Wednesday 31 March 2021

2021 Stack

Not having a lot to say these days, I thought I'd look at my photos for 'inspiration'. The first photo I took this year was of the books I got for Christmas. Hopefully none are from Amazon, but that's not in my control. I give Bill links to alternative sources and I know he feels much the same as I do about Amazon (or says he does) but I'm not sure where his kids stand. Mind, the presents they sent were all in variations of brown wrapping paper that can be re-cycled, so I'm hopeful.




The second photo is of a present from Helen, a cute idea but not likely to be used. It got a second photo because it has no name on the spine.

The Fashion of Film, Amber Butchart.  I'm a major fan of Amber Butchart and have been for several years now, ever since I stumbled upon the series A Stitch in Time. This book  like some of her others (I hope one day to have them all!) looks at categories of clothing that came out of certain types of films, such as Crime: Dressed to Kill; The Musical: Spectacular Fashion; Historical Epic: Dressed to Excess; Horror: Supernatural Chic; Romantic Drama: Seductive Style; Sci-Fi and Fantasy: Bionic Bodies; Art House and Independent Style with Substance. Unfortunately, I didn't come away with many ideas for clothes I might wish to wear, but there were lovely photos all the same.

The Weekend Crafter - Knitting, Catherine Ham. This is a book I found years ago at a thrift shop and it had several simple knitting patterns I meant to try. Unfortunately I must have loaned it to someone and it never came back. I would run into references to it and finally asked Bill to get me a replacement for Christmas. 

Cooking with Scraps, Lindsay-Jean Hard.  Unlike Hugh Fernley-Whittenstall's Love Your Leftovers, this isn't about mountains of meat but rather scraps of vegetables. Lately the cauliflowers Bill has brought home have been rather puny, more leaves than flowerettes.  However, I now cut off all the enclosing leaves and put them aside, which makes getting at the actual head easier (slides of roasted cauliflower are now a very popular main dish in our hosue). Then I slice off the green curly bits and steam them like I would spring cabbage or spinach. Finally, the white stalks that are left can be cut up into bits like sliced carrots or chopped (with the help of a Pampered Chef tool) finely to make cauliflower rice - a name Bill objected strenuously to until he realised how useful this was.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein and The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. Something I can't recall dragged me back into my fascination with the interwar period, perhaps re-reading a Phryne book? I was dismayed to find that neither this biographical work or the cook book were available through my library, so I put them on my wish list. Sarah, Bill's youngest, was asking him what I wanted. I told him to tell her to surprise me with either this book or the cook book and she did surprise me - she gave me both. I've not read either front to back as yet, only dabbled here and there. I've been over run with library books for a while now, but I hope to make them a priority soon. They are very much of their time, but that is what makes them so fascinating. Apparently, Ms. Toklas was so awed by Ms. Stein's writing reputation that she didn't attempt to document her cookery until after the death of Ms. Stein. Can't say I've read any other writing by this august person. 

Alabama Studio Sewing Patterns, Natalie Chanin. I'm not sure this was a great idea. I was keen because I thought it came with a bunch of patterns. It does and it doesn't. The patterns don't work for every one's computer. Bill was thankfully able to make them work after a fashion. However, one either has to understand how to make them into tiles - which means you end up with 40 pages to put together with tape - or to pay for a specialist printer to give you a large pattern. I ended up doing a couple of them with a printer for about £10. So it's not really a great deal. Also, a lot of the patterns have to do with applique by hand, which is sort of their hallmark. Not my cup of tea sadly. I think I was blinded by the coolness of the reputation. I appreciate that if you live near Florence, Alabama, the vast array of 100% cotton jersey fabrics is seductive, but I can't see me paying $30 a yard plus postage and duty. However, I do hope that the patterns will help me to upcycle some of the thrift store sweaters I've acquired over the years.

Threads of Life, Clare Hunter. This was an excellent book that I've read about it elsewhere.






Friday 26 March 2021

How Bad are Bananas?

So, on Tuesday I had nothing to say but I've finished a book since then: How Bad Are Bananas? by Mike Berners-Lee. I was thinking he had invented the internet, but I had him confused with his brother, Tim. There are a few brain cells in that family for sure.

I can recommend the book for readability and for straight-forward explanations, but there isn't a great deal of good news in it. Frankly we'll all need to give up quite a bit of our comfortable lifestyles in order to save the human race and I don't see it happening, at least not until the planet gets fairly uncomfortable for a lot of us not at high risk. Which means it will be lethal for quite a few poorer people initially. 



He does give a good list of what we can do and one of the easier things is eating in season. He gives a list of fruits and veg grown in Britain by month. If we don't select from this group he recommends going for tinned or frozen to avoid air-freighted luxury items. Interestingly, bananas aren't much of a problem as they are grown with natural sunlight and the keep well enough to be shipped by boat rather than plane. So that's a relief. 




