the doctor for every minor illness, but children will not feel the loss of things they never had. Such is mercy.

This also carries danger, when young people forget, or refuse to accept, that people once lived happily with little money, or that neighbours in the USA and UK once kept pigs in their common yard, or greeted each other with ritual politeness on the road. If young people forget those things, they might forget many more things in a continued crash; that women once had the rights of men, or that humans stepped on the moon, or that violent death was once shocking.

Secondly, all crashes are relative. My acquaintances back in the USA tell me that they struggle every day in this economy of high unemployment and fuel prices; I believe them, but I also mention that our unemployment is 50 per cent higher, and we pay the litre-and-euro equivalent of $8.00 a gallon. Today’s Irish, meanwhile, remain wealthy compared to the Irish of 20 years ago, who might, in turn, have been in the wealthiest half of the world. To use another comparison, the average American still makes twice the annual salary today as in the 1930s, even adjusting for inflation, and unemployment was three to four times higher then. Many Americans suffer, but their suffering comes not just from a lack of money, but from a lack of experience.

My neighbour's shed.

Thirdly, a post-boom community can return to how they lived before a boom, but only if they remember how and set themselves to the task. Many local towns here had rows of small stores and pubs, driven out by the high prices and more fashionable stores of the boom. Now that the boom has gone bust those neighbourhood businesses don’t magically re-appear; rather, some spaces remain empty and vandalised, like a ten-metre slice of East St. Louis or Detroit were dropped into a bucolic village. Those storefronts could be restored, but only if neighbours organise and resolve to restore them; if owners or zoning boards waste years waiting for the next boom, for example, people might get used to having a graffiti-covered space and lose the will to change it.

In the USA, I lived in Missouri and Kansas towns that were healthy in the 1950s; today the townspeople drive a day’s horse ride to Wal-Mart, and forgot the days when men walked the streets in suits and ties. When such megastores shut down locals could turn it into a cattle barn or stud stables, but how many people would think of doing so, and how many officials would accept such a use?

Finally, the more traditional your family, the less you stumble when the world does. More than one of my neighbours here said they knew the boom and bust mainly through the news; they continued harvesting turf, planting crops and raising chickens, as always. We Americans think such people would be survivalist loners, hoarding well-stocked shelters, but I find the opposite is true; the ones I have met tend to have extended families and few possessions, but were skilled at using whatever was around. Their lack of unneeded possessions means they never have far to fall, and the presence of loved ones cushions the weight of the world.

Legions

2011-10-07T18:46:00.001+01:00

A great captain of industry, someone who transformed the landscape, died recently, too young, of cancer.

I’m speaking, of course, of Wangari Maathai.

The mainstream media offered little coverage of the death of the Catholic, ecologist and leader in her native Kenya, who passed away last week. In a land that human use and climate change are slowly turning to desert, her Green Belt Movement trained women – 30,000 according to web sites – to plant and nurture trees, like a green wall against the storm. It taught women to earn money by gardening, bee-keeping and other crafts. According to a eulogy by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the movement has now planted more than 40 million trees.

Opposed by central African governments, she led hunger strikes and was forced into hiding, but eventually was elected to office working with the people who had persecuted her. She won the Right Livelihood Award more than a quarter-century ago, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004.

Of course the eulogies do fill the local headlines, the television news and my internet inboxes today, but not one has been for Maathai – all of them, rather, are for former Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs . Social media sites, talk shows, radio DJs and internet forums compare Jobs to Leonardo da Vinci or Thomas Edison, a genius who touched all our lives and transformed the world.

Bless people for mourning the dead, and no disrespect to Mr. Jobs. It must be asked though: did you know him? Was he worthy of such hagiography?

Perhaps he gave billions to charity, as his rival Bill Gates did – although my brief Google search indicates the opposite. When I ask, acquaintances of mine retort that he had every right to keep his own money, and they are right -- but that does not make him more worthy of mourning than the estimated 150,000 children, parents, grandparents and others who died yesterday.

Even if Jobs did give billions away, though … he had billions to give. Jesus told parables about rich men giving away armfuls of gold and poor widows giving their last penny – but his point was not that we should admire the rich person more.

As a separate issue, was he a genius who changed the world, or did he head one of the companies left standing after the computer-company rivalries of the late 20th century? Did Steve Jobs create all these devices, or was it the people who worked for him? If Apple hadn't invented iTunes or the MacIntosh, wouldn't come other company's similar product have been just as successful, and we would be mourning someone else's death – say, the former CEO of Coleco?

The next time you listen to the mainstream media, consider how often they present every business, country, war or movement as though it were an individual with the apparent powers of a superhero. Business articles praise celebrity CEOs for “building a company from scratch,” not the temps or factory workers. A few years back the US president was said to be at war with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, as though individuals can wage war.

Even the most iconic examples of genius turn out to be people, not cartoons. In science, most people think of Albert Einstein as the textbook-example genius, often without understanding why. It is no insult to that intelligent and conscientious man, though, to point out that the world accepted relativity because the world was ready -- previous theories had become out-dated, and scientists had found the technology needed to soon prove the theories. Any other combination of events, any other time and place, and Einstein would have remained a very nice clerk, and some now-forgotten technician would have statues in his name.

Pop-culture histories show Churchill winning the war against the Nazis, and museum exhibits describe how the pharaohs built the Pyramids – as though they did physical labour, or placed themselves in the line of fire. Even when the individuals themselves seemed to be admirable, like Martin Luther King or Mohandas Gandhi, histories ignore the legions of forgotten people who did most of the actual work.

When one of these alleged superheroes dies, people mourn more than they would for a family member, hailing their bravery, their brilliance, and their hard work. Certainly many people are treating the death of Steve Jobs that way, as others did all the celebrities before him.

So take a moment to remember Ms. Maathai, and try to keep in mind how our culture ignores people like you in favour of the occasional hero. Notice, for example, that I’ve just done the same thing to Wangari Maathai.

Thirty thousand women.

Photo of Green Belt project, used under Creative Commons by skasuga.

Update

2011-09-26T09:31:00.002+01:00

We are experiencing technical difficulties with our computer. Blogging to resume in a week or two.

Glendalough

2011-09-19T19:07:00.000+01:00

Doves

2011-09-18T17:21:00.002+01:00

I have never seen two animals as amourous as the wood doves I see on The Girl's swingset every day.

Few other animals beat humans in this area. Most, from frogs to hedgehogs to elephants, seem to have a torrid affair, and after that they will always have Paris. Even among those that mate for life, from albatross to gibbons, I gather the marriage is more a partnership. Our doves, however, are seriously into each other, to the point that I'm expecting The Girl to ask about it.

On the other hand, they fuel their daily exercise with our cabbages, and if my wife ever makes good on her threats, we will be having roast pigeon one night.

*************

Line of the day: Holding up the bulbs of a particularly shaggy daffodil, The Girl said, "Look, Daddy! We got the ones that look like an exploding chicken!"

The old forest

2011-09-14T07:23:00.000+01:00

The Girl

2011-09-11T23:37:00.004+01:00

The Girl at the local pub.

I took a week off my day job this summer to spend time with The Girl, and among other things I took her to a workshop at the Irish Film Institute. They showed the children, six to twelve, how to make their own movies, using flip-books and whirling pictures. She adored it, and when she emerged I told her I had another surprise for her: I was taking her to the cinema. She had only been to a real theatre a few times in her life, so this was a special occasion.

I had picked out a film I thought she would love: an Irish movie called A Shine of Rainbows, about a Irish boy who befriends a seal pup. It was the sweet children’s story I researched, but contained some tragic scenes when the boy’s mother died. As The Girl began sobbing in her seat, I realised that she’s never seen a sad movie before.

I have worked hard to allow her the innocence that many children these days are denied, but know she must be introduced to sadness at some point. Still, I comforted her, talked to her afterward, and gave her a week of fun, and she forgave me.

*****************

As we all settled down after supper, I said I wanted to watch a Cary Grant movie, and that she was welcome to watch it with me.

“Is it scary?” Not that I know of, I said.

“Does it have wolves in it that suck your blood?”

Um ... no, I said. Did you see anything on the telly about –

“Does it have any dead angels?”

Sweetie, I said, have you been watching movies at your friends’ houses? I asked, thinking I might have to speak to the neighbours.

*************

I thought about writing something about the tenth anniversary of the day that I and my co-workers gathered around the television and watched the towers collapse like fast-forward candles. Certainly such remembrances fill the news here, so I can only imagine how gonzo the US media must be about this anniversary.

And yet .... I have studiously ignored such news, as I do my country’s two-and-a-half-year election season. I don’t want to see any of the movies made about September 11, with the real victims played by Hollywood actors. I don’t want to hear the politically powerful announce what the day means, or see choreographed rituals of grief. I don’t want to stick a “We Will Never Forget” link on a Facebook page and say I have honoured the dead. I respect that others find value in these public commemorations, but I am not obliged to.

You see, I actually saw these things happen. I don’t want a media campaign to slowly superimpose its own meaning over that genuine moment, until my own memories are replaced.

Tree in County Meath

2011-09-06T20:59:00.000+01:00

Gordians

2011-09-02T12:51:00.003+01:00

The Girl on a street in Dublin.

Whenever I talk to The Girl, I choose my words carefully, knowing some unknown portion will stick but not knowing how she will piece them together. We don't discuss anything too dark, for example, but I do talk cheerfully about how Nature works or how people lived in earlier eras.

Sometimes, though, she says something that I know she is not repeating from me or anyone else, something she must have worked out on her own.

The other night she was reading Peter Pan to me as I tried to shave with a straight razor, and asked if it hurt.

"Not if you do it properly," I said, "but I'm still learning. Do you know why I'm trying to learn?"

Absent-mindedly, without looking up, she said, "We need to know how to be a Gordian."

A guardian? I asked.

"Like people used to be," she said, and I realised she was saying Edwardian.

Under the old tree

2011-08-31T08:28:00.000+01:00

Review: Hand Made in Tasmania

2011-08-29T22:08:00.002+01:00

Many people I know gravitate to antiques – tools or toys, decorations or devices -- for their beauty and durability. Why, however, must these qualities be antique? Age alone does not improve most items; on the contrary, antique buyers must accept deterioration as part of the item’s already high price.

What draws most antique lovers is not antiquity itself, I suspect, but craftsmanship, the hours of care and lifetime of skill imbued in the final product. A chair, a knife, or even a toy made before the energy needle often meant an investment of many hours of work by someone who had trained for years to master their craft. Such handiwork might last centuries – we have a desk two hundred years old, for example – and if it breaks it can be repaired or the pieces replaced.

While I was writing this, as it happens, my family was watching old film footage of a shoe shop in Naas, a short bicycle ride from us. The film, taken in the 1980s, showed the cobblers wrapping the leather to the shape of their client’s feet, adding layer upon layer, polishing, sewing and adding hundreds of tiny marks solely for decoration. I remarked on the hours and attention devoted to a single shoe, and my mother-in-law, who restored antiques here for decades, said, “Yes, but a pair lasted me thirty years – in six months your sneakers must be thrown away.”

Decades from now, our store-bought goods will not be antiques. Most of them are made of plastic or have some small plastic part, designed to break quickly and require a new purchase -- so most cannot be repaired, and those made of plastic and chemically-treated wood cannot even be safely burned.

Hand Made in Tasmania, edited by Steven French, features 39 crafters who adopted the opposite values, who eschewed normal careers in favour of a vocation. From luthiers to saddlers, felters to binders, each of them embraces, revives and sustains trades that we almost lost when everything became lightly acquired and discarded.

Each chapter, two to four pages long, offers a concise portrait of a single artist; how they came to their esoteric field, and why they have devoted their lives to it. Each explains the quirks and benefits of their passion -- whiskey distiller Patrick Maguire points out that his product, unlike beer or wine, can last virtually forever, or whip-maker Simon Martin explain that kangaroo leather is the strongest leather in the world.

Some of the crafts threaten to disappear altogether; saddler Rick Allen said that his profession was taken off the apprentice list in 1938, and that the last saddler in his city of Hobart died forty years later, the day he opened his shop. Martin said that only 12 whip-makers are left in the world, and that their average age is 68.

Other featured artists revive old techniques; glassblower James Dodson said he uses the same approach as Syrian craftsmen 2,000 years ago. Still others find new methods unique to their region; Joanna Gair makes paper using native plants and kangaroo dung. Some turn modern rubbish into art, like Debbie Reynolds’ baskets of found rope, driftwood and shells.

While the majority of the artists are native Tasmanians, many came from elsewhere; shoemaker Luna Newbie from the UK, knife-maker John Hounslow from New Zealand and beekeeper Yves Ginat from France. In some cases they began in a different field that led them, unexpectedly, to their craft; Hounslow came to knives through cooking, Ginat to beekeeping from farming.

French quotes author Mark Thomson that “… our civilisation, created by technology, is simply an unstable veneer that could snuff out as suddenly as a blown light bulb, leaving us with nothing to fall back on.” Some of these artists will be the people we will turn to in such circumstances – beekeepers, cheese-makers, boat-builders and basket-weavers.

