After an... odd year, we were lucky enough to experience a relaxed and rather wonderful Christmas day: dog walks with beautiful winter tree silhouettes, wonderful presents, open fires, planting new weeping willow tree, nut roast, local fizzy wine, and most of all being together as a family and able to spend time with friend, Andrew.
A very happy Christmas to my blog-readers, and all best wishes for a less... odd 2021.
Well, hopefully there is hope, a bit anyway but at moments like this - when I went in to a hypermarket earlier mainly to use their loo - one does despair. A glass of freezing coke from a frosted bottle on a boiling day is a treat I indulge in maybe three times a year, knowing that my teeth and in fact the rest of me will thank me for not washing down the thirty-nine grams of sugar contained in the mysterious brown liquid more frequently than that.
But that's just part of it. No one needs to drink coke, or any other soda. Look at the sheer enormity of the plastic used to fill just one supermarket's allotted coke aisle. A massive aisle of it! Just this one product. Plastic bottles, plastic packaging, sugar, colouring, caffeine, landfill. Ignore the science. Ignore the warnings. Just keep raking in the money.
Rant over. I'm going to sit down with a book and a lovely glass of tap water.
As stated by Wiki, an animal that has the ability to survive on plant and animal matter. And there are of course many sub-categories such as Frugivores - maned wolf and orangutans to name two; Frugivores favour fruit but can eat meat. Being omnivorous (from Latin - all, and vorare - to eat or devour) gives the omnivore more food security in stressful times and or makes living possible in less consistant environments. The page was massively longer and in depth than these couple of sentences but in the light of a Guardian article yesterday on the growth of lab-produced meat I just wanted to re-check the definition of what us humans are categorised as.
Lab-grown meat. Hmm. Somehow, I find this idea and practice deeply worrying and repulsive. In one way it could be a way of ceasing to breed and kill animals to slake our meat-hunger, but the fact that the process requires the use of 'bovine serum' - blood taken from calf foetuses - doesn't really remove the finished products from the usual meat-producing system. Also, according to the article's writer the 'meat' she was served up tasted like bland chicken nugget flesh, so that cuts out all restaurant dishes other than KFC etc. It's all getting a little to close to Soylent Green for my liking. What about just eating lentils, rice and heaps of vegetables? or, if in our case, mostly that with an occasional roast chicken or mackerel dish for a bit of extra protein.
Certainly where we live in France people would be pushing the vegetables around their plate hunting for the meat, and I have a friend who's husband insists on meat at EVERY meal, even breakfast. At Ezra's old school I picked up a pamphlet that stated being a vegetarian was dangerous for children. Vegetarianism is regarded as a sort of affliction here, the couple of specialist restaurants I've been in serving up dull, tepid, flavourless concoctions as if it serves you right for being a weedy vegetable-eater.
Something has to change, that's for sure, in regard to our health and the future of this maligned planet but adding more complex, planet-damaging and fuel-costly industrial processes to food production seems a very wrong direction.
***
Following, a possibly appropriate extract from my novel, Londonia, set in 2072, in which our heroine, Hoxton, is being taken to visit the mysterious ex-tube train tunnels beneath The Cincture.
‘Iona?’
‘Yes?’
‘What is in the tunnels?’
‘Something you won’t want to see. In fact I want to come with you, and I think we should attire you in something other than the allinone."
Half a Cincture hour later, I’m dressed in a long peacock- blue dress with matching handbag, other hand clutching a small white parasol.
‘Why do I need this?’ I ask, fiddling with the up-and-down mechanism as we wait for another shaw.
She collapses her own miniature umbrella as our carriage arrives. ‘You don’t. It’s just what women are carrying about here this summer.’
We climb in and sit silently. She seems nervous.
‘Have you done this before?’ I half-whisper a few streets on. She looks back at me, eyes huge under her silk hat.
‘Yes. And I said I’d never do it again.’
‘Tell me what it is.’
‘Where do you think most of the meat consumed in the Cincture comes from?’
‘I don’t know—farms outside the parimeter somewhere? Cincture owned lands?’
‘The highest class stuff yes, but for the rest of the population—they’ve developed new ways. Box-beasts is one lightly used term.’
The shaw turns into a wider road and then stops outside a glass building, the pavement outside busy with shaws and cars. Our driver helps us out and we join a group of dames evidently waiting to enter the building. From the chatter, I have the impression this is a popular venue to visit in the Cincture with tastings afterwards and a gift shop. From a gateway a trickle of uniformed bods walk both ways—some having finished a shift, some just starting.
A mec appears from one of the glass doorways.
‘We are ready for the next tour if you would like to follow me. Payment will be taken either by idi-carte or Squares.’
Iona takes my arm.
‘I’ll put you on my idi-carte. Don’t say anything as we go down there. Just concentrate on the meeting afterwards.’
The spritely guide walks ahead and we descend into a warm brown nightmare of a place. The noise makes me want to scream—a low hum of frustrated animals, and a constant whirr of machinery. Down flights of stairs kept constantly clean by minions we pass on and on, the noise becoming ever louder. The guide keeps up a merry chatter of information as if he were describing the manufacture of paint, or wine; dames ask questions and I keep my eyes trained on the embroidered dresses of the dames in front of me.
Finally, we arrive at the destination. I grind my nails into my palms as I catch glimpses of the horror before me. Boxed beasts extend as far as I can see into the yawning tunnels, their heads swivelling, eyes bulging as they live out this captive hell. Workers sweep, sluice, shovel. Great machinery sucks the foul air into tubes to be blasted out into the sky above us.
