A long way from Eden

New Blog

2009-09-12T15:31:00.004+01:00

I have started a new adventure and so it seems fitting to start a new blog to go with it.

You are invited to join me there for further tales.

Last Post From Calais... for now

2009-08-16T22:12:00.004+01:00

--> Read this first! <--

A text message from a friend: "Are you Sans Papiers? Am I going to have to come and feed you?"

After an emotional morning I was overjoyed to hear that my passport had arrived in the post. I could go home! I decided to leave that night as I would still only have four days in Brighton and lots to do while I was there, preparing for my big traveling adventure (more on that soon...)

Cycling down to the ferry I passed lots of Afghan men carrying boxes and bags full of food. I waved from my bike and nearly swerved into the pavement as my front basket was also laden with food. They saw me and recognising me, shouted "Jo! Jo!"

To my shame I'm finding it very hard to remember anyone's name. I have enough trouble with this under normal circumstances, but my efforts are even further frustrated when I can't even pronounce the name properly to begin with! I recognise people often, but usually have no idea where from. These people were obviously heading towards the Hazara Jungle - one I spent some time in on my last visit but didn't go to at all this time. Why had I not gone back there?

I shouted "I'm late! I'm sorry! Goodbye! I'll be back soon!"
They shouted their goodbyes after me.

After buying my ticket and infiltrating a line of cars with my bike I saw them again, passing by on the other side of the giant white metal security fence. I was painfully aware of how much each of them wanted to be in my place. Why should I have such privileges, denied to so many?

We waved to one another again through the white metal bars and they were gone. I will be back.

Ethiopian Squat - 12th August 09

2009-08-14T17:47:00.004+01:00

--> Read this first! <--

Last night P and I went to visit the Ethiopian Squat - two large buildings with a courtyard in-between near to the railway tracks. This is the one the police boarded up so I got first hand experience of the plank of wood and the rickety ladder.

It was dark by the time we got there, good thing I brought my head torch as this squat has no electricity. We brought them some candles as well.

A few of us sat huddled around two tealights in the courtyard, attempting to position a magazine page as a windbreak, picking it up quickly whenever it blew into the candles.

There are women at the Ethiopian Squat and the atmosphere felt to me different from some of the other Jungles, perhaps because of this. I wanted to find out more about the women and their stories, but the girl sitting with us was very shy and quiet and I didn't want to make her feel uncomfortable by asking too many questions. She and the man she was with had both been in Calais for fifteen days. I asked the man how long it was since he left Ethiopia. I thought he had misunderstood me, but no, his English is very good. It has taken him four years to get to Calais. He was put in prison for crossing one of the borders he passed over in order to get here. I asked if his family knows where he is, if he is in touch with them? He said no, he has not spoken to them in a long time. This is no life he is living. He does not want them to know where he is. If he gets to England, then he will contact them.

There were only four of us left around the candles and we realised this was a bad time for a visit. P has spent time there before and knows a little of how the Ethiopian community works. They are apparently one of the most organised Jungles, with a rota of who will try to cross and when. Freight train hopping is a popular choice, rather than paying Mafia to stuff them in trucks. The success and casualty rates are both quite high.

I have just read an update on wwwcalaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com that a delegation from No Borders South Wales has just delivered some 12volt car batteries, lights, LED lamps, a volt meter and a car battery charger to the Ethiopian squat. This has made me smile.

Iranian Jungle - 11th August 09

2009-08-13T21:31:00.000+01:00

--> Read this first! <--

Some of us met some Kurdish guys in the park the other day with very good English. They lived in Liverpool for a few years before being deported back to Iraq. Now they are back in Calais and again trying to reach England. They are young, around 18 and dress like typical London teenagers. One of them calls himself J. J was here during the No Borders Camp and he and his friends remember it well. They say they enjoyed it, lots going on and the police could not get onsite. The camp was held in the park we were sitting in, a regular hang-out for Kurdish people. I asked J if he could translate our 'Who We Are' statement into Kurdish and he agreed, so today M and I went back to find him.

We found the Iranian Jungle first in the same park, and had just sat down with the men there to ask about Persian translations and how to find the Kurdish people when three CRS suddenly appeared, seemingly from nowhere. Neither the migrants nor us had a chance to go anywhere. They checked M's ID and asked if I could speak French. I replied no, only English. They asked for my ID. I said I don't have it. One of them saw my bag and told me to open it.
I asked "for what are you searching?"
He said "Just open it."
I said "Why?"
He replied "Because I am a policeman."
I said "That's not a reason"
But he said "Yes it is."
I opened my bag. I don't know French law and I didn't have my passport. I wanted to do the minimum amount possible to get them to leave me alone.
He saw my notebook and went to read it, but I grabbed it from him and said, "that's my notebook! What are you looking for?"
He saw my wallet and asked for it. I feigned shock and said "you want my money?!"
He said something about ID so I opened my wallet, took out my bank card and gave it to him. He looked at it and handed it back. That seemed to satisfy him.

They then moved onto their intended victims: the four Iranian men we had been sitting with. As the police were talking to them I began quietly writing a text message to send out to the emergency number, but I was seen by 'hands-on-hips CRS' and told to stop. We basically had to just sit there and watch while the cops took the men, despite protests from them that they had already been picked up early that morning. The CRS simply replied that this was "not possible". Before the cops arrived the men had been telling us of how there had been 11 arrests at 6am that morning when the police came and woke everyone up and took them all. Twice in one day! They wouldn't even let one man put his bag away in his tent.

P turned up as they were leaving and managed to take some pictures. My hands were shaking like crazy as I sent texts out saying what was going on.

www.calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com

The Palestinian Jungle - 10th August 09

2009-08-13T20:58:00.003+01:00

--> Read this first! <--

We have a piece of writing about who we are that has already been translated into Pasto and Dari. We still need some other languages, especially Arabic and Kurdish. B and I headed down to the "Palestinian Jungle" to say hi and hopefully make some contacts there.

As with all the Jungles I have visited, the people sitting around makeshift structures in the port were friendly and pleased to see us. We brought them candles and some oranges, which they shared with us.

We chatted to a weathered-looking man from Sudan who told us he has been living in Calais for the past eight years, in the structure nearest to where we were sitting. B and I were both shocked. Eight years is by far the longest any of us has heard of someone living in the Jungle. I asked if he was trying to get to England but he shook his head slowly, pointed to his hair, his knees, his tattered clothes. "I am fifty-seven, nearly fifty-eight. I stay here in Calais."

We spoke with some of the other men, mostly from Sudan, one from Eritrea. Most spoke reasonably good English. There were no Palestinians in sight and I have since discovered it has been mis-named, although some people report having met at least one Palestinian there previously. This is the most international of the Jungles with a mixture of different nationalities living together.

After three games of dominoes in which the winner was unclear (I never did understand the rules of that game), the CRS police suddenly showed up. Some of the men got up. Some shouted, some ran away and were chased by police with truncheons. One man hid behind the sofa we were sitting on. The remaining men stayed where they were sitting and laughed at the others being chased by the cops. This was obviously such a familiar scene that it had become a source of some amusement. To us it came as something of a shock. B went over to the police to confront them. I was on my way to back him up when I saw them check his ID Shit - I still don't have my passport! I backed off and went back to the guys still sitting around the dominoes table. Some of the others were standing near to the waters edge, pretending they were about to jump whenever the cops came near. It seemed to work really well. The police obviously weren't too keen in jumping in after them. The men by the dominoes table thought it was a hoot! Eventually I managed to figure out that I had our emergency phone number in my pocket and after a couple of botched attempts I succeeded in remembering the French code.

Within a few minutes around ten activists were on the scene on bikes, some with cameras - filming the cops filming us. The CRS were clearly not very pleased to see us. They were checking IDs and photographing people, sometimes a few cm's away from people's faces, an intimidation tactic familiar to me from experiences in the UK.

To my shame I stayed well back, fearful of arrest without any ID. The migrants have to put up with this everyday - sometimes more than once a day. Yes, I am a coward. But I am getting better. At least I am here in Calais.

The police left without arresting anyone, but unfortunately returned later when most of us had gone and took three people.

www.calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com

A Sunrise Cycle-Tour of Calais Slums

2009-08-13T20:23:00.004+01:00

--> Read this first! <--

My alarm went off at 4am. This is the earliest morning I have seen since my first retreat. Knowing that in England it was an hour earlier made me feel the cold and dark even more. Still, the spirit of adventure was with me as three of us crawled out of our tents, unlocked our bikes and peddled out into the night. We were going to check out a rumour told to us by some of the street cleaners - that the CRS gather at 5am every morning outside the train station, before moving off to the Jungles to carry out dawn raids and arrests.

We positioned ourselves opposite the station and sipped black coffee in plastic cups while keeping a bleary eye on the road opposite. Nothing. We waited until around 5:30am, moving a little into the park behind us when we realised how conspicuous we must look.

I hadn't seen this park before. It currently has a display of aerial scenes from around the world with an environmental focus. Some of them are really stunning. This is the place activists recently fly-posted pictures of migrants, making connections between migration and environmental crises, as well as saying, "look - this is what's going on here, in Calais, right under your noses!"

The moon was still high in the black sky and deep in the even blacker waters of the pond when we left the park and I was given a cycle-tour of Calais. I can report that even Calais is beautiful at sunrise.

We didn't enter any of the Jungles as early morning is when people try to sleep after having spent the night attempting to stow-away or cling under trucks, jump trains, steal boats or swim...

I saw the squat by the railway that the Ethiopians live in. The police recently bricked it up, with wounded and a pregnant woman still inside. Activists came and knocked through a doorway while the cement was still wet, but police came back again. Now access is only via a wooden plank going up to a wall and a rickety wooden ladder on the other side. This means the wounded people and pregnant woman must remain inside the whole time as the route in and out is too dangerous. The only bonus of this is that the police have effectively blockaded themselves out. They tried to get in but the first was too fat and they gave up. People have been taking food and vitamins to the pregnant woman.

I have an instinctive urge to find this woman and see if I can help her situation in any way. It occurs to me that any of us could spend our time helping any one person and of course it would be worthwhile, but there are up to 2,000 migrants in Calais living like this. Everything we do seems so ineffectual, like a sticking-plaster on a gunshot.

We cycled past the Eritrean squat and the Palestinian Jungle, which had been trashed by the police a day earlier. A few tiny pallet structures covered in blankets remained or had since been rebuilt.

We made our way back to camp where we drank more coffee and I passed out for a couple of hours before the sun got too hot on the tent. D was cooking something hot and spicy for breakfast, but alas the emergency phone rang and it was abandoned as we all sped off to the Pashtun Jungle to check a report that 20-30 CRS vans were headed there. False alarm. The only action was a few Afghan men gathering water in containers from the pump out front and slooshing it over their heads. Back to camp and breakfast - finally!

www.calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com

Sans Papiers in Calais

2009-08-13T20:09:00.005+01:00

I am about to post some of the stuff I have written about my recent visit to Calais. I am back in the UK now. It might be helpful to first read the account from when I was last in Calais as part of the No Borders Camp. There is now also a blog about what we have been doing over there and some of the things we have witnessed at www.calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com

I took my bike this time, which meant cycling 12 miles over Dover Hill (basically a mountain!) from Folkestone to Dover after a three hour train journey. I eventually made it to the ticket office after cycling for over two hours (including a few stops for blackberry munching) and asked for a ticket. The woman booked me a space and asked for my passport. This was the point at which I realised I had not given a single thought to my passport until now - it was safely put away in my drawer at home. Shit! I explained my situation to the woman at the desk and she said she would sell me a ticket, but I might get stopped at passport control. I decided to go for it...and somehow made it to France without getting checked.

All well and good, but in France it is law that you have to carry ID with you at all times. A bit of a problem if you are expecting harassment from French police on a daily basis!

The Very Short Little Green Gathering(and subsequent adventures)

2009-08-05T13:16:00.004+01:00

Lost Chance Saloon

When we first heard the Big Green Gathering might be cancelled, we didn't take the news very seriously. We had already been onsite for a few days and had done most of the work on the bar we were building. The festival punters would be arriving in a couple of days and we could finally relax from all of the hard work and settle into much shorter shifts. Tragically it was not just a rumour. After two days of erecting marquees and three days of making benches, disbelief turned to anger-to frustration-to action. We had enough seating to sit over 350 people. We had the biggest and most beautiful venue onsite. We had almost finished creating it - even most of the decor was up. There was no question of us not having a party. That was one of the quickest consensus decisions I have ever seen.

