About time

This morning (or yesterday evening, for the organised), clocks across Britain were set forward one hour. This is something that has always irritated me. Why do we need to do this? If we want to make the most of light mornings, why can't we just get up earlier? Why do we need to fool ourselves into thinking that the time is an hour later than it really is?

Here's the thing that irritates me: British Summer Time is not real. The position of the hands on a clock face are a measurement, and as such, should aim to measure as accurately as possible. But what are they measuring, exactly? Well... it gets a little more complicated than you might expect when you try to answer this question. Roughly, it's the position of the sun in the sky, but not relying on actually being able to see the sun, and extended through the hours of darkness, too. It's a measure of the Earth's rotation. As such, Noon should mean the time when the sun reaches its highest elevation in the sky.

There are two things which make this an approximation. The first is the use of time zones. Here on the west coast of Wales, the sun sets fifteen minutes later than it does in London and similarly, noon - meaning the highest elevation of the sun - is fifteen minutes later as well. It used to be the case that every town operated to its own local time, but the coming of the railways made it necessary to keep the same time across the whole country. Imagine trying to devise a train timetable with a different time zone for each stop!

I can see the sense in having the same time across the country, so the time is accurate to within about half an hour. For that purpose we all use Greenwich time (the political choice of a location right at the east of the country is also a little irritating - somewhere in the middle would be better), but what about the mean part of GMT? This is mean in the sense of average and derives from the fact that noon-to-noon is not exactly 24 hours, most of the time. On some days it takes a little more and on other days a little less than 24 hours for the sun to return to its highest elevation in the sky.

The reason for this variation is the eliptical shape of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. I was going to give you a brief explanation there, but then I looked it up and it got complicated. If you're interested, Wikepedia has a lengthy article on the subject. The upshot is that some of the time, a sundial is fast relative to a clock, and some of the time it is slow. When clocks were new, the sundial was taken to be correct and an adjustment was applied to the new-fangled clocks to calculate the correct, sundial time. Nowadays, if you are so inclined, you can apply the adjustment (in reverse) to sundial-time to get the correct time as per a clock.

This leaves me in a quandry. I share the modern instinct that the regular clock, with exactly 24 hours each day, is the more correct measure of passing time, but if the sundial, which reliably reports the position of the sun, is inaccurate, what are we measuring with the clock? The concept time of day has become abstracted away from the position of the sun, and that abstraction opens the door to people mucking around with it, with time zones and daylight saving. This feels wrong, as if we've somehow become separated from a fundamental aspect of the natural world. I am very tempted to set up a sundial in my garden and use only that for timekeeping. If only we had more sunlight.

Getting into a rut

A common theme in self-development advice is breaking free from routine. Routines stifle us, say the lifestyle gurus say*. Break out of the rut and set yourself free! While it can be true that blindly following a routine can be limiting, what about the flip side? What if you don't have a routine at all?

Without the demands of children or a job to structure my days, I'm left to decide how to fill the hours. Particularly when mental resources are low, decisions can be taxing, and there's a danger of sliding into the easy, tempting option of browsing the internet. So many interesting things!

I have a problem with hours disappearing as I follow links from facebook, read blogs, and look up the answers to various questions - either prompted by claims on facebook or things I was just wondering about (Can we really live on potatoes alone? What acids are produced in kombucha? No, and acetic and gluconic acids, respectively).

The thing about routines is that they make things easy. This is why it takes effort to break out of them. That's not to say that they're easy to establish; it takes a while before you get the thought popping into your head, Now it's time to do X. Of course, you don't have to make a decision every day while you establish the routine, just find a bit of motivation.

I didn't think it was realistic to construction a whole day's worth of routine all at once and in any case, I wasn't sure I even needed all of that. My main goal was to stop losing entire days on the computer. I've been piecing it together over the last year, and I think it could do with quite a lot more tweaking (as I still spend far too much time on the computer), but this is what I've got so far:-

1. Get out of bed and go to the bathroom
2. Fuss cat
3. Get dressed into underclothes and soft trousers
4. 10 min worth of exercise
5. Change soft trousers for jeans
6. Breakfast WITHOUT switching on computer. Read something in Welsh instead.
7. Wash the dishes. Listen to the radio (also in Welsh) if I feel like it
8. Tea break. If I listened to the radio, the computer is switched on by now, so I'll probably look at it.
9. .....
10. Lunch
11. .....
12. More tea
13. .....
14. Prepare, then eat, dinner

You'll noticed that George has added one item to this list. He gets plenty of attention at other times of day, too, but it's first thing in the morning that he's most interested. There are also little jobs that get done at this time, like kneading bread dough or putting laundry in the machine.

The ten minutes of exercise was inspired by my sister and her husband, who've taken to doing a brief workout every evening after the kids have gone to bed and before dinner. My sister said that if she had my lifestyle, she'd do it first thing in the morning, and I agree. Whereas they're focusing on strength and fitness, I have problems with tense muscles in my back, so I'm doing a bit of half-remembered chi gong and some stretches.

I was going to write do something in the gaps between meals and tea breaks, but if I'm honest, that doesn't always happen. That's the idea, anyway. Stuff I need to get done is so varied that I can't include it very specifically in a schedule, but if I have chunks of time when I'm expecting to get on with whatever project is on the go, then hopefully I'll make some progress. Even if I don't, at least the kitchen is less of a bombsite these days, which makes me feel a lot better when I need to use it.

With this blogging challenge, I was hoping to find a time of day for regular blogging, and maybe manage to shoehorn other computer stuff into that time slot, too. As you'll have noticed, the challenge has suffered a bit of a setback lately. We went away for a few days and it was more difficult to get into a writing frame of mind. I could have done it if I'd had some posts lined up before we went, but I'm not that organised. Before that, though, I was starting to find that the afternoon tea break felt like time to start writing a blog post, so hopefully I'll get back to that. Maybe I'll even resist looking at the computer earlier in the day, but that takes will power, and the whole point of a routine is to avoid needing to rely on will power too much. Hmm, needs more work, I think.

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* At least, they used to. Judging by how difficult it was to find an article to illustrate this point, I guess this advice may have gone out of fashion.

New Year Ramblings

As I started typing this post the sun came out and shone in through the window*. This feels like a rare treat and I'm tempted to jump up and go straight outside to appreciate it, but Ian's just made a cup of tea, and it's too wet out for sitting and drinking tea. It's been raining almost continuously since I wrote about the beautiful autumn weather we had in September and October. Apart from three or four days, we've had variations on light rain, heavy rain, and that kind of closed-in weather we get here where it's not exactly raining or foggy, but you get wet when you go outside anyway.

Since I usually suffer from seasonal depression, with my mood strongly affected by light, I'd expect to be feeling pretty dreadful about now. I'm glad to report that it's different this year. I'm certainly not enjoying these dark days, but they're making me feel grumpy rather than listless. I feel like a reasonably active human being who could get stuff done if only it wasn't so cold and wet. And if I didn't have a cat sitting on me.

As I've mentioned previously, I've had depression throughout this year, and I've been working through several issues. That is to say, instead of looking at depression as an illness in need of a cure (or treatment of symptoms), I've tried to find the underlying causes and address them directly. I know that for many people, depression doesn't have identifiable, psychological causes, but I suspected that in my case it did. That's not to say it's a straightforward response to currently depressing events, but that there are things buried in my psyche that are causing me problems. Some of the things I found were well buried indeed, relating to the death of my mother twenty seven years ago.

