2013 Review of the Year

One of those round robins from an old friend plopped onto my doormat this morning. 

‘We’ don’t really do these in Britain : and for possibly obvious reasons. The midwinter feast, which eventually morphed into the various festivals of light we call Christmas / Diwali / Hannukah etc was created

a) because it’s the darkest time of the year, and

b) it’s a good time to kill and eat animals you don’t want to have to feed all through winter, and

c) the vegetarian option : it’s near the end of the harvest, when stored crops are abundant.

Diwali

Hannukah

Christmas

Thorrablot

It’s a time when summer seems impossible : proximity and excess have made you hate your family beyond reason: it’s getting dark at 3.30 ( I’m supporting Scottish Independence if only for this reason), and winter has only just started. Getting drunk, pigging out, having fires, and pleading with whatever Gods will listen to just make the sun come back, all seem like a good thing to do.

So, would a letter from someone you haven’t heard from all year, enumerating their various achievements and a description of their summer holiday cheer you up? No, I didn’t think so.

Maybe I, as a self-hating Brit,  don’t like these because they read as boasting, and that’s just not cricket ( see next paragraph for politely understated explanation). Yes, objectively, it’s all good news about little Timmy starring in the school play, getting £200 from his dad for achieving a karate black belt, taking up a third instrument, swimming 20 lengths without armbands, etc. but its the one-sidedness of the format that gets to me : an A4 printout, in the post, in an age when digital broadcast of your most banal thoughts is a basic social requirement, doesn’t exactly invite a dialogue.

Also, while I am broadly in favour of children ( if only for the continuation of the species), I consider it bad form to go on about my own. Because I know I have produced the brightest, most beautiful, funniest, most sociable, talented, sensitive and wonderful child ever to have walked the earth, and I feel a little bit sorry for every other parent, simply because their child, while being perfectly ok ( if you like that sort of thing) isn’t as good as mine, I can be very graceful in acknowledging their children’s achievements, and don’t need to go on about it.

But maybe I am being too harsh : maybe persuading others that we are fine is never more important than when life is tough. Like a time for family togetherness and joined social celebration. I remember a card I got a year or two ago : from an Italian lady,  addressed to the previous owner of the flat I bought ten years ago, and with no return address : in which it became apparent, in very few sentences, that she had just discovered that her husband had a secret child who was now three, and promising a proper letter in the new year. It never came, but I do sometimes think of that poor woman, who I never met, but who was so distraught, as to send out this cry into the void.

In my own year  : I have officially achieved Mad Cat Lady status : after the kitten explosion of the summer ( at one point there were 15 of the blighters!) Mini-Mitzi has finally had her operation, and is looking a lot more playful and chirpy as a result. I am now down to six cats, which yes I am aware is 100% over the sane limit of three per household.

http://www.babble.com/pets/top-11-best-pics-of-the-crazy-cat-lady-meme-photos/#next-slideshow

No really, that’s all that happened. I’m writing this in my dressing gown.

The Proletarians aren’t Revolting!

Santa has seen fit this year to give me a copy of Capital by Karl Marx, along with a lovely reprint of Darwins ‘The Formation of Vegetable Mould through  the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits’. He does know what I like, that Santa! Spot the difference!

  

2013 has been a funny old year for me : since completing a Permaculture Design Course in April, I have been going on about Capitalism more than at any time since the sixth form at school. I know it’s partly the company I keep, but also, I think I smell a whiff of zeitgeist proletarian discontent on the way in 2014! 2013 was the year young women started to call themselves Feminists again, and what with the return of the 1980’s in the form of Doc Martens, big glasses and rolled up jeans, I think  we are due this year to collectively cast a critical eye on our political landscape since 1979.

One of 2013’s most memorable moments for me, was an episode of ‘Have I Got News for You’ : the panellists were satirising the number of politicians from private schools, then, possibly struck by the irony, started asking each other if they went to private schools : on that occasion, there was one person on the programme who had gone through an ordinary education, not paid for by their parents. A short silence followed, during which I imagine they were contemplating their careers, their incomes, and their access to the satisfactions of fame, had they not had the advantage of private schooling.

