Food!

My life seems to revolve a lot more around food at the moment. Eating it, making it, thinking about it...

It is probably due to our Lenten experiment, but I currently feel like I might be simultaneously going down the Maslow's Hierachy of Needs (towards the need to meet the physiological needs like food) and up towards the Self Actualisation by attempting to live what I believe. It is a very interesting balancing act.

So far we've had three dinner parties and I'm very pleased we're keeping up with offering hospitality. For one of them we only had to purchase an additional £2 worth of food to feed a two course meal for 8 people! (Our friend kindly brought a scrumptious pear and chocolate crumble to round the meal off.)

I've also started making lunches for myself again, a habit I had slipped out of. Now, I've not always been very impressed with what we've had in the fridge and the resulting lunch I've ended up with, but I have discovered a positive side to making lunches. It is a chance to reflect on the day ahead and it is an act of taking care of myself which is something I can be very bad at. Other things that I've restarted, like sprouting beans and baking, have a similar effect of taking longer but somehow helping a more holistic approach to my life. There is also a pleasing amount of creativity involved when faced with a red cabbage and some left over mayonaise from a school retreat HM1 led and creating a very nice red cabbage slaw...

I've been surprised by things, thoughts and ideas being tossed around my head since we started Lent. It has been a real vehicle for prompting memories and thoughts from the past as well as aiding a reflection on my daily life. It has also been a far more public matter than I had originally imagined and I am most definately placed out of my comfort zone in terms of people outside our Flat knowing what I am doing with my life!

Last Will and Testament...

We are currently sat round the living room and talking about our funeral plans and testaments. HM1 has bought a make-your-own-will kit, asked us to witness her will and we've been talking about our funeral wishes. And we've shared where we keep information, ie passports and addresses of next in kin, just in case we should die. It is a rather surreal conversation to be having with your breakfast. I don't think I've ever had this conversation with other housemates before.

My lack of assests have meant that I've never really considered making a will (and would thus die intestate...I'm even learnt some legal jargon this morning), and I guess I want as green a funeral as possible. But I think that's about as far as my thinking on the matter has got to!

HM1 has just handed me a photocopy of her blank will just in case I want to fill one out too. Perhaps I should give this some thought...

Eating out

Our friend celebrated her birthday today with a meal with lots of people in town (ie central London). Which is all very fine and good until you have to start explaining to everyone there that you can't actually contribute a 16th of the bill and will only pay for your own food... It sounds very antisocial, and it feels it too! But there is only so far we can stretch the £13 handed to us from our communal pot at the beginning of the evening. It is a bit embarrasing though, although I guess it did provide a conversation starter with other people on the table. However, once that bit was over with the meal and company were very nice.

Being awkward in a social situation is quite difficult to do.

Our Lent Experiment

This Lent period my flat will be living at income support level. The three of us will contribute £59.15 each into the weekly budget and we will be paying for our food, transport, utilities, and other small random things out of it for the six week period. The money that we "save" (ie the difference of what we might normally spend) will be donated to our individually nominated charities.

We started talking about doing this ages ago, even if Lent starting tomorrow seems a bit too soon, and I think there are a whole variety of reasons for us taking this sort of action. We are trying our best to be an intentional community and I think this is part of the larger community experiment. What will happen when we are so dependent on each other's actions? Iona community members are accountable for their use of time and money and I think this will make us be more accountable to each other about our use of money, something that hasn't happened much so far. And it isn't just our little community, but the bigger one around us. We've been fairly public about our plans so I hope others will be interested in what and why we're doing - even if they aren't taking part in this crazy experiment themselves!

It's also about our ideas of justice and simplicity. They are very complicated ideas and sometimes feel difficult to live out but I'm hoping this will provide an opportunity for it. Lent is also a time of taking stock and focussing on where we are and where we might want to be. In a pre-Lent buying spree I finally got round to buying two bread tins. Not difficult to do, nor that expensive, but it's something I've been meaning to do pretty much all year but never quite got round to doing it. (There's nothing like an impending spending cut for a bit of focussed panic-buying...:) Somehow that exemplifies for me what Lent/life should be about: living life fully, intentionally, and not always putting stuff off until later.

I agree with what we're doing and as an experiment I think it'll be fascinating to do. However there is also a part of me letting out a little sigh. I've just spent the majority of last year on income support or unwaged and having finally got a decent paycheck I've suddenly agreed to voluntarily cut my spending. The most boring thing about being poor is having to think about money all the time. I'm also slightly worried that my previous simplicity was more to do with frugality and not having any resources rather from the high moral ground I thought I was on!!:)

Nonetheless, the challenge is exciting and I'm ready to be creative with what we've got and what we do. As was said in our house meeting: "We'll just have to drink more gin." Our wine consumption will probably have to become more moderate over the next few weeks, but as we have a fair amount of gin and in the spirit of using up what is in the house we might just have to make do with that...