I got the task of inviting people - trogging round site in the rain announcing that the Last-Chance-Lost-Chance-No-Chance-Saloon would be throwing a big party. Everyone said they would come. One guy asked if he could bring his horse. Ummm... ok?!

The party was quite a success. Most of the people onsite - several hundred by now - came down to our renamed 'Lost Chance Saloon' (we put some zero's over the 'A's) The horsedrawn guy did indeed show up on his horse, which he rode into the marquee whooping and then tied up right in the middle of the party.

We all wore our best cowboy gear and wench frocks. Our beer had not yet made it to site, but plenty of people had enough to go around and there were some other outfits with cider to sell and no venue yet, so it all worked out ok- although we are still £6,000 in debt and I'm not sure what happened about the people who spent £2,000 on eggs. I didn't notice any giant omlettes. One of the many small businesses who are threatened by a festival being cancelled so close to opening. But, I guess the police were probably quite aware of that when they put they piled conditions on that the festival had no hope of meeting. Read all about it ->here<- ->here<- and ->here<-

I noticed that most people were trying to fit a whole festivals worth of drinking, drugs and flirting into one night. Frustration and desperation mingling nicely with beer and sweat. Still, a good time was had by all, despite the limited music available (how many hours can one put up with drum'n'base, occasionally interspersed with cheesy classics?)

The next day we burnt most of the benches we had spent days building and set about taking it all back down again. With come-downs.

Bristol

The Very Short Little Green Gathering ended in a downpour, flushing away any hopes we may have had of a group camping trip. By the time I surfaced from my tent the only lift left was going to Bristol. So I sat in the back of the van, dodging drips from the light-fitting while writing my diary and trying to figure out why I was going to Bristol. I realised I had actually been meaning to go to Bristol at some point anyway but had long since assumed I wouldn't have the time. I sent out some text messages and decided to just go where the wind took me.

Bristol has a thriving squat scene. A lot of my squatter friends have moved here over the past few months after being worn down by serial illegal evictions by police in Brighton. I stayed in my friend's squat and a few of us from there went out to the Occasional Cinema being held at a squatted Free Shop in St Pauls.

The next day my friend Emma dropped by in her van and took us all on a group outing to the woods. Emma is one of the people I've been meaning to spend some time with. Mark is another of those people. After dropping the squatters back home, Emma and I continued our adventure and drove out to Radford Mill Farm where 'Money-free Mark' has been living in his caravan without money for the past 8 months. Here I was pleasantly surprised to bump into Tasha, a girl I met on retreat in Spain. Tasha had seen Emma play in a bar in Bristol a few days earlier... Small World!

After a night in a comfy big bed in the farmhouse I had to again decide what to do next. I almost hitched back to Brighton, but discovered I had left my waterproofs in a friend's bag in the woods in Bristol, so took that as a sign and got a lift back to the squat with Emma.

Tribal Voices

A text message had been doing the rounds calling all BGG refugees to a smaller gathering in Hay-on-Wye in Wales. Small World Solar Stage, Triban, Lost Horizons Sauna and Pachamamas Chai Tipi would all be there. £6 a night to camp in beautiful countryside by a river, with horses, a pub and hire boat. I decided to walk to the nearest motorway junction and stick my thumb out. I found the spot Emma told me about and it was a good one. After only a couple of minutes a dreadlocked man and his young daughter picked me up and took me fifty miles to a service station. After a bit of a walk up a service road I managed to cross the M5 and waited only a few minutes on a slip-road for a bubbly woman called Louise to pick me up and take me down the M50 to Monmouth. I had been intending to get out before that, but we must have missed both of the spots I chose on the map somehow. Never mind, Monmouth will be better then.

Some passers-by described the various routes I could take to Hay, and on a whim I chose the old slow winding road which would have virtually no traffic. Don't ask why, it just seemed like the right decision. I found the bridge and gatehouse they described easily and on noticing the Green Dragon pub (I used to drink in The Green Dragon in Brighton before it closed down), I decided to ask someone there for directions. There were a few people outside smoking, but on instinct I headed straight to the middle-aged ponytailed man sitting alone. I asked if this was the right road to Hay-on-Wye.
"I'm not sure, I'm not from around here.. Why, where are you going? Are you going to a festival?"
I said that I was.
"Will you take me with you?"
"Ok."
"I'll tell you what, I need an hour to sober up. If you buy me a coffee, I'll drive you there."
"Alright!"

My drivers name was David. At the time I wrote this he was playing guitar by the fire having stayed up all night having a great old time. Each time I pass him, he's telling a different stranger the tale of how we met and how he came to be at this festival...
"...And she looked me straight in the eye and I thought, I don't know where she's going, but wherever it is, I'm going there with her..."

I cannot get enough of dancing these days. Minutes after getting onsite I was donning my red frock and gyrating and vibrating to the Glitzy Baghags in Small World, realising I really never had any other option than to come here. The Tribal Voices Gathering reminds me of why I got into festivals in the first place. A small gathering made up almost entirely of festival crews and musicians, with a real free festival atmosphere and ethic. A steward rota at the gate can be signed up to by anyone who wants a nights free camping and a hot meal in the pub. The kind of place you could leave anything lying around and know the worst that might happen is some hippy would spend a few hours trying to find you to give you your camera/wallet/tobacco back. The kind of place where people make truffles with lots of amazing super-food ingredients and half a gram of mushrooms in each one and sell them two for a fiver. The kind of place where a whole tent full of people share mushroom truffles and learn how to blur the lines between performer and audience, spectator and stage. Where rolling around in spontaneous contortion yoga dancing madness, the only man to look at you strangely is immediately offered some truffles by the people nearest to him.

Monday morning arrived and I finally felt like it might be time to go home. After asking around I got myself a lift to the Southern part of the M25 and hitched from there. We left late and I only made it as far as Lewes before it was very dark and hitching was getting harder. I decided to give up and get a train. I saw the ticket conductor so decided not to risk bunking. I just asked him if there was a ticket machine. He said he had one so I got on and we started chatting. I told him how I'd hitched from Wales but had decided to give up. He was so impressed he told me he wouldn't charge me for a ticket, bless him... Wait, did I just hitch a train?

Calais

2009-07-10T10:53:00.004+01:00

On Tuesday 23rd April I set off with some friends in a minibus filled with cooking equipment to the No Borders Activist Camp in Calais. Held in a field bordered by a motorway on one side and a residential area on the other, it was a less than idyllic setting for a few hundred activists from France, Belgium, England, Germany, Spain, Austria and Slovakia - possibly more, but these were the places I heard mentioned - to gather together for a week of workshops and meetings, planning towards a big demo on the Saturday.

I had decided to just come to the camp and cook, stay out of trouble and maybe go to the odd workshop. On coming to Calais I had little idea about the situation there. I knew there were migrants living in slums known as 'The Jungle', that their situation was not good and that most of them were trying desperately to reach England. What I did not know was the scale of the problem. There are actually more than two thousand people living in Jungles. There are different jungles for different nationalities, some of which have better facilities than others. I have heard of one jungle that has shops and a mosque, while the ones we visited had shack-type dwellings made mostly out of wooden pallets and bits of tarp. They did not look unlike many of the protest sites I have visited - minus the tree-houses, the brew crew, and of course the fact that these people are not really living this way out of choice. There was no water supply in the Jungles we visited and we heard that somebody had recently died trying to wash in the canal.

Helping 'sans papiers' migrants in any way is a criminal offence in France. Despite this, there are two humanitarian organisations that have been feeding people in Calais for free for several years. The food distribution points are fixed and it seems there is a begrudging acceptance of it from the police. The local authorities are supportive inasmuch as they allow the food to be distributed and they allowed the camp to happen. I was initially surprised that we had the support of the local government (although not the mayor apparently), but then realised the council probably don't want thousands of starving people on their doorstep either and would be more than happy for Britain to open it's border - the only closed internal E.U. border, making it in theory legal to apply for asylum here, but giving no legal means to actually get here.

La Belle Etoile have been feeding migrants in Calais for free at 2pm every weekday for the past fifteen years. They said a few of us could come with them on the Friday and help to see how they do things. On hearing that there was no lunchtime food distro at the weekends, a few of us had decided to see if we could take some food down there ourselves, given that there were three kitchens onsite and we had more than enough food for the people there. So we went to help. As well as the food, they give out these little plastic bags filled with a few slices of bread, a bit of patisserie, an apple, a plastic spoon and a toiletry item. We set up an assembly line. I put a toiletry item into each of the bags handed to me. There were mini and full-sized tubes of toothpaste, toothbrushes, sample sachets of face cream, body lotion, small bars of soap, plastic razors... I had images of people getting their daily plastic bag and peering inside with dismay to find the 5th tube of toothpaste that week, when all they needed was a bar of soap. I wondered if people swapped with each other, or if most of it ended up in the bin.

When all of the 500 bags were full we walked down to the food distribution point as there was not enough room in the van. We could easily see why it was in the best interest of the police for them to let it happen there: a large open car park right next door to the Gendarmerie. A few almost-undercover cops stood around the edge or sat in cars staring at us. The food given out was not the most appetising I have ever seen: basically stock-based soup with butter and rice in. Not very filling, and some people travel miles by foot to get there from the furthest Jungles. La Belle Etoile get a bit of funding from local government and some donations, but it hardly seems enough for them to feed so many people. The whole thing felt a bit like a soup-kitchen. I have been on both sides of a soup kitchen so this was something I could relate to. The whole thing is a bit demeaning, with people being basically herded into lines.

Of the migrants I spoke to on site, most were Afghan, Kurdish, Iraqi or Iranian. We also met some Eritrean guys living in a large squatted house near the food distribution point and also about six women, who came along late and went straight to the front of the queue along with any injured men. These are the only migrant women I saw for the entire duration of the camp.

There were lots of meetings. I went to one. Usually I would go to lots, but it just didn't feel appropriate for me. It was heartening to see migrants going to meetings as well as the usual activist types, and that there were an increasing number of languages being translated. It seemed more worthwhile for me to just hang out with people. I made friends with a small group from Iran and we had a lot of conversations. Listening to people's stories taught me more about the situation than any meeting I've ever been to. Dancing and hanging out taught me more about their cultures. Visiting the Jungle and sharing food felt more to me like solidarity than going on a demo. So I didn't go on the demo. Instead we cooked up more food than the camp could possibly eat and took the excess to the Jungle. We went first to the food distro point and fed the people who live nearby. We bought a bit of fruit and chocolate and tried to make sure there was a good amount of protein in the food we cooked. Then we went to the Jungle. The first day we went to one near to the ferry port, relatively small and hidden away in the sand dunes. After serving the food it felt odd to just stand there watching, so I crammed in my second portion of food that hour. Sharing food felt more natural than just serving it.

The second day we took food to a different Jungle - a massive one. I asked how many people and was told 700. Some others from camp had been trying to build a tree-house with the idea that it would be harder for the police to evict it. It took a while for them to get across the language barrier, but it eventually seemed like a welcome idea. Every day the police come and take people - 10, 20, or 30, sometimes 100. Migrants in Calais are used to constant arrest. Sometimes they are put in detention centres, sometimes beaten or tear-gassed. The police often trash jungles and the people we spoke to had been told that this would happen there soon.

It seems the great cultural levellers are food, football, dancing and American pop stars. The day after Michael Jackson died, everyone was talking about it. We went to a Jungle where only one person spoke English, but all of the others told us 'Michael Jackson! Michael Jackson!' eyes wide, hands making slitting motions across throats. One of the Iranians I made friends with was into Britney Spears. He asked what 'gimme gimme gimme' means. I tried to explain 'give me'. But he refused to believe. No 'gimmmmmeeee gimmmmmeeeee...'

My two favourite moments: the Iranian disco on the second night and the traditional Pashtun dance - there must have been over one hundred people dancing: a rare glimpse of a threatened culture.