Many of the subjects, admittedly, lean in more purely artistic directions: Rebecca Coote’s glass installations, Ben Kurczok’s hand-crafted kaleidoscopes, Susie McMahon’s sculpted dolls and Emma Colbeck’s refashioned buttons. But the world needs beauty as well, and the same hands that can shape the glass of a bauble could one day do the same, or teach others to do the same, for spectacles, sextant and Sterling engines.

Tasmania might be a particularly fertile ground for artisans, but you likely have people in your area keeping traditions and crafts alive. Wherever you live, there is likely a similar book waiting to be written, filled with allies waiting to be found.

Forest floor

2011-08-24T17:00:00.000+01:00

The turn of the year

2011-08-22T23:00:00.002+01:00

The Girl looking at the neighbours' horses

The seasons turn differently for all of us. My family in Missouri are seeing the last 40-degree (100F) days of an unusually harsh summer, while acquaintances Down Under are seeing the close of a winter. Here, we saw our breath for the first time yesterday, and the leaves are beginning to turn.

These days feel like a countdown; we are drying herbs for tea and seasonings, pickling vegetables, brewing wine, and checking the miles of hedgerow elderberries inching closer to ripeness. The increasingly rainy weather means time is running out to get peat for fuel from the bog; we have enough, but tractor pull wagons past our front gate laden three metres tall with peat sometimes, the father driving and the rest of the family standing and holding the sides. Even though it is still summer, we all feel the oncoming darkness.

I have mentioned how strange it feels -- for one unaccustomed to it -- to live on an island less than a thousand miles from the Arctic Circle, kept mild by a Caribbean current but at latitudes that elsewhere see polar bears. Summers for us mean light in the sky as early as 3 am and as late as 10 pm, long stretches of sun that cause our crops and weeds to grow so rapidly we can’t keep up. Unfortunately, it means that winter brings months of brief, dim light over a Gothic landscape.

Yet the temperature never ranges widely, from a median fifteen (60F) in the summer down to five degrees (40F) in the winter, and the weather only gets rainier. The Irish are well used to the damp and chill; old people tell me they walked to school barefoot in all seasons, which sounds like a standard exaggeration until I see it borne out by historical accounts and photos. Even now the Irish keep their rooms and offices at temperatures far below what most Americans would tolerate.

When the temperature hits 25 degrees, though, (70 F) some of my co-workers turn red, sweat profusely and lunge for the air conditioner – they actually have air conditioners here -- to turn the ambient temperature back down to 15 (50 F) or so. To someone who grew up in 40-degree summers, this seems ridiculous, but we were simply acclimatised to heat as the Irish are to the chill. Even in Missouri or the Deep South, moreover, everyone once lived without air conditioning, and society did not collapse.

Window in a pub near our home

Older homes in St. Louis don’t look ideal for the heat – they look like brick kilns – but they could be sealed off from the sun as Mediterranean homes are today, and instead of verandas they had porches. American homes built in the last few decades have tiny vestigial porches, but on homes built before cheap energy, they served a vital function, allowing people to work and live in shade and a breeze tunnel.

Before World War II, in fact, St. Louisans sometimes slept on their porches in the summer, or on balconies, or in rows of blankets on the grass of Forest Park. You can see a bit of this in the film Rear Window; during the heat wave, a couple sleeps on the fire escape, and the plot hinges on the fact that everyone keeps their windows open. You might think that nothing could be more dangerous than sleeping outside in St. Louis, but crime rates were lower then than now – and that in the middle of the Great Depression, when some people faced genuine starvation. Criminals find it difficult to raid a neighbourhood in which someone is always outside, and everyone knows everyone else.

Similarly, old neighbourhoods in almost any warm city had a range of features to cut down on heat. Some Arab countries feature lattices, which create shade themselves and could host climbing plants that shade further. Awnings draw attention to a window or door and offer protection from the sun, rain and snow, as do street-side trees. Southern homes had jalousie windows allowed air to pass while still offering shade, while Mediterranean homes have shutters that can be closed in mid-day, and many such buildings were white to reflect heat.

Almost all men and women once wore hats, statements not just of fashion but of profession and, most importantly, protection from the sun; hence the wide brims of European sun hats, cowboy hats, Asian bamboo hats and Mexican sombreros. Hats disappeared quickly in the 1960s, however – perhaps victims of changing fashion or the counterculture, or perhaps of the newly widespread office jobs and air conditioning.

Walk through endless miles of strip malls and asphalt in the USA today, and you notice a stunning absence of any basic features to make heat bearable using any method except air conditioning -- no awnings or trellises, no whitewashed roofs, few shutters or trees, and few hats or kerchiefs.

Nor do most modern cities feature amenities for winter; those same awnings would do wonders for keeping snow off the walkways, and those same trees and lattices would break up the wind. Insulated buildings, straw bales or firewood piles around walls, blankets in the attic, close quarters, sealed-off rooms, rows of black bottles in the southern windows – all of these and many more would reduce our winter expenses.

Just as importantly, we could adapt to far less heat in winter, even if we don’t have to walk barefoot in all seasons. A US organisation recommends an indoor winter temperature of around 22 degrees C (around 72F), but the British keep their homes at 17 degrees C (62F), and a few decades ago kept them at 12 degrees (53F), according to the UK’s Building Research Establishment. I don’t have statistics for this country, but I would guess it to be colder still. I’m getting used to it.

Most importantly, just as we can wear sun hats in summer, we can wear thermal undergarments in winter. Growing up I knew long johns mainly from old movies and cartoons, the favoured campfire dress of cowboys and prospectors, or what Mickey Mouse or Tom and Jerry always fell into on a washing line. As Kris deDecker of Low-Tech magazine pointed out recently, thermal underwear is an amazing heating resource, and recently developed fabrics allow us far better insulation than people had a few decades ago. A single layer of thermal underwear, he calculated, equates to four degrees of thermostat heat, letting you save you up to 40 per cent in heat energy.

The elderly people here remind me how little heat we need, just as other places remind me how much we can tolerate, both goals far beyond my current limits. My family lives with more heat than we truly need, I admit, but we live with about ten degrees less room heat now than when we first arrived in Ireland, and several years from now, one way or another, will live with less still. As with so many of our projects, we never feel like we are truly adapting, so slowly do the changes come. Then we look back several years, and realise how much we’ve changed.

Another Girl

2011-08-18T07:28:00.000+01:00

I have an old friend back in Minnesota, with a daughter about the same age as The Girl, and we sometimes trade stories. The other day, he told me, they had the following exchange:

My friend: "You're holding your fork like a dagger. Please don't."

His Girl: "You're talking to me like I'm a barbarian. Please don't."

Tree at Ballindoolin

2011-08-16T07:05:00.000+01:00

Still runnning

2011-08-09T08:03:00.000+01:00

While most cars on the roads here average several years old, as it would be across most of the West, a surprising number of our neighbours maintain cars from the early-to-mid-20th century -- these were parked at a gathering in a nearby town.

Our neighbour down the canal raises cows and his farm seems perpetually muddy, but after he got to know me he brought me to his barn where, two metres from the calves, he lifted a tarpaulin and revealed a row of mint-condition cars from the Prohibition Era, like a secret treasure.

Old yew

2011-08-05T07:39:00.002+01:00

Yew trees can live for thousands of years, and can be seen here wherever the dead are buried, in churchyards or, in this case, an old manor house. Even when you can't see a steeple, you can often identify a church in the distance by the presence of these trees.

I assumed that, for hundreds of years, people here planted yew trees whenever they built a church. Recently I heard a historian propose the opposite -- that the churches, or the temples on the same spot before them, were built where they were because the yew trees made the site sacred. If this theory is true -- since villages often center around a church -- it means these trees helped create the human map of Ireland.

The future of pavement

2011-07-31T21:54:00.002+01:00

One of Ireland’s most iconic images, seen in many postcards and calendar panoramas, is the mosaic of green fields divided by stone walls. Those walls, so common in the west of our island, look even more interesting up close, for the stones are loose, irregular and often lain without mortar. They look as unstable as a card pyramid, yet many have lasted centuries. They demonstrate how insoluble problems can be combined into simple solutions, as farmers here turned an obstacle – the stones that broke their ploughs – into a barrier that would protect their livestock.

Such bucolic scenes seem a world away from, say, suburban USA, where rivers of asphalt and concrete flow through landscapes of strip-malls and housing estates. But there people actually have a similar problem as those farmers, and might learn from their solutions.

For hundreds if not thousands of years, most farmers had some knowledge of how to make walls out of the soil’s round stones, but I’m told specialists went from farm to farm to help with repairs. To build such walls you must select stones of the right size and shapes to fill the spaces formed by the ones around it, like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. When laid properly, the gravity of the stones keep each other in place, like the segments of an archway.

Crafters made their walls in straight lines by hammering posts into the ground some metres apart along the path the wall was to follow, and stretching a rope tautly between them. They did not need to transport materials, as the stones were pulled from the fields around the wall itself – and stones have always been Ireland’s biggest crop.

The resulting walls seemed to grow organically out of the land, and with their crevices could be scaled by humans but made an effective barrier for livestock. Their crevices, meanwhile, provide a home for many forms of smaller wildlife we need for the larger ones to stay alive – the base of the food pyramid, as it were. Seeds eventually make their way to the crevices and sprout, and plants wind their roots and woody stems through the interstices until they become part of the structure, and the wall can barely be seen under the greenery. Eventually some of them become, effectively, hedgerows, and in some hedgerows you can still see their rocky foundation.

Smooth stones fill the earth here because a slow flood of ice scoured this land only ten millennia ago, ripping rock from mountain ranges and suspending it, up to a kilometre above the ground, for perhaps tens of thousands of years. When the ice melted, all the rubble suspended for a kilometre above any patch of land would have slowly tumbled to earth, some of it smoothed by millennia in an icy rock tumbler. Each new ice age would have added a new layer of till, until the soil was thick with it.
One other, more tragic factor might have accelerated the spread of stone walls, especially in the west where they take over from the hedgerows you see in our area. Humans began felling trees as soon as they reached this cold rainforest, but Ireland still had vast forested areas when it was conquered. Then the remaining trees fell to become much of Britain’s navy, until the land was the most deforested in Europe, as Ugo Bardi notes in his 2008 essay “A Distant Mirror.”

Trees hold soil in place; without them it washes away quickly, especially in a rainy country. Bardi notes that erosion seems to have been most severe in the west, and that the thinning soil exposed stones that were brought to the surface; even today, the further west you go, the more barren the land appears, and the more stone walls replace the hedgerows of our region. The diminishing soil, single-crop agriculture, high population and political oppression created an extremely unstable situation, which came, of course, in the form of the potato blight. Over the next few decades, the resulting Famine cut the population in half.

I study old crafts and traditions here to understand how people could live, and sometimes live well, in a truly durable way – and where they did not, to avoid their mistakes. In the modern West – and especially in my native USA – we have thousands of times the wealth that the Irish of 150 years ago, as well as devices they would consider miraculous. Our countries, however, face some of the same problems they did. Many of the forests have been felled, especially around populated areas. We rely heavily on single crops – much of the American diet now consists of corn, in the form of starch, sweetener and meat. More and more people are feeling an economic pinch, and while they have nowhere near the poverty of Ireland 150 or even 50 years ago, neither do they have any experience with the basic self-reliant skills that allowed many people then to survive.

Most of all, Americans specifically and Westerners in general have a problem very like that of the early Irish farmers – their topsoil is blocked by rock. Much of our land been locked away under cement and asphalt, and the more people live in an area, the more of their land is paved. Nor is the problem exclusively urban; suburban and rural Americans, for example, must live with mega-mall moonscapes of concrete and asphalt lining hundreds of thousands of miles of highway.

Such materials require a massive infusion of cheap energy to function, and as energy prices rose in the last decade, the cost of road surfaces soared. Such materials only last a couple of decades, and many roads are reaching the end of their lives. Rural governments in my native USA struggle to cover even rudimentary costs, and several localities are tearing up their roads for more cost-effective gravel. As other areas follow suit, they might find it advantageous to tear down berms, bridges, sidewalks, parking lots and strip malls. That would, however, leave those communities with thousands of tonnes of rubble.

Even residents who have scraps of land they could use for crops – say, suburban homeowners – often dig through their lawn and find thin, depleted soil filled with the debris from the original construction of the neighbourhood. One way or another, they will have to find some use for irregular chunks of concrete and asphalt.
At the same time, many American homes and businesses have chain-link fences for boundaries, which were only invented in the last century and whose cost will increase in the years ahead. How, then, do you discourage intruders or enclose livestock?

In an earlier article I mentioned hedgerows, which provide a thick barrier, a home for wildlife and a seasonal resource of shoots and berries. Many people with sufficient soil, a temperate climate and a bit of space could grow a hedgerow to surround and eventually supplant their existing fences. Hedgerows, however, have a few limitations. For one thing, they take time; even in a moist climate a row of willow saplings would take a few years to become a proper hedge. For another, they must have enough soil to put down roots – a problem for people with concrete or thin soil.

