Eve of a New Day

Sugru

Thank you Rachael for my care parcel!

I don't know which I was more excited by, the packaging or the contents.

The contents: Sugru.

Sugru feels like modelling clay, or Blu-Tack. It fixes in 30 minutes into whatever shape you mold it, and is ready to be used after 24 hours. It fixes soft because it's made from silicone. It sticks to metal, plastic, glass and ceramic. It's waterproof, dishwasher-safe, heat resistant, cold resistant, electrically and thermally insulating.

I don't write this to advertise, merely to explain.

Or if you're more image inclined:

After I fixed the ring and knife handle I was walking around the house like a woman possessed, trying to find broken things, considering what I could chip or bust or smash, just so I could mend it. I gave myself a high 5 I was so excited, when I remembered the missing bit at the bottom of the food processor.

I must admit I had hesitations at first, thinking of all the energy that goes into creating Sugru, but then I thought that anything that promotes the Repair Manifesto, over buying new gear, is definitely a good thing by me.

Fresh Knickers

How often do you buy new knickers? Actually, that's none of my business. Sorry.

When we made the decision to only buy second hand clothes, I hadn't really considered the issue of buying underpants and bras. Occasionally we'll find plain cotton underwear in our sizes still in their packets at the op shop, and until recently that's been enough.

But the other day when PJ caught me wearing two pairs, I knew it was time to do something about it. (One pair had functional elastic at the top, and the other pair was still OK at the bottom.)

I guess we could learn to sew our own or we could go without, but this time, we bit the bullet and bought ourselves some new ones. And just in time, as I recently read that:

Police will soon have sweeping powers to search people at random, including strip-search, even if there is no reasonable suspicion those targeted have done anything wrong.

Rednesday: Muffin

From here.

Self-Contained

One of the things I like about not having a TV is that we can self-program what we watch. We download and borrow films and are regularly given discs by friends (thanks Jiga!) full of random goodies we watch on one of our laptops.

I like buying second-hand things for the same reason. Op shops, markets and garage sales – I love them all. I love browsing through people's discarded things because you never know what you're going to find, or what's going to find you.

I found these coffee and sugar containers at two different op shops, several years apart. Although my style is by no means neat and tidy with everything catalogued and in its correct place, I just couldn't resist buying these oil and vinegar bottles at a trash and treasure market recently, because they match the jars exactly.

The Language of Things

PJ and I had a disagreement while I was reading Outliers. When I told him what it was about he asked what Gladwell had to say about the environment. I told him it was a study in sociology and cultural anthropology not an eco book.

PJ thinks it's too late in history for writers to use up resources publishing books that aren't ecologically conscientious, either by subject or in material. I can definitely see what he's saying though I disagree when it comes to knowledge, but wholeheartedly agree when it comes to things like junk made from plastic and multi-million dollar blockbuster movies that endorse violence and the role of women as love interests only.

But now I see that PJ has a point.

I have just finished reading Deyan Sudjic's The Language of Things, given to me for my birthday by my dear friend, E. As the cover suggests, it is about objects and the things we consume and surround ourselves with. It was published in 2008 in the UK, where Sudjic lives and works as the Director of the Design Museum, London.

Now, can you imagine a book about design and consumerables published only last year that does not mention eco-design, sustainability or waste?

That's not entirely true. There is one mention, on page 14, in relation to Apple products:

Earnest Elmo Calkins coined the term 'consumer engineering'. In Consumer Engineering: A New Technique for Prosperity, published in 1932, he suggests that 'Goods fall into two classes: those which we use, such as motor cars, and safety razors, and those which we use up, such as toothpaste, or soda biscuits. Consumer engineering must see to it that we use up the kind of goods we now merely use.' Apple has made it happen, just at the moment that the world is beginning to understand that there are limits to its natural resources. It has given the relentless cycle of consumption a fashionable gloss, cynically endorsed by hipsters in black jeans and black T-shirts, rather than corporate suits.

And that's it. In the book's 223 pages only 116 words are dedicated to ecological purposes. What a wasted opportunity and what a waste of materials. Sudjic points the finger at Apple for producing products that use non-renewable resources, but he has done the same thing by printing his book on chlorine-bleached, non-recycled paper from non-sustainable forests.

I guess I would forgive Sudjic's environmental oversight, as I have Gladwell's, if I thought the book was worth it. But I don't. I found it stale. So why did I finish reading it? In one sense I felt like I should read it, not just because the book was a gift and came recommended, but because I thought it would be good for me, like I feel in museums reading the wall label next to each old artefact.