Now that I have used the word 'migrants' a lot, as well as referencing several nationalities, I should point out that there was a bit of controversy over wording. I'm using the words 'migrants' and 'activists' to relate to people who were at the camp for very different reasons, with different degrees of privilege, etc. I'm mentioning different nationalities as I believe it gives a more thorough picture of where people are coming from, and also because that's the way those people labelled themselves and I think that imposing our Western anarchist ideas against nationality onto people is a bit arrogant. At one point I was basically told that it's racist to say that there are cultural differences between different countries. From what I saw the cultural differences were very obvious to everyone.

Gender was a particularly overt issue. About halfway through the camp a feminist security team formed to respond to some of the problems that were emerging as a result of very young males getting very drunk (often for the first time) and dancing with women (often for the first time!) There were a couple of reports of men trying to get into women's tents, although it is unclear whether these people were actually just looking for a space to sleep in. More cultural misunderstandings? It's easy to speculate. The vast majority of people I spoke to were very respectful.

The other kind of misunderstandings were also awkward. Having to explain to people that we were only there for a week. That we would be going home to England. That we could not open the border for them. We were there to protest, but ultimately have no more power than they do - just a little square document that allows us freedom of movement and restricts theirs. I have never felt my privilege so strongly as walking to the ferry with a cardboard sign saying 'England' and bumping into some of the people we had shared food with. 'Yes, we are going home now. No, you can't come with us. Sorry. See you in England. Good luck!'

Something I keep being asked by people when I talk about this is why all these people are so desperate to reach England. I'm not completely certain I know the answer. Some have family and friends here. Some were in the Uk for years and have since been deported and made it all of the way back to Calais. Most of the people I spoke to have a very high regard for England. 'You are from England? Very good country, yes?' 'Hmm... sort of' was the only reply I could muster. It's difficult telling people that even if they do make it across the water, their lives may not be much better. Only 30% of asylum claims are actually granted. Many people will be deported or locked up in detention centres. Many will be killed trying to cross the channel. A lot of people we spoke to had their fingerprints taken crossing the border into Greece - often the first EU country if you come by land from the Middle-East. I had to break the news to one man that as his fingerprints were now on record in Greece, he can only legally claim asylum there. He was devastated. He said he had paid 4,000euros. Undeniably there are many people traffickers around making a lot of money by misleading people.

The camp ended on a sad note. All of the activists were packing up to go home and people with the wrong coloured skin and wrong coloured bits of paper in their pockets were becoming less and less. Some stayed to help prepare food and to tat anything not needed from the structures being dismantled. Unfortunately a lot of other stuff went missing too, including several mobile phones, mp3 players and a couple of wallets. Also the donations tin from one of the kitchens. A boy of about twelve years old was seen coming out of my tent. A friend and I made a vague attempt at confronting him about it with the aid of two translators. What followed was bizarre and I can't say I understood it completely, but we were made to wait while the men went off and spoke together with the boy, one or other coming back every now and then to ask a question. There was much apologising and this seemed to put even more of a downer on the mood as word spread around the camp. We saw the thefts as the actions two or three people, but the men seemed to feel shame on behalf of their whole community. More cultural differences!

The camp at Calais deeply affected me. I felt a strong emotional connection to the people I was there with - some of the activists who I am now closer to, and some of the migrants I made friends with. That we had to just leave them there seemed ridiculous and selfish. I am still processing my emotions about all of this but I am committed to going back there soon to do something else. What can I do? I don't know.

There is another personal account from the camp -->here<--

Further reading: http://london.noborders.org.uk/node/177

Captain Scarlet's Journal

2009-05-07T22:27:00.002+01:00

Day 1,

We arrived at Port Solent last night. We have a female skipper, which pleases me. This makes a majority female crew with only two out of six males. I'm not surprised to hear that this is unusual. The males on board are my vegan buddy Jamie and Dave, here learning to sail with his girlfriend Sarah. They are a very Dave and Sarah kind of a couple, clearly a little alarmed at the prospect of sharing a small boat for five days with three freaks from Brighton with peculiar dietary habits. For once mine is not the weirdest or most awkward, having been outdone on this occasion by '100 Mile Beth' and her local food experiment. She is frying pancakes behind me as I write in my journal. Jamie, Beth and I have brought all of the food we need with us for our five days of sailing. Beth has a whole bag with just salad in it as well as a trolley-bag full of other stuff after panicking that she wouldn't have enough to eat.

The weather is bad and currently looks to be bad all day. When we start moving in about 45 minutes I shall find out whether I get seasick or not. I have lots of ginger with me just in case – apparently ginger is good for seasickness.

Day 2,

I am pleased to report no seasickness from any of our crew. The sea got a bit rough yesterday too, so I'm sure we would know about it. Today the weather is clear and hot, yet still with a fierce wind once you get out to sea.

My mind is awash with seafaring jargon. It's all reefs and bowlines, fenders and cleats, jib, boom and halyard. I am reminded of my first ever school French class by the way we are thrown right in at the deep end, left to decipher the commands we are given by deduction... “Jo, could you put the main halyard on the winch please? We're going to put a tack on.” Umm...

Gybing sounds to me like some kind of strange dance. In a way it sort of is. The way we wiggle the boat slowly along our course while sailing with the wind. It can be a dangerous dance though. A sign on the deck clearly states:

WARNING
GYBING can cause injury
Be Briefed
Be Prepared
Be Safe

Blimey!

Day 3,

This morning I managed a spot of yoga on the pontoon at Hamble where we moored up last night. Hamble is the most expensive marina on the Solent, but according to our skipper Karen, they also have the best showers.

Last night we did some night sailing. I loved it. All of the big ugly depressing industrial buildings and oil liners and container ships vanished under a velvety black cloak. Only a man-made constellation of lights could be seen on a sea of inky ripples. We learned how to navigate by the lights: occulting, slow and quick flashing red and green buoys; north, south, east and west cardinals; how to tell which was a vessel is traveling: green light for starboard, red for port.

Today the sea is a shimmering aquamarine dress with glittering sequins. The sun is out but the wind still bites through my five layers of clothing, woolly hat and scarf. I am getting nicely tanned through my factor thirty sun cream nonetheless.

Day 4,

Last night was spent at Lymington, definitely my favourite marina so far and the only one not to have been privatized. Portsmouth seems an exact clone of Brighton Marina and Cowes and Hamble aren't much better – hardly worth going anywhere if that's all you're going to see! Lymington is just a small pontoon out the front of the village. A bloke comes chugging along on his little boat to collect the mooring fee with a bus ticket machine.

I had a little walk up to the local graveyard in the morning and was surprised to discover how much I had missed trees and grass and the colour green. Not sure how I would do seeing only blue and black for days and days on end. I did have one exciting encounter with nature though; yesterday while getting laughed at rowing the dinghy around I came across a fascinating creature that I have been assured must have been a cuttlefish. He swam under my dingy while keeping his big old beady eye on me. I felt we bonded.

Day 5,

I have been having some potent dreams sleeping on the water. Perhaps something lurking deep below is whispering secrets to me while I sleep. During a dream one night I had a clear realisation of how polluted humans have made the sea. It was saddening, sickening and made me think again that we have already pushed things too far. Is there any way out of this? Increasingly it seems not. I mentioned to our skipper that it may not be such a great thing to be flushing toilet cleaner and non-eco (well, any really) washing-up liquid and other cleaners out to sea. Apparently there is an organisation called The Green Blue working with the sailing industry to help it green up it's activities. They have persuaded TUI Travel, the mega-company that owns Sunsail our sailing school that they need to switch to Ecover. However, it's going to take a whole year before the change is actually implemented due to the massive beaurocratic feedback loops in a company this size. Sigh.

On arriving back at Portsmouth it took me a while to get my land-legs back, despite having been off the boat for at least an hour or two most evenings. We were presented with our Competent Crew certificates and got a ride to the station from our skipper. My main reason for taking this course was to learn enough to be useful on a boat and increase my chances of hitching one for part of the world travel escapade I'm hoping to embark on later this year. Also, to check I won't get too seasick and that I actually enjoy sailing. I can definitely tick all of those boxes now, apart from missing the trees.

Boiling Point

2009-04-05T17:12:00.004+01:00

"How are you?" a passing friend asks as I stand on the corner of Threadneedle Street on Thursday afternoon.
"Angry!" I reply.

Actually, anger was one of several thousand emotions battling for attention in my body at that moment. I had just been moved on by the police for the second time that day in a manner both aggressive and patronizing ('cycle carefully now' as we were released from an arbitrary cordon). We, the couple of hundred bystanders on the pavement near the demo at Bank, in solidarity with the man who died the previous day while stuck inside a police kettle, had been surrounded by police and given a choice: leave the area completely or join the protest inside the police cordon by the statues outside the Bank of England. After the previous day, people were unsurprisingly wary of going inside a police kettle and so were declining that offer and moving around to the next bit of pavement where the exercise was repeated. Today's demo had started off with a memorial, flowers and messages of well-wishing, but the police had quickly stopped that and were treating it as though it were "Just more of the same as yesterday", as a cop was overheard saying to a man in a suit who had inquired as to what was going on. No mention of the death, or of the memorial.

Beside me an American man in a tweed suit telling lies to a camera crew is heckled by a protester and ends up revising his story. We laugh for what feels like the first time in years. Tweed Suit turns on us, blaming us for the death of the man. "What were you doing at 7pm last night? You should have been looking after him!"

Rewind to Wednesday. Unless you have been shut off from the world completely, you will no doubt have heard all about the police predictions of the 'Summer of Rage' and it's opening events for the G20 summit. You have probably also heard lots of reports from the day itself. For once, a lot of the media has actually shown some of what really happened. This, this, this and this article from George Monbiot seemed to me particularly accurate.

However, none of the mainstream media that I have seen have mentioned the really shocking violence at the two London squats on Thursday. I spoke to a girl who was there and had been eating breakfast when riot police with tazer guns broke down the door, threatened and beat people (one guy had his face bashed repeatably into the floor), then arrested them, left them all sitting on the pavement in handcuffs for an hour before de-arresting and releasing them due to a lack of evidence against anyone there. They then said that they hadn't come to evict the building, but since everyone had left they might as well board it up. My friend had one cop snarl into her face that this was what she got 'for smashing up our city'. What a charmer.

I'm still finding it hard to process the emotions that have come up both during and after the G20 protests. I had already had an emotionally turbulent couple of weeks before I got to London and found myself completely unprepared for what was going on. There was so much I could see that needed to be done - emotional support, legal support, making food and drinks, keeping people calm and helping make decisions - but I found myself paralyzed with a mixture of adrenaline, fear, exhaustion and frustration that I'm still trying to process now.

I managed to escape the kettle (police cordon) at the bank (amazing what you can do when you need a pee that badly!) and decided that if I was going to be in a kettle, I would much rather it was a Climate Camp kettle. I had an inkling they would be a spot more organised than the Bank protest, and how right I was - a colourful array of around 30 tents, a toilet tent with compost loos and private wee areas, a farmers market and a people's kitchen, three workshop spaces and a meditation area greeted me in an area of Bishopsgate that had been decorated with bunting, banners and had chalk messages swirling over the pavements. Ah, how I love these fluffy campers! Here there was a golden dancing block, a samba band, poetry, vegan cake and uh... riot police in balaclavas. Well, who can blame them - hippy students with glitter and bits of chalk can be very threatening after all. That's why they needed to use such force to evict the camp with batons and shields just after midnight. I had already left but heard all the gory details from friends who were there, plus this footage on youtube shows the eviction.

Obviously I don't think that legality and morality are particularly synonymous, but if the police tactics used on Wednesday and Thursday were legal, then things are already a lot worse than I thought.

The Guardian report that there will be an inquiry by the IPCC (Independent Police Complaints Commission) after witnesses have come forward saying they saw Ian Tomlinson assaulted by the police. But who are the IPCC anyway? And how independent exactly are they? Isn't this a little bit like the police investigating themselves?

If you want to hear what happened to Ian Tomlinson, the man who died in the kettle at Bank, I suggest listening to the two eye-witnesses on this video link.

Can Masdeu

2009-03-04T16:48:00.005Z

Can Masdeu is a squatted community and social centre on the outskirts of Barcelona. It's home to around 25 people, including some children. I visited it on my way back from Ecodharma - a while ago now but I have been meaning to write about it.

