War (What Is It Good For?)

It is not every day you get to speak to someone living in a warzone. Not just someone who has experienced war, but someone who is actually right there in it. And not just some bored soldier on active duty in a fortified compound, but a civilian hiding in a basement from heavy bombardment. And not just any bombardment, but the horrific sustained bombardment of Eastern Ghouta on the outskirts of Damascus that the UN chief has described as “hell on earth”.

We sat in a small room in Machynlleth's town hall, thirty or forty of us, whilst the call was set up. Amongst us were perhaps ten Syrian refugees, who now live in Aberystwyth and Newtown, who had come to this public gathering to testify and explain to us what was happening in their home country. We had just been shown the short film “The White Helmets” which followed a few men of the Syrian Civil Defence, the non-partisan first-responders who rush to the site of every plane attack and pull out the wounded, dying and dead. It was distressing to watch, but particularly so for the Syrians, one of whom told us he knew some of the people in it as it was filmed in his area.

One of the Syrian women had good English, having been in the UK since 2014. It was her idea to hold this event, and she took the role of spokesperson. She told us of the loss of hope that had kindled back in 2011, that now the tiniest of hopes that they had was to stay alive. She was so angry at the misinformation put about by Russia, tarring the White Helmets as partisan ISIS supporters and justifying Assad targeting them with bombs. Someone asked her how it was to live here, knowing what was going on there. She said it was so hard trying not to be constantly telling people about it, and that this evening was a chance to relate it to those willing to hear. She ended by saying how helpless she felt, that she could do nothing. To which someone replied no, she was doing something by speaking to us here.

The voice link was established over Facebook. No video, not enough bandwidth. The Syrian woman's friend was at the other end, in the basement. He spoke (in Arabic) matter-of-factly, without discernable emotion. We couldn't hear the bombs but I could occasionally make out a child speaking in the background. As his words were translated, we heard of the difficulty of getting food, water and medical supplies. The basement had nothing. Food prices were escalating out of reach. He asked for the West to send supplies and money. They were desperate.

It left me feeling ashamed on a number of levels - of our comfort, of our ignorance and indifference to the terrible need of others, of our Government's lack of meaningful action, of the peace and security which we take for granted.

But what to do?

One thing we can do is to make them welcome, those few who make it here.

Tinkling The Ivories

Happy St David's Day! or “Dydd Dewi Sant Hapus!” as it should really be said.

Happy, especially if you like freezing blizzards and howling winds. We are hunkered down with the wood burner, having only dared to step out of the house to run across the road to the Co-op for supplies. Tonight we'll be celebrating St David with a warming meal with our landlords who conveniently live in the same house as us, and then we might brave the weather to head down the high street to catch the vibes at the Open Mic night at the Quarry Cafe.

Snow and music have been the themes of my week.

Yesterday Anna and I were on my land which was doing its best to audition for a remake of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. The soft whiteness transformed the place, and then the sun came out to make it all sparkle. We sawed and chopped the three big Christmas trees I felled last week to make the veg garden less shady. It was bitterly cold but we were quite toasty with the exertion. Pushing wheelbarrows of firewood up the steep track to the car certainly kept me from freezing.

After that I gave the weekly piano lesson to my neighbour's young daughter as I've been doing for a year and a half now. For the first time she tackled a C major scale with both hands! Playing the piano is so good for young people's manual dexterity. A recent news report lamented children's lack of ability to write with a pen since they are so used to tablets and phones. Pianos are an effective antidote.

And then back to Machynlleth in time for a bewitching Chopin event around a piano in the Museum of Modern Art. A local musician in his 20's, Tom McMahon, gave us renditions of his waltzes, mazurkas and nocturnes, interspersed by scholarly reflections on Chopin's musical influences. Now I know to play his mazurkas more in the style of jaunty Polish folk tunes! Oom-pah-PAH! Oom-pah-PAH!

We discovered in the pub afterwards that he and his friends have jam nights at the Friendship Inn in Borth once a month so we hope to head down there later in March. And we've also been invited to join a totally improvisional soundscape-style music event, where pieces are conducted and given a theme, but there is no tune, let alone sheet music. We could break new musical ground.

So the apple crumble's nearly ready. Stay safe and warm! Till next week...

Spring cleaning!

You Are What You Eat

Sprouting a few seed potatoes on the window-sill

We need to talk about our food.

First off let's remember where it all comes from. Farmers. Every edible item in the supermarket, every sweet snack in the newsagent, every guilty pleasure in the fast-food outlet, regardless of how ultra-processed it may be originates in a farm, or more likely a number of farms scattered across the globe. Farmers keep all of us alive.

It's sometimes difficult to imagine these places because we are so rarely exposed to what an industrial-scale "factory farm" looks like. They vary of course dependent on what the produce is, but most arable farms will be vast fields of a single crop tended by tractors and sprays. Then there are the meat and milk farms, producing the  flesh and secretions of animals which are increasingly being kept inside huge warehouses for their entire lives, and fish which are either farmed in underwater cages or trawled from the open seas often using massive indiscriminate nets.

