Live Below the Line

This is a very interesting idea and way of raising both money and awareness of extreme poverty. I am participating on behalf of Christian Aid. This is my message on the fundraising website:

This May I'm going to be living below the line! From May 2nd - 6th I'll be surviving off just £1 a day for all of my food... Given that sometimes I spend that much on a piece of cheese I expect it to be eye-opening.

I'm expecting it to be difficult (I'm going to have to wean myself of caffeine to prepare), but it's an awesome way for me to raise money and awareness for the 1.4 billion people who have to live like this every day - and who have to make £1 cover a lot more than food!

I will be blogging about what I'm eating and how hungry I am at http://yvonnemrowse.blogspot.com/. Have a look.

Please donate to support me, and critical anti-poverty initiatives. After donating - you should consider joining up and doing it yourself!

I have spent much of today doing research which has been fascinating. I've got my ingredients list sorted. I just need to work out how to cook my very limited ingredients so that I'm not bored. I'll write up my research in my next posting. If you want to read more the website is here.

Illustrious

Eastercon, despite my anxiety beforehand, turned out to be a qualified success. This was good because I'd feared a disaster. The 'History of SF' theme seems to have been replaced at the last moment by 'Women in SF', something that I am very interested in and the only one of the 'themes' that I went to. As someone pointed out, in the History of SF, apart from Mary Shelley there would have been few women until Monday, assuming chronological items. The other programme items I attended were, as always, items with friends on.


What went right? Many, though not all, of my friends were there. June & Nick, Christina & Doug, Sue & Roo, Tim & Clarrie MacGuire, Julian Headlong, Tony Berry, Lilian and, for half a day only, Meredith MacArdle who I met at my first Eastercon. All the Sheffield crew were there too of course, the reason I moved to Sheffield. Swimming with Julia was one of my highlights. 
As Eastercon many years ago stopped being, for me, an event to learn about SF and became a place to meet and party with friends, this immediately made it a good Eastercon. On these grounds this makes the Heathrow Eastercons the best because the lazy, good-for-nothing London fans turn up (this means you Joseph & Judith) but I prefer not to trek down to Heathrow at Easter if I can avoid it, unless Neil Gaiman is a Guest. Other than geographical considerations, to make a good con there has to be a good enough programme to move people around the hotel. Toucon is an example of this not working. The movement, even if you are not a big programme attender, means that you meet other people and often have something to discuss or argue about. Without this the whole con stagnates. 
The programme, seemingly cobbled together at the last moment, was good enough for this. As I noted, the Women in SF theme gave me the opportunity to always find June and Christina and was interesting, although slightly superficial and over reliant on the same panellists. The Diana Wynne Jones memorial was lovely and reminded me of how wonderful her work is, and that I must check that I've got all of her books whilst the getting is good. It also reminded me that I like panels that talk about books, which were noticeably lacking. I missed 'Not the Clarkes' and 'Read this Novel' was cancelled. There were a series of items called 'Best Books & Lego' but I assumed they were not aimed at me.
Other than these I went to the audio books panel, the only place I saw David Weber who seemed to be a fine guest, the mirror universe panel which was fun but had been secretly set up so that all Ian's preparation (a full quarter of an hour) was useless, and Never Mind the Buzz Aldrins which was even more fun even if all the movie themes sound the same to me. Oh yes, and the permanent Fan Lounge/Real Ale bar with an excellent and changing range of beers was the programme item I frequented most enthusiastically.
The book room seemed to be suffering from Julian having bought a Kindle but was still humming although, due to miscalculation of this month's budget, I could only find the money to buy two books, a new Guy Gavriel Kaye and Engineman which I suspect I have already but Rog insisted.
The hotel was great. The staff were universally friendly and helpful, the bedrooms were comfortable (once the windows were opened), the swimming pool and jacuzzi were light & airy and just right, and the breakfasts were excellent, I mean, really excellent. Vast choice and omelettes cooked for you while you waited. The toast queue provided another opportunity to meet large numbers of fans you were not acquainted with. 