Without much in the way of responsibilities this year, I had the luxury of space to deal with my mental health. Time will tell how much healing has actually taken place but, cautiously, at this point in time, I feel that I've made a great deal of progress. I feel ready to start again with the garden, ready to reconnect with friends - I've been a hermit this year. If I said to you, You must come and visit! I really meant it, I just couldn't quite manage the necessary to make it happen - and ready to put my life back on the internet in the form of intermittent blog posts. In short, it feels like new year, and that looks a lot like a set of new year's resolutions. That makes me a bit nervous, knowing how such resolutions usually go, but hey ho, let's roll with it and see what happens.

In the meantime, here are some pictures of starlings coming in to roost under Aberystwyth pier, on a day of actual sunshine that we took advantage of, shortly before Christmas:

Here come the first of the starlings

Looking south along the seafront, there was a beautiful sunset

and in the other direction, the moon.

More starlings heading for the pier...

... and down to roost under it.

One more picture of the moon, with lamps and a few late starlings.

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* This event was remarkable enough to make the news. I say news - this is a joke news site, but still, they were very quick to report this remarkable sighting!

Foraging vs. gardening, and our place in nature

A discussion on a facebook foraging group the other day has prompted me to write about something that I've been thinking about for some time, now. The discussion started with,

Not to open a can of worms as it were, but I thought this site was to help promote the sustainable collecting of wild produce, as well as edible plant identification. By sustainable I mean taking enough for us humans to enjoy as a treat but leaving enough for wildlife to eat as an essential to survive winter. Some of the posts though show such large quantities being collected which will quite possibly impact on wildlife survival, including birds, squirrels, mice, voles etc. Do we humans always have to be greedy at the expense of other creatures?

and towards the end included suggestions about heating up the can of worms on a bonfire, but being sure to leave some worms in the can for the blackbirds, and whether it's best for a blackbird to learn to use a can opener, or simply train a human to do it as and when required.

Chestnuts. Should I leave these for the woodland animals?

While I'm all for respecting and supporting wildlife, I have several problems with this position (the original post, not teaching blackbirds to use can openers). Firstly, while this point of view is common amongst foragers, it's very rare amongst gardeners. It may just be that there are two groups of people with very different standards, but I suspect that the concept of ownership has a lot to do with it. In my garden, where I have toiled and nurtured, the plants are mine and I'm entitled to harvest all of them, with no regard to what the wildlife might want. Indeed, gardeners go to great lengths to protect their crops from being eaten by other animals, and it's very rare to hear any disapproval of this behaviour.

Squash. How about these? Should I have left these too?

It's not just the inconsistency that bothers me; this highlights what the alternative to foraging is. Gardening is akin to farming: Deliberate cultivation of crops on land designated as being for that purpose. One viewpoint expressed in the facebook debate was that we don't need to forage if we can afford to buy our food from shops, implying that this is the default, neutral position.

Let's think about that, shall we? Food bought from shops is farmed, almost universally. There's a spectrum of farming practices, but they all involve identifying pieces of land as farmland and making efforts to keep wildlife from eating the crops on that land. People may debate the methods used, but does anyone say to a farmer, You must leave those caterpillars alone, they have as much right to the cabbages as you do!? Actually, it's possible that some people might say this, but I think you'll agree that this is an extreme point of view. It's generally accepted that farming involves keeping as much of the crop as possible for humans, not caterpillars.

If the default, neutral position involves, at the very least, displacing wildlife, what then of foraging? Taking wild food certainly deprives other animals of it, but otherwise doesn't disturb them much, unlike farming. Foraging, then, surely has a lower impact on wildlife than farming.

The next question has to be whether foraged food supplements or replaces farmed food. In other words, do we eat just the same amount of farmed food when we forage, or do we eat less? The answer to this is not straightforward. One possibility is all the food that is necessary for survival and good nutrition comes from farmed or home-grown sources. In this scenario, any foraged food is additional to this, treats and luxuries that we simply wouldn't have if we didn't forage.

Another possibility is that when we forage, we reduce the amount of food we eat from other sources. Even if the type of food we forage ends up as luxuries, for example sloe gin, we would have bought some equivalent luxury, perhaps another liqueur, if we didn't have the foraged food. This second possibility also covers cases where foraged food replaces more essential food items, such as foraged nettles or fat hen substituting for spinach or spring greens.

If the first possibility was mainly the true situation, then foraging really would be an additional impact on wildlife. There would be a simple choice between taking wild food and not taking it. However, I think the second possibility is much more likely to be true. We do not add to our diet with foraged food, we replace some of the farmed food with wild.

The person who started the recent debate, who is far from alone in this view, considers wild food to be treats for humans, but essential for wild animals. Even for those whose foraged food is only sloe gin or blackberry and apple crumble, which are certainly treats, I think this misses the point if - as I suspect is usually the case - these treats are substitutes for alternative treats. Even with treats, foraging is an alternative to farming, not additional to it.

What really bugs me about this point of view, though, was expressed by another member of the facebook discussion. It reflects a view of human beings as separate from the natural world. The bounties nature world are not for us, they are for wild animals. We have other sources of food, other than what we might forage.

This treats the farms where our food is grown as being apart from nature; as having no impact on it. Of course, people who express this view are not thinking about the farms, but that's part of the problem. When you think about it, farmland obviously has a huge impact on wildlife. Everything we do interacts with nature, because we are part of nature. Just like all the other wild animals, we have to eat, and that food has to grow somewhere.

From the point of view of being one animal amongst many, and needing to feed myself as much as any other animal does, I feel that I have as much right to nature's bounty as the next animal, especially when the next animal happens to be a slug.

One mushroom - a cep, I believe - that I didn't get to first.

What am I?

This isn't a riddle, it's a question I've genuinely been grappling with recently. Let me back up a little. I've been suffering from depression over the last month or so. I've found this quite hard to accept - I get seasonal depression, I can't be depressed in the summer! - or even recognise. When the sun is shining, spring flowers are out and the birds are singing, it can be quite hard to see that underneath my appreciation of all this, there are still some serious problems. However, it got bad enough to force me to face up to it when I just couldn't face going to an event that I'd usually enjoy a lot. I've been talking to my dear friend Sarah, who is a counsellor and has been helping me figure out what's going on in my head.

There are a couple of obvious things, like money worries and the general election result, but we've turned up some less obvious things too. One of these is loss of identity. I used to be a scientist, but I don't do science any more. It's been very hard to let go of; to accept that I no longer know what's going on in my field of research (or anyone else's, for that matter), that I'm no longer in a position to conduct experiments. If I'm not doing science any more, I'm not really a scientist, am I? I talked to Sarah about the difference between human being and human doing and, although I've come across the conceptual distinction before and it has intuitive appeal, if I'm honest, I just don't get it.

I am wedded to the idea that what one is is defined by what one does simply because I can't envisage a human who is not doing anything. If you take away all activity, what is left? If anything is left, I can't see that it differentiates between one human and another. I'll try another tack. Suppose we take a quality such as, kindness. It might be true to say that someone is a kind person even when they're not doing very much at the time. But isn't kindness just a disposition to act kindly? I can't find any meaningful qualities that don't come back to action in the end. I am a human doing.