For many people, then, the best solution might be the same ones the Irish farmers used, to let these two problems solve each other. Chunks of rubble can be stacked into walls, and more easily than glacial till, as former pieces of road or parking lot are likely to have at least one flat side. They can keep livestock enclosed, perhaps in a single suburban block whose residents decided to tear down their chain-link fences and keep pigs together. They can break up the wind, shade lambs and piglets from strong sun, provide a home for the miniature wildlife that larger animals eat, and for the flowers that often grow in crevices.

If you think chunks of concrete and asphalt would look ugly, you could try finely chopping moss and mixing it with yogurt and beer, and painting the resulting smoothie on your rocks – I haven’t tried it myself, but I’m told it rapidly creates a moss covering. Alternately, you could plant ivy-leaved toadflax or some other flowers in the crevices, providing food for bees.

Given enough time, plants might wind their roots or stems through the gaps in the wall, and you might get a proper hedgerow growing out of your wall, their fallen leaves and the animals’ waste slowly building back the soil inside the wall.

Given enough time, that moonscape of parking lots could look like that green mosaic of our postcards.

Top photo: Landscape of walls and fields in Conemara.
Second photo: Dry stone wall in Conemara.
Third photo: Overgrown wall in Tuamgraney, County Clare.
Fourth photo: Wall in The Burren, County Galway. Note the eroded landscape in the background.
Fifth photo: Fields in County Clare.

The Girl

2011-07-29T14:04:00.001+01:00

Even after we took off The Girl's stabilisers (training wheels) she has felt apprehensive about riding her bicycle long distances -- until last weekend, when she rode four miles, with me running beside, and another four miles the day after.

When I asked what made the difference, she said, "Papa, I decided I would believe in myself!"

Near my office in Dublin

2011-07-26T21:41:00.002+01:00

Horse carriages ride around this neighbourhood every day; you can see one in the background. The drivers go where they expect tourists and loiter beside their horses -- and it seems to be a family business, as the drivers often carry their sons with them.

In the afternoons the boys -- they look between six and twelve -- take the horses to the tenements near my office, and try to look tough while their charges graze.

Our salad days

2011-07-24T22:48:00.003+01:00

As children my brothers and I loved our rare family outings to a salad bar; foods like artichokes, water chestnuts and sprouts were exotic to us, and we set upon them like locusts. As we piled mountains of garnishes onto our plates, we realised we loved salad – we just hated lettuce.

For some reason, “salad” in the modern Anglo world has come to mean iceberg lettuce, one of the few vegetables with almost no taste or nutritional value; it’s no wonder that so many people think of eating fresh vegetables as they would going to the dentist.

Romans must have eaten salad, for the word comes from the salt they added for flavour, and the old US motto “E Pluribus Unum” allegedly comes from a line describing salad dressing, in Virgil’s Poem “Moretus.” I don't see many references to them in recent centuries, however; Irish historian Olive Sharkey says salad was never part of the traditional Irish diet, and Ms. Beeton’s 1861 cookbook includes only one recipe for it out of hundreds. Perhaps food historians can tell me differently; if salads were rare, there must be a compelling reason, because wood or peat to cook food was often expensive.

Perhaps many people ate salad but thought it too commonplace to mention; old writings tend to leave out the details of everyday life. We often have to imagine what was commonplace from gaps in information; for example, a 19th-century cookbook begins a recipe or sheep’s head stew by noting, “First prepare the sheep’s head in the usual way,” implying no housewife needed to be told. Alternately, perhaps salad was looked down on as food for slaves and peasants, like lobsters and other forms of seafood used to be in Britain and the USA.

Or perhaps salad only caught on slowly because, until recently, almost no one had the sterilised tap water we take for granted. Leaves can carry parasites and must be washed, but if the water, too, is contaminated, the risks of salads might outweigh the health benefits. Also, perhaps the diners did not have the teeth we take for granted; dental care was almost nonexistent until recently, people lost teeth early, and even a century ago women sometimes had their teeth pre-emptively removed at 21 years of age, so as not to incur dental costs later in life. Overcooking food makes more sense when no one can chew.

Whatever the reason, modern Westerners were slow to embrace salad and its potential; as late as World War II in Britain, for example, salad was often a small bowl of plain lettuce before the meal, dipped in a side of mayonnaise. Even when wartime made fuel scarce and malnutrition rise, people seemed to have an unspoken taboo about raw vegetables, according to accounts of the time. Finally the government aimed propaganda campaigns at the nation’s female majority that promoted greens as the secret to beautiful skin, in the same way that advertisers in the US promoted yogurt first as a diet aid and then as a cure for constipation. Wartime housekeeping manuals told housewives how to boil and liquefy potatoes into a mayonnaise substitute; perhaps salad dressing was still too alien an idea.

Those of us with clean water and teeth can embrace salads as substantial meals, partly because “salad” can mean any raw food – and many cooked ones – held together with sauce. Like soup or quiche, salads can re-use leftovers -- meat, fruit, herbs, dried bread, seeds, sprouts, eggs, beans, nuts, berries, pasta or pickles – and mix them with whatever edible parts are flowering, budding, leafing, bulging or shooting in the nearest field, garden or woodland.

Here in Ireland, for example, March brought the first hawthorn shoots, along with the first dandelions, cowslips and primroses. A month later linden leaves could be taken right off the tree and chopped for salad, along with daisies, sorrel, parsley, bernard and clover. Then the red lettuces, green lettuces, mizuna and rocket came up, along with herbs like chives, borrage and coriander, and weeds like fat hen and Good King Henry. By June the kohlrabi, carrots and fennel could be uprooted, cleaned and grated. Right now the nasturtium, spinach and cabbages are ready and the dandelions and clover are still coming, and in winter we will turn to chicory and roots, while still growing other vegetables in the greenhouse.

Many people think root crops must be cooked, but I enjoy shredding them into salads. Beetroot makes a great mix with feta cheese in a sauce of soy sauce, spices, olive oil and vinegar. Celeriac, a celery relative bred for its bulbous roots, can be finely grated and mixed in a tangy sauce with lemon, sesame oil and cayenne pepper.

Many people buy bottles of salad dressing from the store, but you can make your own dressings at home for a fraction of the price, and they are likely to be healthier and taste better. We make ours from home-made yogurt, which we make by putting a bit of plain natural yogurt as a starter into warmed milk and leaving it overnight in hot water. Or you can make your own mayonnaise by whipping 2 egg yolks, 20ml of lemon juice and a pinch of salt together in a bowl, and whisking the mix as you slowly pour in a cup of vegetable oil.

Many foods that do not taste great by themselves are rescued by the other ingredients in a salad; bitter dandelion leaves in spring, for example, and tart elderberries in the autumn. Other foods change their flavour when treated; we slice cucumbers and salt them to extract the astringent taste, soak the slices in water to wash off the salt, squeeze the water out of them, and mix them in a dill-and-yogurt dressing.

Traditionally heavy dishes like potato salad can be made surprisingly light for health or hot weather. My mother-in-law makes a very light summer potato salad with a small pot – say, 500ml -- of boiled waxy potatoes, and similarly-sized volumes of diced apples, diced hard-boiled eggs, and thinly-sliced celery. Mix together about 300 ml of dressing – for example, yogurt and lemon juice, mixed with lemon zest, sesame oil, cayenne powder and pepper, along with chopped mint, dill and chives. As soon as the potatoes are boiled, drained and chopped – when they are still hot – mix them into the dressing, and they will absorb the liquid as they cool. Then mix in the cold apples, eggs and celery for an all-in-one meal. This is a general recipe; experiment until you get it right for you.

Winter brings a dearth of light here, but some salads grow in darkness. Chicory grows outside in the summer and fall, and when winter comes you can chop off the leaves and place the roots in boxes of earth in the shed. The plants shoot up white heads of crunchy leaves, high in vitamins that would otherwise be scarce in the dark months. Bean sprouts also grow in darkness; mung beans work best, but I have sprouted seeds as small as broccoli and as large as adzuki beans. Growing darkness crops like these will be useful skills if climate change drives populations northward, and more of the world shares our long subarctic nights.

As fuel and electricity become more sporadic or expensive, we might want to get our hands used to preparing, and our bellies used to digesting, more foods that don’t require them. It makes a convenient way to slowly introduce a wider variety of species, flavours and techniques, and to discover the joys of finding food for free.

Photo: Salad of borrage, nasturtiums, dandelions, clover, daisies, lettuce, spinach, cornsalad and sorrel.

Local pub

2011-07-18T22:48:00.000+01:00

Broken espalier

2011-07-11T23:18:00.001+01:00

One of the old espalier trees I mentioned in this article, long broken but still producing fruit.

Summer Bounty

2011-07-07T22:54:00.000+01:00

For a single blessed week, it was warm and dry here, and I could bicycle across the countryside wearing shorts. The climate remains so consistently chilly here that people do a Don Knotts double-take when they see someone wearing shorts. Nor do they have any tolerance for warmth; the first day the climate rose above 20 degrees -- say, 60 degrees Fahrenheit -- everyone in my office turned red, panted and dripped sweat, and lunged for the air conditioning.

Still, the garden has overflowed with riches; strawberries and kohlrabi, rocket and broad beans. Our weekends have filled with sowing, digging, pruning, trimming, pickling, weeding and other projects. Our pantry is filling with flower heads and herbs drying from the ceiling, elderflowers brewing and jars of radishes pickling.

Enjoy your midsummer.

The canals

2011-07-03T22:58:00.001+01:00

Built 250 years ago by armies of barrel-chested Irishmen fed on meat and beer, they became one of the country's great natural resources. Within sight of my front gate lies the rusted husk of a barge station, where teams of horses drawing carts of peat - dug from the bog all around us -- on rails from the bog up to the canal. From there the peat could be pulled by horses, in boats this time, to provide the urban centres of Dublin with heat in winter.

Today, as I ride my bicycle along the canal, I pass the derelicts of old canal boats, some with literal trees growing through them. In the coming years, this is a resource the Irish will have to remember that they have.

I wish more governments would begin such projects now. Employing armies of otherwise struggling young males could substantially reduce the crime rate, as happened during World War II. It would provide wildlife with a haven and families with sources of fresh water and fish, as it does for us. It would create infrastructure that could continue to serve Iowa or Alabama a millennia from now.

New chapter

2011-07-01T07:52:00.004+01:00

Every night I take the bus home from Dublin for an hour and a half, until I get to my stretch of country road and step off at a pole where the bus stop sign used to be. I get my bicycle out of a neighbour’s barn, and ride the rest of the way home – and if I am lucky, as I was last night, I am greeted by a running hug from a six-year-old girl, and told that she missed me all day.

Whatever kind of day it was, it ends with me reading stories to her. Over the months she has begun reading more and more to me, and I can see her view of the world gather more detail and shadow. She wants stories of fairies and magic, of brave young girls who stop the villains and restore the world. Sometimes I also work in elements of the world around her – the herons and hedgehogs that live near us, the plants that grow around us, the weather and the soil – helping her understand that magic and power are not limited to fantasy.

She makes her own stories. Last night she showed me the one she drew in meticulous crayon detail, about the princess imprisoned with spiders in a dungeon, by a witch who wanted to turn the green land grey, and guarded her with a dragon who was working for the witch against his will, and secretly sympathised with the princess, and had a giant tear hanging from his eye because he would rather be doing good things for the world. I understand, I told her, as I laid out my clothes for the office tomorrow; we are all that dragon sometimes.

I recognize the threads of children’s books, after-school cartoons and inchoate understanding of the world, which she weaves together like a bird building a nest. But I tell her she has a greater story – I know more of it than she does, but soon that will change. It’s your story, I tell her, and you will know it all one day, but it can never be told, only lived.

I wrote my first magazine cover story on peak oil around the time she was born. In the years since then we have intensively studied building, gardening, traditional crafts and skills we think need preserving, and we pass them onto her in the hopes that she becomes the kind of person the world will need in the years to come. So far, so good.

A new chapter just began. Happy Birthday, love.

Old courtyard

2011-06-26T19:39:00.002+01:00

Peacock included.

Fences of fruit trees

2011-06-20T12:28:00.010+01:00

We visited a 200-year-old walled garden yesterday in County Offaly, a vast area of infrastructure exquisitely crafted to feed whole communities. The paths through the gardens were flanked with what appeared to be wooden fences covered in leafy vines. One closer inspection, they were not vines, but apple trees.

The branches were thin but heavy with what my daughter calls “applings.” Near them stood similar trees perhaps a century old, their gnarled trunks supporting immense candelabras several metres across. The pear trees nearby held a different but equally improbable shape, their trunks erupting into many thin shafts radiating like bicycle spokes across the wall.

Almost anyone who has a backyard or garden would do well to plant fruit trees for the years ahead. Most fruit trees, though, take more years to mature than most of us have to prepare, and take up more space than most of us have in cities or suburbs. Luckily, only a few centuries ago master gardeners developed a way to cultivate fruit in narrow spaces – one that yields more fruit, more quickly, and with a longer growing season.