So what was not good? The hotel mainly. The bedrooms were over hot, the room rates were horribly high with no option to find a sharer from the convention, the coffee came from the Hitchhiker universe, and the cost of the cheapest bottle of wine was over £26. Two large glasses of wine would set you back enough to buy three, maybe four, bottles of drinkable wine from the Spar at the airport if you fancied a ten minute walk. The con food was unexciting to say the least. Cheese and tomato baguette twice in a weekend is more than enough. If motorway service stations can produce a better selection for vegetarians surely a decent hotel can. We didn't find the actual cheap con food area until the Monday. My baked potato was barely edible but the pizzas would have made unattractively glazed bathroom tiles. For this type of operation to work there must be a fairly fast turn over of food and there obviously wasn't. Perhaps we were not the only ones to fail to find it. 
The setting of the hotel was surprisingly nice, in the Birmingham International/NEC park, but that meant that there was nowhere worth eating within walking distance and the taxis, like at Heathrow, are decidedly expesive. Still, pack enough people into the taxi and you can get a very nice meal and reasonably priced wine to go with it at The Bull at Meriden, cheaper than the hotel even with the taxi fares included.


So overall, I enjoyed it far more than I expected to. If the programme was a little skimpy it worked well enough and perhaps the best thing they did was to allow hour and a half time slots for the programme. This meant that interesting items could overrun slightly, that people had time for a comfort break or to buy a beer between items, and that we did not repeat the embarrassment and audience annoyance caused by bundling Ben Goldacre off stage midflight. Well done Illustrious!

More thought on bikes

On the train yesterday three young women were drinking raspberry bellinis. The fourth in the set of seats was hiding from them behind a copy of the Independent. This allowed me to see the front page. This morning I googled it. I was shocked, though not surprised, by the article, ‘Save our cyclists: Clamour for flood of avoidable road deaths to be stemmed’. I was horrified though not surprised by some of the comments. In the eyes of some Independent readers cyclists seem to be not only an inconvenience to drivers, but the undeserving recipients of too much money spent on protecting them and, obviously, all arrogant idiots who would only be improved by a head injury.

What is all this about? I would have thought that the advantage other drivers get from fewer people being in cars far outweighs the slight frustration of driving a little more carefully because slower and more vulnerable cyclists are sharing the road. I was given a lift from Hayes House to the railway station in Sheffield last week. Googlemaps suggests three different routes varying from 1.4 to 2.2 miles and estimating around 7 minutes for the journey. At something after five in the evening it took more than half an hour and I missed my train. As we inched forward at a couple of miles an hour a seemingly endless stream of cyclists passed us. I can imagine that is very irritating to the sorts of drivers who think Jeremy Clarkson is a god. It is not, however, the bikes that cause the delay but the other people thoughtless enough to want to drive their cars in rush hour too. Damn them, not the cyclists weaving their way through the almost stationary pollution producing obstacles. I mentioned this to my friend Julia when I eventually arrived at her house (by bus) and she recounted the story of a cyclist who she heard would have knocked a child down if not stopped by the quick thinking lorry driver who blasted his horn and frightened the child to a standstill. I am not contending that there are not idiots on bikes and that these idiots can’t do damage but every time prejudice against cyclists is mentioned everyone has a story confirming the prejudice.

Because I am sad I looked up the government statistics for road casualties for the UK in 2008 (the last year with full data). In that year there were a total of 230,905 reported casualties of all severities with 2538 people killed. People driving whilst over the legal limit of alcohol were involved in 13,020 casualties with 430 deaths. In the same year 115 pedal cyclists were killed and 2,450 were seriously injured.

When a cyclist is involved most reported accidents (93%) involve two vehicles, the bike and another compared to all reported accidents (59%), which presumably means that 41% of reported accidents involved a vehicle and a pedestrian. 95% of the casualties resulting from a pedal cyclist accident are pedal cyclists. 2% of pedal cyclist accidents involve a pedestrian and in 2008 this resulted in eight deaths and 143 serious injuries for the cyclist. The same set of accidents resulted in 1 pedestrian death and 54 serious injuries. This is very obviously one death and 54 serious injuries too many but in 2008 6,642 pedestrians died or were seriously injured in traffic accidents. How come the drivers who killed or seriously injured 99.2% of pedestrians are less vilified than the cyclists who kill or seriously injure 0.8%? Or the drink drivers who caused over 13,000 casualties, 430 deaths?