He also gives a website produced by the Marine Conservation Society to help people select the most sustainable fish:  Good Fish Guide


However, food only makes up a quarter of the average Brit's foodprint of 12.7 tonnes and we all need to aim for a 5 tonne footprint. Berners-Lee says a meat orientated diet can easily make up the whole of a 5 tonne foodprint. We have a lot of work to do!







Wednesday 17 March 2021

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

No book to write about today. I'm in the midst of two: one of my favourites of the Sue Grafton alphabet detective stories (a re-read of course): S is for Silence. The other, Mrs Lincoln by Janis Cooke Newman. It is gripping, but of course it is fiction. However, Mary Todd Lincoln's Wikipedia entry suggests the novel is close to her life story and from that entry I gather she may have suffered from bipolar illness.



I went for a walk yesterday, something I've not done much of in weeks due to icy weather and then just lack of habit. I remembered to take my camera and take photos of the daffodils I passed - I've been watching them for a while now. I never cease to be uplifted by the long swathes of daffs the council have planted around the area. (Did you know that by definition a 'swath or swathe' is the width of a scythe stroke? - I didn't until just now).



I learned last week that a cousin had died from complications of Covid. He wasn't a close family member, but rather a genealogical discovery from some years back. I met him when we were invited to a wonderful cabin on Torch Lake, Michigan. Bryan was a few months younger than I. I particularly feel for his father, John, who is nearly 96. No one wants to outlive a child. 


Bill is out for a walk. I will venture into the pharmacy later today to pick up a prescription. We had tofu for dinner last night for the first time ever. It was a recipe from my Aunt Rita's Weight Watchers cookbook. 



It used a combination of hoisin sauce, chicken stock powder and garlic to flavour the tofu and broccoli. It was OK but nothing to be excited about. Given that the tofu cost about the same as stewing steak - bought for beef bourguignon later this week - I think I'd rather just eat beans than try to fake myself out with tofu. Should we ever completely give up meat, I might revisit that opinion.



This past week we've been arguing with a bird who wants to build its nest on the chimney pot of our dining room fire. It was winning, with us vacuuming the carpet in front of the fireplace twice a day and picking up the sticks that fell through. We don't begrudge it the space, it simply isn't safe and we didn't want to be picking up a dead bird or having cooked eggs on the hearth. So, we are now the proud owners of a 'seagull cage'. Only it turned out to be a black bird - probably a crow - who broke a twig off the tree just as the cage man was standing at the front door telling us of his arrival. The cage covers the neighbour's pots as well but rather than ask for half we just got permission to do the work. 



Earlier this month we had the tree 'trimmed'. Butchered would be more apt but, hey, it takes longer to grow back to a pesky height that way. 




I finished a longstanding project in time for WI Craft Group last night. It is a birthday present for Simon's girlfriend - who is now his wife of almost two years. I had initially tried to line it using some upcycled plastic but it was too stiff, so I had to take it apart and re-do the straps and lining. 


So I need to tidy the East Wing as it looks like the usual wreckage following a project. Yesterday I filed my FBAR form. This is the one where I tell the US government about the most money held in each of my foreign (British) accounts during the Calendar Year 2020. Nosy of them, isn't it? I'm almost used to the intrusion, but not just quite.


I've also nearly got my US taxes done, or rather the accountant in California has. Every single year I have to tell them to correct the same mistake; I shudder to think what other errors they make that I've no hope of catching. 

I've decided to bite the bullet and pay an accountant to do my UK taxes this year and - gasp - to do them early on rather than in January (when the payment is due). They no longer seem to me as simple as they once were, not least because I had endless trouble signing into the online account. I feel too old for this sort of hassle.

I planted two "chicken boxes" (black plastic trays that 20-some chicken breasts come in) with various lettuces. I hope to plant more with basil, coriander and parsley.  Bill found a text on his phone that our GP had tried to reach him with, but since he's already got his first Covid-19 vaccine from the national system, he's stuck with it. We both struggled to book my vaccination appointments on the national system but finally did - only one is 50 miles away in Darlington (in late Apr) and the other 12 miles away in Washington (in late Jun). So when he found this text with a GP's booking website, I had a go and got two appointments two miles away - the first is on Friday! When all goes well with that I'll ring up and cancel the other ones. The wonderful NHS is free, but rarely convenient or straightforward. 

I'm feeling rather sanguine as I have two purchased birthday presents in hand for Bill's upcoming birthday (73). One is a book that I think we would both enjoy (and he heartily approves of such purchases). The other is the biggest box of chocolates I could buy him without feeling I was hastening his demise.

Those are all my thoughts on this day. Happy St. Patrick's Day! 