So, what do I do? This a question that is often asked in social situations, when meeting new people. It's one I have trouble with; I don't really know what the answer is. It's not a bad question, and the person asking it is simply trying to find out a bit more about me. When I had a job that I felt reflected my personal identity (even, formed a big part of my identity), I had no problem with this question. Answering it would be a very concise way of conveying a lot of information about myself. Now, I don't have that kind of job. The occupation I've chosen is unpaid, but that's not the main problem. I'm not sure that self-sufficient is a very good representation of who I am, not least because I'm not very good at it. Competence is a big deal for me, but I'll leave that for another time.

I now have a disconnect. I accept the identification of a person with what they do, yet what I've chosen to do with my life doesn't feel like who I really am. What am I, then? I think I've found an answer that might work for me. I used to think of myself as a scientist, but if I go back a little further, to my undergraduate days, I had a dual identity. I studied both philosophy and psychology and at the time, was equally happy identifying with either. I pursued psychology as a career mainly because it seemed like a more realistic option. Now I've stopped doing that, perhaps I can re-identify with the other branch of my studies? I never really left philosophy behind. Look at this blog post: It's all about picking ideas apart. Human being vs human doing? What does that really mean? What's the point of asking, What do you do?

Rodin's The Thinker

This is what I do: I think about things. I am a philosopher. That's not an answer I'll give when people ask, What do you do? It sounds pretentious and is also misleading. I'm not doing philosophy at the highest level, and I'm not getting paid to do it. However, it is an answer that gives me an identity I'm comfortable with. An intellectual life has value, at least in my world view. I need no longer feel that I'm trying and failing to be self sufficient. This answer is for me. I still need to find an answer for other people, for use in casual social situations, but I hope that now the question won't be poking at an open wound. If I'm happy with my own view of myself, I don't mind too much what other people think of me.

New year thoughts

The solstice has been and gone and, as the year turns, we have now come to Imbolc, which coincides with Candlemas, St Brigid's day, and Groundhog Day. I'm not sure how much these various festivals have in common, but the first of the three spring festivals (the other two being the spring equinox - Easter - and Beltane, or May Day) seems to me like a good time to mark the new year, so this is when you get my new year ramblings.

As I have mentioned previously, I had depression towards the end of last year. I'm glad to say that with the lengthening days in January it started to lift, but it took me out for a good three months. From the equinox to the solstice, there were many days when getting up and dressed, feeding myself and my husband were as much as I could do. That said, I was able to do that much every day, so it could have been a lot worse. A year ago I hit on the theory that autumn depression is in fact a shift in motivation towards food gathering and storage. I'm not sure that entirely holds - there were harvesting tasks, notably cleaning sugar beet, that I couldn't face, but on the other hand, I found some enthusiasm for foraging, at least in fits and starts.

I adopted an attitude of acceptance: It doesn't matter if I don't achieve anything, this is depression, I get it every year, there are reasons why it's particularly bad this year, it will pass. And so it has.

From my perspective of now, this has coloured my view of the past year, so I have to make an effort to look back past the autumn equinox, and appreciate the rest of the year for what it was. Reading back to earlier blog posts, I see that the year didn't start too well either, with last year's depression not quite lifting in the spring, possibly due to poor diet. On the other hand, we did have a glorious summer, and I can't help being cheered by that much sunshine.

I can't avoid the fact that this past year has been dominated by a lack of money. Ian earns his living by writing about classic cars (and yes, we are fully aware of the ironic juxtaposition between our green lifestyle and this source of income, but cars are his passion). He gave up a staff position on a magazine to work freelance so we could move to Wales. When times are hard, freelance commissions will go before staff jobs, and times have been hard. Visits to friends and family were cut back, foods such as avocados and honey were reclassified as expensive luxuries, for occasional treats only, and our underwear is in tatters.

There was the prospect of something that had us hoping for most of the year, but it came to nothing in the end.

In the meantime, the obvious question was asked, mostly by well-meaning family and friends, Why don't I get a job? I didn't, though. I even cut back on what little paid work I had been doing. In hindsight, perhaps not so sensible, but on the other hand, it did have the desired effect. I'd been struggling to focus on a challenging project, so I cut back on other things and succeeded in paying attention to the solar panels. And that's the point. I have struggled with this. Although in theory I could get a job for a short period of time, just until things are looking better, I fear it would take me away from what I want to do with my life and I'm not sure I'd be able to turn back. We have friends here who tried self sufficiency and have more or less given up. I can see that happening to me.

Learning self sufficiency skills is not easy, but it's more than that. It's not just that I need space to give my attention to difficult projects, there's also a shift in mindset. The longer I'm out of the mainstream world of paid work and consumerism, the more alien it is to me. Of course I haven't left it completely - we're not hermits - but I mostly don't engage with a world in which trade is central. I don't sell my time and skills, and as far as possible, I produce rather than purchase. Given the all pervading presence of commerce, it takes a certain amount of isolation to maintain an anti-commercial mindset. Alternatively, if I manage to sustain my current frame of mind whilst re-engaging with the world, the constant contradictions would be quite distressing.

This all sounds rather melodramatic, and of course it's not as all-or-nothing as I've made out, but I'm struggling to express why I'm reluctant to return to the world of paid work. I fear losing what I've gained in the last four years; I fear turning away from the road I'm on in case I can't find it again.

That said, we do need some money. A few months ago I was moaning to a friend about our lack of funds and she said, But isn't this what you want? To live without money? Well... yes and no. Yes, I would love to be completely self sufficient*, but that's not realistic right now. I'm working on developing my skills - this last year I've learnt plumbing, for example, which is a case in point to illustrate why some money is necessary. I may not have to pay someone to do the work, but I still need to pay for the materials. In the more everyday area of food, I bake my own bread, but I don't grind the flour (though that might be something I could do in the future) and I don't grow my own wheat. The latter is something I'm unlikely to try, as the climate here is not well suited to it. There are limits to our self sufficiency. I will continue to push those limits back, but I can't realistically see the prospect of us living without money entirely.

There is obviously a conflict between my desire to avoid the commercial world and our need for money, albeit not a huge amount of it. I find this easier to live with if Ian's the one earning the money, which brings us back to the fact that he hasn't been earning as much as we need recently. Now, finally, there is the prospect of something a bit more stable. I can't quite believe it yet, but it's progressed far enough that I can tell you about it. As well as his freelance work, Ian volunteers for a local community transport group, providing bus services for routes that aren't commercially viable. In rural areas this can be a lifeline. There are a couple of paid roles in this organisation, and the holder of one these roles has just resigned. Ian will be filling in temporarily, and will apply when the job is advertised. Hopefully, we'll have a regular income before too long. He will also be able to continue writing about cars in his spare time.

Looking forward to the new year with a little less anxiety now, I'm starting to think about the garden, and various projects that I'll write about in other posts. I don't generally make resolutions, as I think that's setting yourself up for failure, but this year I felt the need for one or two. Firstly, I need to cut down on my computer use. I find it all too easy to get stuck on the computer, particularly when depressed, and this has become a habit. I've decided on the modest rule of not switching the computer on at breakfast time. Instead of Just browsing facebook while I have breakfast, which so often ends up consuming the whole morning, I must get up and do something, even if only the washing up, before switching the machine on.

I did actually implement that rule in early January, and it's going well so far; I'm a lot more active than I was before Christmas, and the kitchen's generally tidier, too. This might be more to do with the lengthening days than rules about computer use, but I think it's a good rule anyway. I think I need a little more routine in my life (I'll come back to that another time), and this is a first step.