Espalier is a method of growing a dwarf fruit tree along a wall or fence, binding it for support, and bending the branches to follow certain lines, as Japanese artists do with bonsai trees. Most gardeners started espaliers with a “maiden,” a one-year-old sapling that had not yet forked, and tied it to a staff of wood to keep it straight. Then they tied the desired branches to the fence or wall as they emerged, bending and pruning aggressively as the tree grew.

With the tree’s natural growth concentrated into only two dimensions, it creates many spurs looking for a chance to spread, creating more flowers and fruit than their conventional counterparts, and earlier in the trees’ life. The fruit can be picked casually while standing or sitting, with no need for the ladders or devices needed to pick many other fruit trees, and no risk of injury.

Growing a tree against a south-facing wall has another advantage; not only does the tree receive maximum light and heat, but the thermal mass of the wall absorbs the heat and provides shelter from the wind. In this way trees get a longer growing season, and can grow in cooler climates than they would ordinarily tolerate.

Apples seem the most common espalier tree, and pears were also common here when this practice was widely used – many varieties of each can be used, some more easily than others. In other climates I am told peaches, lemons, oranges, tangerines, figs, nectarines and plums can be trained.

We could not have grown those in northern Europe, of course, but we did have many fruits our modern supermarkets have left behind. Fruit like damsons, sorbus, medlar, quince, sloes and rosehips must have fallen from public favour during the energy needle – perhaps because they could not be bred for or kept in supermarkets -- but they might still grow in your area, as might dozen s of fruits you’ve never heard of. Some of them might be trained this way, and I would be interested to see whether the same could be done to nut trees for protein.

Espalier trees can be grafted like other fruit, so that a single tree could grow multiple varieties on its branches. I know of no upper limit to how far an espalier can be stretched, nor of how many grafts a single tree can take; the BBC reports that gardener Paul Barnett in West Sussex, UK grows 250 varieties of apple on a single – admittedly non-espalier -- tree.

Homeowners might want to consider reviving this old technique, as it uses vertical space for production and decoratively covers the bare walls of houses, sheds, stables, chicken coops or compost bins. You could border your garden with an espalier fence, as we plan to, or you could turn a chain-link fence into something beautiful and useful. They are still trees, however, and take years to grow, so it’s best to develop a long-term plan for fruit as a resource.

It’s a matter that deserves some thought; before “fruit” became a candy flavour or chemical colouring in breakfast cereal, their vitamins helped families survive the winter months in a variety of ways. Some, like cooking apples, could keep for months in the attic. Many could be crushed and left to ferment, and the resulting liquid came laced with enough alcohol to kill many pathogens. They could be dried into rings or leathers, pickled like chutneys or mixed with some kind of sugar to make jam, preserving much of their vitamin content for decades.

Today, when people here visit a neighbour’s house or commemorate a holiday, they often bring jam or wine from their own trees. To many people today it might seem a twee bit of etiquette; to earlier generations, I suspect, such gestures were deposits in an unspoken community bank.

Top photo: Espalier saplings at Ballindoolin Garden, County Offaly.
Middle and bottom photos: Old espalier trees.

Favourite lines from Girl

2011-06-15T22:08:00.002+01:00

As I was removing a hornet's nest from the shed:
"Here, take this tiara for protection, Papa! Hornest hate all things princess!"

After her crisps (potato chips) spilled:
"Papa! Something catastrophic has happened!"

Sailing ship on the River Liffey

2011-06-14T22:33:00.001+01:00

No articles yet

2011-06-13T07:22:00.002+01:00

The best-laid plans. Sorry. Enjoy this photo of our in-house pest control division.

Life with Girl

2011-06-05T23:39:00.010+01:00

We have had a busy weekend. I ordered a new bicycle to replace the one that was beyond repair, showed The Girl a Marx Brothers film, got more willow for making baskets, climbed the Tower of Kildare, went camping and presided over a pet funeral.

I brought The Girl to the neighbour’s house, where she has friends her age. The day turned unexpectedly solemn, however; the girls’ hamster had died, and I was asked to be the gravedigger.

I and the children gathered round and bowed our heads as the girls knelt down and laid the pet to rest. They wrote its name in crayon on popsicle sticks, taped them into a tiny cross, placed it over the grave, and hugged each other.

The mourning ended abruptly as their new puppy ran over, ate the grave-marker, and ran away trailing popsicle-stick splinters and pursued by four indignant girls.

****************

As I helped The Girl write invitations to her seventh birthday party, it occurred to me that my fellow Americans would not recognise most of the names. The Irish have many of the basic Williams and Annes, Emilys and Roberts, but recently parents here have returned to traditional Irish names: Caomhe (pronounced Queeva), Soirse (pronounced Seer-sha), Ciara (Keera), Diarbhla (Derv-la), Brighde (Breeda), Niamh (Neev), Siobhan (Sha-vawn), Diarmuid (Deer-mwid), Eoin (Ee-oin) and Enda (Enda).

Few of these common Irish names ever made it to my native USA, even though many Americans embrace their Irish heritage; most major cities celebrate St. Patrick's Day, for example, even though the larger German population gets no St. Boniface parade. The last few decades also saw a fashion for unorthodox names. In the 1984 film Splash, a mermaid calls herself Madison after a street sign, and Tom Hanks’ character protests that it’s not a real name -- two decades later it was the most popular name in America.

You'd think these trends would merge, and to be fair Aidan and Liam have become popular boys’ names – perhaps because they have an English-friendly spelling. But the schools of Iowa and Arkansas have not filled with Eoins or Caomhes, and even most of Ireland’s more phonetic names remain alien to Americans; the New York Times mistakenly called Ireland's new leader Enda Kenny a woman, perhaps thinking of the name "Edna."

Irish-Americans I know have named their children Colleen ("girl" in Irish) or Erin ("Ireland" in Irish) but these are not names here. The few superficially similar names often appeared in a different gender; I knew many female Pattys in Missouri but no males, which baffles the Paddys I know here, and the same holds true for the Shawns and Seans.

Nor did the more recent American names reach these shores. I told The Girl about her cousin Heather; she said, surprised, "She’s named after the plant?”

****************

The Girl and I went camping last night -- within sight of our house, but a little farther each time. A short time ago she didn’t spend the whole night in the tent; when dreams woke her, she crept sleepily to her familiar bed inside. By camping on our land with her every month or so, I hope to help her grow comfortable with sleeping far from home.

I awoke before she did this morning, and as I relaxed at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee, I turned and saw her looking at me in the doorway. “Did you really spend the whole night in the tent, Papa?” she asked sceptically.

Top photo: The Girl feeding ducks at the canal terminus in Naas.
Bottom photo: Our neighbour driving by in his carriage.

Keep checking in

2011-05-22T21:17:00.008+01:00

I have been busy, but will post more soon. Promise.

Life With Girl

2011-05-15T23:56:00.002+01:00

This weekend, with The Girl keeping me company, I picked bushels of nettles before the season ends. I boiled some nettles and blitzed them, and separated it into liquid -- nettle tea – and solid puree. Let the tea cool, and bottled it for later this week. I froze the puree for dishes later in the year.

I tied more nettles into bundles and hung them from the ceiling of the greenhouse, where they can dry over the next week or so and yield tea all through the year.
Most of the nettles, though, went with some lemons, sugar, cream of tartar and yeast into my first experiment with beer. The yeast is bubbling along happily when I last checked.

Also this weekend, The Girl and I ran all over the garden, playing the game of “Raw, Cooked, Poisonous.” Cowslips raw, elderflowers cooked, foxglove poisonous. Hostas? She asked. Ummmm ... I don’t know, I said. Assume anything is poisonous until you find otherwise.

Later that day she asked to go fishing, so I dug up some worms and we walked with her fishing rod down our driveway to the canal. When I showed her how to bait the hook, though, she began to cry, saying she felt sorry for the poor worm.

I’m proud of you for caring about how others feel, I said – but there are millions of worms under our feet, appearing and disappearing. When it’s their time to go, they become part of Mr. Robin, or the naughty magpie, or the fish. And the fish becomes part of the big heron that lives outside our front gate, I said, so when we wave to the heron, we’ll be waving to the worm too. She looked dubious, but the energy spent working that thought over was energy not spent on tears.

I promised we could go camping Saturday night, but it got chilly and damp again that evening – only ten degrees or so in May, that’s Ireland. So we set up a tent in the living room, and camped there. I read her favourite fairy stories to her, and as I sang the Sesame Street song “That’s About the Size of It,” she fell asleep curled up in my arms.

The next evening I asked her if she wanted me to read the next chapter of her fairy book, and she said slyly, “I already got a chapter.”

Of what book, honey? I asked.

“Not out of any book,” she said.” I got a chapter of the Papa Fairy.”

You’re right, I said, you got a chapter of my life this weekend, and I got a chapter of yours. Thank you.

The Girl

2011-05-08T22:47:00.003+01:00

Every night I read The Girl at least one book, and as she can read most words herself now, I make her read part of it. She still needs a little help with certain words, though, and like any six-year-old, she gets distracted easily.

“What’s that ribbon there?” she asked, pointing to a small illustration halfway down the page.

Well, I said, the story is about the fairy getting her ribbon back from the goblin, so perhaps that’s to show you what the ribbon is like.

“But it has a D on it, and the fairy’s name doesn’t begin with D!” she said, perplexed. “What does the D stand for?”

She’s a dancing fairy -- maybe it stands for ‘dancing,’ I said. We agreed that was a bit of a reach. Honestly, I said, it doesn’t seem a very clear illustration.

“Well they should have made it clear when they wrote the book,” she said.

Perhaps it’s there to encourage us to do what we’re doing now, I suggested – to ask questions and think. Things that make you stop and think are usually a good thing.

“Well, they shouldn’t do it here,” The Girl said indignantly. “We’ve slid completely off the story now.” Kids don’t tend to like it when people play with their expectations.

Let’s get right back on, I said. We won’t even think about that little picture.
“Okay,” she said. “I will look away until you’ve turned the page.”

****************

My apologies for blogging so little – with Ireland’s economic situation, we’ve been working a lot more to pay off our debts, and our weekend garden-building has gone into overdrive. Today built the last bed of the garden for a while, completing our year’s work transforming our muddy and overgrown acre into a working kitchen garden.

Photo: The Girl running through the woods in the boglands. We were hunting for wild garlic, but came up with nothing but armfuls of bluebells.

The Girl at Glendalough

2011-05-01T22:10:00.002+01:00

The Girl at Glendalough, a monastery built in the 400s AD. I notice the roof is made of stones and mortar like the walls, the only such roof I have ever seen. I wonder if they built a wooden frame inside and built the stone up around it, as they did with arches.

Happy Easter

2011-04-24T21:43:00.001+01:00

The Girl

2011-04-18T21:44:00.002+01:00

Tonight, I said, as I tucked her in, I don’t want you staying up late.

“But Papa, I stay up late because I become a fairy at midnight, and join my fairy-kind,” she said. “I worry that, if I fall asleep too early, my fairy-self will fade away forever.”

That might happen a bit as you get older, I said. But some people can hang onto it.

London

2011-04-16T23:14:00.005+01:00

Well, I’m back from London Book Fair -- I was supposed to go last year but, as some of you might remember, the eruption of an Icelandic volcano cancelled all air travel here for a while. This year my day job sent me there on business, and when my colleagues went home I stayed for a holiday.

The first night after the Fair, I headed for Picadilly Circus for a performance of Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play “The Children’s Hour.” I was also fortunate to find a hostel in the middle of Picadilly, only a few blocks from the theatre. I love hostels, excellent Spartan accommodations for tightwads in an expensive city.

I wanted to see this particular play; to my knowledge, this was the first time it has been performed since I’ve been alive. I’ve never had a chance to see the 1936 version with Miriam Hopkins, Joel McRae and Merle Oberon, but I did love the 1962 version with Shirley MacLaine, James Garner and Audrey Hepburn. This production carried a surprisingly prominent cast of Ellen Burstyn, Kiera Knightley, Elizabeth Moss and Carol Kane, all famous television and film actresses who proved their stage presence here.

The next day I took London’s open-top bus tour, drank coffee and oxtail-flavoured crisps on the banks of the Thames, and visited the Garden Museum – a small but beautiful volunteer exhibit across the Thames from Big Ben. They have a collection of gardening instruments from centuries past, finely-crafted instruments whose names most people would once have recognized – dibblers, spudders and netting shuttles.

I recommend the Imperial War Museum to London visitors as well, particularly for its focus not just on the guns and machines, but on neighbourhoods and families. In its depths English rooms from the 1940s are recreated – books, music, utensils – just as it would have been in the Blitz. In the middle of the living room was one of the cages families would hide inside, and along the wall are the stories of the children – native Londoners and refugees – who were evacuated and who stayed. I appreciate learning about war through the eyes of most people who see it, rather than through political speeches or generals’ memoirs.

I was not able to see the one museum I most wanted to, however -- the Natural History Museum. Hopefully I can return soon and see it properly, with The Girl.