Iona squeezes my arm and whispers. ‘Keep looking. Don’t think about this now.’
Even the dames are quiet within this theatre of slow-motion death. The guide keeps talking.
‘These bovine forms are created to fill each box—no need of legs and easy for the production line . . . and over here—our latest development in milk production. Sanitised, safe and easy for the workers too. The udder of each animal descends here,’ he gestures to the bottom of one of the metal boxes, ‘and we have managed to create a new model with eight teats—faster, more efficient.’
Londonia is published by Tartarus Press. Link to the right on the blog.
I started trying to meditate during the first throws of our house moving project when the lists, packing and endless arranging of everything became overwhelming. At first I could never switch off sufficiently from the to do lists, the phone calls, solicitor stuff, etc, but after about five attempts with the help of a guided meditation channel on Youtube the quiet mind thing gradually seeped in to my overloaded person. If anyone reading this has never tried meditation I would recommend it, especially in our current bewildering time of this century - all centuries have had their own varieties of bewilderment but I imagine most humans would find 2020 to have been somewhat challenging...
A successful meditation is almost as good as a calming massage, and free! especially if you can get to the particular ultra relaxing state of body heaviness - being grounded I suppose. I can't cope with the guided mediations that feature 'calming music' just the spoken word seems to work for me, or possibly a bit of gentle sea on pebble beach sound, or something similar. I can just about get myself into a mediative state now if I recall one of the guided meditations I have used many times, and am becoming more aware of the general 'me being in the moment' and worrying less about what must be done later, tomorrow, next week, etc as I go about my day.
Here's a small youtube of Martin Scorsese talking about his own meditation practice and thanking David Lynch for his work in creating - The David Lynch foundation for transcendental meditation. Clint Eastwood meditates too . . . has done for the last 40 years . . .
That time again. I've reached the end of my current novel, have found what I hope is a good last sentence and am about to embark on the big trawl of the whole book; trawl of errors, time line confusions, continuity mess-ups, characters who appear after they've been suppressed, and all the other ravelling up after the unravelling. Interesting . . . I didn't know the word ravelling existed, but I suppose it must in the sense that one can unravel something. Just as combobulated must exist in contrast to discombobulated. Spell check doesn't like this but it is there, in the dictionary. Ha-Word, got ya.
Towards the next draft
Edit time is good, in that I have the framework of the book to work within, no scary wandering off into nothingness, or less at least. However this story is well out of control, something I have been aware of all the way through writing it but I've stuck to the 'no going back, let's get draft one finished completely and then review everything' method that I seem to employ.
Here goes . . .
And here's the opening paragraph, as it stands currently . . .
“I can’t go forward, my backside’s collapsed.”
The words were muffled from inside the horse’s head.
The director scrambled onto the stage. “Crap! Two days ‘till curtain up. Now what!”
Marion Peel watched the rotund man wrestling with the fastening of the pantomime horse’s rear end. She sighed as she considered the decades of attempted theatre breaks, and her failure. She picked up her handbag and searched for her phone. Her call found the answer machine. She left a message.
After being in our new house for a few months we have experienced a few cold days and can imagine what it might be like on a dank february day so for that reason recently went to a wood-burner shop in the local town and sort of fell in love with a small, cute red Canadian stove that was EEK expensive. On returning to the house and the room it would be situated in we justified the expense and went ahead to ask the shop owner to pay us a visit, survey the chimney situation and give us a quote. He did and the quote arrived a few days later - the sort of quote that requires the opening of a bottle and sitting down for some time in disbelief. Admittedly, the chimney is quite tall, and the tubage required no doubt very expensive as it was red to go with the stove, even though I'd said bog standard black would be fine...
We tried the wheely oil radiator for a few evenings but it's a big room and it barely made much impression so I looked at cheaper stoves and then somehow - as you do on the Net - ended up peering at electric 'wood' stoves. No lugging wood upstairs; click of a switch and heat would appear . . . attractive as we already have a big stove downstairs. Ideas change when one inhabits a new house for a while; things you had assumed about room usage don't necessarily stick. Case in point for this oversized bedroom. We had assumed it might become a species of second sitting room but all life revolves in and around the kitchen with afore-mentioned large stove. So, apart from sleeping and stuff and watching TV with hot water bottles (heaven) was it really necessary to invest a large amount of our savings on the real thing?
After looking at the electric stoves with a wry smile and raised eyebrow Mark agreed it might be the best option. I ordered it and the van magically appeared two days later. 'Will we be able to get it up the stairs' he had said as we went to sign for the box. I reminded him it had cost around 100 euro so was unlikely to be made of cast iron. The box was very much smaller than we had imagined. The 'stove' too - about the size of an average hotel mini bar. And it was made of plastic. Plastic! I'm sure the ad said métal noir - black metal. I just checked. It does . . . not sure how they got around that one. After laughing a lot and agreeing it was the naff-est thing we had ever bought we took it upstairs, screwed the legs on it and plugged it in.
The fire has a heat and flame option or a just flame option. The heat setting is actually pretty efficient and quickly 'takes the edge off' the glacial air temperature compared to the oil heater which sits greyly emitting a slight warmth after about half an hour. But the weird thing is how comforting the just flame option is. The mind, (or at least mine) appears to be taken in by this little flickering pretend grate of 'logs'. Even though I know our purchase is future landfill (and I am ashamed to have added to this nightmare - it almost never happens!) I'm happy to have bought it, happy to have saved an enormous amount of money, and even feel quite fond of it and its little whirring sounds.