The other resolution I considered is not your typical new year's resolution: I'm resolving to take less responsibility. Let me explain where I'm coming from with this. Over the past year I have been observing myself, in the same way that I did before making the decision to quit my job and try self sufficiency. I've known for some time that I have a bad case of volunteeritis. I've always thought of myself as a strong, capable woman. All the women in my family are strong, and this is a source of pride for me. When faced with adversity, I do not crumble, oh no, I step up to the mark and deal with it. I can handle anything! The trouble is, I can't.

Whenever something needs doing, my natural tendency is to think, I could do that, and mostly it's true, I could. When I moved schools at the age of 16, my new teachers expected far higher standards than I was used to. I discovered then that if more is expected of a person, then more is delivered. It was an important lesson: If I challenge myself to do more than I think I can, then I probably will be able to do it. This is often conveyed as Step out of your comfort zone. I took that lesson on board wholeheartedly, never shying away from the difficult. In fact, I stepped out of my comfort zone so often that I really don't know what my comfort zone looks like. It's not a place I'm familiar with. I think maybe it's time to explore it, not with a view to retreating there for ever, but just to get acquainted.

The trouble with constantly accepting tasks that are beyond what you think you can do is that sometimes they actually are beyond you.

I volunteered as treasurer for a national club we're members of, with no knowledge of accounting. I'm pretty good with numbers - how hard can it be? Very hard, as it turns out, especially when taking over from someone with considerable expertise in moving numbers around to make them look right. Especially when you discover that a long-standing, popular member of the club has stolen a substantial sum of money. That was stressful.

I volunteered as a committee member for a local community group. The principle attribute required for this seemed to be local knowledge, in which I felt myself singularly lacking. I spent much of the time in committee meetings with no idea what was going on, feeling very much out of my depth.

I also volunteered to take over the running of live music events at our local hotel. This last was frankly ludicrous, as I know very little about music and lack the vocabulary to talk about it. I also take a dim view of the whole business of marketing. If there's a fun event happening, I am not the person to cajole everyone into joining in. My attitude is to let people know it's happening, then it's up to them if they want to come along. If they'd rather have a nice, quiet evening at home, that's entirely up to them. As a music promoter, I am the least suitable person in the world.

I have now extricated myself from these things, with varying degrees of grace, and currently have few responsibilities. I was chatting to someone in the pub the other day who asked about my resolutions, so I told him. A little later I mentioned an upcoming event... You've got an event? As in, you're organising it? What about no responsibility? he said. Well, um, that's different. On reflection, it is different because the event in question is quite easy, relative to many of the things I take on. I suppose you could say that it's well within my comfort zone. Also, it's Ian's gig, really. I'll be honest - I know this is a resolution I'm not going to keep, but I will try to think carefully before taking on new challenges about whether I really am capable of doing them, and what impact they might have on the rest of my life.

Last year was tough, but I'm feeling positive going into the new year. Things are looking up and I'm confident it's going to be a better year. Look - even the eggs are smiling!

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* That is, I'd love to be part of a self sufficient community. It may be possible to live entirely by one's own efforts, but the general consensus amongst those who've tried it is that a small community is a better option.

The darkest time of the year (and a fireplace)

Take several months of financial stress, add seasonal depression, responsibility for a big, stressful event, a period of intense uncertainty (which isn't resolved yet, so I can't tell you about it) and on top of all that, a dead cat... well, it hasn't been the easiest autumn. There are good days and bad days.

On the good days, I've been working on the fireplace surround. This has been a ragged hole in the wall since I attacked it four years ago.

I've had some ideas about what to do here, but most of my ideas involved spending money, which we'd generally rather avoid, and is currently not an option for merely decorative projects. The part I was most certain of was the brick arch. It would be nice to get hold of some attractive bricks, but perhaps not entirely necessary. I started by searching the property for all the old bricks I could find. One was on the driveway, having been used as an alternative handbrake. Several were serving as a stand for the barbecue. Some were just lying around. Those you see in the photo above were the least scruffy/most similar to each other that I could find.

The next step was to clean the bricks as best I could without buying chemical cleaners (to be avoided for several reasons). Online advice suggested that dishwashing liquid might be worth a try, so I tried it, applied using brushes with both nylon and steel bristles. It didn't make much difference. My next attempt involved play dough. I made up a salt dough and pressed it onto the ends of the bricks, then baked them in a low oven until it was hard. The next day, I soaked it off, then scrubbed with dishwashing liquid again. I can't be entirely sure, but I think that quite a lot more soot came off the second time. Whether the play dough had anything to do with this, I have no idea.

Having selected my bricks, I still didn't know what to do with the edges of the fireplace. I'd quite like to leave the bricks bare, but as you can see, the brickwork is far from tidy. My cousin suggested brick slips - bricks made in thin tile shapes, including corner pieces, sold for applications just like this. It was a good suggestion, but.... money. Then a visiting friend suggested a wood surround. This is much more realistic as we have lots of old floorboards. I was sure I could find a couple of pieces that would suit. I even considered carving some decoration into them, but that would be quite a big project, not to be attempted before Christmas. In the meantime, I considered how to fix up a shelf above the fireplace.

I found the old shelf that had been there before, somewhat weathered now, but not necessarily any the worse for that. I was holding this up in position (it's just a little longer than the width of the arch - the ideal size), wondering what kind of brackets would be suitable, when Ian walked by and said, Ah, a mantlepiece! This comment set off a new train of thought. I'd been referring to the horizontal pieces of wood in my mind as a shelf, and shelves are typically supported by brackets. Mantlepieces, on the other hand, are often part of a fire surround, with supports that sometimes go right down to the floor. I wondered whether we might have any pieces of wood that I could use like that? Initially I was thinking of new cut timber that I might carve, but before long I lighted on the idea of using the leylandii trunks I got from cutting down the hedge. Quite a few of these have been turned into firewood, and some still have branches attached, but there were three trimmed and unburned. I selected the two longest and cut the ends straight across. Here they are in position, under the mantlepiece:

Leylandii trunks holding up mantlepiece and hiding scruffy brickwork

I'm quite pleased with this. They're currently held in place with bits of string - I'll fix them properly after Christmas. No, really, I will!

The bad days come with the rain. Not just the rain, but closed-in, up-in-the-clouds weather that blocks out light and warmth and joy for days on end. The air and the ground get saturated with water so that nothing's ever quite dry, and we get puddles in the store room.

Those orange dots at the top of the picture are squash. I'm having to keep a close eye on them so as to eat them up quickly as they start going mouldy.

The other day, some friends and I discussed what the point of Christmas is. We came up with quite a lot of points, and agreed that you can take your pick. My focus is to fend off the gloom and darkness of this time of year, and celebrate the return of the light. When my mood lifts sufficiently to get anything done, I'm focusing on Christmas. Today, I am mostly making sweets and - the reason I wanted the mantlepiece up before Christmas - I have decorations up.

Mouse ears and chocolate pigs

Evergreens and sparkly things around the fireplace

Tonight is both the solstice and the new moon, so it truly is the longest, darkest night of the year. After this, the light returns. Yuletide greetings to one and all!

Thoughts on the 5/2 diet: Fasting is not for me.

At the beginning of this month, I reviewed our poor diet and decided to give the 5/2 diet a try. This means severely restricting calories - fasting - on two days of the week, not necessarily consecutively, and eating what you like on the other five days. Yesterday was my sixth fasting day, having missed one when relatives were visiting.