I know looking at numbers may be boring but it puts the whole thing into context. There are dangerous cyclists but they do not cause anything like the slaughter on the roads caused by people in powered vehicles. The danger of vilifying cyclists is that you tend to take less care over someone you perceive as worthless than those to whom you accord some measure of respect. I don’t have any problem with the idea of prosecuting cyclists who, because of dangerous riding, cause death or injury to others but I would like to see the safety of pedestrians and cyclists taken much more seriously.

Having recently taken to the road myself on a rather flash girly bike I am far more aware of the respect, or lack of it, accorded to cyclists than at any time since passing my cycling proficiency test almost forty years ago. Apparently research has shown that drivers are more courteous to women bikers than male cyclists. Crikey! Somewhere in the comments section in the Independent someone remarked that in Europe the person in the more powerful vehicle is automatically judged to be at fault. I quite like that. If you plough into someone more vulnerable, even someone who is not where you think they should be (the gutter is full of drains, potholes & broken glass), you are held responsible whether you are driving an HGV or a pedal cycle. If you are at fault you should be prosecuted. The other suggestion I liked was that before you are allowed to drive a powered vehicle you should be required to ride a bike in traffic. For professional drivers I think this should be something imposed annually. You want to drive for a living you have to spend a full day cycling through heavy traffic.

The taxi driver who pulled into the path of my brother-in-law recently as he cycled down a steep hill won’t be prosecuted because Robin didn’t die although, judging from the state of his helmet, he might easily have. Sentence the driver not just to a couple of days retraining but include a day on a bike.

And whilst I’m wishing for the impossible, I’d like cycle lanes to include double yellow lines and not fade away into hostile traffic.

Spring!

This morning I finally made it to the allotment to do something other than gaze happily and show it off to friends and family. I think I probably need a skip to dispose of all the assorted trash that has built up there. I wanted to trim the hedge back but there were areas where the footing definitely wasn't safe. I need to find out what is rotting below the undergrowth before venturing up to the hedge line. It took me 40 minutes to walk there but there are buses (81 and 88A) which I will catch from now on. I spent an hour and a half clipping and digging and have 7/8th cleared one tiny bed, as you can see. The bed was mainly supporting docks, dandelions, buttercups, wild strawberry and more couch grass than seems at all reasonable. I stopped at 7/8th cleared because I was concerned I wouldn't be able to walk home if I didn't.



In the areas further in there were a fair number of young stinging nettles. This is a good thing because it tells me the land is fertile. The buttercups indicate wet ground. The soil seems quite reasonable; a tendency to clay but not too heavy. There is also, to judge by the tubs strewn around, a slug problem, but that just seems to be the case anywhere is Sheffield.


Eventually, having spent some time on back-breaking work and coming to the end of my available time window (it was due to rain but, more importantly, I'd drunk enough tea to need to be looking for a loo), I spent a few minutes picking my first harvest. Early spring nettles, before they get all dry and stringy, make wonderful soup.

So here it is. Yummy nettle soup made with onions, garlic, leeks (from the garden), potatoes and a little bit of nutmeg. And a dollop of greek style yogurt. I suspect it'll be quite a while and a lot of hard work before I get anything else worth eating from the allotment.

Hiatus

So much to do so little time. This weekend was Veggie Night at FFW (awesome), Ian's birthday, Mothering Sunday, and the weekend I had put aside to try to pull Journey Planet into shape. Oh dear.
I met the Leader of Sheffield Council, Paul Scriven, at FFW and was rather taken with him. As the leader I have always liked the way he, or his minions, deal with letters and emails. It's nice to know that he's someone I'd be happy to have dinner with. He even laughed at Ian's jokes.

My lovely and accommodating sister, Sue, and her husband, Robin, drove me to the new allotment for a look round then took me to Galaxy 4 to buy a remote control Dalek for Ian. I'd decided what to buy weeks ago but didn't want to carry it home on foot and I'm far too tight to pay for a taxi. What do you buy for the man who has everything he wants and needs? As it turns out, a T-shirt from Questionable Content, an Atlas of Remote Islands and a Dalek.