In the UK, the dominance of people from private schools goes further than almost everyone in Parliament and almost everyone in the Media, to include almost everyone in Business as well. I think this explains much of the absence of women in powerful jobs too : Eton, the school which educated apparently nine tenths of our political and social elites, does not take girls.

Now, I am not knocking the achievements of some of these people : privilege might get you the interview, but once you’ve got the job you have to stay there by your own wits, of course. And private school doesn’t guarantee you a successful career : there are plenty I’m sure, choosing to drive around in the family Bentley smoking heroin rather than having an influential career in Politics, Media or Business.

The thing is, though, that, given a useful quantity of limbs and brain cells : the one thing that makes a difference to any child’s life is this and only this : Opportunity. For a brief time in the UK, intelligent working class children could be lifted out of their class by access to Grammar Schools. My mother was one of these, and I remember her telling us of the yearly struggle to afford the cashmere uniform that had to be bought from some posh shop in Piccadilly, from the wages of a single mother working as a dinner lady. Not that her education ushered her into a fabulous career : but it did find her middle class friends, and gave my parents the opportunity to ‘fake it till you make it’ for us. They told us we were posh, and, in the way of children, we believed them : and no amount of evidence to the contrary would make any difference : the fact that we had tea instead of supper, and it was leek and potato soup rather than Vichyssoise, the ramshackle farm that gave way to a (for shame!) council house, the lack of a university education, or, ahem, any money, none of these gave us an inkling, bizarrely, that we were in fact working class.

Last year, Margaret Thatcher died, after a long illness which could apparently only be eased by residence at the Ritz Hotel. She was another of the few working class girls, like my mother, who was lifted from the masses by a Grammar School Education, but so much about her legacy is explained by  her origins and her struggle. Now, I know when she got power, she used it for evil rather than good, but I think she should be recognised for her achievement in getting power at all, firstly, as a girl, and also, as a working class person. I’m fairly sure the Devil went to Eton, but she didn’t have his advantages : she emerged from a small town dominated by heavy industry, through a male dominated career, and got to the top of a party dominated by class and gender privilege. Once there she set about dismantling the structures by which men passed on power to other men : from the trades unions to the old boy network in the City. When she died, people held parties, but the truth is she didn’t get us into this mess alone : for decades those with political privilege, whether born or acquired, have been lining the pockets of the rich, while chewing holes in the safety net for the poor, and pulling the ladders to university education and home ownership ever higher. Our manufacturing skills have not been nurtured,  any job that can be exported to a low wage economy has already gone, and Academy bootcamps are teaching inner city children not how to think, but how to obey.

We had riots in London in 2011, where outrage at police treatment of the young and/or marginalised spilled over into fightin’ and lootin’ : if you must tell people their worth is measured by their acquisition of trainers and tellies, but deny them the means to get any, don’t be surprised if it causes trouble in the end!

Zero Hours

Is it just me, in the runup to Christmas, that can’t stop thinking about Capitalism? As its the season of wish fulfilment, I’ve put Capital by Karl Marx on there, along with a juicer, a DVD of It’s a Wonderful Life, and  a Norwegian Style Jumper from Primark.

Without having read Marx yet, what I can say about capitalism is this : profit is made from using what money or resources you already have to make more, and the more people you have working for you the more you can make, and the bigger the difference between what you pay your workers and how much you make from their work, the bigger your profits.

The only limit on this being how many hours you can get from your workers, and of course, the limits on how you can treat them, imposed eventually, and long overdue, by governments. They listened for far too long and with far too much sympathy to the businessmen who proclaimed their value to the economy, and claimed they couldn’t survive without slave labour, then child labour, then banning unions, then exporting production to the ‘Developing World’, now zero hours contracts.

And they have some powerful guys on their side :

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/quiz/2013/dec/03/boris-johnson-iq-test-questions

The idea of getting people to work for free occurred early and was applied with enthusiasm globally : slavery was the basis of capitalism because it obliged people to work, firstly by genocide and landgrabbing within Africa, then by  the imprisonment, forced labour, dehumanisation and more genocide on the descendents of the survivors of this process : these are the foundations on which the prosperity of the ‘Free’ or ‘ Developed’ World is built.