A friend lives at Can Masdeu and it was he who said I could come. Unfortunately he neglected to tell anyone else I was coming. I arrived late one night and shouted both mine and his names up at the person in the window above to discover I had missed him by an hour. He was out for the night and nobody had heard of me. I felt a little... well, not unwelcome because people were very nice about it, but it was explained to me that there are alternative on and off months for visitors and I had inadvertantly picked an off month to appear on. Oops.

Places like Can Masdeu inspire me with hope. The building was once a lepper colony. It's a listed building but had been left to fall down by the council. Since the squatters moved in they have been working hard to repair it. There is one workday a week on the house and one on the garden when everyone pitches in. I was there for the garden day. They have a huge community garden and people from all around Barcelona come to help out. The gardens provide most of the vegetables for the community. They buy organic grains and pulses from co-operatives and also get some 'recycled food' from skips and from donations from shops. It's not just food that gets donated. A local bike shop regularly donates bike parts that people don't want after they have upgraded. Apparently it's quite a top quality bike shop so the donations are often really good stuff. The bike workshop space is huge and includes the old confessional booths in the lower part of the building. There is also a 'quiet space' for yoga and meditation, a social centre open to the public on Sundays, a free shop and internet room. The shower block is outside and uses spring water heated with solar panels and there's a bike-powered washing machine. The toilets are composting ones outside and the classiest women's pisser I have ever seen - a sort of bidet contraption that flushes with spring water!

Can Masdeu obviously has a lot of strong links with the local community and shops, the bike shop being one example. They also do environmental stuff with local kids and while I was there they got a van load of unsold televisions delivered from Ikea! Seven years ago, a few months after it was first squatted, the police came to evict them - but the community resisted. During the eviction attempt there was a huge amount of local support and hundreds of people came to show solidarity and to try to get food to the people resisting inside. The police were stopping supplies from going in and food and morale was low. Eventually the police left. They still haven't been back, but the community is aware that there could still be an eviction attempt at any time.

Can Masdeu is not as vegan as most of the communities and social centres I have visited. The communal meals while I was there were all vegan but the community keeps chickens and bees and my friend hunts the local wild boar. Fortunately he managed not to kill anything while I was there - just. We found a sick blind rabbit with myxomatosis sitting on the road. It let us pick it up, which turned out not to be a good idea given that it was crawling with fleas. Fortunately the fleas much preferred soft rabbit fur to my hands. Martin suggested we kill it but I was sure there must be another way. I later found out the disease is treatable and the rabbit should have been taken to a vet. Now we'll know for next time. We didn't kill it but it was probably in a lot of pain. Maybe we should have?

I made oat milk with one of the guys who lives there. He has inspired me to refine my recipe: it now includes tahini, vanilla and a little sugar or honey. I have been debating about honey a lot lately. I had a few sips of mead one night which was made from the honey they collect at Can Masdeu. I asked a few questions and ascertained that they do not kill any of the bees on purpose, they do not feed them any substitutes and only take (what they consider to be) excess honey. I am starting to think that super local honey collected under these conditions is possibly slightly more ethical than sugar. The long-term aim is of course to un-develop my sweet tooth.

On the garden day I was delightfully surprised to bump into somebody familiar - a girl who knows me from Brighton and shares some of my friends. We got on really well, digging through the rotting compost, almost slicing a rat in half with my spade and discussing vegan dilemmas, Buddhism, paganism and the strange and wonderful places we have come across. It turns out she lives at Escanda, another radical community in Spain I have been meaning to visit - so now I have a contact there and renewed excitement about visiting.
Unfortunately I didn't stay long enough to see the social centre while it was open, but I did have a look at it and donated one of my jumpers to the free shop. Can Masdeu is definitely on the itinerary for my next adventure: "The Big Trip". I am starting to plan the trip now. It's all very exciting. I am inviting suggestions of places for me to visit and I'm also looking for travel companions for parts of the trip. Where would you like to go? I basically want to go everywhere: the world by thumb!

Winter at Ecodharma

2009-02-04T18:21:00.004Z

The snow on the mountain ranged from ankle to knee-deep, and even the landrover got stuck in places. We parked near Cal Victor, the house/ruin we stayed by on the working retreat and where Guhyapati ('G') has his yurt. The snow and ice got even worse further along the track and access by any vehicle would be too dangerous to attempt. This time we would be in Cal Monsor on the other side of the valley. This house was rebuilt from ruins by hand with the help of friends and the local community and is a bit warmer than the little yurt I shared with Lucy in September.

By the time the retreat started a few days later the sun was blazing hot. I was walking around in a vest and people were talking about sun hats and lotion. Snow was still on the ground almost ten days since it last snowed. I had no idea snow could last so long in such heat!

The retreat stretched over three weeks from December 20th to Jan 10th. I have been looking for a way to escape xmas for years and finally found it. For those who wanted to celebrate we compromised with a puja.

I tried my first ever persimmon (and second, third and tenth!) - a strange tomato-looking fruit. I know a tomato is a fruit, but a persimmon is, well, fruitier. They arrived in our fruit and veg boxes each week and it was a race to eat them before they went rotten and fell apart, although stewing with porridge seems to work well and they are also nice with chocolate. The boxes included a range of local organic fruit and veg from a co-op. Tragically the squat we were getting bread from on the last retreat got evicted two weeks prior.

Communication, community and group dynamics made up a large part of the retreat structure. We had consensus-based meetings after dinner each day where we each shared in decision making about the retreat. We experimented with bringing mindfulness into this practice as well, sounding a bell after each agenda item. It had a very positive effect, bringing us back to awareness before moving on.

A contentious issue was the vegan question. Three of us were vegan and most others felt we should all eat a vegan diet (plus honey) during the retreat. There was only a small amount of resistance to this, but being an emotive issue it seemed to come up again and again. I learned a lot about communication, patience and compassion during this retreat and this issue and the way we dealt with it had a very large part to play in that. Several others mentioned they were thinking about going vegan by the end of the retreat and I think talking about the issues involved rather than shying away from them was one of the main factors.

G has an interesting method of teaching. He explains complex carbon cycles with a whiteboard and markers and the next day marches us up the mountain to see what he was talking about for ourselves. Yes, here are the lines in the landscape where the ocean floor split and ruptured - and here are the mountains that erupted when the continental plates collided. Here are the layers within the rock right at the top of the highest peak, which were once layers of sediment at the bottom of a primordial ocean. We spent seven hours climbing, sliding and occasionally walking up and down the individual precipices that make up the north ridge. We stopped occasionally - a sandwich here, a look at the view there - but not for long. I felt I had been hurrying the whole way. G said it would take five hours. Apparently he can do it in two - bouncing along from one rock to the next in trainers. I wasn't sure how to look at him - in awe or with a scowl. I opted for sarcasm, with one eyebrow raised.

Each week we had a Solo Day: a chance to go out into the wildness alone and just be. I spent my first under the overhang of a rock in thick snow. On the second I went to hunt out the ruined houses up on the ledge near the coll. Lito was with me and was very exciteable. He continuously bounded off and then lolloped back again to check I was still coming. After we reached the far end of the ledge I sat down and he got bored and ran off. He came back looking for me after a while and when he eventually spotted me lying on my back on the grass he went
crazy with excitement and bounded over in his lovely clumsy doggy way. It was all I could do not to scream as he lunged towards my face, tongue flapping sideways in the wind. We both collapsed in a fit of giggles. Then he started chasing his tail round in manic cicles and I had to sit very still until he realised I wasn't playing and bounced off again, pressumably to jump on one of the others who said they might
go up to the coll. I spent hours up there: lying, sitting, meditating or just gazing. The view was magnificent. I feel like I need almost unlimited amounts of space right now. I
almost feel like I could not possibly get enough of it. There was a moment up there on that ledge, having not spoken for a few days as we were in silence and with nothing to do for the day other than explore the wildness and just be. I could see only mountains, forests and fields for miles and miles. I thought: this is what space feels like.

Some people wanted a lot more silence. It was brought to the meeting and after some discussion it was agreed by everyone to have five days of silence in week two. I was initially hesitant, but after hearing from the others I began to see that it could add something to the experience. I have done a ten day silent retreat in the past, but had felt that for this retreat the communication was integral to what we were doing. I was reminded that speaking is only one form of communication. In the end I could happily have had another few days of silence, although it was a joy to speak with the others again and there followed a whole load of some of the most profound and interesting conversations I have ever had.

I am fascinated by the valley's history. Some of the land Ecodharma is on used to belong to Tom, a local man. Tom's father was shot by Franko's men after hiding out in the valley. G has found obscure caves with tins of food in that date back to the civil war. There is also a giant cross on a distant hill that I would love to see sometime. I am told the Catholic Church erected it in support of fascism after the war, but there were loads of anarchists and communists hiding out in the area and they went and smashed it down. It's still lying smashed on the ground somewhere.

On a long walk alone one day I came across two houses I hadn't known existed - very exciting as I *love* ruins. The first was last lived in something like eighty years ago. It has plaster on the walls, a bed (complete with human-corpse-sized rolled up hay mattress), worn out straw hat on the back of an ancient kitchen chair and a cupboard with an assortment of old bottles and jars. A few small rooms are still intact and most door and window shutters are still in place, but the floor-boards are caving in and some of the furniture is dissappearing down the hole. I didn't manage to get down to the bottom floor as I couldn't see a safe way to do it and it seems as though the top floor may crash down into it at
any given moment.

I was surprised and delighted to see the furthest house as I came over the top of a mountain and saw it in the valley below me. This is the one Tom's dad was killed in and it is still owned by him. It doesn't have much in it but is mostly intact with a front and back doorway, ladder going up to small attic space and steps leading downstairs. I found a big dead tree near it and took some of the peeling bark for the altar in the shrine yurt. Later I lit a candle for Tom's dad and all of the others who lost their lives in this valley.

After the retreat those of us who were left went to Tremp, the capital of the area. It was strange going back to the place G collected me from one month before. I felt different in some indefinable way. Tremp was like a huge city after the valley. We did some shopping and went to Carol's house in Eroles for lunch and hot showers. It is SO BEAUTIFUL. Really vibrant, artistic, eccentric, creative, rustic, quirky, circusy and delightful. I desperately want to live there and start a community and put a trapeze up in the attic space. It was here we had a meeting one week later, with me talking and G translating into Catalan for a small group of people who want to start a Transition Initiative in their area. I am inspired to hear about how much is going on already in Catalunya.

There is so much more I could write about: contact dance with Ben and Alex, making marmelade with Yashobodhi, wood chopping lessons and discussions about gender with Rob, Jeanette's yoga classes, Maitrisara's rising song that woke us more gently than any alarm clock, Penny's book, singing and poetry round the fire and so many more unique moments that made this my most beautiful winter ever. Thank you to all who took part in it.

La Sorga

2008-12-16T18:33:00.004Z

My female driver - the first of my etire journey - takes me out of her way, up the mountain and into the driveway marked `La Sorga'. It is gone 8pm, cold and dark. She wouldn't hear of me walking the rest of the way. I walk towards the faint voices and even fainter light behind some tree-shaped silhouettes. The light and voices are coming from what appears to be a wooden cabin, but turns out to be part caravan, part wooden construction. I knock lightly on the glass door, thoroughly surprising the inhabitants whom I discover have never heard of me and were not expecting anyone at all. The `owner' of the place is away. It must have been him I was emailing and he hadn't mentioned I was coming to the others. But it's ok - the more the merrier!

I am introduced to everyone: Caroline is French and has been here only two weeks herself. Antoine and Laura are a couple who met here for the first time two months ago. Antoine is a sunny-faced guy from Belgium and Laura is German and almost always laughing. Then there is Ash, a New Zealander who has been here the longest. He is currently on crutches having slipped in the woods about a week ago and badly twisted his ankle. Ash is freegan. He spent a bit of time squatting in London and also used to work at Pogo Cafe. We probably know some of the same people - small world! Christoph is the only one who doesn't speak a great deal of English. He is a bit of a clown and always up for some fun and games. I think I will definitely get on with everyone here. We are all around the same age and I cannot help but think that La Sorga feels more like a youth hostel than a community. There are no permanent residents here at present and it all feels rather transitory. This is great for me as a passer-through but I'm not sure how I would feel about it if I wanted to stay for longer.