This weekend was payday and the beginning of my new year's budget. Ow! It was the weekend we ate every lunch out, it was the weekend we found that Rita Rudner was playing in London in July and it was the weekend I looked through all the Margaret Mahy pages on Amazon. It was an expensive weekend.


There will be more words when Journey Planet goes away.

What is 'Anyway'?

You may, or may not, recall that some time ago, inspired by Sharon Astyk’s Anyway challenge I had decided to tackle my own life. You may wonder if I’ve achieved anything. Hm. More on that later. Perhaps when I’ve achieved something.

But let’s take a step back. Let’s begin with 'The Theory of Anyway’. This is Pat Meadow’s theory, popularised by Sharon and it makes absolute sense to me. Many of the things I do cause my friends and colleagues to wonder. Why take public transport, for example, when I could get where I am going more easily (sometimes) by driving? My often-incoherent answer is made up of various points that come down to, ‘I think it’s the right thing to do.’ The component thoughts that lead to this conclusion for this particular choice are these.

If I need to travel I should pick the option that emits the lowest amount of carbon dioxide. Climate change is cumulative and my decision will not, on its own, make a noticeable difference but it contributes to the problem and it’s the right thing to do anyway.

Similarly for transport congestion. Going anywhere by road in Sheffield is unpleasant because of the huge numbers of, mostly singly occupied, cars on the road. The car advert where a couple of gorgeous young people speed thrillingly along empty roads through glorious countryside is a dream. The reality is lines of little boxes on wheels, some shaking with heavy bass, containing grumpy unhealthy people, inching forward enshrouded in a miasma of their own exhaust fumes. Again, this is cumulative. One car on the road could get anywhere in the city in minutes. When everyone tries to do it unpunctuality ensues. Getting out of that collective misery takes away only my small contribution to gridlock but it’s the right thing to do and I do it anyway.

Then there is effective use of resource. I am struck by this when I look at the clutter of close-parked cars occupying all conceivable curb-side positions, and some frankly inconceivable ones, around where I live. During the day the street doesn’t clear, although there are fewer cars. The value in terms of money, embodied energy and resource tied up in these machines is vast. I know. I sold my car to pay for a kitchen. It’s not just the capital cost either. It’s the ongoing cost of tax, fuel, insurance and maintenance. If we owned our means of transport collectively think of the money and space that could be freed up. The road I live on is a tetris of steel, plastic & glass; without cars it is spacious, quiet, safe – a place for kids to play and adults to sit around chatting. Once a year when we close it for the street party. I can’t do anything about my neighbours’ choices but I can choose not to own a car myself. It’s the right thing to do; I should do it anyway.

The last two things are clear positives for me. One is exercise. For some years I used to drive to the gym, work out on the treadmills and steppers and bikes whilst watching MTV and then drive home again. ‘Like the doped white mice in the college lab.’ Being inherently lazy and having a certain amount of sense I have always struggled to exercise with the only aim being getting fit. My radical idea is to combine travel and exercise. Instead of walking to nowhere on an exercise machine I can walk outside, see the seasons change and arrive somewhere new, if only at work. Walking or cycling to my (fairly local) destination is the right thing to do for my health and wellbeing.

And finally, the time issue. I can get somewhere faster by driving, all being well and assuming no one has had an accident anywhere on my route. (I occasionally listen to Sally Traffic on a Friday afternoon just to remember how horrid driving can be.)

I’m not saying there are no delays on trains. Obviously not. But during the delays you can still get to the toilet, get a cup of tea, catch up with your mail etc. And if the delay is longer than an hour you can get a refund of the fare. But that is only one aspect of the time issue. In terms of actual time spent in travel, public transport requires more, but what you can do with that time, the quality of the travel time, is better on a train. You can read, write, work, knit, sleep, chat to your fellow travellers (or hide in the private aural world of your iPod), eat your lunch, drink a bottle of wine or just gaze out of the window. I am prepared to ‘spend’ a little extra time on public transport in order to enjoy the time I spend travelling. For me it is the right thing to do.