I cannot highly enough recommend London’s transportation system; between the Underground, the buses and the very walkable streets, you can go anywhere quickly and easily. Locals complain about the Tube and the crowds, but I would rather have a system with a rush-hour crush than none at all. I was left wondering how, and how long, such a system can be maintained.

Photo 1: Big Ben across the Thames.
Photo 2: The West End at night.
Photo 3: Garden implements from decades past.
Photo 4: The artillery guns outside the Imperial War Museum.

Away for a week or so

2011-04-08T11:41:00.001+01:00

I am travelling on business to the London Book Fair, and will be incommunicado from this weekend until Thursday.

Girl in the Wicklow Mountains

2011-04-07T22:03:00.003+01:00

Laying hedgerows

2011-04-05T22:20:00.009+01:00

If there is one thing that distinguishes the place I grew up from the place I live now, it would be not the yards and fields themselves, but the boundaries. If you grew up in the USA as I did, you were likely surrounded by chain-link fences -- waist-high around our back yards and two or three times higher around our institutions, giving every kindergarten and churchyard a distinctive penal look.

Of course the steel chains were not edible, nor did they grow thicker and stronger over time. The fences did not spread shade over your land in the summer sun, nor thin out in winter to let in precious light. The chain mail did not make the soil more fertile, nor protect it from being washed away by the rain. The wires did not offer a home to wildlife, and their manufacture burned more carbon into the atmosphere rather than removing it. Here in Ireland, surrounded by hedgerows that stretch to the horizon on all sides, we see how unnecessary it all was.

By hedgerows, I don’t mean the decorative evergreen sculptures I see in front of banks and businesses, often a monoculture of invasive species. Hedgerows here are lines of densely-planted trees – fast-growing breeds like willow, elder, hazel, birch, chestnut, pine, hawthorn, blackthorn and rowan. Their branches intertwine so thickly that they weave like threads in rope – I recently tried to cut a tree down here recently and even when the base was cut through, the trunk continued to hang in the air, supported by the branches around it. Blackberry brambles and ivy help fill the spaces above, and useful weeds below.

They add variety to fields that would otherwise go sterile. Each plant adds its own chemicals and removes its own nutrients from the soil, so fields of monoculture need to be continually fertilised. Single crops provide our bodies, too, with a single set of nutrients, and only at certain times of year. They also encourage a glut of certain animals, like pests that eat our crops, and offer no homes to the birds and insectivores who would eat the pests.

Hedgerows offer fields a needed balance, a wild river through human land that can soak up our excesses and give us a reservoir of food and fuel for lean times. They give your garden a third dimension, a vertical salad bar that middle-aged and elderly can reach with a minimum of back pain.

Unlike field crops, it provides for much of the year; right now they have hawthorn shoots and dandelions for salads and nettle and bramble shoots for tea. Next month we will get linden leaves and daisies, rose hips and elderflowers later still, sloes and blackberries in the autumn.

The principle of a hedgerow is simple, but hedge-laying was an art form in traditional Ireland and England. Every year farmers would take a few days out to maintain their hundreds of metres of hedge, re-weaving or pruning the new growth, and each area had its own style and tricks. Ireland has hedge-laying associations, contests, awards and fans, and farmers take pride in maintaining the same hedges that have existed for decades or centuries.

Typically the hedge-layer takes each upward-pointing sapling, holds it at whatever height he wants the hedge to be, and cuts diagonally downward through the wood – but only partway. He then lays everything above the cut down horizontally, often weaving it through the other saplings and beating the woven branches down with a club until they were densely matted. A bit of bark and wood still connects the top and bottom of the tree, so the top remains alive and growing even as it lies flat amid many other branches. In this way, the weave itself gets thicker over time, until it is an impenetrable barrier of living wood.

You might have noticed that this is beginning to sound more and more like a wall, and so it is – walls of buildings were made the same way, in a technique called wattle-and-daub. The main difference was that the saplings were cut through and dead when they were woven into a wall – the “wattle” -- and covered in a daub plaster of clay, straw and perhaps manure. You might also notice that the basic idea is not very different than weaving a basket – there you simply take cut willow or some other sapling, partly dried, and knit them into a tight circle.

You don’t need acres of land in rural Ireland to have hedgerows; if you have a fence, you could try planting willows or some other hardy saplings underneath, weave them through the fence like thread, and see how they grow.

Vertical gardening, though, could be done with many of our human-made structures. Your house or apartment building has sides, as do your sheds, shops, schools, churches and highway overpasses. Not far away you likely have telephone poles, fences, walls, signs, gates and, of course, trees, any of which might be covered in productive garden plants. Such a project could transform ugly and dilapidated sprawl, insulate buildings, soak up rain and protect walls from the elements. If I could recommend one single thing that suburbanites could do to make their lives better, it would be to cover every vertical surface with the means of production.

Beans and peas might make a good start – they grow easily in many temperate regions, make beautiful flowers, add nitrogen to the soil, and offer a high-protein, easily stored crop. Brambles, roses other thorny plants not only provide shoots, flowers and fruits, but a natural security fence against human or animal intruders.

If you want to give this a go, first pay attention to what kind of climber you have. Ivy sinks its roots into bark or masonry, and should probably have a trellis if you are putting it on the side of your house. Roses and other scramblers, which have hooks or thorns that latch onto other plants and allow them to pull themselves upwards, would also require support. Twiners like wisterias twist their tendrils around trees and other structures, while beans whip their shoots around looking for something to latch onto.

Keep in mind how much sun or shade the plants need, and how much they are likely to get where you’re planting them. Finally, make sure they have enough water – the ground along a wall often stays dry in the rain – and that toxic paint is not flaking off if you’ll be eating it.

If you have an apartment, you could use a balcony or install a window box, and train plants to grow out around your window or grow downwards using hanging plants like nasturtiums.

Everyone lives in a different situation – a farm, a flat in town, a suburban house – but most of us have some opportunity to experiment with three-dimensional farming. Look around your neighbourhood, and try to imagine what it could be.

Top photo: Low hedge in Cwm Llinau, Wales. It seems like British hedges are often lower and tightly-knit, like a wall of basketry, while Irish hedges are more strips of dense forest.
Second photo: Gorse hedges divide the hilly country of County Clare, near Bealkelly.
Third photo: A metre of exposed bank where my daughter rides horses shows how much earth is retained by hedgerow roots.
Fourth photo: Hedgerows often line the roads here, giving the constant impression of driving through a trench. Driving across Ireland you see less of it than you imagine. Courtesy of Msmail on Flickr.com.
Bottom photo: My daughter's favourite path through the forest.

The Labyrinth

2011-03-26T22:50:00.003Z

The monastery at Glendalough, a secluded haven of meditation since the fifth century, has a walking labyrinth; visitors are to slowly walk a winding trail over the grass to meditate and achieve a state of awareness. Or you can be my daughter, and be there already.

Six-year-old questions you’re not prepared for

2011-03-23T07:30:00.000Z

“Papa, how do you know you’re really alive, or that you just think you’re alive and having a death-dream?”

I slowly turned to the back seat and glanced at our two guests, friends of ours from America.

What makes you think of that, honey? I asked.

“Well, you know how when you’re dreaming you don’t realise you’re in a dream? Well, I feel alive, but what if I’m really dead and just dreaming that I’m alive?”

Um .... Well, if you feel and dream, I think you’re alive, I said. The dead don’t dream.

“How do you know?” she asked. A fair point.

Do you remember anything before you were alive, I asked – before you were born?

“Oh yes,” she said agreeably. “I was a fairy then, and was a fairy for many lives, even as far back as the dinosaurs, and I was friends with a Barosaurus.”

Did Barosauruses make good friends? I asked.

“Sure! He followed me around like he was my puppy.”
How long were you a fairy?

"Oh...I don't know."

Just how long you can remember.

She pondered that question a moment. "I only remember being a fairy two thousand times."

Two thousand?

"Yes."

I paused a moment. Well, who taught you to be a fairy? Did you go to fairy school?

"No!" she said indignantly. "The fairy-mothers teach you how to be a fairy. A fairy learns from the fairy-mother." She said it as if everyone knew such a thing.

"That's a very good mother."

"Yes. I only go to school when I am human. This is the first time I've been a girl."

So you remember coming to life as a girl here? I asked.

“Yeah ...” She looked thoughtful.

I’m certain you’re alive, I said.

Irish movies

2011-03-16T22:49:00.011Z

It’s St. Patrick’s Day again: downtown parades, green felt hats, plastic orange beards, pennywhistle-and-accordion music, and television repeats of The Quiet Man and Darby O’Gill and the Little People. If you want to see Ireland on screen in some other way this year, though, you can check out any of dozens of great Irish films: some bright and sweet, others dark and dramatic, and many little-seen and under-appreciated.

A list of “Irish movies,” of course, could be defined many ways. It could mean the stereotypical “Oirish” films that annoy the Irish themselves – the two mentioned above, for example, or the deeply weird Finian’s Rainbow. It could mean films set somewhere else but shot in Ireland – usually the Wicklow Mountains near us -- for the scenery: Excalibur, Braveheart, Zardoz, Saving Private Ryan, the 2004 version of King Arthur. It could mean US films that use Ireland as a backdrop for American romance (P.S. I Love You, The Matchmaker) or family drama (Da).

You can see comedies about colourful characters in Ireland’s villages (Garage, Waking Ned Devine, War of the Buttons) or its towns (The Van, The Snapper, Once, Circle of Friends, Eat the Peach), dramas set in the country (Dancing at Lughnasa, The Field) and the slums (My Left Foot, Angela’s Ashes, Veronica Guerin, The General). Some modernised old legends (The Secret of Kells, Into the West, The Secret of Roan Inish), while others exposed sad chapters of history (The Magdalene Sisters, Evelyn).

A number of films have focused on Ireland’s rebellion against Britain (Michael Collins, The Informer, The Wind That Shakes the Barley) or “The Troubles” with Northern Ireland (In the Name of the Father, Cal, Omagh, Hunger, Bloody Sunday, The Boxer).

It could mean creations of the Irish film industry, whose films often leave all these stereotypes behind and deal with life in modern urban Ireland (Inside I’m Dancing, Intermission, Once).

Most of the films above were critically praised, although I haven’t seen them all myself. I have seen and particularly recommend the ones below – if you like movies, check out the titles and see if anything appeals to you.

Light meat:

Waking Ned Devine: An elderly man in a remote village wins the lottery and dies of shock. His neighbours conspire to maintain the pretence that he is still alive, so that they can all receive the winnings and divide them among themselves.

The Secret of Roan Inish: An unashamedly mystical and sentimental film by John Sayles, about a young girl in rural Ireland discovering an old legend.

The Commitments: An ambitious young music fan in 1990s Dublin tries to hammer a motley group of musicians into a soul band. Set in the slums of Dublin and with a bittersweet ending, this still makes the light category for its gentle humour. If you liked The Full Monty or Billy Elliot, you’ll probably like this.

Dark meat:

The Wind that Shakes the Barley: A keenly-observed film about young men drawn into the Irish Revolution, showing how early idealism leads to stark choices.

The Informer: John Ford’s 1929 film shows 24 hours in the life of a revolutionary sympathiser, and how a single act of desperation leads to a tragic chain of consequences.

The General: The biography of one of Dublin’s most notorious gangsters, who laughed at the police for years until he ran afoul of the IRA.

Photos top to bottom: The Wind That Shakes the Barley, The Secret of Roan Inish, Waking Ned Devine, The General.

Note: Blogging is more-or-less weekly for the moment due to technical difficulties.

Forest after rain

2011-03-08T00:11:00.002Z

Yes, we really do live in a bog.

Four Lessons from Ireland's Election

2011-03-04T12:32:00.003Z

We watched Ireland’s election results roll in over the weekend, marking the country’s biggest political upheaval since its civil war. Voters who watched their country’s boom turn to bankruptcy in just a few years punished the party in power – Ireland’s dominant party for 85 years – by turning it into a third party overnight. Some third parties that traditionally scraped by with single-digit percentages suddenly became major players, while others found themselves wiped off the political map.

In last month’s cover story of The American Conservative magazine, I wrote about Ireland’s boom and bust, and what it means for the USA. A few months earlier I described the tense week of Ireland’s bankruptcy and international bailout, and a few months before that I wrote in Big Questions Online why the Irish might be better able to handle austerity than Americans. This election begins the next chapter, one that offers many lessons for politically active folk back home. For example:

1.)CHANGE THE SYSTEM

It sounds like a campaign slogan, and usually it is used that way, by people who do not have a clear idea how their system works or what alternatives exist. In American schools, for example, we were taught that democracy consisted of voting, and that the person with the most votes wins. Most of my countrymen still do not realise that most democracies have better methods than that.

In most European countries, voters can pick between several choices – the national debates here were between the leaders of six parties. Voters here can rank two choices for a given office, their favourite and next-favourite. In addition, districts don’t just elect one person to represent you, but three, four, five or more depending on population. In our case, all the representatives together form the Dail (pronounced like Doyle), and the dominant party elects the Taoiseach (TEE-shak, or Prime Minister) -- the president of Ireland is a largely ceremonial office.