I arrived in time for a dinner of spaghetti bolognese. Laura is vegan too, so all evening meals will be fine for me to eat. It is decided that I will share a cabin with Christoph. This turns out to be my own double mattress on a mezzanine above where he is sleeping, with my own lamp, a window and bookshelves. Hurrah!

Day 1 - Friday
Porridge for breakfast. Already I can tell this is my kind of place! The morning is spent moving an enormous pile of wood from the front entrance. It has been given to us by a neighbour apparently. It is the last thing I feel like doing after a full day of hitchhiking, but I dutifully take wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow full of wood behind the caravan for stacking.

I am expecting more work after lunch, but find that everyone goes off to do their own thing. I end up `sunbathing' in my polo-neck jumper and two pairs of trousers on my rollmat near to the front drive. A peculiar place to lie but with a lovely big patch of sun. A big white tom cat - clearly the bravest of the five feline residents and one of only two who are not blind - comes to sit beside me - then on my book - then on my back, where he gives me a lovely massage. We remain firm friends after this.

I have discovered that La sorga has some strange contrasts: a compost toilet, wood burners and permacutlure principles - but also running water, a boiler, internet and - bizzarely - a washing-machine!

Day 2 - Saturday
There is a market in Le Bugue, the nearest town, on Saturdays and Tuesdays. The market shuts at midday, so that is when we need to get there - to ask the market people for any unsold food they are throwing away - kind of a cross between skipping and begging. Four of us walk down to the main road with the intention of hitching in pairs. Two cars pull over at once - success!

I'm told there is usually a lot more and people seem dissapointed, but we manage to fill a few carrier bags. Antoine has a tip-off about a field where a lot of corn has bee cut and is being left to rot. He and Laura head off to pick some while Caroline and I return home. They arrive hours later with sacks of the stuff. In the field was enough sweetcorn to feed the chickens for a year. We will go again another day and get more.

Since I arrived people have been talking about the party we will go to on Saturday night. The time has arrived and I am almost reluctant to go. I have not enjoyed the last few parties I have been to and not drinking means always being on a different wavelength to people at parties. I have not drunk alcohol for six weeks and have been attempting to abstain for three months. I even spent my birthday sober. Something about the surroundings and the people weakens my resolve and the minute I get in the door and see tables covered in bottles of free booze I pour myself a large glass of champagne and have done with it.

The party is wonderful. It is in a shop which has just opened. It is not-for-profit and runs solely on donations - everything from clothes to toys to computers to furniture - which they fix up and sell on at an affordable price. It is huge and bright and clean and beautifully decorated with a large Mongolian yurt frame (no canvas) at one end, filled with cushions, paintings and information about various projets, of which La sorga is one. A stage has been set up and the bands play some excellent folky stuff that we can't help but dance to. I am properly warm for the first time in a week and go right down to one layer of clothing. Antoine takes to the stage at regular intervals - a bit of drumming here, a little singing there. He adopts strange squeaky voices and somehow manages to fit in with the rest of the band - at least mostly! We can't help but dance - all except poor Ash who spends the eveing on one of the sofas with his twisted ankle. There are plenty of children and people of all ages. I am very glad to have come and also very glad for my champagne. Bad girl.

Day 3 - Sunday
I am informed early on that this is our day of rest. Suits me fine. My first hangover in six weeks and I am feeling guilty about drinking last night. I console myself by reasoning that it is still the longest I have ever gone without drinking (since age 15 anyway). I turn down a glass of walnut wine in the evening, to the shock and dismay of Christoph, who claims it is a traditional French drink and I must at least try it. I feel a little better with myself for refusing and feel certain that I can now go on to abstain for another six weeks.

Day 4 - Monday
I was originally planning on leaving today, but I was going to Barcelona and heard by email that the squatted community I wanted to visit there is at capacity until February. I will stay here for two days extra and try to visit Barcelona on the way back.

Christoph left this morning, so now there are only five of us. It seems there are even fewer as Antoine and Laura spend most of the day in their little house and Ash is ill in bed. The skipped paella is suspected but unconfirmed as the culprit and is consequently fed to the cats, much to their delight.

Another lazy day. I spend most of it reading `Frech Phrases For Dummies'. I must sound very odd to the others, sitting in the corner muttering phrases like `What a lovely dress!' and `peaches are my favouite fruit'.

By evening I am feeling a bit rested out. I have done little but sit for two days. I go for a stroll and nose around some of the other structures for the first time. I also finally make frinds with one of the blind cats and end up with a trail of cats following me around the grounds pied-piper style.

Day 5 - Tuesday
I woke up late - almost 10am. Last night we had a projet meeting and chastised ourselves for doing so little work this week. We resolved to go into town early for the market. On entering the caravan I discover that I am first up. Hmm, strange. I entertain myself while waiting by washing-up and watching the chickens outside.

The cockrel and one of the chickens have escaped again. They are strutting and waddling around on the wooden platform outside the caravan. I witness my first ever chicken-rape scenario when the cock forces himself on top of the squarking, flapping hen and holds the wobbly red bit on her head in his beak to keep her down. I am shocked. After he's finished she shuffles her feathers violently and he struts about crowing loudly. What a cock. He struts over to a nearby plastic bucket and stretches his head to peer over the brim. On finding it is filled with pieces of sweetcorn he pecks one out onto the deck and gobbles it aggressvely.

Eventually the others emerge. Caroline and I hitch into Le Bugue while Laura and Antoine finish breakfast. There is something good in the air today. The first car we see pulls over before we have even made it to the main road. A man at the market breaks open an orange and gives me half as I pass his stall and another sticks his tongue out. Perhaps it is my pigtails. Caroline says I look like a little girl.

We fill all three backpacks and three large shopper-bags with food. Lots of it skipped from the supermarchè and market and some more we actually paid for, like the indispensible yeast extract and some apples and broccoli. Some of us have been feeling a little lacking in vitamins. I buy almost €5 worth of olives as a treat for us all to go on the pizzas we are making tonight. Today is also Bread Day, and that means pizza also. Yum.

Tomorrow I will leave here early in the morning and hitch down to Ecodharma. It's strange leaving here - in a way it was just one stop on my way to Spain, but I have stayed longer and settled in more than I expected. I wonder if I will return?

Links:
La Sorga's page on Intentional Communities Website (how I first found them)
Website
La Sorga Wiki

Rennes

2008-12-10T17:32:00.003Z

There were three clues that told me I would be staying in a squat in Rennes. The first was my couchsurfing hosts profile saying 'squat the world!' The second was being warned I would need to say my name when I got to the door and the third was seeing the door itself.

On entering I have my suspicions confirmed by Manuel, my friendly Europunk host. The main reason I am in Rennes is after searching CS for the keywords 'anarchist', 'vegan', and 'squat' in France, his was the one that kept popping up. This is great - squats were on my list of things to find in France along with permaculture communities, social centres and protest sites.

I have arrived just in time for what Manuel nicknames 'The Green Meal' - green beans with pea soup and some other green vegetable broth that nobody can remember the English name for. There is also some nice French bread and some sweet stewed fruit for dessert. I break out my jar of vegan chocolate spread as well. It is everything I dreamed it would be.

Manuel explains that they go skipping at the markets a couple of times a week for vegetables. He has an old friend who runs a bakery and gives him whatever bread is left over at the end of the day. They also steal some food from supermarkets.

After dinner I get a tour of the building. It used to be several appartments and I get lost through room after room after room. Some parts of the building are in better nick than others. They have also been busy repairing, cleaning and decorating some of it. The nicest bit is the attic, particularly Manuel's room which has wooden panels on the walls and a slanted ceiling. The worst is covered in damp patches and peeling plaster - a wall Manuel says they wanted to knock through but then discovered it was keeping the building stable. There is only one toilet in the whole building. A peak out of the back door reveals why - a row of toilets, each with it's own door. One for each of the old apartments. How bizarre! There is also another apartment which is only accessible from out the back door. This one is very large and I'm told they will be having a gig in there on Saturday. It is also sometimes used for large group meals.

I choose 'The Tea Room' to sleep in. It's in the attic next to Manuel's room and has a heater, fairy lights, two sofas, bookshelves, a couple of coffee tables and a good supply of redbush and honeybush tea. The attic is where they all slept for the first few nights. This is confirmed by a row of hardy locks running down the inside of the main door up here. The tea room is now a chill-out space as well as a venue for small feminist gatherings. It also has a nice clean looking mattress. I get some allergic reactions anyway - probably from the damp and the dust (I am allergic to everything!), but sleep about ten hours in spite of it.

In the morning I do yoga in the other attic room - a large one with nothing but a sink, bare floorboards and a table made out of a large wooden pallet with bricks supported by two computer towers for legs. Yoga helps with my aching, but not much and I'm really feeling it as I walk around town on my unsuccessful mission to hire a bike (why is it so hard to hire bloody bikes in France?!?)

Before leaving the house I found Manuel dragging a shower cubicle out of the downstairs outside apartment. He says he is cleaning it up to use as a changing cubicle for their free shop. The shop is currently lots of boxes and shelves of clothes and books in the room by the one functioning downstairs toilet. I think I can successfully tick squats and social centres off my list of things to discover here. Mission successful! Tomorrow I am moving on to La Sorga, a permaculture community East of Bordeaux.

Newhaven to Dieppe - that elusive hitch

2008-12-10T16:45:00.004Z

Last time Jim and I were so unsuccessful in our attempt at hitching this boat that we ended up giving up on our trip completely and going home. I have since scoured the internet and asked every hitchhiker I know if this hitch is possible, but nobody else seems to have ever tried it, let alone managed it. I decided to have one more attempt. After dragging myself out of bed at 3:30am to be sure of catching the first bus to Newhaven at 5:15am I managed to arrive well before the ticket office opened, still under cover of darkness...

I stash my bag behind a fence and amble around casually like any normal fare-paying car driver might do. The drivers lounge has the lights on but is empty. Several trucks are parked around the freight area but with lights off and curtains drawn.

I wait.

When I see a light go on I wave and make my approach.
"Hello! Do you have space for one more?"
He doesn't speak English. Or French. Damnit. Fortunately the word 'Autostop' seems to work for most European languages. Now he understands. He nods. Yep, he can take me... to Birmingham. Oh.

I am not dterred. In fact I am encouraged a little - at least he was willing to take me. I stand around a while longer until I see a huge beast of a lorry turn into the freight area from the main road. He judders to a stop in front of the little gate leading to the ticket office and climbs out of his cab.
"Hello! Do you speak English?"
He does.
"Are you going to France?"
He is!
"Got space for one more?"
He's not sure. He will have to check the bookings. He doesn't know how many his company has booked for, but he's willing to have a go. Success! (Maybe...)

He buys me a coffee. We're sitting at a table chatting to a bunch of security guards. Well, he is. I appear to be invisible. Possibly a good thing since I'm sure one of them is the guy who told me and Jim off for trying to hitch here last time (you can't do that...you'll get arrested...blah..blah...)

The ticket office takes a painful amount of time to open. Eventually it does. Nigel (my driver) has to change the booking from his usual truck to this one as his has broken down. They change the number of people as well: from one to two. Easy!

Nigel is great. One of the wisest and most open truckers I have come across. We are given a cabin on the boat with a bed each and a shower and free coffee to boot. A luxury crossing and it's cut hours and many miles off my journey. Horray!

I made Nigel a little thankyou card while he was napping and gave it to him just before he dropped me off on the road to Rouen.

A Working Retreat at Ecodharma

2008-10-23T21:31:00.001+01:00

G threw the land-rover up the mountain, pointing out the sights to me… “This is the start of the land we have been using.” I am immediately struck by his choice of language, careful not to claim ownership of the land. He may have paid money for it, but how can land be owned? It’s indicative of the mixture of radical politics, ecology and Buddhist ideas that brought me to this place.

Guyhyapati, (or ‘G’), has been here eight years. He saw the south-facing slope of the valley from afar while out climbing and knew it was the place. He found the man who owned it in the village, persuaded him to sell it, raised the money and now here he is: recounting the story to us eight years later. G flicks his long grey hair to the other side of his head, exposing the shaved part underneath. He speaks gently, confidently. We sit around the kitchen in that house that G first bought. The ‘land we are using’ has now extended to cover a much larger area, including six houses, though most are little more than ancient dry-stone-wall structures with rotting tree-trunk beams attached. This kitchen is currently the only part of this house that has been done up, although there is another beautifully renovated house some friends are staying in further down the track. G mostly lives in the yurt just behind the kitchen. It seems obvious that although eight years have passed, this is a community in its infancy. G wants it to grow slowly and sustainably.