So I think it will be frustrating at times having to make awkward choices. But I am looking forward to it all too, as a chance to reflect on my own priorities as well as the household ones, as a challenge, and as a chance to make a difference.

I'll keep you posted...

Australia Day

Last night HM1 & 2, and myself went to an Australia Day barbeque. The only thing is: it wasn't Australia Day (that was on the 26th). It wasn't a bbq - more like grilling food in the kitchen. And our hosts had no real connection to Australia.

Brilliant excuse for a party! Hats off to that!

My very social weekend also included sitting outside (!) on Sunday for about three hours. Quite impressive in January even if I say so myself. The sunshine was lovely and the lunch and red wine and company were too. I was frozen by sundown, but it was worth it.

A weak vegetarian?

After a morning/afternoon full of meetings I helped staff a trip with a group from a SEN school. We took off to Kingston to see Alvin and the Chipmunks (the music is very irritating!) and a meal in a chicken restaurant. Not so PC after all the ranting Jamie Oliver is doing on TV - and also not particularly vegetarian friendly. Most places manage at least a half-decent veggie option but it was truly awful here: processed junk that leaves a horrible after taste. It's such a shame we took our young people there even if we are constrained by a budget.

Pulling into the bus station near my flat at the end of our trip I was unable to open the mini van door prompting disparaging remarks from colleagues about my choice in diet! Not much to be said in my defence though, as I did feel pretty awful after that meal:)

Hooray for our fully organic veg and fruit box my flat gets every week. What a blessed relief it is to eat real food.

And the walls came tumbling down

The images of the wall between Palestine and Egypt laying down on the ground with people, carts, and animals streaming across are a sight to behold.

And there are so many people crossing the border back and forth that there seems to be very little that could be done either practically or politically. Go people power!

Training, training, training...

I love training courses and I've been lucky enough to go to loads of interesting ones over the past year. I am especially lucky in one of my volunteering placements where I tend to look for an interesting course and then my manager will just stick me on it. It's brilliant! (Currently I'm looking for a course on how to grow vegetables:)

This week has been almost over doing it though as I've spent the past three days in training. One was a child protection course (always heartbreaking) and the past two days have seen me in the first section of a course on sex and sexuality work with people with learning difficulties. It is absolutely fascinating. And very thought provoking. Being new to this area of work there are a lot of things I've never really given much thought to, and this is definately one of them. There can be a very unfortunate tendency to view people in the terms of the disability they have rather than as a human in their own right, a human fully alive. Ignorance can never be good with such a vulnerable group so anything we can do to increase knowledge and empower people we work with can only be a good thing. I guess increasing my knowledge and allowing space to reflect on these issues is very helpful too.

The scariest thing about this particular course is of course the implication that once I've finished it I'll have to deliver it others... At least I've been doing the course with a colleague so we can share this task, but I'm glad the next two days next month will deal with the more practical side of things of how to deliver such work to our clients.

In some way this is very typical of my work where I am, as the American's would say, flying by the seat of my pants. Not exactly blagging, but then again not that far off either. It keeps you on your toes - and is so exhilirating when you pull it off!

Ethical Questions Prompted by Free Newspapers

Walking back from the Lyceum Theatre along the Strand our group, along with every other pedestrian, was bombarded by hoards of people thrusting the free newspapers into our hands. A number of the young people were happy to take the newpapers and we ended up at Waterloo clutching newpapers left, right and centre.

As we were standing waiting for the Responsible Person to tell everyone else which platform we were headed for one of the young boys wandered over to a stand selling paper and took one. Fortunately I saw the event and was able to have a discussion and we returned the paper to the lenient paper seller, but it was interesting trying to explain the differences between free papers and one that you have to pay for, and then also the reasons for the difference. "Would you steal anything from a shop?" I got asked, "Would you steal a chocolate bar if you had to?".

My mind conjured up all manner of situation where I might HAVE to steal a chocolate bar while I was busy saying "No, I would not steal a chocolate bar."

When I questioned further for a rational about why I might have to steal chocolate, a revealling: "Because your friends told you to" came out. What an opening for a discussion on ethics and our rules of engagement with each other! That's one thing I love about youth work: the creative opportunities and the thinking on one's feet that any engagement with young people offers.