Wednesday 10 March 2021

 I seem to be reading more serious books these days. I recently finished Melinda Gates' book: The Moment of Life - How Empowering Women Changes the World. I found it almost astonishing that it happened to echo the message of David Attenborough's book that I wrote about last week.




There are chapters dealing with topics such as maternal and child health, education, child marriage, women in agriculture, unpaid work, women in the workplace and women excluded from society. Each of these chapters tells stories of women the author has encountered in her work for the Gates' Foundation. She talks about aiming to lift people out of poverty at the start and then discovering that empowering women was the key to that. They resisted this initially, calling it 'mission creep' but eventually the penny dropped. 

The stories don't just come from Africa or India, but from impoverished areas in the US, which I find appalling. Ignorance breeds ignorance wherever it happens. 

One of the stories that stayed with me was about Patricia, a woman farmer in Malawi. While the rest of her family and village celebrated Christmas Day, she was meticulously planting her small field, because that was when the rains were predicted to come. Farmers need five things to succeed: good land, good seeds, time, knowledge and farming supplies. The barriers between these things and Patricia existed simply because she was a woman.

1. Up until recently women in Malawi could not inherit land. A law has been passed recently but the culture is slow to change. Paying rent for her plot was expensive and prohibited her being able to increase the size of her plot. It also stopped her investing in improving the land. 

2. Her husband made the decisions about where the family's money was spent and she had no say so couldn't acquire farming tools that would make her work more productive or for other tools like cooking pots that would shorten her other work to make more time for farming.

3. Her husband also had the say over how she spent her time: collecting wood and water, cooking meals and washing up after, caring for the children. Any work to grow food for the family had to come after those tasks. Even had she the means to hire farm labour, the workers wouldn't like taking orders from a woman.

4. Even the quality and choice of seeds was influenced against her as a woman. Development organisations working to create seeds resistant to pests or to grow larger plants would speak with community leaders to get their input. Those leaders were always men who were most interested in crops they could sell, where Patricia wanted to grow nutritious crops to feed here children, like ground nuts (peanuts) or chick peas (garbanzo beans). And because the men didn't do the work in the fields, they never thought to tell seed developers to make tall plants: the women complained that harvesting short plants was hard on the back. 

5. Giving useful information to women about farming is tricky. Few poor households have TVs so radio was thought to be the best option, except that women don't control the radio dial. Most men would not wish to listen to an educational programme and would select something more entertaining, Also, women are not allowed out of the house without the permission of their husbands. They will be beaten - and believe it to be justified - if they leave without permission. The solution in Ghana was to talk with men to encourage them to allow them to let their wives meet together in groups of ten or fifteen. 'so she could increase the family's income'. 70% of the world's poorest people make money from growing and selling food from their small plots of land. Making those plots more productive would give families more money. 

Some time later, Gates attended a group meeting and was surprised when the group leader said

Raise your hand if - before you joined the self-help group - you could grow enough food to last your family the whole year. 

Not a single hand went up. Then the leader said

Raise your hand if you had surplus to sell last year.

Almost every hand went up. 

Patricia's solution was a bit different. A CARE organisation worked with couples and had them switch roles and role play. She was able to tell him to 'Do this, do this, do this, do this...' He came to realise that if she had no help in the household work then they would always be short of food. He became a more supportive husband and she finally had what she needed to succeed at her farming endeavours.

The book is careful to explain how empowering women also helps men: there is more food, children are healthier, there is perhaps money to educate their children which reflects well on the head of the family and, in one scenario, a man worked out that if helped his wife with the work - contrary to community expectations for men - his wife was happier and less tired and so their marriage bed was happier.

It is not just men who hold women down, but other women as well, particularly when it comes to female genital cutting (using the word 'mutilation' is derogatory and not conducive to discussing the issue with villagers). The consequences for individuals and for families aren't always obvious to people who blindly follow traditions and it is necessary to find ways to help them see the benefits of change. 

Another surprise from Gates' book was that she tackles the role of religion in suppressing and damaging women. I've ended up buying the book, as I did Attenborough's book, to re-read and study. 

My first choices for charitable giving have always been women's causes, particularly Planned Parenthood, women's refuges or homeless shelters for women. At the back of Gates' book is a list of causes she recommends, many of which she described their work in the book:

Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee

www.brac.net


CARE

www.care.org/our-work


Family Planning 2020

www.familyplanning2020.org


Girls Not Brides

www.girlsnotbrides.org


Kakenya’s Dream

www.kakenyasdream.org


Malala Fund

www.malala.org


#MeToo Movement

www.metoomvmt.org


Population Council

www.populationcouncil.org


PRADAN

www.pradan.net


Saksham

www.community.org.in/story


Save the Children

www.savethechildren.org


Tostan

www.tostan.org


Gates Foundation

www.gatesfoundation.org


www.momentoflift.com 



Wednesday 3 March 2021

A Life on Our Planet

I finished reading this book by Sir David Attenborough a week or so ago and it still resonates with me. I read it as a library book but decided to buy it because I wanted to re-read and study it. I want it to inform a lot of my purchasing decisions. I actually think it should be required reading for everyone on the planet - or at least for everyone with young children. 