A typical day at Ecodharma:

My alarm goes off at 5:30am. Groggy and cold I pull myself from my sleeping-bag and grab a pile of jumpers. We meditate at 6am in the small dome just down-slope of the yurt I am sharing with Lucy, a girl from Manchester I became friends with instantly. I do the first forty-five minutes of meditation and then return to the yurt to practice yoga looking out over the mountains as the sun rises. On a warm day I can remove a couple of jumpers at this point.

I make my way up to the kitchen and am greeted by warm smiles and nods from those already pottering around the small kitchen making breakfast. I have become quite fond of porridge mixed with crunchy cereal and runny mulberry jam. There is always a kettle boiling or pot of tea stewing. Olive oil sits in a little metal oiling can - for lubriacating the pan-fried toast along with the homemade jams. There is fruit too. Apart from the clinks and clatters there is silence until all are present and have eaten. I watch the army of cute but wild kittens playing with whatever bit of food they have managed to snatch from still sleepy humans. G rings a bell to signal the end of silence. We take it in turns to speak whatever is on our minds, how we are.

After check-in we work out jobs for the day. The people who arrived before me had already levelled off some new terraces and begun making a fence to keep any wild pigs off whatever veggies might get planted there. I learn how to use a pickaxe, a backhoe and some other tool with a funny name. I learn a bit of plumbing stuff too and install a new shower (tap resting on wall in private area). All water comes from the spring that runs through the valley, other than the foul, stinking washing-up water which comes from the roof – rainwater mixed with rotting fruit.

After a few days G realises heavy work is not my strong point and I am moved onto painting and kitting out the beautiful new Mongolian yurt for a woman who will soon be beginning a six month solitary retreat. I learn that sanding before painting is a good idea, what a ‘key’ is and how to wire up a solar panel.

We finish work at 2pm, although two finish early to cook lunch. We have a rota for cooking and cleaning and I sign up for a mixture. We take turns to cobble together experimental feasts for the others. The food here is a locavore heaven, all fruit and vegetables are grown locally and even the bread comes from a squatted social centre 17km away who grow their own organic wheat. Peaches come from a workers co-op nearby. The valley itself produces a huge array of herbs as well as plums, mulberries, blackberries, apples, figs, mushrooms, rosehips, various nuts, honey and more.

There is free time until 5:30pm. I alternate sleeping and reading with the odd walk or chat.

In the evening we have study – more like a fervent debate. What is Ecodharma? What are the five precepts? How do radical ecology and Buddhist ideas fit together?
Sometimes we sit in the meditation dome, sometimes the kitchen, often G’s yurt. I suspect I’m not the only one who likes that option best – sitting around in the warm, teapot in centre, grandma cat on somebody’s lap.

We eat supper around 7:30pm. Usually soup, sometimes toast. If we’re lucky, G will make his special chocolatey-almond dessert. After supper there is often a puja or meditation period before bedtime.

I read by candlelight every night before sleeping, listening to the sounds of the crickets, birds and other inhabitants of the valley. There is a small candelabra hanging from the ceiling of the yurt. If I get back after Lucy I can see the yurt lit up like a beacon to help guide me home.

The Great Hitchhiking Adventure - Part 2: Toulouse to Ecodharma

2008-09-24T17:41:00.003+01:00

Toulouse is a beautiful city. There are some places I go that I know immediately that I need more time in and this is one of them. It’s great to be travelling alone and without time restrictions and I decide to stay in Toulouse for a couple of days. Through some synchronicity I find a couch-surfing host quite quickly and am walking to his house when a man stops me and asks if I would like to join him for a drink. I immediately refuse.
‘Where are you from?’ he asks, seeing I don’t speak much French.
‘England,’
‘I have been to England a few times,’ he says, still walking beside me, ‘London, Swindon...’
‘Wait a minute...’ I stop walking, ‘did you just say you’ve been to Swindon?’
‘Yes..?’
‘I grew up in Swindon!’
‘No!’
‘Come on, let’s get a drink.’

Joel thinks I’m crazy. Crazy for hitchhiking, crazy for travelling alone, crazy for staying with strangers. He is not the sleaze I originally took him for, but is actually very polite, respectful and intelligent. He says he prefers to meet people on the street rather than in a bar where they will just be drunk. Sex is of course nice, but he is interested in meeting people for conversations also. It’s nice to have a drink with somebody friendly and we have a good chat.

The velos are bikes you can rent for a euro a day plus a sliding scale depending on how long you use them for. It takes me a couple of days to work out the system as there is nothing written in English about them, even at the Tourist Info Office, which is otherwise very useful. There are velo stations all over Toulouse and I constantly see people riding them around, so eventually I get somebody to show me. Once on one myself I realise they are not quite as romantic as they look when one is wobbling down a cobbled street vibrating fiercely. The bike is largely made out of plastic and has a large advertisement for HSBC bank on the side, but still, I miss the bike back home and this is a poor substitute but quite fun nonetheless.

I spent my first night in Toulouse with Franek, the couch-surfing ambassador for the city. Franek shares a one-bedroom flat with his sister Iris but loves having CS guests and would rather share a room with his sister than turn anyone away. There is another guest staying the second night, a German man called Matthias who I instantly take to. To avoid overcrowding I spend the second night with Franek’s neighbour, who we discover by accident is also a CS host.

I am in a campsite about as different from the one at Castelsarrasin as you could possibly get. Dodgy pop-dance music blasts out of the cafe-bar behind me. I’m sitting at a blue plastic table eating chips and drinking beer. My blue plastic chair has ‘Nestle’ emblazoned across the back. This ‘Camping Village’ charges €10 a night, €20 if I leave after 10am! They have taken my passport to ensure I pay before leaving. It’s such a shame because this is a really beautiful town, nestled right in the heart of the Pyrenees. I was expecting to arrive at Ecodharma today. I at least thought I would get out of France but no, I’m still here. I am wishing I hadn’t taken the advice of the man smoking outside the bar back in the town and had carried on to Andorre rather than stay here tonight. He’s probably an undercover tout for this campsite. I am intrigued to see Andorre, a tiny little independent country I had never heard of before, right on the French-Spanish border.

I had some good lifts today. Not long ones, but nice ones. One was a man whose name I have sadly forgotten. He’s a meditator too and we had a really interesting conversation while listening to the most beautiful music as we drove through the winding mountain paths and remote crumbling sand-coloured villages in the French Pyrenees. ‘It’s music from the desert’, he said. Really enchanting. My driver was the second who waited for me today, rather than the other way around. ‘You didn’t have your thumb out, but I guessed you were hitchhiking’, he said. He and his wife, both aged 50, have recently moved to this area from further north. He said he feels 22 again. His love of the area is infectious, especially as he tells me local legends and points out hidden landmarks.

The first lift that waited for me today was not so great. No, that’s mean of me, he was nice enough. He had his lorry pulled over and waited for me to catch up to him at the toll booth I was heading for on the autoroute out of Toulouse. Hitching on the autoroute is illegal, just like on British motorways, but you can walk along behind the barrier and it’s ok to hitch at the tolls where a lot of people also stop to use the public toilets. This driver seemed quite keen for me to take off one of the tops I was wearing and to let down my hair. He emphasised strongly how hot it was. He didn’t speak English, but made it clear in French that he was a man and that I was in fact a woman. I was convinced by him to take a very roundabout route through Perpignon. I changed my mind halfway and got out at Carcassone and headed south on the smaller D roads – hence still being in France.

I stop for a sandwich in the most beautiful place I have been to so far: a remote picnic spot outside a tiny village up in the mountains. It's a crappy place for hitchhiking and I wait an hour – my longest wait by far since leaving the Uk, which I blame on the amount of ex-pats living locally – but I don’t really mind because the area is so outstandingly beautiful.

My first lift of a new day speeds through the mountain roads with dance music blaring – ‘you’re so sexy - sexy, sexy, sexy’ sings the woman on the stereo. My driver is heading to the first town in Andorre, which it appears serves as an off-licence to the whole of southern France. Andorre is not in the EU and alcohol is a quarter the price, a packet of cigarettes is around €2. My driver warned me earlier that there may be a ‘traffic marmalade’ and I see what he means as the queue gets longer and longer. It’s not only alcohol and cigarettes that are cheap, but also clothes, food and oil. We cross the border without any hassle. Au revoir France!

After a forty minute wait I finally get a lift out of Pas de la Casa, the first town in Andorre. It’s small but still very built up and has cows grazing on almost vertical patches of grass. I feel certain they will fall and crush the cars parked along the side of the road directly beneath them. Now my new driver and I take the wiggliest mountain path ever to this tiny country's capital, Andorra la Vella.

I arrive in Isona after a semi-dodgy hour and a half long trip with a man in a tiny white van. I’m waiting for Guhyapati ('G' to his friends) in Bar Miami. I think I am the only English person and the only female apart from the barmaid. I seem to be an unusual sight. I drink my last half pint while waiting - it may be a while before I consume alcohol again. G arrives and greets me like an old friend, although we only met once before for a brief ten minute chat at the Buddhafield Festival. He has exactly the white landrover I imagined he would. I get in and we wind our way up an ever remoter road that turns into a track at steeper and steeper angles. G tells me a little about the centre and points out landscape features as we pass. He also tells me who else is on the retreat and it turns out I know one of them - he will be surprised to see me! There are only 8 of us, but another 3 will arrive over the next few days. My sense of exitement is growing...

The Great Hitchhiking Adventure - Part 1: London to Toulouse

2008-09-15T19:07:00.003+01:00

I spend ages getting out of London – even longer due to waiting 50 minutes for the bus I left my tent on to do it’s round and come back to where I got off. Having retrieved my tent and found the road junction marked on hitchwiki.org, I wait patiently in the pouring rain with a soggy cardboard sign saying ‘France please!' and a smiley face. After around 20 minutes a waiter comes out of a nearby pub with a cup of tea for me and discovering I don’t drink milk, takes it away and comes back with another – black with a bit of lemon. Bless.

My first lift is Adam. Adam has just started growing vegetables and has never heard of Peak Oil. I fill him in on all of the happy details. Adam is quite well travelled but has only been to what he calls ‘party towns’ to get drunk. Apparently this includes Cuba. I tell him about 'The Power of Community', the film about Cuba and how it's handling the energy crisis. This sets him thinking... 'hmm, yeah, there were a lot of people hitchhiking and it was a bit like that now you come to mention it.' Telling Adam about my plans he just keeps repeating the same thing – 'It’s like a different world'.

I meet another hitchhiker at junction 10 of the M20. We both have signs saying ‘France’ and decide to travel together until we get there where we will go our separate ways. Max has a more upfront method of hitching than me. He approaches cars as they are waiting at the traffic lights, knocks on the windows and asks for a lift. I stand by the turning with one of our signs. It’s Max that gets us the lift after asking around 15 cars. We get a lift to Dover with an Iraqi man and his Argentinian girlfriend. Max tells me about the number plate system for French vehicles which could be helpful for my hitching. Apparently the first two numbers indicate the region the car is from. I scribble down the numbers for some of the regions I will be passing through from the book Max is carrying.

Max paid £12 for a ferry ticket, but I have been reading about boat hitching for a long time now and want to at least give it a try. I have around fifteen minutes before they stop boarding foot passengers. There is a road with a long string of lorries heading past the ticket office, so I stick out my thumb and wait. Many lorry drivers shrug or frown at me but a couple smile and eventually one stops. Tom is Croatian and lives in Germany, on his way home now after six weeks away driving. At the booth I hand the man our two passports and a slip of paper Tom hands me. 'What are you carrying?' the toll booth man asks. 'Oh, some crates, some pallets...' Tom starts to explain. 'Oh right, just stuff basically!' The man laughs and hands back our passports. Off we go then! Tom has a laptop and internet in his cab. He asks exactly where I’m going and works out that I will travel 1300km in total from London to the place I am heading to in Spain: Ecodharma.