Nowadays, apparently,  we do things differently : mass enslavement and brutalisation is not an acceptable business strategy, per se, at least in the UK : but because the origins of global corporations are in the Perpetration of Evil, maybe its not such a great surprise, that a couple of hundred years later they are still very much in evidence.

I have been reading recently about the wholesale destruction of the rainforest in central Africa, to make way for oil-producing palm oil plantations. You may think you never eat this stuff : but apparently enough of us do, that without it Mr Kipling would either be out of business, or simply using a more traditional, but more expensive, local ingredient, and making a few pennies less profit on every nutrient free item in the production line.

 

The picture of the rainforest in Brazil above came from this explanation of the links between economic growth and deforestation :  http://rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/amazon_destruction.html

If I had a choice of what life to lead, I am not sure I would choose to be a hunter-gatherer, with my life dependent on the weather, the outcome of chance meetings with large predators, and my ability to survive childbirth : the value inherent in individual consciousness is of huge importance to me. I am glad for every day I don’t have to spend searching for enough calories to keep going : whether working for a global corporation or living off the land.

It often seems that the only way out of capitalism is through capitalism : from eco-villagers to co-housers, from organic garden volunteers to ethical food businesses : all have benefited from capitalism’s surplus to fund their escape. From doctors to designers, we are all paid from the surplus produced by the exploitation of slaves, but does it have to be so?

Are you Granola enough?

Apparently, I am : according to Urban Dictionary : it means an urban hippy, but not like those terrible driftwood casualties of the 1960’s, but a nice mainstreamy one : shopping at farmer’s markets, eating healthfood , organic, outdoorsy, but not yet ready (or able) to turn their back on the whole nightmarish capitalist experiment.

I have decided today, while making some for myself, that everyone I know is getting granola for Christmas : and this is why :

1. I won’t have to go Christmas shopping : the soulless obligation of tramping round shops in despair of finding something nice, or failing that, appropriate. Ok, the health food shop : my favourite one  is called Mother Earth. And maybe the haberdashers!

2. As you get older, you supposedly earn more money, but feel less inclined to accumulate stuff. ( not in all cases, I grant you). The real gift is that the giftee doesn’t have to find a space in their life or house to put what they’ve just unwrapped : very easily enjoyed and recycled, is granola!

3. It’s really, really good for you. Maybe not the stuff you buy, which can have quite a lot of salt, and even corn syrup (ew!) in the ingredients, but the stuff you make : all the things western diets don’t have enough of are in here : fibre, both soluble and not, seed oils ( still in the seeds), fruits full of micronutrients, and cholesterol-lowering oats. All traditional seasonal ingredients from harvest stores btw.

4.Christmas, while being an appropriation of pagan midwinter feasts, is still a feast y’know! Apparently, we’ve been looking at Stonehenge the wrong way round all these years : instead of being built for the Great Hippy Tokefest of Summer Solstice, it was actually designed for a Hogroast and a Hoedown on the darkest day. In our modern times, a nice bag of goodness should hopefully go down better than  a freshly killed pig on Christmas morning, especially with all that nutrient-depleting alcohol we’re all forced to drink!

So far I have made it with almonds and cinnamon, then I ran out of almonds and today I have made a version with chocolate and hemp seeds.

The Recipe :

I haven’t gone into quantities, because what I actually did to make this was chuck in what looked like enough : and having just tasted it cooling on the hob : I’d say this worked fine.

Some jumbo oats

some honey

some coconut oil

some other nuts, seeds and fruit as available

Melt the honey and oil together, much like with flapjacks

Mix in dry ingredients

Spread on a baking tray and bake in a medium oven

For about half an hour,

Turning every so often if you feel like it.

Other things you could add :

dried fruit such as : goji berries, dates, figs, apricots, cranberries

Seeds such as sunflower, pumpkin, sesame,

Nuts such as walnuts, hazelnuts, coconut flakes, brazil nuts, pecans etc

Flavours such as tahini, nutmeg, orange, vanilla, molasses

The only warning I will give is that eating it all yourself is not in keeping with the spirit of the season! Enjoy!