All those pages and all those words surrounding me like objects in a stuffy old design museum. I'm with Will, the narrator in Dave Eggers's You Shall Know Our Velocity who says he would rather give things away than endure "the slow suffocation of accumulation".

Seven Words

Over the course of this week I have had hundreds of readers come to my blog by way of Claire Robertson's creative HQ, Loobylu. She has a cult following, and it's not hard to see why.

Claire and I worked together seven years ago. I remember when she first told me about her blog, I read and loved it, though I didn't completely understand what a blog really was and what it was for. As a long-time diarist, I didn't understand why someone would want to air their private thoughts publicly. 

Oh, how whole worlds change!

Here is a zine that Claire illustrated the cover for. It's called How Comics Can Change the World. Open it up and the first words you read are: "Do not pay money for this comic." I often think about these seven words. 

Despite what governments tell us, and despite how our whole lives revolve around us being slaves to it, the things that really make a difference in the world have nothing to do with money.

Product Placement

I love the taste of this water. I have often thought that maybe because it is sourced from a nearby spring it has all the goodness in it that my body needs to flourish. Our bodies are best when we eat locally grown seasonal food, so surely it's the same for local water?

I love the simplicity of the label and the fact it is bottled locally, and in glass.

When I was thirsty and on the go I used to buy water in a plastic bottle, refill it a couple of times then recycle it. This was before I learned about the toxins these bottles leach.

This was before I realised that although I may have been recycling mine, 65% of plastic bottles end up as landfill. 

This was before I read that 314,465 barrels of oil are used every year, just so Australians can drink water bottled in plastic.

This was before I moved up here where there are natural springs aplenty, and where Coca-Cola Amatil source the water for their Mt Franklin brand. Every day we see petrol-guzzling water tankers chugging to the bottling plant in Melbourne from local springs. 

This was before I found out that Coca-Cola pays $2 per megalitre of water they take, which is about 5c a tanker. 5c!!

This was before I read this quote by the American environmentalist Derrick Jensen: "If people will pay for water bottled in plastic they will suffer any indignity.”

This was before PJ became a water activist and made this film as part of his campaign:

The Garden of Self Defence

On the opening night of TINA, PJ was invited to be on a panel called 2020: Arbitrary Figures & Advocating Real Cultural Change. The panel was made up of people who run festivals or write books or host radio programs about the arts; people whose opinions influence change, but who were not invited to take part in Mr Rudd's 2020 Summit.

Many of the questions were about how young artists can find alternative sources of funding.

"Do we have any Climate Change or Peak Oil deniers in the audience?" PJ wanted to know.

"Is there anyone here who thinks the Government is going to save us from environmental catastrophe?"

He asked: "Why not take responsibility for ourselves and not rely on Government for funding or survival?" He asked: "To have more time to make our art, why not grow our own organic food?"

I am thinking about this because of two great articles my Mum sent me. One is Dirt cheap – Step one in the battle against soaring food prices: Start your own recession garden and the other is Sweat Equity Put to Use Within Sight of Wall Street, and also because PJ launched his blog yesterday, from where the above picture of our broad beans comes.

Friday Night Rule

Whenever we go to Melbourne, the Friday Night Rule applies regardless of what day it is.

PJ implemented the rule several months ago after I had a fight with a guy on a street corner. The guy finished his cigarette and dropped it on the ground just as I walked past him. Taken aback, I asked if he was going to pick it up. He told me he wasn't and a fight ensued.

The rule relates not just to smokers but to people doing anything offensive and pertains to my not accosting them on the street, especially after dark.

Last night PJ and I went to Melbourne to see our gorgeous friend SV perform with her cabaret outfit for the Fringe Festival.

Every time we come to Melbourne, the first things I notice are how many cars there are and how many people smoke. But this time the first thing I noticed was how people were just carrying on, business as usual. 

The shops were full of shoppers and their hands were full of goods in plastic bags. How is it that the papers can be so full of doom and gloom but that the majority of people haven't noticed?

A bit of denial is a good thing, I know this. Otherwise being awake would be too hard. But for how long can be people be in denial about the state of things?

Global warming? Peak Oil? The Wall St Crisis? The list goes on and on. People still smoke, gamble, eat junk food, fly overseas on holidays. We delude ourselves to get by, I get that. 

But what I don't quite get is the extent.

500 Tablets (500 mg)

Five years ago I asked a naturopath: What one supplement do you recommend everyone should take? To which she replied, without even thinking, Spirulina. And thus began my love affair with the blue-green algae.