It wasn't too bad to start with. Of course I was hungry, but nothing I couldn't live with. I tweaked things slightly and by the third fast it seemed quite do-able. I reduced my breakfast slightly (it's usually about 600 calories on its own) and delayed it until midday, allowed myself three cups of tea throughout the day, and ate a high-protein snack, such as a boiled egg, at about 6pm. There were periods of intense hunger between for about an hour prior to eating, but I thought that as I got used to it, that would get easier.

Actually, it didn't; it got worse. I found I was spending more and more of the day feeling painfully hungry, completely fixated on food, unable to concentrate on anything, and seriously irritable. Furthermore, I didn't like the effect it was having on me the rest of the time: I turned into a dieter.

I have never in my life been a dieter. My mother believed that we should listen to our bodies' signals about when and what to eat. She encouraged us to try new foods, but never forced us to eat things we didn't like or to finish a plate of food if we were full. She didn't keep sweets in the house, and cakes and ice cream were special treats, so our food choices weren't completely unrestricted, but we had a lot of choice in what we ate. I have grown into an adult who, from time to time, craves spinach (or nettles, if that's what's available).

One comment about the benefits of the 5/2 diet is that it teaches you what it feels like to be hungry, so you can distinguish it from wanting food for other reasons. I couldn't relate to this; I know what it's like to be hungry, and I mostly don't eat for other reasons. I don't want to sound holier-than-thou about this, and I do eat food just because it's delicious, but I can take a large bar of chocolate from the cupboard, eat four squares, and leave the rest sitting on the table in front of me.

This changed when I started fasting. On non-fast days, I felt drawn to food in a new way. I've observed this in friends, but I've never before felt the compulsion to eat food just because it's there. What I learnt from fasting was not what hunger feels like, but the desire to overeat, because you never know when food might be in short supply again, so you'd better build up your reserves just in case. OK, that second part isn't conscious, but I assume it's the survival strategy underlying that desire.

I don't like being a dieter. I eat when I'm hungry and I stop eating when I'm full (or sometimes before, if I didn't prepare enough food). My food intake is not completely unrestricted - I'll resist eating something so I can use it for dinner tomorrow, for example - but I don't force myself to feel hungry. I live in a world of relatively plentiful food and I'm well adapted to it. I'd like to keep it that way. My experiment with fasting ended with an ice cream in the middle of yesterday afternoon, and I felt so much better for it!

Five a Day - How?

Sorry, this is another post about diet - I'm a little obsessed at the moment. I'm still thinking about the government advice to get five portions of fruit and veg per day, with a portion being 80 g, or about 3 oz. Let's look at what I ate yesterday.

I started with my usual breakfast of muesli, made up of porridge oats, fruit and a few nuts. I'm not sure whether oats count - they are a grain, not a vegetable - but I have about 70 g, so that's almost a portion if they do count. I had a small handful of raspberries from the garden - about an ounce, so nowhere near a portion.

For lunch, I had a salad of peas fresh from the garden with some marsh samphire that I picked the other day, plus a few herbs with an oil and vinegar dressing. Because I'm keeping track of what I harvest from the garden, I weighed the peas: 2 oz, so rather less than a portion. I didn't weigh the samphire, but I doubt it was an ounce. Between them, barely one portion. I also had a little polenta, because I'm experimenting with alternatives to bread.

Dinner was a big heap of cheesy mashed potatoes with chard. I harvested 10 ½ oz potatoes, but they got mixed up with the ones in the cupboard so I'm not sure how many I actually ate. It could have been as much as 9 oz. Whether that counts as three portions or not is contentious. Officially, potatoes don't count, but I heard an interview with someone involved in issuing the advice, who said this was mainly because they were worried that people would just eat lots of chips and think that was healthy. It's sad that such a lack of common sense is assumed, and also sad that they were probably right. The chard was 2 ½ oz - barely a portion - and I had a glass of tomato juice, which also counts as one.

Counting strictly, I had barely one portion of veg at lunch and barely two at dinner, including the juice. That's somewhat short of three. If I include the potatoes and oats I get to seven, a target supported by recent research. The thing is, this is pretty much everything I ate yesterday, and it all looks healthy to me. The only other foods I had in any quantity were dairy: Cheese, probably about three ounces, and half a pint or so of milk. If I didn't count the potatoes, as advised, how would I get to my five portions?

I found the following on the NHS website:

Having a sliced banana with your morning cereal is a quick way to get one portion. Swap your mid-morning biscuit for a tangerine, and add a side salad to your lunch. Have a portion of vegetables with dinner, and snack on dried fruit in the evening to reach your five a day.

That suggestion adds two snacks to my usual meal plan, and both are fruit, so relatively high in sugar. That doesn't sound like an ideal adjustment to my diet.

I'm curious - do you monitor your fruit and veg intake, and if so do you get five a day? How?

Poor diet

You'd think, what with foraging and growing vegetables, that my diet would be pretty healthy, wouldn't you? Well, I kind of assumed that. The thing is, foraging takes a lot of time and the garden isn't at its most productive in the spring.

Over the last six months or so, I've had the nagging awareness that my health is not at its best. That period started in the middle of winter, when I usually have SAD, so I expected to get better with spring, but it didn't really happen. I'm not ill as such, but my energy and motivation are low. The clearest sign that's something's not quite right is in my skin: It's in generally poor condition and it's not healing quickly after cuts and, currently, insect bites.

The other day, I looked up what counts as a portion of vegetables and was shocked to realise that I'm not even getting the government recommended five portions of fruit and veg a day. That's really not very good. There are several reasons for this. One is that Ian does not have a good relationship with food.

Ian's a supertaster, which means that many flavours that are unremarkable or pleasant to me, are seriously unpleasant to him. I persuaded him to try a slice of cucumber the other day - surely a food so bland that it couldn't be offensive. It was a distressing experience for him... How can you eat this? In spite of his attempts to wash it away with a cup of tea, the nasty taste stayed with him for a good fifteen minutes. A lifetime of this, combined with lack of understanding from others (imagine being branded a fussy eater for rejecting something so bitter that you can't imagine anyone wanting to eat it), has left him with a very restricted diet and a reluctance to try new foods. Basically, he doesn't like vegetables.

During the hungry gap - that period in late spring when there's not much in the garden - I would usually treat myself to expensive, shop-bought vegetables, particularly asparagus. One day... one day... I shall harvest asparagus from my garden, and this will fill the gap between the end of the purple sprouting broccoli and the start of the broad beans and peas. In the meantime, asparagus costs money, and money has been in short supply lately. It is the lot of a freelancer to have periods of feast and famine, and the last six months have been a famine, almost literally. The likes of asparagus have been classified as expensive luxury and hence off the menu.

I can cook cheaply, I really can. I can even cook cheaply for someone who can't contemplate a main meal that doesn't include meat, and whose acceptable side vegetables are peas, carrots, and baked beans. What I struggle to do is cook cheap, healthy food, with those restrictions, during the hungry gap. As I discovered when I looked into the £1 a day challenge, refined carbohydrates are cheap. When I examine our recent diet, I find that it does contain a lot of wheat.

At the same time as I was having these thoughts about diet, we watched a documentary about the effects of fasting on health. I've never been a fan of dieting, but we were both very impressed by the health benefits reported, so alongside looking for alternatives to bread and pasta, we've decided to give the 5/2 diet a go. This is five days a week of eating what you like, and two days of eating no more than 600 calories. If nothing else, the simple observation that we did not evolve in an environment that offered a steady supply of food makes it plausible that the human body would be well adapted to a feast and fast pattern of eating.

