Notes taken...2006

I'm spring cleaning, and throwing a lot of paper away - years of copious note-taking - it's hard to let go but I feel better if I can write certain bits of my notes down here. Walmart now controls as much wealth of 40% of the US population. The water needed to produce 1 lb of beef could be used to be in for months. Producer responsibility is a new idea in the US. In Brazil, in 1993, it was decided that food was now a right of citizenship. The city acts as convenor, bringing together business and labour - there were dozens of innovations of how to make food accessible - such as accessible priced food listed at bus stops. How the developing world is "holding" our natural way of doing things... We have to move from a carbon fossil economy to a living carbon economy. the fossil age has created a a mechanistic paradigm of thinking.. Soil not oil Preparing for climate change - eg farmers who have been forced to grow indigo for textiles for a national market, should now be growing food to feed themselves. Save ancient varieties of seeds = adaption capacity Skyscrapers reflect the human condition in our time - they don't touch - isolated. Technology isolates. Future visions: we'll take ships across Atlantic, keep working on the internet on the ship The more you can empower others the more you can empower yourself Don't keep digging up weeds, plant better trees...

Addressing climate change though art

I like this organisation. George Monbiot, Mark Lynas, Herbert Giradet are all on the board. They give funding to organisations applying with specific projects addressing climate change. Eg, Trees For Life. http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/groves/ape.html Here's their website and vision: http://www.apeuk.org/who-are-we Through music and the arts, APE aims to achieve permanent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to levels that minimise further degradation of ecological systems and human livelihood. APE recruits internationally known musicians and artists through albums, concerts, art exhibitions and art related projects to raise awareness of climate change and funds for campaigns and disaster relief.

Our Mission

We identify both the opportunities that enable people, especially in the world's richest countries, to reduce their emissions and the obstacles that hold people back. We devise innovative and effective ways of communication that encourage people to share this experience. We recognise that individuals cannot make the required changes on their own. We aim to create a powerful and vocal community of people working together to move technology, government and business forward to reduce emissions and make real and lasting changes to the way we live. All our projects will demonstrate that our vision of stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions is practically attainable. APE believes that the many of the solutions are within reach, if only we have the will.
Tagged Arty Green Stuff

Fun with my stamp collection

I've never purposefully collected stamps but somehow I seem to have ended up with a collection of thousands. There's no way I'm going to sort through them, though they all seem fascinating, from hundreds of different countries, some very old. Who knows what their value is. Collections are worth much more when they're displayed properly. So, I sorted them into colours and I have started to make my own displays, see below. But it's not just the aesthetics that please me, it's what they represent...
Media_httptheeggsinmy_jkbaa
Media_httptheeggsinmy_rdmlu
Media_httptheeggsinmy_abvgg
Media_httptheeggsinmy_olecr
Media_httptheeggsinmy_bvnyf
Media_httptheeggsinmy_mucjb
Global Saliva Hundreds of tiny pieces of paper and ink passing through thousands of hands into mine..Doesn't it make you think? How many people? How many lives? Each stamp has journeyed through time and space to be here now...How far, where from, how old? Where were you made? By whom? The stories we'll never know - the contents of a letter long ago - lost now. A collection of ghost fingerprints and global saliva... I am their keeper.  From Russia, Vietnam, the Congo, you name it. From professors, and perhaps lovers daughters and friends and colleagues. Collected for me by my family, also long gone. Mama, and Zizzie, and Ronnie Grandpa, me here now. Digging them out of an attic to jumble and reassemble and examine and stare and appreciate and feel ...and touch the people, once important. Found, lost,  found, lost, remembered, forgotten This is me. This is humanity, actually. --
Media_httptheeggsinmy_djwkh
Media_httptheeggsinmy_jpchf
Media_httptheeggsinmy_bfdmv

Food Waste

Following on from my Bloody Well Smell It post, I want to investigate how food outlets and restaurants in my local area deal with their waste. Here's a professional service for food waste collection and composting, but it's based in Essex. I wonder if anything similar exists in Brent. I need to get a campaign going under the Transition umbrella... and then tie it to free compost for our gardens... Juniper Food Waste Run by a team of dedicated and experienced professionals, our sole purpose at Juniper is to provide a food waste collection service that is cost effective and efficient, that addresses corporate social responsibility and regulatory requirements, in a manner that is environmentally sound.

Raw colourful salad yum number1

Mash up an avocado with some feta cheese, lemon juice salt and pepper. make a vinaigrette. Chop up - small - the following : (obviously you can bung in any veg you have in the cupboard/fridge) a couple of sprigs of spring onion some french beans (don't steam, leave raw) a pepper - red or yellow grate a carrot maybe some home grown sprouted seeds Throw on a handful of mixed nuts, sunflower seeds - and a few raisins. Mix the vinaigrette in and put some dollops of the avocado cheese on top. and feel virtuous!

Rainbow cake???