I am driving off the ferry in a truck with Manuel, my Portugese driver. Manuel is a little bit racist and thinks Indians are dirty, but other than that seems quite nice. I try to avoid the topic and get rather nervous whenever he mentions nationality. The time is now 8:45pm – an hour ahead of the UK – and it is already getting quite dark. Manuel is driving all of the way to Portugal but will stop for nine hours in Tours to sleep. Tours will be great for me – if I can hack driving all night to get there!

I sleep fitfully in the passenger seat for what seems like five minutes in every fifteen. I awake in the middle of the night to discover we have already passed Tours. Tours was actually somewhere I had wanted to visit on my route, but oh well. Manuel parks at a truck stop in the middle of nowhere. This is the end of the line for me as he will sleep now. I get out in the cold, thank Manuel and tentatively wander into the service station. I get some Euros from the cash machine, the first opportunity I have had, and buy two small road maps: one of France and one of Spain for €2.95 each. The man behind the counter doesn’t speak English. 'Ou et... moi?' I ask, showing him the map. 'Ici?' he points. I am just outside Tours to the South. It doesn’t look like there are many other towns nearby, and besides it’s only 5am. Thinking of Max’s technique I ask some men where they are going, but they just grunt at me and walk off. Another man asks where I want to go and offers to take me to Poitiers. I accept gratefuly.

My new driver speaks barely any English and communication is hard, but he does give me €20, offers to pay for a hotel or to put me up for the night (I decline both suggestions) and buys me a coffee at a service station and a mint tea in Poitiers before leaving me to go home and sleep. He says God told him to give me money. Thanks God!

I was hoping to spend some time in Poitiers, but the only bit I saw of it looked like Churchill Square shopping centre in Brighton (not good), and besides it is still early and everywhere is shut. Better to head for Bordeaux for breakfast and to see if it’s the kind of place I could spend the day. I’m picked up after a few minutes by a guy heading to Niort, only a few miles South. Ok, why not? His English is as bad as my French but we manage to communicate a little in a mixture of French, English and Spanish, which we each speak equally badly.
Niort is very pretty. I write up some of my travels while waiting for the tourist office to open. I’m feeling quite tired and hungry and looking at my map I can see why: no proper food in the last 70 miles. I have started measuring time in miles rather than minutes.

Alex and Stephan are heading south, partly for a holiday and partly because they like it better there and may just stay if things work out. My sign said Bordeaux, but since they are going to Toulouse I will just go there instead. It will probably be my last stop before Spain and I am amazed to have seen so little of France. I have moved much faster than I had imagined, but am making up for it now by watching crumbling yellow brick buildings and tiny French villages pass by out of the window. There are toll booths on French autoroutes, kind of a pay-as-you-go motorway system. We are taking the smaller roads to avoid some of the costs. I’m still munching my way through the pile of goodies I bought from the magazine-bio (organic shop) in Niort: Almond and hazelnut rice milk, tofu wieners, fake cheese spread, mushroom pate, chocolate, muesli, avocado, tomato and some fresh fruit. That’s all the money the man from Poitiers gave me but I haven’t spent any of my own yet apart from the maps. This food should last a couple of days.

The D roads, although very pretty, were taking too long, so Alex and Stefan decide only to go as far as Montauban. They drop me off a little sooner at a ‘campsite’ in Castelsarrasin. My tent is the only one here. Reception is closed, possibly non-existent and everything either doesn’t work (the lights and at least one shower and sink), or is covered with a thick layer of cobwebs and dust. It’s not entirely unlike a zombie movie, but I’m trying not to think about that as I sit in the dark writing this by head-torch at a round concrete picnic table. There is a phone, which I saw a man use earlier, but tragically I do not have a French phone card. Far from being a well needed night of solitude and brandy in remote French countryside, I spend ages trying to rid myself of the only thing that unnerves me more than zombies: a Polish man named something like ‘Wokash’. Having established that we have the biggest language barrier ever, with Wokash not speaking any English, French OR Spanish and me not knowing any Polish, we eventually manage to convey through the use of sign language, gestures and drawings that:

1. He is Polish
2. He picks apples here
3. He is staying in the caravan – the only other thing in this field
4. He does not like picking apples
5. He wants me to stay in the caravan with him

Wokash is a little more pushy about point five than I feel comfortable about, especially given there is nobody else around. I try to make it clear that I am enjoying time alone and wish to sit and read my book in peace, but Wokash persists in beckoning me to his caravan. Eventually I shout at him in English to fuck off, thinking that if he doesn’t understand the words, at least some of the sentiment will get through in the volume of my request. I wave my penknife at him for good measure as he shied away from it when I first took it out to make a sandwich. He finally wanders off looking a bit sulky. I'm still a little nervous and keep turning my torch off at intervals and listening out for footsteps but he seems to have gone. This just goes to show that wild camping is not all that dangerous really. I’ve wild camped with much better facilities than these and have never had this much hassle.

I am awoken twice in the night: once by a strange man saying there is a phone-call for me. I am groggy with sleep but am still pretty certain there’s no way anyone could be calling me here, so I say ‘no, it’s not for me’, zip up my tent and go back to sleep. The second time I awake to a familiar voice outside my tent calling me – ‘Joy, Joy’ (he can’t pronounce Jo). I unzip my tent. Wokash and the man who woke me earlier are both there. Wokash beckons me. I say ‘no, I’m not coming with you. Fuck off and let me sleep’. I turn to the other man. ‘You know English? Do you understand what I’m saying?’ He says ‘yes, he just wants to be your friend’. I tell them to fuck off a few more times, quite loudly, then zip my tent back up and yell, ‘I’m going to sleep now!’ They walk off laughing and talking in Polish. I am awoken no more. I see Wokash on the phone in the morning and he waves to me. I don’t wave back.

Climate Capers

2008-08-17T12:12:00.004+01:00

I have recently returned from the police state that was this year's Climate Camp. Somehow, despite being stopped and searched six times, sitting on gates staring at police for hours each day and being pushed around by riot cops, I managed to enjoy it immensely. Something amazing happens when hundreds of people stand together and resist the violent oppressive force of the state. That feeling of solidarity has given me a new faith in the power of people.

"We're people too", said one policeman to me.
"Yes, of course you are. But you're not here representing yourself as a human being. You're here representing the state, and our experience of the state is not a positive one. Take off your uniform and you will be most welcome."

My inroduction to the camp this year was awakening at 5am, only three hours after arriving from a long day of hitchhiking, to the sounds of people shouting - "police on site! Everyone get up! If you want to have a climate camp then you're going to have to defend it!" I dragged myself from my slumber and trudged in the direction I could see people running in. At the gate a scuffle was ensuing between protestors and a line of police in full riot gear trying to barge their way onto site. A red van had it's windows smashed and tires let down by the police, who claimed it was an abandoned vehicle. Apart from the fact that somebody had been sleeping in the van at the time, there were now people on top of the van, inside the van, beneath the van and a couple of hundred people surrounding the van, all chanting in unison - "This is not an abandoned vehicle! This is not an abandoned vehicle!"
One man shouts down at the police from on top of the van - "This is the least abandoned vehical in England!" to laughter and applause.

The police know it's not abandoned. What they want is unfettered vehicle access to the field. A few days previously, police vehicle rampaged around site, seizing dangerous items such as plumming equipment, wood for the toilets, childrens crayons and board games. This red van and a couple of cars are now blocking the most obvious access route.

A few hours on the gate may be tiresome, especially after only three hours sleep, but it really makes you realise how compassionate and organised the movement can be. After a couple of hours, more people arrived with trays and carts full of hot tea, coffee, porridge, fruit, cake and all sorts of other goodies. Large bottles of water, suncream and rescue remedy were passed around the crowd and cries of "anyone up the front there not had cake yet?" could be heard. Things like that give me a warm feeling inside.

One thing I loved about the camp this year was the amount of local support. Walking through a nearby town on our way there we were stopped by plenty of locals.
"Hey, you going to that camp? Yeah? Nice one! Wouldn't mind getting down there myself - I hate that fucking power station!"
One guy actually worked there.
"Listen, you guys do anything to my car and I'll fucking 'ave you, but smash that place up man coz I fucking hate it!" He then offered to sell me his pass for £50. I only had a tenner and politely declined.
A fair few locals joined us onsite, some taking part in meetings, helping with the running of the camp, even getting pepper-sprayed by the cops on the frontline and giving media interviews. Going for a walk near the end of the camp, I was stopped by an elderly lady who congratulated me and said how pleased she was that we were doing something. "It's up to the younger generation now", she said.

Well, whether we shut down the power station or not depends on which media you read. Some interesting ones to look at would be Indymedia, Schnews and also check out some of the stuff on Youtube, VisionOnTV, and of course the camp's own website.

Buddhafield

2008-07-29T14:36:00.001+01:00

I recently returned from ten days at my favourite festival: Buddhafield. Here are a few short glimpses of those ten days:

Ecstatic Dance
I am feeling very self conscious. The big top is filling up quickly with dancing bodies. My friend and I stand on the edge and sway about a bit. We both agree we will need a lot of warming up for this one. The cheesy dance song finishes and Jewlz, our hostess, gets on the mike and tells everyone to take off their shoes and socks. My toes feel their way in the cool mud as another song begins, the last of the warm up. As it comes to an end Jewlz gets back on the mike. I close my eyes as she instructs. 'There is nobody else around. Nobody is watching. Let your body do what it wants to.' The theme of the festival is Dance of the Elements, so we dance the elements, beginning with water. I start off feeling pretty ridiculous. 'Nobody is watching. It doesn't matter what you look like'. By the time we reach fire I am really getting into it. Sometimes we dance alone, sometimes in groups of three or four. The energy in the tent is amazing, and there is a large group of people outside who can't fit into the space but are still writhing and skipping and bouncing around. Suddenly, Jewlz orders all of the women into the middle of the tent, all the men to the outside. The men are to shower us with love and wishes of freedom. Me and all the women rush to the centre of the tent. There must be a hundred sweaty, dancing women. I have only once before been with a large women only group. The energy is so different... like there is suddenly no resistance. I'm not sure if that makes sense but it was the sentence I came out with when I described the experience later, and it seems acurate experientially. The shift is so obvious, so beautiful I almost weep. After this we swap around with the women at the edge and the men in the centre. Then we all mingle together again and rush out into the sunshine, we make lines and circles and dance and flow around one another. By the end everyone is hugging everyone else, completely blissed out at this alcohol free festival. I see my friend, I thought he had left near the beginning, but no, he's sweating and grinning with his shirt off.

The Mermaid Song
With some time to spare, I walk past Lost Horizons Sauna and see a board announcing a women only time. There is only about an hour left so I go straight in. There are only a few other women in there already but more come in after me and shortly there is a circle of around 12-13 women, with another woman and a small child in the middle on the floor making shadow puppets in the light from the candles. One woman asks if anyone knows how to start a song, then the woman in the middle stops making shadow puppets and sings the most beautiful song. We all sit and listen. When she is finished, after a few moments of silence, the girl, who must be about six years old, starts a new song. She hits every note perfectly, although the tune is complicated. The song she sings is 'Song of the Mermaid Queen'. We are all speachless. A woman opposite me asks the girl to teach us the song, which she does, singing one line at a time which we all sing together, repeating each line after the girl. We sing the whole song twice in this way, repeating each line after the girl just as she sings it. Some of the women are weeping.

Hitching back
My friend and I left it too late to get a lift to Brighton, everyone else went the day before. But that's ok, life's an adventure, right? In all my days of hitching I have never had such an easy time of it as the journey back from Buddhafield. Full of loved-up-blissed-out-metta-bhavana-festival-vibes we never waited longer than 10 minutes, and although we didn't leave site til gone 3pm and stopped for over an hour in a pub, we still got dropped on the outskirts of Brighton at about 9pm. All the way from Taunton in 5 hours! That's about the same amount of time it would have taken to drive straight back in one lift. We had about eight lifts, and great ones at that, everyone so happy to help. So here it is:proof. We do manifest our own realities. Screw you cynics ;)

Critical Mass

2008-07-26T22:49:00.002+01:00

I ride the BMX I'm still borrowing from a friend down to The Level at 5:30pm and wait. I'm very early but after about half an hour I notice more bikes arriving and conglomerating near the centre of the park. I ride over to join them. Three guys sitting together drinking beer have never done the Brighton Critical Mass before, although one has done one in Manchester. Two of them have BMXs, one is just like the one I'm riding and I tell them the story of how the day before I was walking out of my flat with it when a woman who lives below me said "oh, I have a bike just like that. Would you like it?", which everyone agreed was very fortunate but also rather odd, especially as she then said she actually had two bikes and I could take both of them. They are not in working condition though...yet!