For me, the main appeal is the health benefit, not weight loss. As a bonus, this saves the cost of two main meals a week. With the money we save, perhaps we can afford healthier food the rest of the time.

The not-so-simple life

People refer to our sort of lifestyle as, The simple life. I can see where they're coming from, but I really can't relate to that description. My focus may be primarily domestic, but things that were quite simple in our old life are considerably more complex now. Take, for example, the pizza I had for dinner this evening.

I was going to put a picture of a pizza in here, but I ate it instead

When I lived a normal sort of a life, the kind that includes working in an office and buying food in shops, the preparation required for pizza was 1) Buying pizza, 2) Heating oven, 3) Taking pizza out of box, putting onto a baking tray and into the oven. These days it's a little more complicated.

I started in the morning, wondering whether my sourdough starter had enough yeast in it to provide for pizza bases. I took some out and mixed it with lots of water and little sugar and flour then left it in a warm place in the hope that the yeast would multiply. At intervals I added a little more flour, stirred, and peered at it anxiously to see whether it was alive or not. At about lunchtime I decided that it probably was, and mixed it up into a bread dough, which I rolled into two balls and left to rise.

At about 4 pm, I shaped the dough into disks and covered, leaving them to rise again. At this point I turned my attention to toppings and went out in search of mushrooms. I found one. To go with this, I decided to have lacto-fermented wild garlic, which I'd gathered, chopped, and put in a jar to ferment some weeks ago.

At some point in the future, I hope to make tomato sauce from tomatoes and onions grown in the garden, which I can then bottle and have on hand for pasta and pizzas. You could say I'm already preparing for future pizzas in growing the plants. In the meantime, I make sauce from tinned tomatoes and bought onions, with herbs from the garden. I did that after getting back with the mushroom.

Having made my bases and sauce, and assembled toppings, I can then get to steps 2 and 3, heating the oven and cooking the pizzas.

Not everything is quite this complicated, but if I make something instead of buying it, that takes additional thought and planning. The range of things I give my attention to may be smaller (though I'm not sure even that's the case), but each thing is more complex, not simpler.

2013: A year of foraging and pondering

If you look back over this blog for the last year, it seems to have been a year of foraging and thinking about things. That's probably a pretty accurate reflection; it doesn't feel like it's been a very productive year. That statement betrays my continuing attachment to notions of productivity as an important part of what's valuable or successful, and that statement tells you that I am moving away from that way of thinking.

To start with the lack of productivity: I haven't made and fitted solar panels; I have half-replaced conservatory roofing that needs fixing (again); further projects await the old panels; the house is only partially insulated; its decorative state is much the same as it was a year ago. On the positive side, I've learnt a great deal about wild food, and I've spent a fair bit of time pondering the question of how to live well. I think this has been valuable and I expect to continue in this vein.

For now, I give you some completely unrelated pretty pictures from 2013, some of which have appeared in this blog, but others are new. The people in the bottom photo are my sister and her children.

The time is now

The first part of this post was written on Tue 31st Dec.

Susie has found herself making a 40 Before 40 list. Being the same age, I'm tempted to hop aboard the bandwagon, but I won't because I find lists oppressive. All the same, there are a few things that I've long wanted or intended to do and that occur at a point in the future called "one day". My fortieth year strikes me as a time to ask, If not now, then when?

Some of these are lifestyle changes. I believe that my life would be improved if I took up yoga or meditation, or preferably both. I've wanted to learn hang gliding, or paragliding, for as long as I can remember. Other things are (probably) one-off events. I would love to see both a total eclipse of the sun (I did try, on 11 August 1999, but Cornwall was cloudy that day) and the Aurora Borealis.

This may look like a bucket list or new year's resolutions, but it lacks that sense of obligation. This is me looking at things I want and asking myself, quite straightforwardly, Why not? What's stopping me? If the answer is money, I'll ask further, Is there a cheaper way of doing it? Could I save up for it? The answer may still be no, but I'd at least like to think it through.

As I type, I am sitting in a holiday cottage in the north of Scotland. The weather is cold and miserable and there isn't much daylight. The last of those is part of the reason we're here. Other factors include the new moon, sunspots, and the fact that Scotland is cheaper to get to than Norway or Iceland (both places I'd love to visit). Yes, we've come here for a chance to see the northern lights.

It really is only a chance, as it's necessary for the right solar weather (stormy) to occur shortly before the right terrestrial weather (clear), and both are fairly unpredictable, certainly on the sort of timescale involved in booking a holiday. For the first few days of our stay we've had some clear weather, but solar activity has been low. However, it's forecast to increase later in the week and the local weather forecast is for 'partial' cloud on Thursday. It may not be a very good chance, but it's a chance. We shall pack a thermos of soup, put on our thickest socks, head out somewhere with a clear view of the northern horizon, and wait.

By the time I next have internet connection to post this, I may be able to tell you whether the gamble paid off.

---

Well, here I am, back in Wales, with internet connection. So did we see them? Were we treated to one of the most spectacular cosmic displays visible from Earth? Yes and no. Yes, we saw them... no, they weren't spectacular.

We'd headed north from our cottage to Dunnet Head, the most northerly point on the UK mainland. We figured that if the chance of seeing the lights was slim, we'd better make sure we had the best possible view of the northern horizon, so that's where we went. We got there at about 4:30 pm due to a petrol panic. That is, we had only just enough petrol to get to Thurso (town near Dunnet Head) - probably - and on a bank holiday we didn't reckon on finding a petrol station open in the rural area closer to the cottage. We gambled on finding one open in Thurso, but thought we'd better not leave it too late. If there hadn't been, we'd have been stranded there for the night and probably not made it to the headland, but there was, just one, luckily.

So... petrol panic over, we parked up at the top of Dunnet Head and settled down to wait, though it wasn't even fully dark when we arrived. We weren't the only ones with this idea. The first couple who arrived thought that the lights were pretty much constant when active, and would be visible as soon as it got dark enough. They were disappointed, and left after a couple of hours. The next couple arrived in a smart looking Audi, but got out to watch the sky. It was way too cold for that kind of behaviour. They didn't stay long. The third couple arrived at around 10 pm, with a tent. This was their third trip to see the lights, the previous two having been unsuccessful. Shielding our eyes from their bright torchlight as they erected their tent, settled themselves down, checked the tent, added more guy ropes, we began to see why. They never turned the torch off for long enough to let their eyes adjust to the darkness.

At 10:20 pm, nearly six hours after we'd arrived, we saw something. It wasn't much, but it was definitely light in the northern sky that hadn't been there a moment earlier. We got out of the car and watched for about ten minutes, until we got too cold and retreated. Hmm, definitely northern lights, but not exactly the dancing sprites we've seen photos of. About an hour later, they came again, this time a bit bigger. Although it was too windy to use a tripod outdoors, Ian managed to get some photos through the car windscreen.

The car belongs to the couple with the tent

To the bottom left you can see the lighthouse. Dunnet Head isn't completely without ambient light

If I'm quite honest, this looks better in the photo than it did in real life.

So there we are. We made the effort, we took the chance, and we saw the northern lights. I had the sense that there was one heck of a light display going on somewhere to the north of us, and we were seeing the very edge of it. I'd still like to see the lights properly, but I'm glad I've seen them at all. There's also a sense of satisfaction that the effort paid off. It took a bit of research and a lot of waiting to see this. If we hadn't done it right, we wouldn't have seen the lights. We might not have seen them as it was, but when there's only a small chance, it's worth making an effort to maximise that chance.