This generally means that multiple parties can exist, as no one fears that their minor party will “spoil” the votes of a lesser-evil major-party candidate – and Ireland has traditionally had two major parties and several minor ones. Several local people from different parties represent us, and if one doesn’t respond we can go to another.

While the US system remains advanced for the 1780s, it allows parties to ignore most voters in most states. This does not even include the ridiculous Electoral College, which actually elects the president, and whose members -- as I pointed out in this article eleven years ago -- are not legally required to follow the will of the people in their area. Put it this way: most Irish vote, most Americans don’t – they know it doesn’t matter.

This American system works against the presence of all but two parties, since any vote for a third party would be a vote against the major party you despise the least. It means that each major party must desperately triangulate between its core financial supporters, cultivating an image of ideological warfare while agreeing on most major issues. It is a comparatively undemocratic system in which most people’s votes don’t count – but it is also an anti-capitalist system, one in which each representative of an area holds a complete monopoly on those constituents.

The USA doesn’t have to adopt a full parliamentary system to make their system fairer – Americans could bring back preference voting, which most states had in the 19th century – more than one party can endorse the same candidate, so candidates must solicit the support of several independent groups. We could have ranked voting, in which people list their preferences. If your state has a House and Senate, one body could be filled with locally-elected representatives, while another could use state-wide Proportional Representation, and voters could get the best of both systems.

I know Tea Partiers, Libertarians, traditional Republicans, paleo-cons, crunchy cons, distributists, anarchists, evangelicals, Greens, liberals, socialists and all manner of single-issue zealots, and I tell them all the same thing. If you want change, lobby to change the voting system – you deserve better than to have one choice more than North Koreans.

This country has other electoral attitudes that my countrymen might want to consider adopting. The election season here is a few weeks long – the law prohibits candidates from putting posters up more than a short time before the election, and the posters are to be taken down shortly afterwards. Television advertisements are illegal. Candidates do appear on news programmes and interviews, and while they are not above the usual vague platitudes and soaring rhetoric, they tend to stick to economic issues – how to get more people employed, or what public employees will have to be fired.

News media tend to focus on what candidates vote for, not the sordid details of their personal lives – unless it affects their public life, as when the Prime Minister appeared apparently drunk in an interview. The closest thing to a scandal came a few years ago, when a young female candidate in our area saw photos of drunken party stunts circulate on Facebook. The “scandal” was limited to a brief and amused mention by journalists and, for the candidate, a large number of marriage proposals.

2.)WATCH OUT FOR THE BACKLASH

Since Ireland won its own revolutionary war from Britain, it has had two major parties – Fianna Fail (rhymes with tall) and Fine Gael (rhymes with tail), leftovers of the two sides of Ireland’s civil war. Fianna Fail was in power for 61 of the last 79 years, and almost continuously for the last 25, riding the Celtic Tiger boom years.

When the global economy began to slide in late 2008, Ireland had a real-estate bubble three times the relative size of the USA’s, and the country’s six banks were badly overstretched. Fianna Fail leaders took the bold step of guaranteeing all bank deposits in the nation – not up to a certain amount, not all low-risk loans, not just personal savings. Everything.

The next two years saw the country’s economy go south anyway, and by late 2010, after weeks of denials, Fianna Fail leaders were forced to ask for the European Union and International Monetary Fund to bail out their country. Perhaps 100,000 people protested in Dublin – as I mentioned in American Conservative, a proportionally-sized US protest would comprise the entire state of Virginia. The Prime Minister was so unpopular that he was forced to step down as leader of his party before the election.

Pre-election polls indicated not just the expected boost for Fine Gael but a surge in support for two of the minor parties, which had traditionally only received single-digit percentages of the vote -- picture a US election in which Ralph Nader suddenly polls better than the Democrat. Labour was running neck-and-neck with Fine Gael for a while, to the point that they took the bold step of promoting their own party leader as Prime Minister.

Sinn Fein’s surge was even more remarkable – as the political party affiliated with the Irish Republican Army, it brings considerable baggage to elections. To their credit, the Irish media did not let leader Gerry Adams off easily, either – radio hosts grilled him about IRA crimes years ago, and asked whether a man allegedly involved in the murder of police officers would, as part of a ruling coalition, control the police. At the same time, his party was allowed a fair hearing in the national debates, and probably justly; except for the occasional incident, both sides have kept the peace and their word in Northern Ireland for twelve years now, and everyone wants to put the “Troubles” behind them.

In the end, Fianna Fail came in third, with just 12 per cent of the vote – a quarter of their usual share. Fine Gael took about 45 per cent and will lead the new government. Labour took 22 per cent and is expected to be the coalition partner, although how their labour-union vote will mesh with Fine Gael’s centre-right platform remains to be seen – some Irish say, only half-jokingly, that they don’t expect the marriage to last long. Sinn Fein tripled their usual numbers with nine per cent, independents and other parties another 12 per cent. Importantly, though, all these groups received a major bounce in support even though they hold very different platforms – voters angry at Fianna Fail and demanding change threw their votes in all directions to get it.

Americans are seeing some of the same trends. In the last few years they have seen massive anti-war protests, the election of a black president with an unlikely name, the Tea Party protests and the labour conflict in Wisconsin. Each of them have complicated origins and varied circumstances, but all of them represent more of what in Third World countries we call “unrest.” As the fossil fuels grow scarcer and our decades-old economic boom continues to fade, the coming years are likely to bring many more historic firsts for good or ill, as increasingly frustrated voters see only diminishing returns from old choices.

3.)BEING RIGHT IS NOT ENOUGH

I have done a bit of volunteer work for the Green Party here, whose members comprise many farmers and small businessmen, and who have been spared some of the wackier characters that plagued its American counterpart. Like Green Parties in more than 100 countries, though, they had to decide whether to retain the comfortable purity of the outsider or to “sell out” and inch forward incremental changes. They remained independent outsiders for a quarter-century, slowly building their base until they won several seats in the Dail.

In 2007 came the first election since issues like peak oil and climate change, long derided as fringe issues, percolated into the mainstream, and the Greens hoped for a breakthrough. At first, though, the election changed little. Fianna Fail held control with 45 percent, while the Greens held only four percent of the TDs. One thing that did change, however, was that Fianna Fail’s old coalition partner lost most of their seats, and Fianna Fail needed a new ally to have a majority. Armchair politicos put minor parties together like jigsaw pieces to create new alliances, but FF reached out to the Greens.

The coalition was controversial from the beginning, with some elected officials leaving the party in protest. Three Greens were appointed ministers or junior ministers -- like US Cabinet secretaries – and they pushed through a few reforms.
While in power they came to our churches and neighbourhood groups and spoke bluntly about peak oil, localisation, community agriculture in a way that most national leaders do not. On the other hand, they had to back down on a number of government policies long protested by the party’s activist core, like the U.S. government’s “rendition” flights through Shannon airport and Shell Oil’s gas pipeline over the west coast.

Shortly after they took power, though, the economy crashed, and over the next few years the Greens objected more and more often to Fianna Fail’s handling of the crisis. So did most of the public, and the Greens shared in the perceived blame for the government’s policies. Finally, after the bailout, the Greens announced they were breaking the coalition, forcing a new election, but the defiant move proved too little too late. They lost every single one of their seats in the election, and may disband.

In 2007, I was cautiously optimistic about the Greens in power, and supported their decision to work with other parties. If they had refused a coalition then, however, their party would have been much healthier now. Decisions are often obvious in the rear-view mirror.

4.)KEEP YOUR GOALS REALISTIC

The Irish government made more than one binding agreement – first to cover the banks’ massive losses, then to pay back the emergency bailout money – and no one is clear to what extent those arrangements can be undone. If a new government remains locked into those agreements, its options will be much more limited.

Again, Ireland’s specifics are unique, but the USA and most other governments have commitments that go beyond international agreements. For example, most Americans live among post-war building construction of suburbs, strip malls, asphalt and warehouse stores, and they aren’t going to go away anytime soon. With the money and time we have left we can’t simply make all our cars electric, replace our roads with Personal Rapid Transit systems or redraw our cities. Personally, most of us live near family and friends, have mortgages, perhaps bound by neighbourhood association agreements. On many levels, we are all limited.

This doesn’t mean we have no control, simply that we need to understand what our options are. Most of us can’t build a new eco-house tomorrow, but most of us can insulate our homes, turn the lawns into vegetables, turn the chain-link fences into hedgerows and turn the shed into a chicken coop, if we can get the neighbourhood association to back down. We and our neighbours won’t be able to tear down the abandoned Wal-Mart safely, but we can fill it with livestock, cover it with blackberry brambles and build raised vegetable beds in the parking lot.

We can prepare to change our position – say, to save up to buy a small farm. But such a move requires time to save up money, skills that are not easy to acquire in one’s spare time, and years of commitment during which you won’t get any younger. Radical changes will become more difficult as time goes on.

In the coming years, Ireland will probably have to return to its traditional limits, probably by returning to some of the local farms, businesses and community they never completely abandoned during the boom years. The new government can help determine how painful life will be in the meantime, though, and if voters deem them useless, this won’t be the last political shake-up here, or where you live.

All photos thanks to Infomatique at Flickr.com, used under Creative Commons license.
Top: Photo for Dublin Sinn Fein candidate.
Second: Counting Irish ballots with their many candidates.
Third: Dublin independent candidate.
Bottom: An image of Ireland's longtime Fianna Fail Taoiseach, the cunning Bertie Ahern, who held the country's top office through the boom and passed the office to his successor right before the crash.

Wisp

2011-03-01T07:22:00.002Z

Goose-grass climbs all over saplings and bushes here, and in the winter it dies off and covers every low thing in the woods with a gossamer veil.

The grace of invertebrates

2011-02-21T17:51:00.004Z

We live by the grace of invertebrates. They work around the clock, collect and dispose of our waste, replenish the soil, feed animals above them on the food chain and allow plants to return each spring. Most importantly, perhaps, bees, butterflies and other insects deliver valentines between plants, which must procreate but cannot move, and so rely on couriers. Flowers grow for the benefit of these pollinators, not us, and bloom in more colours than we can see – only insects’ superior eyes can see all their shades and patterns.

Now, of course, humans have changed the face of the world; we have levelled forests, eliminated thousands of species in a field in favour of a single crop, and sprayed those crops with a cocktail of exotic poisons never before seen on Earth. After several decades of this, bee populations are collapsing around the world, and while we do not know the specific causes, we know that areas that have been heavily hit with pesticides have also seen serious collapses. In a few areas of China, farmers have begun laboriously pollinating cash crops like pears by hand, taking brushes from flower to flower – a method that would not be feasible for most survival crops should the problem spread.

This time of year, as those of us in the northern hemisphere plan our gardens and sow our first seeds, we must remember to invest part of our garden to reimburse the armies that work for us. What sorts of armies you have, and what payment they accept, will vary depending on where you live: our forest here has bluebells and my Missouri hometown had mimosas, but the principles should remain the same.

You could bring pollinators in by the box-load if you keep bees, and you get honey and wax from the arrangement. Bee hives can be kept easily on a small plot of land, a backyard, a balcony or even a rooftop, so long as the bees’ flight path to and from their headquarters is located away from humans’ personal space. They tend to like simple flowers with an easy landing pad, like poached-egg flower, daisies or dandelions, and our local beekeepers recommend putting out water for them as well.

Honeybees, however, are only one of 20,000 species of bee in the world, and we can encourage the rest of them as well. They don’t give us honey or wax but they do pollinate our gardens – sometimes more effectively, according to some experts – and many are stingless. Dozens of species are bumblebees, which live in small colonies, but most are solitary, often named according to where they make their hole – miners, carpenters, masons and plasterers.

Depending on the type of bees in your area, you might want to leave a rim of unmown weeds around your property, or plant or maintain a hedgerow that can give ground bees a place to shelter. Some gardeners give bees a pre-made home --boring holes in wood or stacking reeds or bamboo for carpenter or orchard bees, stacking adobe bricks for mason bees or building a small, cotton-lined box with a large entrance hole for bumblebees.

If you want to plant for bees and other pollinators, you need to plant foods that bloom in early spring and late autumn, the off-season months when bees struggle to find enough food. Snowdrops, crocuses and daffodils are emerging now in our gardens, giving bees their first taste of nectar for the year as honey stores run low. Ling heather, the plant used to make thick heather honey, does the opposite, blooming after everything else has gone. Ivy, similarly, grows up every tree and building here, and blooms as late as Halloween.

One of the champion bee flowers, in our experience, is borrage – our bees go nuts for it. It also makes a great herb to add to salad, with a tangy melony flavour. We find that verbena draws legions of bees and butterflies--- my wife and mother-in-law bought some from a garden store after seeing one covered with them last spring. Almost all herbs, in fact, make great bee fodder – thyme, rosemary, oregano, marjoram, sage and mint.