You can see that I am little short of perfect. Except last week Julia dropped me off at college and Doug gave me a lift home from Julia’s after a particularly fun evening at her house. This weekend I made Ian take me to a garden centre to buy two pots and two bags of ericaceous compost for planting blueberry bushes into. The first two trips were pure lazy indulgence, the last could not have been done without a car. What I am hoping to achieve is a minimisation of indulgence trips.

There are many other choices that I apply ‘Anyway’ to. Generally, like the issue of transport choices, they are built on a number of reasons. Why eat seasonally and locally? Why cook from scratch? Why eat at non-chain restaurants and cafes? Why make my own clothes? Why grow my own food? Why work for a small environmental consultancy? Why have a store of food in the house? Why be polite to people? Why try to form my own picture of what is true and important? Some of the reasons are based on a perception of environmental limits, on a sense of fairness, and some are just because I enjoy my choice but all come under the heading of ‘It’s the Right Thing To Do’, and that I should do it Anyway.

Books 'n' stuff

I read 'Cannery Row' when I was in my teens. I reread it whenever I need to. Recently I have been prompted to search it out from my chaotic bookshelves by Powells. 


Do you know of the wonderful, fiendish service Powells provide? Powell's Books is based in Portland, Oregon and their shipping costs, among other things, prevent me from buying from them and yet, generously, as any pusher will, they send me teasers to what my appetite. Every morning a little email of temptation arrives in my inbox. I first came upon the review service as a reference in Suzette Haden Elgin's live journal and signed up unthinkingly at the end of 2007. Since then I have received a book review every day. All sorts of books are reviewed, new and old. The reviews come from a number of sources. Some are dull and endless and I give up way before the end. Some are erudite and although I have no interest in buying the book I enjoy the easy acquisition of a superficial knowledge on its subject. Some are so tantalising that I buy the book. Amazon UK do very well out of Powell's generosity. The full list of books reviewed can be found here.


Actually, whilst I'm sharing I ought to note Sam Jordison's blog at the Guardian. I visit this page infrequently but when I do I can lose a whole afternoon. Currently he is revisiting the Hugo awards as well as the Bookers and has got up to Rendezvous With Rama. Intelligent, accessible and even the comments are worth reading.


Anyway, back to Powell's review a day. On the 5th March Cannery Row was reviewed by Doug Brown. This is a nicely short review that sent me searching for my dog eared old copy. It took a while to locate as the end of the alphabet hasn't been ordered on my bookshelves yet (it's only been 3 & 3/4 years). Finally there it was, socialising with the elderly Sturgeon books. They have a lot in common, not least a sympathetic understanding of the less than perfect members of humanity.


Cannery Row was based on Monterey in California. The days of the sardine cornucopia that fed the canneries is long gone and that area of Monterey has been tidied up. Monterey Bay Aquarium and Steinbeck memorabilia have taken the place of that industrial wasteland. The majority of the characters inhabiting this slender book would be treated with suspicion by the nice new attractions in the area, and rightly so. 


At the centre of this book are Mack and the boys living in the Palace Flophouse & Grill, and Doc, a scientist making his living by harvesting, preserving and sending off for study the various creatures of the sea edge. At the centre of the book is a party. These alone would make it a good book but the cast of characters from Lee Chong with his 'anything' shop, through Dora, the magnificent madam of the Bear Flag Restaurant to Frankie, a little boy unable to learn but full of yearning and love, make this book a wonder. The short chapters make it ideal for 5 minute train journeys and the sea shore makes it astonishingly beautiful. The 'orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs' who 'slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers', the gorgeous but deadly anemones, the nervous Hermit crab moving house, the murderous octopi, inhabit the tranquil lovely pools of low tide as Doc picks his way through them looking for specimens. All this to the sound of sacred music and the crashing of waves in the distance. Even better, there is a sequel, Sweet Thursday, hiding somewhere in the bookcases. And before that, I am going to order Cannery Row in hardback so when this sad copy finally falls into separate pages I have a robust replacement. This is a book to keep forever.