As for cosmic spectacles, there'd been a fabulous sunset while we were driving north, which we didn't stop to photograph because stopping and starting uses extra fuel. The moon was also stunning that evening.

This one looked better in real life.

Perhaps this should be a reminder to appreciate the more common spectacles, and not get too distracted by chasing the exotic.

A thought on seasonal depression

Every year, I wonder what's wrong with me: Where has my enthusiasm gone? Why do I feel like such a failure? Then sometime around mid October the penny drops: It's autumn! I suffer from SAD - that's why I'm feeling rubbish. You'd think I'd learn, wouldn't you?

This year, I noticed something else, though. While my motivation for things that I ought to be doing (fixing the conservatory roof; publicity for Wild West Wales) was rock bottom, I was quite happy foraging and preparing food for storage. These can be quite tedious tasks, but I had no problem motivating myself to wash and dry laver, or to peel and chop a whole carrier bag full of apples that a friend gave me.

This made me wonder about the nature of seasonal depression. It's always struck me as evolutionarily implausible that so many people should feel sluggish for quite such a large proportion of the year. I could understand it in the darkest, coldest months, when hibernation looks like a good strategy, but SAD often kicks in with the rapidly shortening days, particularly around the equinox in September. I wonder whether it's not actually a general depression, but a switch in motivation to food gathering and storage, at the expense of everything else. In our modern world, there's not much opportunity to express that single preoccupation, so all we see is the loss of motivation to do anything else.

Like much of evolutionary psychology, this has more than a hint of the just-so story about it, but it does make a testable prediction: If I could focus all my energy on food gathering and storage throughout September, October and November, and not worry about doing anything else, then I wouldn't feel depressed. I wonder if it would be possible to arrange my life that way?

What is fulfillment?

I wrote this a while ago and left it sitting around on my desktop. I think I was going to polish it up a bit before posting, but I can't think of anything else to say and I quite enjoyed re-reading it, so I'm sharing it as is:

As I started out on this new life, a friend expressed concern that I wouldn't find it fulfilling. Over the last year or so, that question has been lurking in the back of my mind. Not just, Is this fulfilling? but, What does that even mean?

Recently it struck me that Fulfillment is the same thing as Self actualization in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. That might not sound like much of an step forward in explanatory terms, but having spent much of my career in Psychology departments, this sort of thing has seeped into my thinking.

The point is that if someone's written a theory about it, there'll be stuff written down that I can look up and see if it adds anything to my own thoughts on the subject. Good ol' Wikipedia told me that the theory is much disputed (do we really need to meet all our basic biological needs, including sexual, before we can care about things like whether people like us or not?) but included the following simple statement about self actualization:

The desire to become everything that one is capable of becoming.

That made a lot of sense to me. Start by thinking about what one could be; fulfillment is when all those could bes become real. At the same time, it's problematic; to become everything one is capable of becoming.

Let's see...

• I could be a teacher
• I could be scientist
• I could be a mother
• I could be a gardener
• I could be a seamstress
• I could be a cook
• I could go on...

but what I could not be is all of these things.

Life is full of choices and, to use a well-worn metaphor, the journey through life involves taking one path and turning away from another, many times over. Sometimes it's possible to go back and try a path that was turned away from the first time round (though it wouldn't be quite the same path on second approach... The metaphor may be breaking down a bit here), but it's not possible to explore all of the paths thoroughly. One life just isn't long enough to do everything.

I think the concept of fulfillment is flawed. We can survey a range of possibilities and deceive ourselves that we could have/do/be everything. What the glittering possibilities show us is that we could be anything not everything.

So by stopping the intellectual work I was doing before, am I, in any meaningful sense, unfulfilled? The meaning of this negative state is perhaps a little easier to grasp than the corresponding positive, Fulfillment. To feel unfulfilled is to feel that one could be doing more, doing better, doing something more satisfying. This is a dissatisfaction with life that could be entirely valid, and a prompt to try and change things, to fill life with more satisfying activities.

The important thing to remember is that one can't do everything. If you choose to do more fulfilling things, you will almost certainly have to stop doing some of the things you do at the moment. There are only so many hours in the day.

As for me, I'm very happy with the choice I've made. Today I received a request to review a paper for a scientific journal. I might do it because the editor who asked me is a very nice man, but I have no sense that I'm missing out by not doing this kind of work.

Accepting that I can't do everything

... is not something I'm very good at. I was brought up to believe that I can do anything and this self-confidence is a gift for which I am very grateful to my parents. However, it's all to easy to go from anything to everything and I have a bad case of volunteeritis. When asked, and quite often even when not asked, I'm all too inclined to think, Yes, I could do that, and before I know it I've committed myself to yet another thing. This is even more of a problem now I don't have a full time job, so I tend to think I have a lot of time to spare.

So it is that I'm on the (proposed) village hall committee, I run book club and philosophy group, organize and promote live music events, and have a part time job. I also volunteered to help with the local school gardening club, but never quite made it there. This on top of growing our veg, cooking from scratch, foraging, making and mending where I can, and bigger projects that currently include replacing the conservatory roof and making solar panels. Perhaps it shouldn't surprise me that once again I have that familiar feeling of not being able to keep up with my own life.

A few recent conversations have shed some light on this. My sister and her family came to stay last week and chatting to my brother in law, I found him quite sympathetic to the over-commitment problem as he has the same tendency himself (with a full time job and two small children!) He commented that one contributing factor is having the attitude that you shouldn't complain about how other people are doing something if you're not willing to step up to the mark and do the job yourself. This is certainly something I agree with, and I can see times when, I could do that better, has played a part in my volunteering. My sister, less sympathetically, said, Well, you could do it all, with better time management. The most irritating thing about this comment is that it's true. It's an annoying habit my sister has - being right.

The third comment was made a couple of days later by my neighbour, who's known me for less than three years. We were talking about being argumentative, and I said that I no longer feel the need to react whenever someone says something I disagree with. He replied that I'm noticeably less abrasive than I was when he first knew me. Really? I've mellowed noticeably in such a short time? That's interesting.

On my recent excursion into my old life, I found the whole trip much more difficult than it would have been a few years ago. There was no time when travelling to Spain on my own would have been easy, but this time I felt I was having to make a big effort to wind myself up to a doing state of mind. I don't know whether that makes sense, but what I'm talking about is essentially stress levels. I used to operate at a higher level of tension all the time. This enabled me to get more done, and to manage difficult things, but also made me sharper and more abrasive in conversation. I believe I'm healthier and happier these days, too, and I'm sure being more relaxed is part of that.

So yes, my sister's right, I could fit more into my life if I really wanted to. The cost would be to wind myself up to operate at a higher stress level all the time, as I used to. When I look at it that way, I think that cost is too high. It's not so much that I can't do everything, the truth is that I don't want to.

A visit to my old life

Seven years ago, I was living in Northamptonshire and working as a Psychology lecturer, both of which I was very happy with. Then Ian landed his dream job, which happened to be in Cambridgeshire. I had to agree that it was worth moving for, and so we moved.

We didn't take to the East, and every trip back to the Midlands gave us pangs of homesickness. We didn't regret moving - it was the right decision at the time - but we never felt that we belonged in the East. It was only after we'd moved to Wales that we could visit the village where we used to live without wishing that we lived there still.