"What would you do if you saw a fiver on the street? Would that be stealing?" was slightly more tricky. But I turned it round with the get-out-of-jail-free trick of just asking the same question back and carrying on the conversation from there!

The Lion King

Another work trip, another musical. This time round we took 15 young people to a matinee performance of the Lion King. It involved a rather complex set of logistical maneuvering to get everyone to the same place at the same time, but things like this have a tendency to fall into place somehow. I only got to see the second half of the musical due to being paired up with a delightful young girl who was not interested in seeing the Lion King at all. But what I saw I did enjoy! The set design, costumes, and lighting were very clever and I thought the giraffes were particularly brilliant.

However, I cannot wait for our adult social club trip - that has got to be easier I reckon.

On Monday I got given a more definate area of responsibility, volunteers and volunteering, which is helpful. At least I've got something else to say that "I don't really know" when people ask me what I do at work... We also got told that working unauthorised overtime is going to become a disciplinary action which is a novel approach (in my experience) to the pervasive problem in the Third Sector of people working 50-70 hours a week while being paid for 20. Okay, so maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but probably not by much.

Taking myself out for lunch

I'm celebrating the end of two+ months of unemployment and no benefits and feeling hugely excited about actually receiving a paycheck at the end of December! Because I got perilously close to the red line I feel euphoric to have money in the bank again. So on a whim I popped into a cafe and had a proper sitdown lunch today in between work. It's so nice to not be counting pennies every time I walk out the door. Although given the price of food around here I might be back to square one soon!

A change in language

Britain drops 'War on Terror' label. I didn't see this widely reported, I was alerted to it by another website, but I do think this is really interesting. And not before time either.

Wretched birdfeeders

Having returned safely back from Finland, today has been full of activities around the house before I disappear back into the world of work. Having ascertained which plants had been moved around and where to, I was ready to get to business (HM1 has a habit of periodically moving the plants around the flat). I tend to job share the filling up our two birdfeeders with HM2 but as he works the usual working week and only has time during the weekends it falls on me to fill the feeders during the week.

The feeder that holds the nuts is a personal enemy of mine. It was placed way up in the branches by HM2 (who is significantly taller than me), and while I do need the little stepladder to reach both feeders, the nut one is a particularly precarious endeavour. I balance on the top step and cling to the feeder while trying to undo the bottom to refill it and not let the branch whip back upwards and out of reach... It must be amusing to watch me for any of our neighbours. This morning there was a biting wind which chilled my hands and I had to keep stopping to put my hands in my pockets for them to carry out the task required. At one point the branch did swing upwards and out of reach and I had to resort to tying my housekeys to a bit of string and fling it over the branch and then haul it back down to my height. I'm surprised I got the feeder filled and back on the branch at all! Thankfully the seed feeder was - in comparison - far easier, although there was a moment when I thought I was going to unceremoniously fall off the ladder and onto the whirligig laundry drier.

The birds appreciate the feeders at anyrate. These are not shy country birds that take weeks to adjust to any new feeder, oh no! These are town birds who know exactly what a birdfeeder is and what to do with one. Satisfyingly, there are plenty of birds eating our offerings. Satisfying at least until the feeders are empty again. Fingers crossed that happens on the weekend!

You need to see this

Here's something to delight, amuse and brighten up long winter days. Go over to Cheat Neutral - a site dedicated to helping you because you can't help yourself. I recommend watching the film. It's only 13 minutes long and well worth it.

Enjoy!

Hugo Awards 2007

I'm hopelessly behind the times here and only just listened to the episode of StarShipSofa that revealed this year's Hugo Award winner (it aired in September...). StarShipSofa is one of my favourite podcasts. Two guys, Tony and Ciaran, talk about science fiction authors in a very amusing and informative manner. The passion really shines through and I have actually learned loads during my listening career. Anyhow, this year's winner for the novel prize is Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End.

I'm excited about that because I've actually read the said book - even before I knew it was nominated, or indeed had won. Admittedly, I haven't read the other books that were nominated, but I think Rainbows End is a fantastic book. The described interaction of technology and humans seems to be a distinct possibility given the pervasiveness of our current web-culture. It is refreshing to have technology that merely is, there, as now, it's still the humans who drive things forward in a good or bad manner according to the needs of the story.

I've always found the Hugo Award winners list a good starting point if I'm ever wondering about some new reading material. Obviously the choice is also limited by what's available in the local library, but if the author has been nominated or has won it's usually a pretty safe bet that at least it'll be readable. I have to admit that I was surprised to see Rainbows End in my local library. I dream of one day living next to a library with a decently stocked sci-fi section, but that day has yet to come.