I found this on another blog and I just HAVE to try it one day, even though it could be disgusting! Maybe I'll do it with merangues instead.. Here's the link: http://whisk-kid.blogspot.com/2009/08/say-it-with-cake.html
Media_httptheeggsinmy_afjlf
Tagged Foodie cake colour

Hoarding and letting go

I have suffered for a long time from a serious disease and it is now horrifically acute as well as chronic.  This is serious. It's affecting my whole life and it has to stop..This is a post that's hard to write since I'm not sure I even want to admit to myself how acute this problem is.. Basically, I can't stop collecting things. Particularly information. I have spent days of my life rearranging my filming systems for all the notes I have written, all the leaflets and torn out articles and pictures and pamplets that all represent something to me. I have gone out and bought more and more furniture to house these filing systems...it has cost me a lot of money. I have gone through many phases of fanatical interest in varying topics. Back in the 90's, personal development, facilitating personal development, spirituality; food, always food, and issues around food; from 2002 onwards, environment and anything to do with climate change; I must have attended literally hundreds and hundreds of meetings, talks, speeches, symposiums, all of them generating their own large pile of bumph with its scribbles and ideas and names and lightbulbs signs (my doodle-speak for an idea I want to follow up) in the margins. In the early-mid 2000's, lever-arch files full of notes on filmmaking techniques and camera instructions. Those cameras have long gone out of date, yet I still can't bear to let go of them. They represent the knowledge I consumed voraciously - but, as the next topic of interest shoved the last out of the way, these files grow dusty, neglected and unread on my specially-made shelves. And in the last couple of years, hording anything to do with Transition Towns, anything to do with gardening and flowers...and so on. The other day I threw away ( or shall I say, put on a charity pile in the corner) a set of rather pleasingly colourful elastic bands that I had had SINCE I WAS 10 years old!!!!!!! AND NEVER USED! And this situation is now replicated on my adorable new Macbook Pro; rather too many folders divided into subject matter and now spilling over into 3 or 4 external hard drives. Sad case, I think.  In my defence, everytime I re-organised everything, I did throw stuff away; but I also kept a lot - some of the notes and ideas would make their way onto my To Do list (book of To Do lists actually, which itself keeps getting reorganised, - it's been in the form of flip charts all over the walls, excel spreadsheets, fancy expensive notebooks, filofaxes, 10 different iphone or computer app, but that's another story). Of course, all this aquired knowledge - that % which has stayed inside me - is part of what makes me who I am - but I also know how much I had to let go of, involuntarily because time marches on and you can only do so much. Throwing stuff away is tremendously relief-inducing BUT it also makes me frustrated and sad as if all that embodied energy was wasted somehow. It essentially boils down to much deeper questions about who I feel I am and which direction I want to take my life in. My huge enthusiasm and curiosity in the world need to be reigned in, harnessed and used to develop something amazing. But every time I feel that I know what, for now, that might be, the next day something else has come along to make me wobble. I know I should be more selective. But I must have a deep-seated fear of closing doors, shutting options off perhaps. At least I am working in an industry which allows me to regularly learn about new topics, in great depth, to meet people, to travel. One month I might be talking to a scientist about how the sewers of California are run (actually not something that was on my List of Things to Learn about, but hey there you go!) or how the International Space Station evolved; the next, talking to an artist about modern art in a globalised world, the next about biochar or hydroponics... and so on. Can't complain... it's just that I feel the need to dive in now, to have my own topic on which to become an expert. I could actually have a separate blog couldn't I, for people who have too many things they want to do. That's the kind of thing a life coach might do. I'm still looking for answers. I know what the self help books say and the life coaches, but what I mean is I'm still looking for answers within myself. For now I'll just tell you the story of the Confused Donkey, which my pal RL told me. Once upon a time there was a donkey, and he was surrounded by several piles of hay. He looked around at them and they were all delicious-looking, so he couldn't decide which to eat! He stood there, looking and looking, more and more frantic, trying to make up his mind... In the end, he starved to death! Poor donkey.
Tagged Personal

The Falafel King

For many years I have been addicted to the falafels of a small outlet called Falafel King, just near the bridge on Portobello Road. They put cabbage and tahini in the pitta with their falafels but the best thing is their chilli sauce - delightfully, juicily GREEN and runny I was always ask for triple the amount anyone else has. I've asked a couple of times over the years what's in it, but they kept it a closely guarded secret. However, I'm pleased to say I can now tell you, having worked it out. It's just coriander (masses) , vegetable oil, and green chillis. Radical man. Maybe some lemon.Whizzed in a whizzer-upper.
Tagged Foodie

Coconut water - miracle food number 1

Our miracle food for the week is: Coconut Water ! The natural electrolyte! Coconut water happens to be one of the purest liquids known to man, and the health benefits of coconut water are numerous. Don't bother with those sachets of manmade electrolytes when you have a runny tummy; this is what you should be drinking as it's packed with organic electrolytes, sodium, potassium, magnesium. When you need rehydrating, or a sports drink - THIS is the one to pick, don't let any of that fake artificial Lucozade stuff go near you. Drinking coconut water helps in breaking down and eliminating all forms of kidney and bladder stones. It is also known to calm nervous and emotional imbalances. Coconut water aids in flushing the liver, since it contains lauric acid, which gives it anti-microbial properties and makes it suitable for treatment of some liver ailments like hepatitis. And it contains glucose, which acts as sugar for energy in the body when taken, vitamin B's, for  replenishment of worn out cells and tissues, and vitamin c, for the immune system
Media_httptheeggsinmy_dhdft
etc. Of course, Polynesians, Asians, Brasilians, etc have known this for centuries. And now Madonna & Demi Moore and co are investing in the Vita Coco brand. If I had any money and knew how to invest, I would too! Although - I have to say - it's far nicer out of  a chilled and freshly macheted coconut on the beach than out of my fridge in freezing London. see more on electrolytes and why they could be the key to understanding your body under the tag "electrolyte" .