When I moved to the country, I was most pleased when I found out there was a guy selling it locally.

I know I bang on and on about all the reasons I love living in a small community, and I guess I do because I was born in the city where people operate with different, less personal motives. 

Here, business transactions aren't raced through because I have deadlines to meet or parking meters to feed or trams to catch. I used to live like this. But now my relationships are nurtured because there's time, and because in a town with a population of under 4,000 people, you are bound to see the people you have dealings with again and again and again.

When I buy my Spirulina, if I'm not home, J just drops my jar off on the deck. J is a photographer and one of my favourite parts of buying my spirulina from him is that he will email me through a recent photograph he's taken. Today it was of his son.

Fighting For It

This morning on my walk I listened to a podcast interview with Emmanuel Jal, who at aged 8 was a child soldier carrying an AK-47 rifle in the Sudan People's Liberation Army. (He was later adopted by a British aid worker and is now a rising international music star.) 

The interviewer said that by 18, the usual age for conscription, people can determine right from wrong, but at aged 8, you haven't yet developed a conscience.

I heard this and thought nothing of it. Until Z saw this poster and asked what it was.

PJ and I explained to him that Fair Trade empowers farmers in developing countries, (though we left out that John Pilger has an argument against some Fair Trade agreements, saying they are constructed by the privileged).

In response Z said he wishes he were a policeman. If the greedy people are mean to the farmers, he would put them in jail for one day. If they do it again, he would jail them for two days. And if they do it again, in they go for three days...

I look at a lot of the injustices in the world and the generation of the perpetrators and I think: up until what age can our behavior escape scrutiny?

Redar

I rode my bike past this red grid the other day that I had to dismount to pick up. It's usually to fill my basket with gleaned fruit that I stop, not discarded bits of plastic.

I like red things. I like red things for lots and lots of reasons. And have done so for almost a decade. One of these reasons is as a means to filter because the world is just so big. Someone once called it a redar, like a radar, but only for red things.

My mum has come to stay for a couple of days. We walked through the bush first thing then read and wrote for the majority of the day. The plumbers came to hook up our water tank and we walked to a nearby trash, treasure and collectibles market, where I once again noticed how I notice.

I notice red. It doesn't matter what: sparkly shoes, capsicum, olive oil tins, tattoos and forsaken bits of rubbish I can wear around my neck.

Brrrm Brrrm

It took us several attempts at listing it on eBay, but we finally sold our Peugeot.

As part of our plan to reduce our cash and carbon expenditures, we decided that despite the inconvenience of being a one car family, having a second car was an indulgence we could no longer justify.

It's true we could plant 20 trees a year, or whatever the number is supposed to be, but to us, it's not about offsetting, but decreasing.

It was dark by the time the couple who saw it on eBay arrived last night. PJ took them for a drive into town so they could look under the bonnet under a street light. I had my knitting group over and we all oohed and ahhed when they told us they needed a bigger car because they were having a baby.

The car had become anathema to us and was beginning to represent the epitome of unnecessary waste, but even more so, what we are envisioning the world will be like when petrol hits $8 a litre and the majority of vehicles are rendered useless.

The couple drove up from Melbourne after work, stayed an hour, then left. I sat and knitted with my posse while PJ filled out forms and exchanged money for keys and papers.

It was such a relief to see the car's taillights head up the hill and out of sight, and to know that the car was going to a good home, brimming with new life to come.

Nooks and Crannies

I used to shop at garage sales and op shops and markets.

I still do. But where I used to do these things to save money (I had a travel addiction I was always saving to fund), I now do more as a way of living.

I choose to live in a small community where there are no chain-stores or billboards. Not just because I am anti-consumerist, but because I am not a fan of the visual intrusion.

I have just had my contract extended another week. I am thankful to have more time to work on the project and to work with my team.

Although I knew what I was getting myself in for when I took on the role, working in Melbourne is hard. Getting up early to catch the 6.30 bus and getting home 13 hours later is exhausting. And is something I will have to do every day next week as my home computer is still broken (though Apple is sending me a replacement).

A month ago when I was thinking about how I'd go working full-time, I wrote: "I don't want quality time or me time," which I now see was just naive.

When I lived in the city I was good at this - filling my time to the brim. But I am a country girl now who still loves shopping at garage sales, but needs a lot more quiet to live in.