It was the same with work. Having left academia, when I had the chance to go to an academic conference with my new job it felt like going home. I was once again surrounded by people who'd been educated the same way as me which meant, to a very large extent, we had the same ways of thinking.

Over the past few months I've found myself missing that kind of interaction. I know lots of lovely, interesting people, but I can't just assume a certain body of knowledge or a certain way of thinking. With some trepidation, I booked a place at my favourite conference, the annual meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology, which was in southern Spain this year.

The conference was last week and my goodness, it was hard work! This was largely the challenge of travelling - and just getting by - in a foreign country where I don't speak the language. I also suffered terribly from the heat, which was entirely predictable, though I had expected the lecture theatres to be air conditioned, which they weren't.

So much for the practicalities, what about the conference Itself? It was excellent. It took me while to get back into it and at one point on the first day I put up my hand to ask a question only to find that my brain had ceased working, which was a little embarrassing. I'd also forgotten quite how difficult some Philosophy talks can be, especially when the speaker has a strong foreign accent and is simply reading out a written dissertation.

By the second day I was back into the swing of it. I could keep up with the talks, make intelligent contributions, and met interesting people, some of whom I went out for dinner with and had a lovely evening. Unfortunately I felt ill on the third day, whether from drinking tap water, eating salad, or just the heat, I don't know, but I recovered by the afternoon and attended talks on belief and rationality, the self, and self consciousness. This included a talk by one of the people I'd had dinner with that seemed to me an example of the best that philosophy can offer science - a, What exactly do you mean by that?

The final day passed in similar fashion, with talks on what we mean when we say how big something is, on metaphor, and a very entertaining session on sport psychology. I thoroughly enjoyed it, in spite of the heat, but I didn't get that sense of homecoming that I'd had before. Whilst I can participate in an academic conference and enjoy it very much, I no longer feel part of that world any more.

Really, this is the best possible outcome. I had a good time but it didn't make me want to go back to my old life. I'm not sure whether I'll go to another conference. It was a huge effort and the cost wasn't insignificant, either. It took ten weeks of my little part time job to pay for this. Worth it to learn that I don't want to go back to my old life, but I'm not sure whether it would be worth going again. Maybe I'll change my mind in a year or two. As with the village I used to live in, I can go back for a visit and feel happy to come home again.

Too many projects!

If things have seemed a bit quiet here lately, it's because they've been very busy in real life. I feel that I am not one of life's multi-taskers; I function best when I have one project at a time to throw myself into. If only I could manage to keep this state of affairs, I'd be happy as anything.

Currently, I have four major projects: Garden, solar panels, village hall consultation, and Wild West Wales. The last of these could just as well go on the list of ongoing responsibilities, which include the foraging challenge, running the philosophy group, admin for book club, getting food on the table every day, working at the falls and of course, writing blog posts (including this one!) I've also decided to go to the conference I was considering, so spent a large part of yesterday booking trains, planes and hotels. I can also add, Sort out computer as it's currently taking about half an hour to start up and runs too slowly for watching videos.

I have lots to tell you about and I'll do my best to get round to it, but bear with me while life goes a little crazy. In the meantime, check out this video of Funke and the Two Tone Baby. He played here on Saturday and he was awesome!

In which my past comes back to haunt me

I recently joined, then rather shortly afterwards took over leading, a pub philosophy group. We don't meet in a pub - indeed the venue is alcohol free - but the idea is to exercise our brains discussing philosophical questions in a relaxed environment. I offered to take the lead when the founder left as I've studied philosophy and even taught a bit, though that was all rather a long time ago.

This week's topic was, Mind and brain: One kind of stuff or two? I was asked if I could provide a bit more structure than the somewhat freewheeling discussions we've had so far, which I agreed to do. This meant homework. I dug out my old teaching notes and found a file marked, Mind Brain notes. That should do. I looked at my old notes and was dismayed to find how much I'd forgotten. What did Ryle say again? Who the hell was Place?* This was stuff I used to know really well and now I couldn't drag it out of my memory at all.

At about the same time, my friend Gill mentioned a Horizon programme she thought I'd be interested in, The Creative Brain: How Insight Works.** Um, yes, I'd be very interested. That was the area I used to research.

Watching Horizon was an unexpectedly emotional experience. It wasn't just a programme about a topic I used to study, it was all about my work. I'm not trying to claim anyone pinched my ideas, but I'd been doing just those experiments. The scientists featured were my peers. But I left that world six years ago. When I tried to remember the results of a study that was particularly similar to one featured in the programme, I couldn't. The feeling was rather like visiting the town where I grew up: a mixture of familiarity and strangeness; a peculiar kind of homesickness.

I don't really want to go back to that world. Every time I talk to someone who works in a university I'm reminded of all the bad things about institutional life, things that I put up with at the time but I'm very glad to be rid of now. At the same time, it wasn't just a job to me. My work was very central to my self-image, and to a large extent still is: I think of myself as a scientist.

When we moved here I wondered whether I'd miss the intellectual stimulation. I don't, but what I do miss is talking to people who have the same education as me; people who live in the same intellectual environment; people I can make assumptions about. There are lots of interesting people here and it's challenging to discuss ideas with someone who has a completely different viewpoint, but I don't want to be challenged all the time.

I spent too much of yesterday investigating whether I could afford to go to a particular conference that I've been to a few times before. I'd really love to go, but not sure whether I can justify the £500 or so that it would cost, and also not sure whether it's really a good idea. Would it just make me miss that world even more? The thing is, I feel at home there in a way that I just don't here.

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* We don't refer to philosophers' ideas much in the discussions, but I'd used these names in my notes as shorthand for fairly lengthy arguments.

** If you watch this programme, please ignore almost all uses of the word, Creativity. The links between the insight experience and creativity are tenuous, to say the least.

Caring for things

I was brought up to believe that we shouldn't attach too much importance to things. What really matters in life is other people, and we shouldn't care too much about mere stuff. I basically still stand by this, but I've been wondering recently whether there's a danger of taking it too far.

If we attach no importance to things, we're essentially treating them as worthless, and there's a very short step between worthless and disposable. I may feel that not caring too much about things is anti-materialist, but I still use things. Treating things as worthless tends to result in losing track of them and/or throwing them away, so next time I need that thing, I have to buy another one. Not caring about things can actually lead to consumerist behaviour.

Having bought a pair of hand made shoes, I feel the need to take care of them, otherwise they'll get ruined and that would be a shocking waste of money. Notice that word care? Caring for things is very closely related to caring about things. In fact, without the latter I think the former is almost impossible. It's the same with my kettle. Although I didn't pay much for it, valuing it highly gives me the motivation to polish it (and mend it if necessary).

Today I needed wire strippers. I have a beautiful pair that I inherited from my grandparents, who had no sense of economy at all. They always bought the best, whether they could afford it or not.

I couldn't find them, so I asked Ian, and he sheepishly admitted that they were, In the garage... somewhere. I sent him to find them (I had already looked there) but when he brought them back I was less bothered by the fact he'd borrowed them than by the state of the blades. I'm trying to avoid turning this into a whinge about my husband, but I was really upset. He'd used them as pliers to remove a stubborn circlip, and they no longer had beautiful, sharp, close-fitting, V-shaped blades. A bit of work with a needle file returned them to a usable state, but they're not the high quality tool they once were.

It still feels wrong to be so attached to an object, but actually I do care and I'm not entirely sure that's a bad thing. If we value tools enough to look after them, they can last a lifetime. If not, we end up on the treadmill of cheap, disposable crap.