Hedgerows, the ubiquitous borders here, often provide the best source of bee flowers. Blackberry brambles, in hundreds of varieties, grow widely here and make another flower beloved of bees, and of course they grow in the margins where their thorns and the bees are out of your way. Sally or pussy willows seem to be a particular favourite of bumblebees in our observation – at times we have seen dozens of bumblebees on a single tree near our house. They also love hawthorn, which grows rampant here and usually starts flowering in May – it’s sometimes called the May bush.

Come summer, whole fields here erupt with red and white clover, which have many uses -- bees love them, we and animals can eat them, and they actually put nitrogen back into the soil. They like moist earth and warm days, and beekeepers say that, once the flowers emerge, their beehives start filling up with honey. Oilseed Rape, which Americans call canola, has been widely introduced as a biofuel crop here, and turns some fields a brilliant yellow every spring.

Bees and other bugs use many other flowers common to our area, and which our local beekeeping society recommends – poppies, cornflowers, forget-me-nots, zinnias, wallflowers, bellflowers, dahlias, hellebores and roses. In exchange they service many vegetables, including artichokes, lamb’s ears, asparagus, brassicas, broad beans, cucumbers, cherries, apples, currants, gooseberries and courgettes.

You can draw insects other than bees to your garden, of course, but you want to be choosy about which ones. We all love butterflies, but they spend most of their lives as the caterpillars that we spend picking off our crops, so you want to encourage only those species that eat the plants you don’t want anyway.

Few words sound less appealing than “parasite” and “wasp,” yet parasitic wasps can be very useful in the garden, preying on the bugs that would eat your plants and doing no harm to humans. Sally Jean Cunningham, author of Great Garden Companions, cite herbs like caraway, anise, mint, chamomile, dill, fennel, yarrow and cicely for drawing wasps, along with wildflowers like cornspurrey, lamb’s quarters, wild mustards, oxeyes, red sorrel and clover. Similarly, some gardeners buy ladybirds (ladybugs to Americans) to unleash on their aphids, or even recommend planting nettles to attract aphids to attract ladybirds.

Finally, you can plant species designed to repel certain insects you don’t want – many gardeners recommend hyssop and thyme for cabbage moths, or marigolds for nematodes. Such recommendations often carry a high folklore-to-evidence ratio, though, so experiment in your own garden and take notes on what seems to work.

As David Attenborough once pointed out, if we and other large animals were to disappear, the vast majority of the world that remained would get along just fine. But if they were to disappear, the soil would become sterile, the lands desert, and almost all life would perish. As you walk through your garden, thousands of them are labouring like elves around your feet, unthanked and occasionally swatted. As you plant your garden this year, make sure to give something back.

She has my number

2011-02-16T22:15:00.002Z

Tonight I put The Girl in jammies, picked her up and gave her a kiss.

“Papa, I hate kisses.”

Okay, I won’t do that again.

She looked at me sceptically. “Papa … I know you.”

Yes, you do.

Photo: The Girl’s anonymous valentine to her Mama.

American Conservative

2011-02-15T13:40:00.001Z

My cover story, "Wreck of the Irish," is now online.

A Patch of Somewhere Else

2011-02-07T17:51:00.005Z

When people list history’s most world-changing inventions, they usually include fire, or guns, or computers. Rarely do people mention something so ubiquitous to us that it has become, literally, invisible – glass and transparent plastic. Glass was known to the ancients but rare -- Job 28:17 lists it with gold among the most precious of materials. In the Renaissance, though, when glass began to be sheeted and shaped in quantity and with skill, it created a boom in civilisation; microscopes and telescopes opened up the breadth of the world to science, spectacles doubled men’s intellectual lifetime, and windows allowed for the creation of the first greenhouses.

We spend so much technology and energy -- electricity, oil and coal -- to heat homes against the weather, altering it to suit our needs. Properly-placed windows, however, allow the sun to do our work for us, allowing light in and slowing the passage of heat out. Even when the temperature outside dips below freezing they keep out frost, and allow the gardener to more easily control water, pests and wind-blown seeds.

Nowhere, perhaps, is this more important than in a land like this, a nearly subarctic island kept mild by the Atlantic current, where the climate usually hovers just below the ideal range for many vegetables. Here, greenhouses extend the growing season by months and create pockets of Italy or Illinois in, say, the cold bogs of County Kildare.

Here and in Britain, greenhouses, cloches and coldframes allowed Victorian master gardeners to grow a range of seemingly impossible crops: not just tomatoes and aubergines but melons, lemons, limes, grapes, olives and peaches. Pineapples, for example, became a status symbol among the manor-born, and banquets sported them as a centrepiece.

Greenhouses remain a worthwhile, albeit expensive, investment for most people in most climates. If you want to start small, though, you can create cloches, transparent coverings for one or a few plants each. Victorians, again, mass-produced glass bells to cover plants to create a microclimate inside. You can do the same thing, however, with soda bottles.

To make a cloche, cut the bottom off an old two-litre bottle and place it around a seedling in the garden. Once the bottom is off, the plastic becomes very flimsy, so you might want to bury the edges several centimetres deep to keep it stable. Alternately, you can place a ring or solid structure inside if you have one, something that will keep the bottle in place but allow the seedling to grow. Or you can place it around a flowerpot whose diameter is smaller than that of the bottle.

Cloches, like greenhouses, allow you to regulate the amount of water a plant receives – here that means not getting waterlogged in the rainy winter. You might want to keep the caps of your soda bottles in a drawer, so you can put them back on at night if it gets too cold.

A step up from a cloche is a row cover, something to put over an entire bed. We clamped flexible plastic piping over our raised beds to make hoops, draped clear plastic over them and secured the plastic to the wood below the hoops with staples. Alternately, instead of plastic, you could put horticultural fleece over another raised bed, to keep in the warmth – we did both this year, and gave our plants such protection that our corn salad survived the month of snow and ice.

If you want to go sturdier still, you can build a coldframe, especially if you have old windows you can use. A coldframe is just a box with glass or transparent plastic on top, ideally with a top slanted toward the south. Fill the box with earth and plant seeds inside, and over the slanted top secure a sheet of glass or whatever you have. You could install the window frame with hinges at the top for maximum convenience, but just taking off the glass gently will do.

If spring and autumn nights get very cold where you live, you could insulate the back and sides with anything from straw bales to foam. People around here used to combine coldframes with manure composters; since manure gives off considerable heat as it matures into soil, they filled a coldframe partway with horse manure, put soil on top for the seedlings, and gave the baby plants warmth from above and below.

Polytunnels are an excellent means of creating a walk-in garden for a fraction of the cost of an old-style greenhouse. You can get one as small as a closet or as large as a warehouse, and most are guaranteed for a decade or two. We had to tear down our old one to build our house, but it had lasted almost 20 years, and we installed the new one two weeks ago.

If you have old windows, or sheets of glass or clear plastic, you could try building a greenhouse out of cob. To do this you would stack rocks to make a low wall – say, half a metre to a metre high, depending on how high the snow or moisture get – and then build upward with a well-mixed and kneaded blend of sand, clay and straw. The walls could be built upward with large holes on the south side, and the cob could be plastered around the glass to keep them in place. Such a project would consume a lot more time and labour – we have day jobs, and didn’t take this route – and it would not in as much light as an all-clear home. It has the advantage, however, of being potentially free and using all-local materials.

Since you put such care into creating a greenhouse of some kind, make sure you have good fertilised earth in it – many warm-weather plants, like tomatoes, also need a great deal of nutrition, and gardeners used to sprinkle potash and other supplements around them.

In years to come we might not be traveling as much as we used to, but with the help of a little store-bought or scavenged material, you can create, in your own land, a patch of somewhere else.

Photo: Greenhouse in County Mayo.

Brigid's Well

2011-02-02T07:18:00.003Z

This is St. Brigid's Day, to commemorate a saint who built a learned and peaceful community here as the Roman Empire was experiencing its own Long Emergency. Her church was supposedly built under a great oak, so Cill (temple) + Dara (oak) = Kildare. Brigid's Well, not far from us, has drawn penitents for perhaps thousands of years, and the branches of the surrounding trees are thick with rosaries, flowers, photos of loved ones and other signs of devotion.

The broader palette

2011-01-31T13:50:00.002Z

As money grows tight here, people increasingly turn to gardening and other self-reliant hobbies: Grow-it-yourself clubs are popping up all over Ireland, our local one hosted by my non-profit. The local beekeepers’ annual course traditionally draws 10-30 people, more in bad times – last year 70 people came. Gardening programmes seem to fill the television schedules, and a number of local farmers are leasing their fields to allotments.

As pleased as I am to see so many rows of cabbages and potatoes, though, I don’t want to see people rely too heavily on only a few crops. It’s understandable, of course, for gardeners to start with the easiest or most familiar plants, as well as the ones they know how to cook. Here that means cabbages and potatoes, in my Missouri hometown that means tomatoes and peppers, and where you live it might mean something else.

Relying too much on only a few varieties of a few plants, though, makes for a very fragile kind of self-reliance. Eat a surfeit of one food and your health declines; meet the wrong caterpillar or fungus, a summer too hot or a winter too long, and much of your food is gone. The Irish did that once with potatoes, with disastrous results, and Americans began eating mostly corn – corn-fed beef, high-fructose corn syrup and more -- around the time they gained a global reputation for obesity.

Most of us, though, have little idea how many edible plants are all around us, and how many could fill our salad bowls or soups. Even if we restrict ourselves to the minority of plants that have become domesticated crops, we typically recognize only a few varieties of each – the ones bred recently for fossil-fuel transport, not for taste, health or your climate.

Take the colour, for example – most of us have never seen green oranges, purple carrots, striped beets or blue potatoes. Or look at breed names -- most of us have eaten Johnagold or Green Delicious apples, perhaps without knowing what they were called, but I have never had Seek-no-Furthers or Belle-de-Boskoops, and you probably haven’t either.

Even many ordinary vegetables have become widely unrecognized. When I was in charge of a magazine in America, we made an arrangement with a local CSA to get a weekly box of whatever was in season. I waited until everyone else had their share and took the rest home – which meant I took most of it home every week, because my colleagues had no idea what to make of the vegetables or what to do with them. Some of these people were environmental activists or vegans, but they stared quizzically at the kohlrabi, fennel, mange tout, swedes, daikons, parsley root, beetroot or sunchokes as though they were specimens from an alien planet.

Still, I didn’t grow up knowing many of these crops either, and had to learn them over time. When we moved here, for example, my mother-in-law introduced me to celeriac, a celery relative bred not for its stalks -- which are edible but foul-tasting, I can assure you – but for its bulbous root. Ours can grow as large as a human head, and can be left in the ground until needed or transferred to boxes of sand in the shed. My mother-in-law usually cooked them like potatoes, but I find them great raw, finely grated like parmesan and mixed in a spicy lemon dressing.

As another example, we grew scorzonera last year, a yellow-flowered dandelion relative that seemed to fall out of favour after the Victorian era. Its black roots taste great peeled and either boiled, steamed or stir-fried. Its cousin salsify has blue flowers and white roots, but can be treated similarly. We also grew chicory, not to harvest at the time, but to transplant to earth boxes in the shed in winter and force its blanched leaves upwards.

Acquaintances of ours experiment with other roots and tubers: yacon and occa originated in the Andes Mountains alongside the potato, but spuds became the staple food for millions while the first two continued to be eaten mainly by Incas. Sometime soon, though, we really must experiment with yacons, which can be eaten raw and, we are told, taste like sweet radishes.

Even outside the garden beds, in the woodland and hedgerows, you can plant or foster hardy wild crops that most people pull out as weeds. Good King Henry grows naturally in the forest understory here, and tastes like spinach – it grows wild here but not enough, so we are sowing its seeds in our garden this year. Fat Hen runs rampant here and makes a good addition to any salad, as does jack-by-the-hedge, sorrel, oxlip, cowslip and primrose. Nettles can be cooked like spinach, fermented into kimchi, juiced like wheatgrass, dried and powdered like herbs. Fiddlehead ferns, Matteucchia Struthiopteris, have edible shoots – I’m told bracken ferns do as well, but considering how poisonous the rest of the bracken is, I’d stay away from it altogether.

No matter how damp or chilly your climate, it might support more subtropical plants than you realise. When I first visited Ireland, I was shocked to see so many palm trees: the air rarely goes above room temperature, but it so rarely freezes (until recently) here that they survived along the coast. In the same way, olive trees, tea bushes and wine grapes grow in the south of England, and once the greenhouse was invented, gardeners here grew pineapples, peaches and melons.

Nor are all such fruits as exotic or tropical as many people believe. Most people think kiwis come from the South Pacific; in reality the name was a 1960s marketing ploy, a Cold War rebranding of the Chinese gooseberry. They too grow in this damp and windswept country, perhaps not as big as the ones in supermarkets but just as tasty --- and without using their own weight in fossil fuels to get here.

We will never approach resilience unless we wade into the vast pool of little-known and rarely used plants. This time of year, as those of you in the Northern Hemisphere are buying seeds for the spring, consider devoting a piece of your land for experimenting with new crops and new varieties. Not all your experiments will work, but some might prove easier, healthier, more pest-resistant, tastier, or more suited to your particular patch of the landscape that what you are planting now.