Great Value

Today over the Bass Strait, one of my favourite bloggers, Farmdoc, has been musing about the value of things:

The true value of something is often out of proportion to its perceived everyday value. In other words, it’s often the little things that have the biggest impact.

I agree with him wholeheartedly. (And not just because he's my dad.)

I also wholeheartedly believe that we in the privileged West have no real understanding of what "perceived everyday value" really means. Myself included.

So removed are we from what's most important in our lives, that when we see the words Great Value, we immediately assume they are referring to a bargain.

As one of our household's heroes, George Monbiot wrote yesterday in The Guardian:

If the world is sliding into recession, it's partly because governments believed that they could choose between economy and ecology.

It's true PJ and I are on our way to becoming self-sustaining, but still we have been stressed lately about our personal finances in the face of rising interest rates, our council rates that are now the third highest in the state, water rates increasing by 25%, petrol prices, blah blah blah.

I say, bring on the crash, and let's start again.

Only after we have been forced to redefine the merit of our principles, will we be reminded of what's of real value in our lives and what's not.

More Than the Show Itself

Nine years ago, PJ won a competition to create a sculpture that runs alongside our local library.

His Poemscape: A Physical Anthology comprises 18 hand-carved local Eucalyptus plinths, each with a brass plaque on top containing a poem. Beside each plinth, he planted an apple tree.

In summer we water the trees, in winter PJ prunes them and at the end of apple season we take all the fallen fruit home to compost. 

In autumn, I love riding my bike past the trees and picking an apple to munch on. In fact, one of my favourite things to do is to go biking around this hilly town, filling my basket with fruit gleaned from public trees to eat if they're ripe and stew if they're too much so.

Agnes Varda's gorgeous film, The Gleaners and I, is a political, moral, aesthetic and personal enquiry into the age old tradition of gleaning, which these days falls under the banner of freeganism.

I am thinking of PJ's Poemscape, Varda's film and Freeganism, because of a UK game show that I read about that is due to air online this month.

Ready Steady Skip is a game show where "needlessly wasted food is recovered from the bin and turned into delicious dishes before your very eyes!"

The Iron Chef meets Oscar the Grouch?

Like freegans, I'm not interested in being part of the conventional shopping economy, and I am very much interested in becoming a producer, not a consumer. It is this aspect - of self-sufficiency - that interests me about the show, more than the show itself.

Mediated

Tonight in the bath when PJ got home from work, he at one end me at the other, I finished reading this book - a chance find in a good book shop.

I say: READ THIS BOOK.

De Zengotita says: The issue is no longer representation versus reality, phony versus authentic, artificial versus natural . . . there is no going back to reality. . . . We have been consigned to a new plane of being engendered by mediating representations of fabulous quality and inescapable ubiquity, a place where everything is addressed to us, everything is for us, and nothing is beyond us anymore.

This notion of being perpetually addressed is the framework that cities are based on, De Zengotita says. Whereas nature on the other hand, doesn't address you or flatter you, it ignores you, which is why humanity no longer cares for nature, because, “the flattered self is spoiled. It never gets enough. It feels unappreciated. It whines a lot. It wants attention.”

So we ignore nature back, we control it and use what we can get for our own advantage. And because we are so disconnected from the natural world, so wrapped up in our busyness and shopping and blockbusters, we forget what's really important.

We make placards and take to the streets to protest when governments threaten our entertainment, yet we do nothing when they sell off our natural resources, put chemicals in our food, force us into war, put taxes on what's rightfully ours, stick their noses into our sex lives, hop into bed with corporations and prioritise economics over wellbeing.

Jesus Goes Shopping

I spent the afternoon yesterday writing content for a website about dips. A few weeks before, the business owner had asked me if I would consider a contra deal - content in exchange for dips. If I could pay my mortgage with food, I told her, I would love to.

Maybe that's the direction we are all headed.

The vision of Adam Grubb, founding editor of EnergyBulletin.net, a site dedicated to the proposition that oil output has peaked and that our current way of life will inevitably change, looked decidedly apocalyptic. His vision was of a suburban wasteland where abandoned McMansions are raided for their copper wiring, where people lose their homes and are forced to live out of cars and destitute communities rely on neighbourhood trading to survive.

Last night we watched What Would Jesus Buy?, a film about Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, who, like missionaries, travel across the US preaching their anti-consumerist values.

You see them trundle through mall after mall, in the days leading up to Christmas, attempting to get their message through to the shopping throngs lining up for their Nintendo Wiis.

"This is why we need to have a crash," PJ says.

This is why we are growing our own vegetables.