Cherry trees

The cherry trees in the garden of the building opposite our flat are temperamental. A couple of years ago they bloosomed twice in one season. This year they stubbornly refused to bloom, even when most of the other cherry trees in Edinburgh had started their belated blooming, most of Spring being late this year.

I went down to Bristol for a few days, saying goodbye to the bare branched cherry trees. But what happened while I was away?

home again -
our cherry trees finally
in blossom.

Rich blossoms pink against the creamy walls of the old school building.

Organic in Bristol

I had a very enjoyable trip to Bristol. The train trip is 6 hours but passes through beautiful areas of southern Scotland, the English Lake District and Gloucestershire, an excellent route for birdwatching - I saw lapwings, oystercatchers, Canada geese, kestrels and buzzards among others. I think it is very positive that Soil Association expects us to use the train to travel between Edinburgh and Bristol, every other organisation I've worked for that has an office in Bristol has expected me to fly and I've needed to put in a good argument to be allowed on the train.

On Tuesday evening I met a friend for supper and we went to Bordeaux Quay - the UK’s first eco restaurant to achieve a gold rating under the Food For Life Catering Mark, This scheme, developed by the Soil Association, guarantees customers get a sustainable meal, with standards governing things such as food additives, animal welfare and the seasonality of the produce. For more information visit: www.foodforlife.org.uk/resources/catering. The food at Bordeaux Quay is also very tasty, we had a lovely creamy onion tart with salad and potatoes and I had an amazingly delicious lemon meringue trifle.

I stayed at The Greenhouse, which is a lovely friendly B&B that serves organic breakfasts and has a very affectionate West Highland terrier called Archie.

I also had very productive meetings with my colleagues!

Off for a Few Days

I'm going down to Bristol for a couple of days to meet people in the Soil Association headquarters, to have a meal with a friend and to stay at my favourite B&B in Bristol. I'm very glad that Soil Association have a commitment to travelling by train, for once I've not had to fight to take the train down! Have a nice few days and I'll be back soon!

Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan

This is a magnificent novel, a surreal but sometimes brutally realistic wander through the live of a convict colony on an island off Van Dieman's Land (now Tasmania). William Buelow Gould, a convict is ordered to paint a book of fish and in the process learns to love fish and to wonder very much about the relationships between humans and the environment and between the native peoples of the island and their brutal colonisers, not to mention the convicts. It's a book with much food for thought and much heart rending and disturbing description of torture and other such. These two extracts below I thought were worth quoting here:

I would prefer to ..... watch the thrush smashing the snails against a rock in the midst of a litter of other similarly shattered shells until it can free the meal inside. Much better than an illustrated inventory of thrush types, defined by claw similarities, by beak differences. Much better to hear the plaintive toot-toot of the nightingale when it is alarmed and see its young chicks freeze stock still in response than analyse a collection of stuffed birds in a glass case by radius of head and distance of extended wing tip.

*******************************************

when I finished the painting and looked at that poor leatherjacket which now lay dead on the table I began to wonder whether, as each fish died, the world was reduced in the amount of love that you might know for such a creature. Whether there was that much less wonder and beauty in consequence, what, in the end, would be left?

It began to worry me, you see, this destruction of fish, this attrition of love that we were blindly bringing about, & I imagined a world of the future as a barren samenessin which everyone had gorged so much fish that no more remained, & where Science knew absolutely every species & phylum & genus, but no-one knew love because it had disappeared with the fish.

blackbird haiku

blackbirdsong -
opening the window
to listen

More Pot Pourri bags

I've been making a lot of pot pourri bags for April is Stash Busting Month. I've got a lot of sheer fabric in my stash and its ideal for making pot pourri bags using pot pourri bought from second hand shops. Here are another two bags. I'll be taking a few of these to the Forest Free Fair tomorrow, which takes place at the Forest Cafe in Forest Road, Edinburgh. I'll also be reading some poetry on the themes of recycling, alchemy and sky burial and doing a brief talk on altered and repurposed books. So if you're in Edinburgh, why not pop along, there will also be plenty of other free things to pick up and I believe free food too!

The Future of Food

As part of my job for the Soil Association yesterday I attended the Scottish Food and Drink Federation's Conference on the Future of Food. It was a very interesting conference, covering a wide ranging discussion of the possible futures for our food, with speakers from industry, academia, the Soil Association (not me though, thankfully!) the National Farmers' Union and the Scottish Government.

I was struck by how committed everyone was to environmental issues, though admittedly industry delegates tended to have blind spots about the specific environmental impacts of their own technologies. Techniques such as companion cropping (planting species with natural insecticidal properties next to crops) and minimum tillage were mentioned by more than one speaker. All speakers stressed the importance of reducing food waste (in some supply chains up to 50% of food can be wasted through a combination of spoiling, processing loss and rotting in the fridge) and the importance to local sourcing of as much of our food as possible. So it looks as though environmental concerns are becoming more mainstream in food as they are in politics.

There were a lot of issues to think about and the details will be saved for work but it was a very stimulating day. It's also nice to be in a position to be working for an organisation where I can combine my environmental commitment with my (long ago!) academic science background without having to be a scientist, because I was a really bad scientist as a student.