Fun with light

For a satisfying session of creating pictures take one digital camera, one torch, and follow the instructions from WeLikePlay and have fun... It is possible to do this with a candle but the wax flying everywhere isn't really worth the trouble!

The Phantom of the Opera

Last night I had a work trip to see the Phantom of the Opera. (I know, I know, sometimes work can be such a drag... ) There was a huge group of us that jumped on the train to Waterloo and then onwards to the theatre just in time for the show to start. We had one incident where a boy refused to get off the train at Waterloo and so got escorted back to his parents, but other than that it was merely a matter of trying not to lose anyone. It is so difficult to count a group of 27!

I was first introduced to the music of the Phantom of the Opera when I was about 8 years old and in Nepal. A woman who was living with us in our flat had the CDs and I was entranced. During my teens I did buy a copy of the music and listened to it but I never saw either the play or the film until yesterday. It was interesting to try to allign the version in my head with the one unfolding in front of my eyes. They were surprisingly different. Not so much in essence as in the nuances. Also, I think the rather more adult themes glibly flew over my head when I was about 8...

It was a bit scary for some of our group, but we also did get renditions of the Phantom all the way back along with a fairly philosophical discussion on whether or not the Phantom is evil. One definition put forward by one of the volunteers was that the Phantom knew the difference between right and wrong which meant that he could be evil. Interesting thought.

On the way back we ended up waiting outside on an open air platform close to midnight for about half an hour for our train to come, which hasn't made my cold any better. In fact I've only just emerged out of bed and I don't know if I'm going to venture outdoors at all today. (Sniffle.) I might just try to find cookie receipies instead, as my Flat is hoping to make several batches for people as gifts.

Decorating trees

I got involved in hurling baubles at a 18 ft Christmas tree today hoping it would result in a beautiful tree. This is an unorthodox approach to decorating that I've never come across - but oh what fun! The tree stands rather majestically in St Matthias and fills the space well, and all things considered that's quite the feat. I spent an inordinate amount of time going up and down the massive ladder helping various little people go up as high as they felt comfortable going and hanging their decoration on a branch. Quite good excersise, and a good moment to teach the under 7s how to climb a ladder - and more importantly: how to get down again - safely. And, all in all, the tree looks good too!

It suddenly feels more Christmas-sy now, especially as we've limited the decorations at the Flat to an advent wreath (with purple candles and a pink candle, which again is new to me) and some fairy lights. Our Flat tree is about 25 cm tall and lacking in decoration as I haven't quite figured out decorations that are small enough for it. There's still a week though.

Spontaneous reaction

Last night I trundled over to the Teddington Studios to watch the last episode of the sitcom "Teenage Kicks" being filmed. The first episode hasn't aired yet, nor will it until March 2008, so I don't think many of us in the audience had much of an idea of what was going on. But that didn't really matter and we all were able to provide the "spontaneous reaction" required of us!

What a fascinating experience it is to see a programme being filmed infront of you. It's slightly like a very weird play. The set is layed out - pub on the right, house on the left - the actors take their places and say their lines in character, a director is hovering somewhere. Yet plays don't usually pause after every scene with the cast and crew reverting into their everyday roles, nor is there often a standup comedian MC threading the various bits together with bad jokes and explaining to the uninitiated what is going on.

I remember reading once that the laughter track on most sitcoms was recorded so many years ago that the people we hear laughing on our tv are dead now. Odd thought.

Watching the "Making of" was as interesting, if not more so, than the actual action. Seated in the audience we had the choice of seeing the unfolding plot on screens suspended from the roof at various points over our heads or watch it directly and unmediated. We also got the joy of seeing the scene being acted out again a few times when the first take didn't come up to scrap. That, more than anything, gave me the sense of the effort and work such a production involves. The ability of an actor to go back to a line halfway through the scene and pick up the action/emotion/idea again was fascinating to watch.

Ade Edmondson is the co-author and lead actor in "Teenage Kicks". It's Vyvyan (of the Young Ones) minus the studs and orange hair and all grown up (ish) with two teenagers and living in a under-the-stairs-cupboard! There were still strains of the punk woven in even if very much tamer and mostly in poster or t-shirt references. Who cares! I saw Vyvyan live! Sort of.

It's a new me and a new blog...template

I got tired of the old and rather sombre colour scheme and have gone for the lighter option. Lets see how confused I get with it all!

I am also very pleased that my addiction to the internet is now back in full swing after our connection was restored. It's been great catching up on all my favourite sites and finding some new ones as well.