A vegan chocolate truffle cake made at one of Edible Mach's recent workshops.

How are these farms managed? Why should we care? Because agriculture is creating such havoc to our living planet. Habitat destruction and pollution and chemicals causing sharp biodiversity decline. Degradation and loss of soil which has taken thousands of years to accumulate. Over-watering leading to aquifers and rivers drying up. Greenhouse gases from livestock driving climate chaos. It is our food, as much as anything, which is tearing our planet's ecosystems apart.

Secondly, what is our food doing to us? In the UK over 50% of family food purchases is “ultra-processed” (the study is based on data from 2008, but is unlikely to have improved since then). And a recent French study links ultra-processed foods to cancer. Diabetes is rocketing. The NHS is spending ludicrous amounts on dealing with the fall-out of the crap our British food system is churning out for us.


There are alternatives, and they are not necessarily expensive. They take a little knowledge and a little willpower to change our routines. As we're in the season of Lent, perhaps it's a good time to take stock of our eating habits. Here's a few ideas to try.

1. Choose organic produce where possible, or produce from local farms and growers. Join a vegbox scheme.

2. Cook from scratch rather than getting takeaways or ready meals. If you don't have much time, make a big turreen of stew and freeze portions of it.

3. Eat less (or no) meat. Once or twice a week makes it a treat. 

4. Eat more grains and pulses. Buy them in bulk to keep costs down (eg from Real Foods)

5. Teach children how to cook from fresh ingredients, at school and in our own kitchens. 

6. Eat with others if you can. Invite neighbours and friends over but not for an elaborate dinner party, just make it a simple and enjoyable meal. It might happen more often that way.

Any other suggestions?

Weddings demand a tie. But which one?

Might As Well Admit It

A snowy walk outside Mach

Back in times of lore (the 1980's) I was a committed subscriber to a monthly magazine called Your Sinclair. It covered, basically, ZX Spectrum computer games, a subject I had a particular fascination for at the time, and it did so with an irreverent editorial style which lives on in such rags as Private Eye (indeed one of the Your Sinclair staff writers went on to write for that illustrious paper). Issues came with a cassette taped to the front cover, bursting with playable demos of new titles and full games of a more trivial nature. I read it from cover to cover. I tracked the Top 10 game sales each month on my own handmade chart. I totally geeked out on it.

13 Feb: Sowing the first seeds of the year - broad beans.

Inside, games were reviewed and marked out of 10 but none ever got more than a 9 (“a YS Megagame!”). The ratings were also broken down by graphics, playability, value for money and addictiveness. It's that latter quality that was the most important. A game could be drawn badly, hard to play, and pricey, but if it had you coming back for more time after time, it was a surefire winner. You wanted to be addicted to a game, if you were going to fork out fifteen quid for one.

Sixteen pallets of compost arrives to be divvied up amongst local growers

Later during my software programming years at Symbian, I recall discussions of Symbian's various smartphone User Interfaces (UI's) and the absolute necessity for them to be “compelling”. The user must be compelled to keep using it, to be drawn back to the screen by the slickness of the way the controls slide across when you swipe.




Now of course we have various social media giants connecting us via our smartphones to each other on their networks. And they, surprise surprise, have made their products as compelling, or as addictive, as possible. Why wouldn't they? They want the advertising revenue. Any company would do the same. The only snag is, most companies' products are not on our person 24/7. At least with a game console you can put it down after a solid ten hours of play and head out blinking into the sunlight. Not so the smartphone. It is always there, somewhere, its bleep announcing either a vital new Facebook message or an utterly trivial “What's New” suggestion. You have to check it to find out which.

My Jimny on its last mission, bringing muck.

There's a media backlash right now, but the media will eventually tire. It's up to each one of us to regain a little control. Ash Wednesday is tomorrow, the start of the forty days of Lent, which some people mark by changing some aspect of their lives. I offer the suggestion of visiting your notification settings on your phone and switching your social media to OFF.

Facebook active users

We're All Going On A Winter Holiday

A long trench to electrify Pilsdon's fancy new greenhouse

This winter is the first winter since 2011 that I have not lived at the Pilsdon Community. Normally come mid-November I've packed up everything here in Wales and shifted my life south 200 miles. I have had two homes, two lives. A summer Swan and a winter Swan. Not till February would I pack up again and drive back up over the Severn bridge to resume my Welsh life.

I began doing this not only to avoid spending winters alone in a miniscule caravan, but also to keep my connection with Pilsdon. It is an antidote to everything depressing about modern life. A place where people live and work together, eating the produce they have grown, caring for the livestock, bearing with one another's quirks, helping each other through crises. People who have previously known only urban sprawl are immersed in the peace and birdsong of rural Dorset. 

It's been doing this for nearly 60 years. I've recently met someone there who was just back after a 30-year gap and asserted it was still very much the same as it was way back then.