Quite a day

2011-01-29T22:20:00.002Z

After months of brief and faltering moments upright, The Girl finally took off and rode, properly and briskly, without stabilisers (training wheels). For about a mile down our country roads. With me running behind the whole way.

"Papa, I'm almost a teenager now."

Quite a year

2011-01-26T17:54:00.007Z

I don't usually get into politics, but some people have asked me about the perhaps confusing news coming out of Ireland right now. I dealt with some of it in a previous post, and in the upcoming AmCon article. For now, here's a summary of recent events for anyone interested:

2005: We move here to be near my wife’s family. In unrelated news, Ireland voted best place to live in the world.

Summer 2007: Election leaves Fianna Fail (rhymes with tall) party -- which has dominated Irish politics since the country’s founding -- short of a majority. Ireland has a parlimentary system like the UK, so people vote for one of several parties, and if no one has a clear majority, two or more parties must form a coalition, and the major coalition partner picks the Prime Minister. Fianna Fail asks the Green Party to join them in coalition, and in a controversial move, the Greens accept.

Fall 2008: Economic crash bursts Ireland’s bubble. Fianna Fail ensures all of nation’s banks, placing nation in unprecedented debt.

Winter 2009: Ireland sees worst floods in 800 years.

April 2010: Volcano temporarily shuts down air travel.

September 2010: Fianna Fail Taoiseach (TEE-shak, or Prime Minister) Brian Cowen appears drunk in interview – makes the news across the world.

November 2010: Irish government is bankrupt, asks for bailout. Massive protests fill Dublin, offices of Dail (Congress) members vandalised.

Late November 2010: Ireland sees worst snowstorms in living memory.

December 2010: New budget cuts services and pensions and raises taxes. Fianna Fail widely blamed – their poll numbers drop from around 45% to 14%.

Monday, Jan 13: FF leaders begin to question the Taoiseach’s leadership.

Sunday, Jan 16: A faction of Fianna Fail breaks away and calls on Cowen to step down. Foreign Minister resigns.

Tuesday, Jan 18: Fianna Fail votes on whether to retain Cowan as leader, attempt to oust him fails.

Wednesday, Jan 19: Four of the 15 ministers (like US Cabinet members) resign.

Thursday, Jan 20: One more minister resigns. News reports that Cowan is attempting to pack his cabinet with allies. Green leader John Gormley tells the Taoiseach the Greens will not support his ministerial appointments.

Saturday, Jan 22: Cowen announces he will resign as head of his party but remain head of government.

Sunday, Jan. 23 – Green Party pulls out of government. Only seven of 15 ministers left. Coalition ends.

Monday, Jan. 24 – TDs (like Congress members) hashing out new Finance Bill – as soon as that is complete, the Dail will dissolve and a new election will be set.

Today – Finance Bill set to pass; new election at end of February. Fianna Fail votes for new leader, Cowan will stay as Taoiseach until after election.

More on the story here, here, here and here.

It's dramatic, but only in the way the USA's 2000 election was dramatic, and on a smaller scale. We're still working, the police still function, no one's shooting and the lights are still on. It could be a lot worse.

Good news

2011-01-22T22:41:00.003Z

If my writing's been a little sparse lately, it's partly because I've been busy writing the cover story for the next issue of the American Conservative magazine.

The article, "The Wreck of the Irish," deals with the meteoric rise and fall of Ireland's boom, and its lessons for America. It's not online yet, but I just got my copy in the very slow Irish post, so it should be on newsstands where you live soon. I'm not going to tell anyone what to do, but if you checked it out, it wouldn't hurt my feelings.

Sauerkraut

2011-01-15T15:12:00.002Z

Cabbage has come a long way from its origins as a little beach-weed called sea kale – over centuries, our species has bred it into an amazing variety of different vegetables. We’ve bred it for its head of leaves – green cabbage, red cabbage, Chinese cabbage, kale, bok choy, mustard, rocket, mizuna and others. We’ve bred it for its flowers – broccoli, cauliflower and romanesco. We’ve bred it for its buds -- Brussels sprouts – and we’ve bred it for its roots, kohlrabi.

In all its forms, it remains one of the best crops for the Irish climate, as for similar climates like the Pacific Northwest, but it grows in a wide variety of climates. It’s a famous staple here in many of its forms, the basic vegetable of many dishes. Amazingly, though, few people we know here make sauerkraut or kimchi, methods used in other parts of the world to preserve cabbage, make it easier to digest and to give it flavour. You can make sauerkraut very easily at home, and it will be much tastier and more nutritious than the canned variety.

The biggest trick is to find 1.) a cylindrical container, not made of metal or plastic, and 2.) a lid slightly smaller than the top of the container, so that it slides down the interior with little air in-between. The cabbage has to be pressed down in salt water away from oxygen, you see, but not sealed off completely. We have a ceramic pot and lid; you could hold it down with a plate slightly smaller than the pot and hold the sauerkraut down with a stone. Alternately, you could use a mayonnaise or other glass jar and use a glass or ceramic candle-holder as a stopper. Use your imagination, but of course wash and sterilise everything well beforehand.

First cut a cabbage into quarters and chop it finely with a knife or through a mandolin. Mix up a few handfuls of the shredded cabbage, put it in the container, and pound it down for a few minutes with something heavy like a rolling pin. Then sprinkle some salt onto the cabbage – about three tablespoons of salt for every five pounds of cabbage – and repeat the process with another few handfuls until your container is full.

Then fill the container with water – from the cold tap, but heated on the stove until lukewarm – until it just covers the top of the cabbage/salt mix. Put the lid on and place the container someplace warm to ferment at room temperature – about 20 degrees Centigrade is ideal, so try near the heater or stove.

The cabbage should begin to ferment right away, and one of the great things about this recipe is that you don’t have to wait until it’s “done.” It will gradually turn from cabbage to sauerkraut over about a month, but you can dig in at any point, eat some and put the rest back. Just make sure to top it up with more salt water if you need to – about a tablespoon per litre of water – as you have to keep the cabbage away from oxygen.

Your sauerkraut might develop a slight scum on top as it ferments. Just skim it off and clean the plate when you take some out -- it’s just the result of contact with the air, and not very dangerous. Also, don’t worry if the kraut has a faint yeasty smell – it’s fermenting, after all. If it starts to go pink on top or smell genuinely bad, something has probably gone wrong.

My mother-in-law says that only green cabbage was ever used for sauerkraut in Germany, although she’s not sure why – perhaps the pinkness that indicates harmful bacteria was more difficult to see on red cabbage. We read of people online who use red cabbage, however, and we plan to try it soon – if you have, let us know how it goes.

After about a month, take out the sauerkraut and eat it straight, put it in the refrigerator or cook it, as you like. You can also add other vegetables into the mix, like onions, carrots, cauliflower and beetroot, or spices – juniper berries and bay leaf are the classics, but you can also experiment with ginger, chilli peppers or other things.

This is a great way to preserve cabbage through the winter without refrigeration, also, and to give vitamin C during the months when it’s most needed and least available.

Photo: Our sauerkraut pot.

Low winter sun

2011-01-11T18:19:00.004Z

The Girl

2011-01-08T12:14:00.004Z

The Girl decided to be very organised and label all her drawers. She works hard every day learning to read and write, but sometimes her spelling remains creative. See if you can figure out what the labels mean:

Marbls

art

Maocing stf

Dols

Pusuls

Towees

Cudlee Stf

Cars

Personally, "Towees" has to be my favourite.

***********************

A few days ago The Girl and I were talking about Gompotheres, elephant-like animals with giant, shovel mouths, which roamed North America until humans arrived.

The Girl loves them so much she took out her pom-poms and wanted to show me a cheer she had made up:

“We love our great big Gompotheres,
They always have a smile,
The bogs there had the Gompy Mamas
And the Gompy childs,
We love our Gomp-Gomp-Gomp-Gomp-Gompy-Oh-Gompotheres,
‘Cause they like to Chomp-Chomp-Chomp-Chompy-Oh-Chompotheres,
Yay, Gompotheres!”

Update

2011-01-02T15:27:00.004Z

The snow and ice have melted in a warm spell, and being snowbound did not stop us from having a great holiday season. The country remains on edge, politically and economically, but the buses still run, businesses still function and we still have our jobs.

I'm writing an article about Ireland's situation in more detail for a magazine; more details when the time comes. In the meantime, Happy New Year, everyone.

Photo: The Ha'penny Bridge over the River Liffey in Dublin.

Day out with six-year-old

2010-12-27T13:02:00.003Z

With the clock ticking, The Girl and I raced to the theatre from the train stop, me holding her hand tightly as we hurried across the Dublin streets amid the heavily falling snow. We slipped and slid across the bridge over the River Liffey, then through old doorways in stone walls, and down a maze of alleyways to finally arrive just in time to see the panto.

Let me back up a minute. When we first moved here our neighbours talked excitedly about talking their children to this year’s panto, and I discovered you can only smile and nod for so long before admitting you don’t know what anyone’s talking about. Pantomimes, I discovered, are vaudevillian children’s plays, part of the ritual of growing up in Britain and Ireland and especially popular around Christmas time.

A typical panto tells a loosely adapted fairy tale – Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Robin Hood and, in our case, Aladdin -- and contains the following vital ingredients:
1.) A boyish leading man;
2.) The princess he falls for;
3.) A hammy villain, usually with black clothes and facial hair;
4.) One or more middle-aged men in drag;
5.) A backup group of singers and dancers.

Famous actors and pop stars here often take a break from their regular career to ham it up in pantos – BBC actor John Barrowman was in a panto last year, and another this year starred “Jedward,” the Irish singing duo enjoying their fifteen minutes of adoration among prepubescent girls here. This panto’s villain was played by a former member of Ireland’s boy band Boyzone, which had a similar bout of fame several years ago.

While pantos cater to children, with broad acting, bright costumes and clown comedy, the lines are inevitably loaded with lines thrown over the children’s heads at the parents – racy double entendres, pop-culture references and political humour.

This was my first panto, but I suspect this year they threw in many more political jabs than usual. In the last several weeks, of course, Ireland has seen a national bankruptcy, a bailout, a split government, a new election, an emergency budget and a nation of furious voters, and the performers dropped more than one reference to unpopular Taoiseach (TEE-shak, or Prime Minister) Brian Cowan.

Aladdin: Mother, we can take this money and move to someplace like .... Ireland!
Aladdin’s mother: Well, we’ll be the only people with money there.

Or:

Aladdin: Look princess - the treasure’s gone! Brian Cowen must have been here!

Back to The Girl and I. I’d booked tickets for the panto, knowing she was six already and would not be a little girl for many more Christmases. Getting to Dublin, though, posed some problems. On top of so much financial and political turmoil, Ireland -- which ordinarily receives only a light dusting of snow once or twice a winter -- has been hit by weeks of snowstorms. Sometimes roads have been completely impassable; we have all missed days of work, and at times the whole country seemed to stop.

You see, we can only leave our property via a narrow one-lane road that runs, with no shoulder or railing, along the edge of a canal, and when covered with ice it is treacherous indeed. One of our neighbours plunged their car straight into the water, and had to be fished out with our neighbour’s tractor. We must drive very slowly, so the nearest village has become much further away.

We started out for Dublin around 10:30 am, three hours before the play was to begin --- the trip ordinarily takes an hour and a half. We drove slowly and carefully to the bus stop, and so missed the bus. We drove fifteen miles to a village with a train station –no train would make it in time. Finally we drove to another village to catch the electric tram, which could take us into the city ... as it turned out, very slowly.

We ran through the streets and made it just in time for the panto, sliding into the box office like it was home plate, and because the weather kept so many people away, we could ignore our tickets for the nosebleed section and sit in the middle of the front row. Panto actors ask children in the audience for advice, and they spoke right to The Girl, to her amazement.

Good things we weren’t a few minutes later; one family was, and all the stage-lights turned on them as they walked down the aisle. All the actors stopped onstage to make fun of the latecomers, and everyone turned out to sing the “You’re Very Very Late” song.

The play had singing, dancing, costumes, a “flying” carpet, puffs of smoke, showers of sparks and, at times, a complete absence of a fourth wall. The children went wild, and as we left she talked about the play excitedly to herself and anyone who would listen.

It turned out the night wasn’t over yet. First we walked down Grafton Street, Dublin’s shopping district, its fairy-tale decorations and light displays peeking through the heavy snowfall. We ran into one of the panto actors quite by chance, and thanked her. The Girl found a mobile phone in the snow, left, it later turned out, by a French immigrant, and we had to track them down -- I called a random contact in France, found someone who spoke English, asked them who had just called them, asked for someone who would be accompanying that person in Ireland, and so on. We eventually got them their phone back.

Then we had to wait for buses that never came, until we got one whose destination was close enough. The normally hour-long ride took four and a half hours, and amid the long wait and stranger conversations, The Girl found a large audience who would hear about her day.