Although this book is packed with scientific information, it's an easy read - except perhaps for the Glossary which I found I had to concentrate to get through. All those terms placed in context with his straightforward style of writing were easy to take on board when introduced in the text. 

It isn't a terribly depressing book either. I had watched his television programme of the same title and found that though the information presented was alarming, the gorgeous photography and the history of his career (in black and white) was fascinating. This book does present much of the same information but it also presents some of the possible solutions being developed. He sets the stage for us all to make some adjustments as well. 

One of the things I love about A Life on Our Planet is that is explains why some things are important, eg 'diversity'. I've recently come to associate this term more with racial and other minority people being more included in society, but of course diversity of species is one of the necessary criteria for health of the planet. Or, let's be right about it, health of the human race. The planet will be just fine, thank you very much, without humans. The plant life we work so hard to beat back will re-grow, various inconvenient species will thrive and the ecosystem will set about re-creating itself. The species we've killed off may never return, but other species will develop to take their place, in time.

For example, Attenborough explains why we needed to stop killing off whales: 

A key problem restricting life in the open ocean is the availability of nutrients. When conditions are right, plants and animals live in the surface waters and, when they die, drift continuously downwards as 'marine snow'. Where nutrients are not freely available, the surface waters of the oceans can be almost sterile. Just as land plants need fertiliser as well as sun and water, so phytoplankton, the photosynthesising foundation of the food web, need nitrogenous compounds in the sunlit surface waters if they are to thrive. There are places in the ocean where the decomposed marine snow is stirred and carried upwards by the currents flowing over submarine mountains and ridges, and here the phytoplankton - and hence fish populations - can flourish. But the rest of the open ocean would remain a vast, blue desert were it not for the whales. They are so big that when they dive to feed in the depths or rise to the surface to breathe, they can create a great stirring of the water around them. That helps keep nutrients near the surface. And when they defecate, the waters around them are also greatly enriched. This 'whale pump' as it is often termed, is now recognised as a significant process in maintaining the fertility of the open ocean. Indeed, whales are now thought to be responsible for bringing more important nutrients to surface waters in some parts of the ocean than the outflows of local revers. The ocean of the Holocene needed its whales to remain productive. In the twentieth century, men killed close to 3 million of them.

He also includes the idea of a 'Donut Economy' as part of his vision for the future. Population growth is a large contributor to the difficulties we are facing. He quotes a report I hope to read soon: The Economics of Biodiversity, which states that 50% of the impact we humans have on the living world is attributable to the richest 16% of the human population. I am curious to learn whether I am part of that 16%. Don't laugh - there are an incredible number of very poor people in the world and it is remarkably easy to be 'rich' by comparison if one lives in a developed country. The donut economy should be our compass for the future: the inside ring is a minimum standard of living to be enjoyed by all humans: clean water, health care, food, housing, gender equality and other basics for a decent life, called the 'social foundation'. The outer ring is is called the 'ecological ceiling' which is the limit of our human activities that the natural world can tolerate and still be in balance, still provide us a place to live. Some of these boundaries include climate change, air pollution, biodiversity loss, fresh water withdrawals, among others. Not all of these boundaries have been quantified, but several have already been breached and need to be brought back into line. Using the Donut Economy is seen as the best way to bring all nations into a state of population stability, to help them transition past the high death rates and resulting high birth rates.

One of my favourite parts of this book is about empowerment of women. It seems that 

Among all these social improvements, one in particular is found to significantly reduce family size - the empowerment of women. Wherever women have the vote, wherever girls stay in school longer, wherever women are in charge of their own lives and not dictated to by men, wherever they have access to health care and contraception, wherever they are free to take any job and their aspirations for life are raised, the birth rate falls. The  reason for this is straightforward - empowerment brings freedom of choice and when life offers more options for women, they choice is to have fewer children. The faster and more fully women are empowered, the quicker a nation will move through State 3 and on to state 4. 

I may have fallen in love with David Attenborough when I read those words. He goes on to describe various examples of empowerment. As it happens I am also in the midst of reading The Moment of Lift: how empowering women changes the world, by Melinda Gates. It hasn't thus far told me a great deal I didn't already know or suspect, but it's an interesting read all the same. At this point I might venture the opinion that it is more about social psychology than philanthropy.

So, I hope I've convinced you to read A Life on Our Planet. Do you think you might?