Kale, sprouts and purple-sprouting broccoli are still producing in Pilsdon's garden

Now my centre of gravity has swung towards Wales. My better half has a permanent job here so we can't go both head down to Pilsdon for months at a time. The winter of 2016 I left her here and spent ten weeks at Pilsdon, this time round I've stayed put (and proposed). I am a full time resident of Wales.

We both wanted to return to Pilsdon though, at least for a week, and so last week we did just that. It was bendigedig (Welsh for 'wonderful'). We were put to work of course. I chainsawed through the remains of some logs. Anna joined a work gang creating a trench maybe 30 metres long from the Annexe to the new greenhouse at the end of the veg garden, laying an electric cable down it as they went. I drove the minibus on the Wednesday afternoon shopping trip. We both made meals (our home-made pizza went down very well). 

And we found time to make some wedding arrangements at the church there, the date for which is now not very far away. April 7th here we come!

Winter veg in my own polytunnel, a month or so ago before it all got eaten by something overnight.

Singing In Tongues

The toll bridge over the Mawddach estuary

Earlier this month I dipped my toe in the proverbial waters of a Welsh tradition called Plygain (pronounced Plug-aye-n). Every January around these parts, certain churches open their doors for a special evening service of unaccompanied singing.

The songs are old Christian carols, written in Welsh and performed in Welsh (Cymraeg, pronounced Cum-r-aye-g). The whole service is entirely in Cymraeg. The participants tend to be first-language Cymraeg speakers. The only reason I was there is that I attend one of the churches that hosts an annual Plygain service, and as a congregation we decided to put a small choir together and join in.

An inscription on our woodstore

By the time we'd got our act together and decided to do it, we only had about ten days left. We quickly scheduled some rehearsals. Hardly any of us speak Cymraeg to any great degree so we relied heavily on Roland the vicar (who can) for how to pronounce the lyrics of the two carols we chose. Fortunately a few of us knew something about singing and could read music so we were able to fit the four parts (soprano, alto, tenor and bass) together by the end of the first rehearsal. I was singing bass with Roland and a local farmer we'd drafted in. We were the weakest link. I realised that I had never actually sung in a choir before - and now I was doing it in Cymraeg before an entirely Cymraeg-speaking audience.

On the night Anna and I rushed to be there on time, she had to leave early from work in Aberystwyth. I was playing the organ too for a couple of congregrational hymns at the start so had to be prompt. Then the Plygain was declared open. There is no compere at a Plygain. Groups or individuals just get up as they feel appropriate, go to the front and launch in. However since we were the host congregation, we got to go first. Lucky us!

Some of my produce for the veg box scheme last year

It wasn't terrible. Neither do I feel we did ourselves justice. But we got through our song and sat down. No one applauds, or even smiles. This is a serious event. About thirteen acts followed, some of them absolutely beautiful. A half-time congregational hymn, then we all went again in the same order but with our second carols. No song can be repeated, even by a different group. If someone else sings your carol before you get to sing it, you have to sing a back-up one.

The finale was all the men in the church (including me) going to the front and singing a carol out to the women. I had no idea of the tune or what the words meant, but at least I had a lyrics sheet so I could mouth along. Which I had to do because I was in the middle on the front row.

It was a fascinating insight into a part of the local culture which is normally a closed book to the English. By this time next year my Cymraeg might actually have improved enough that I know (roughly) what I'm singing about!

A bean burger from an Edible Mach cooking workshop

R.I.P. Jimny

Jimny in 2013

 Those of you with long and sure memories might be able to recall an event five years ago which I committed to blogprint here. It was the purchase of my first car, a red Suzuki Jimny. Even then it was twelve years old but to me it seemed brand new. Everything about this 4WD worked well. It performed its principle function admirably - to tow my caravan from Devon to Wales and then down the steep and narrow track onto my land. 

Arriving onto my land

It has since been invaluable for bringing many trailer-loads of manure down that track onto my land, and taking many crates of fresh produce up that track off my land. Not to mention all the trailer-loads of felled wood going down and chopped and seasoned firewood going up. Its four-wheel drive let me leap up the slippery muddy slope with a careless laugh.

Sadly the years and the rain and mud have taken their toll on this fine workhorse. Last year I had to spend hundreds to get it through the MOT, with hours of welding required to patch up the rust which was spreading like a cancer through the chassis. This week it failed its MOT for that rust has continued to spread. You can see the road through holes under the back seat. Every wheel arch needs work. Last year's welding work would need to be removed and a whole week's worth of welding done. That's not counting the other failures - exhaust leaks, emissions breaking legal limits and an axle apparently a bit loose.

So it's time to say goodbye to my Jimny. A couple of people have said they'll take it off my hands. We still have Anna's little Hyundai to get to the land from town but we have to park at the top and walk down.

I'm in the market for another 4x4. I'll need it for this year's growing season. It can't be too pricey since market gardening is sadly not a rich man's game. Main criterion: no rust. Any tips you might have on buying such a vehicle, send my way!