A friend has been doing Brighton Critical Mass for a very long time now. He seems a little bitter. Apparently numbers have been falling steadily, especially since the police stopped providing an escort. Last month there were only 18 people, bit shit considering how nice the weather is, but maybe people are away? I do a head count and by the time we get moving there are 26 of us - bit better than last month then.

Everybody seems reluctant to take the lead, so we start slowly with a circuit around the park before a man up front indicates he is going left towards the seafront. We all follow suit. It's nice riding with so many other cyclists and seems a lot safer most of the time, especially since we have enough bikes to effectively block the road and stop people coming past us. But as we continue around town and back down to the seafront drivers become increasingly aggressive, first honking loudly, then overtaking us at risky positions and shouting abuse from their windows. Where are they all going in such a hurry?

One man yells at me from his front seat - "Why are you all blocking the traffic? What's wrong with you?"
I tell him "We're not blocking traffic - we are traffic!"

I hear the bigger Critical Masses, like the ones in London, are really amazing. You can effectively end up with a huge car-free space on the road and feel supported by one another. I got small tastes of what that could be like but it did seem that a large part of what we were doing was pissing off motorists. Well, they piss me off a lot of the time too, but I don't really understand why they are so angry with us. The police stopped us at one point too to ask us to go single file (!?!), although the police car did say Crawley on the side. Maybe Crawley police have too much time on their hands?

The Weirdest Meal

2008-06-29T22:12:00.005+01:00

A few of us have decided to start a monthly foraging trip and today was our first jaunt out. None of us have a great deal of knowledge, but armed with a pocket 'Food For Free' book and some second hand advice we cycled (yep, I'm really getting into that now but my arse is *really* sore!) down to... the seafront. A strange place for a foraging trip you may think, but near to Brighton Marina we found a huge amount of sea kale, sea beet, samphire and rosehips, which I have now discovered were rosa rugosa.

The rosehips didn't really look like the ones in the pictures yet. They were still a lighter orangey colour, so we decided to leave them and come back again later in the year when the book says they will be at their best, but we each gathered bagfulls of the other stuff. The book says sea kale is very rare but there was so much of it, I don't think we even took a fraction of a percentage. According to a web resource it is one of the few vegetables native to Britain. The book also says to only eat the stalks, not the leaves, which is a shame because the leaves are these huge great cabbagy things and are really abundant. It was only later that I reaised the flowers I collected all had tiny black insects living in them which marched indignantly around the polythene bag I had unwittingly rehomed them in. Alas, I will have to put the sea kale out with my compost tomorrow as I don't really want to drown a whole village of insects just so that I can eat their homes. My rather more experienced friend now tells me the leaves are in fact fine to eat and delicious in a stir fry - next time!

So, my meal tonight was one of the strangest I have ever had. It consisted of...

A mixture of three different kinds of pasta (ends of bags), served with tomato and basil soup (free from FareShare) with chickpeas and sea beet flowers and leaves cooked in it, samphire (also known as sea asparagus) blanched and dressed with olive oil and lemon juice and locally grown lettuce with tahini dressing.

All rather nice other than the samphire, which has a 'distinctive' taste. It's strangely chemically and not all that great really. We are going to try pickling it to see if that helps.

I'm looking forward to hearing what Beth has made with her samphire, being one month into her year long 100 Mile Diet.

Flying

2008-05-18T13:18:00.003+01:00

"I will recycle, I`ll use my bicycle, I`ll walk into town, I`ll turn the heating down,
I`ll fill my kettle halfway, listen to everything else you say..
But don`t take my freedom away!
Don`t take my holidays, don`t take my time away,
Don`t take my wings away.."
- 'Flying' by Seize the Day

I am an active member of couchsurfing.com - an international network of people who host other travellers for free on their sofa, floor or spare bed. I have hosted a lot of people recently - an average of around one a fortnight for the last couple of months. This is great and I love doing it. I have met some wonderful people and have had no bad experiences, but something is starting to nag at me: am I encouraging people to take cheap flights by giving them a free place to stay?

I first started to think about this when I hosted a couple of girls on their way from mainland Europe to Edinburgh and spotted a flight card sticking out of one of their bags. I was struck with horror. Am I encouraging this sort of behaviour? I couldn't bring myself to speak to them about it, it just felt too rude. Since then I have hosted a number of people and have only once had the guts to bring up the conversation. They had flown, although were quite anti-flying themselves. They said on this occasion they had little time and money and had no other option. I have heard this sort of thing a lot. It seems to me that it goes a lot deeper than just an unwillingness to take what is seen as an inconvenient option, and speaks more about the pressures of modern life and the way people view travel. The more a person is ingrained in modern society, the more they are under this sort of pressure. Even a part-time employee will usually only get a set amount of time in which to take holidays and full-time workers are usually exhausted by the time a holiday comes around, so they feel they deserve to just have a relaxing time in the sun, somewhere far away, with all of the apparent hassle and stress of travel taken away. This is added to by advertisers preying on fear of the unknown in order to sell safety - package holidays, travel insurance and pre-booked flights.

To me, travel is about adventure. The journey is as important, if not sometimes more so, than the destination. Fellow travellers are as interesting as those I go to meet. I have vowed never to fly again. Is this a huge sacrifice? Not really. Why? Because not flying is not synonymous to me with not traveling. I hope to visit hundreds of places in the future, just not in the sterility of an airplane, in front of a child that repeatedly kicks the back of my seat, with a little pre-packed box of something unidentified to eat and popping ears. People have been traveling the globe since the dawn of mankind and we have only had airports for about 100 years so why cement the two together in our minds?

I have just started a 'Travel Without Flying' group on CS. In case people are interested it can be found -->here<--

Because you’re Worth It!

2008-04-29T16:11:00.002+01:00

Because you’re Worth It!

I was talking to a girl about my desire to live without money. I’m still far from money-free but am down to living comfortably on around £25-£30 a week (minus housing benefit).
“But you can’t live on that!” From her reaction you’d have thought I just told her I was paying my way by robbing banks. “I mean,” She continues, “I need fresh organic vegetables and yoga classes and…” she reels off a list of things that she believes she needs lots of money for… “And you need that too… you deserve it!”

Aaah, I see. This is about you, not me. This is similar to the kind of reaction sometimes provoked when I mention I’m vegan – immediate defensive mode and a string of arguments against my chosen way of life, often ending up with the statement, “you can’t tell other people what to do!” No, I wasn’t. Are you?

Why is it we humans so often take somebody else’s difference as a direct attack on ourselves? Is it because on some deeper level we look for sameness with others of our species and are deeply offended if we don’t find it?

An extreme example: I was reading in the news this morning about a girl who was repeatedly kicked in the face and beaten to death. Her boyfriend who was with her was also beaten into a coma and has now reverted to a childlike state, afraid of leaving his house. Their crime? They were Goths. A group of teenage boys set upon them for no other reason than that they looked different. The ambulance men were unable to tell the genders of the couple because their injuries were so severe.

The word ‘deserve’ is a dangerous one. Do I ‘deserve’ to eat organic fruit and veg? Is there anybody who doesn’t deserve to eat organic fruit and veg? I recently gave up alcohol for a month and then conned myself into going out on the piss because I ‘deserved’ a break. Did I then deserve the hangover which wiped me out for two days and then turned into a cold? Did the assholes who kicked that girl to death think in some way she deserved it? Who gets to decide what we deserve? Surely what’s important is what we need? Do I need money? Not necessarily. Do I need food, shelter, clothing and a warm place to sleep at night? Yes. Do I deserve that? Hmmm…

One of the reasons I ‘need’ so much less money these days is that I’m no longer a wage-slave. Back when I was working I thought I deserved all kinds of stuff because I had been working so hard, or because I was hung over, or because I was hungry and couldn’t be bothered to go home to eat. Marketing really prays on this kind of mentality… ‘Because you’re worth it!’

Worth what? Worth entering into a cycle whereby I’m earning money just to pay for all of the stuff I deserve to buy because I work so hard?

Post Peak Panic?

2008-04-14T22:18:00.004+01:00

One of my ever-growing volunteer 'jobs' is an organic wholefood co-op at Brighton Unemployed Centre Families Project. We get stuff through the Infinity Foods catalogue and sell it at not-for-profit prices, plus people can order stuff at the wholesale price.
On Thursday morning last week while 'working' there (more like shopping while helping others to shop really), I possibly witnessed my first post-peak-oil-panic-buy. A guy came in and spent £69 on three 25kg sacks of rice to put into storage. He openly admitted he was doing it because he's uncertain how much longer rice will be available. Eeek!
If this turns out to be the first of many panic buys, surely that will hasten the food shortage and inflate the price of grain still higher?
If you don't know what I'm talking about please read this and then this. I know the basics of peak oil but it will be much quicker and easier to understand if I just refer people to the experts rather than attempt it on here!

Meanwhile I have now made it to the allotment twice. I now know how to plant peas and also how to 'green mulch' (I think that's what it's called). I'm also growing some stuff on my windowsill at home... well, the mint hasn't completely died yet so there is hope... and I'm sure the tomato plant will keep it company now, even though they are only about an inch high each and can't see one another over the tops of the pots yet. Still need to buy some potting compost for the basil, lavender (I know you can't eat that but it will make my flat smell lovely) and thyme. Does anyone know where I can get veganic peat free compost???

Riding a bike

2008-04-05T17:40:00.004+01:00

It must have been around fifteen years since I last rode a bike... rode one any kind of distance anyway. A few years ago I rode a few wobbly yards along the pavement near Queens Park but that's about it. Enough to know I hadn't forgotten (so it's true what they say) but that I should probably avoid riding anywhere near people, obstacles or roads.

Lately with all of the naked bike rides, critical masses, London to Brightons and bike film festivals, I've kind of started to feel a bit left out. It's like suddenly there's this whole world of bike riders doing really interesting things and I have no part to play in it.

A friend has lent me her BMX while she's away. So it was with some trepidation and clumsiness that I carried it out of my block of flats, down the steps and wheeled it down the hill. Safely on flat ground I made some embarrasment for myself out of leaning the bike against a tree by the level and attempting to climb on. I managed the feat but with one clear problem: Antonia obviously has much, much longer legs than me. This is not difficult, I'm barely over five foot.

Fortunately help was at hand and I peddled my way most uncomfortably, climbing (or rather falling in a slightly controlled manner) off at intervals when I was too near a pedestrian, road or another cyclist, to Cranks DIY Bike Workshop. A very friendly man showed me how to lower the seat and I was off again - still uncomfortable but a vast improvement. One thing I don't remember about bikes is the pain. Friends assure me that your bum hardens up after a while but I really can't imagine how anyone copes! I cycled all the way to the art squat in Portslade from just by Brighton Pier, only stopping once to eat an apple and discreetly massage my poor bottom.

On the way back I'm ashamed to say I bottled it and took the bike on the train.

100 Trees

2008-03-10T21:12:00.002Z

I spent the weekend at Gleneirw, a small community in Wales with a big plot of land, complete with ancient spooky farmhouse with a thousand rooms and corridors, very little electricity and an outdoor compost toilet.

Seven people and a dog, we drove over from Brighton in a rattly van for a tree-planting weekend and to check out the community. I have decided to visit a few such communities this summer as well as doing my usual festival circuit, so I jumped at the chance when I heard there was a place for me in the van.

Saturday morning at 10am we trudged through the rain into the field adjacent the farmhouse in our raincoats and wellies. By lunchtime I was just about getting the hang of it. Slice the earth open with my tree-plating doodah (long handle, flat, slightly pointed blade pointing straight downward) and wiggle it from side-to-side in both directions to create a hole. Repeat two or three times to make hole deeper. Stick tree in hole along with cane. Place mat around base of tree and peg slit together with corn-starch peg thing, then peg each corner. Twizzle boingy tube around base of tree and then let it ping into position so it swizzles all the way up.

Repeat over and over and over again.

Not sure how many we planted over-all but being pedantic I decided to count mine. I counted exactly 100 trees. I feel all proud. I think a lot of those trees will be used for coppicing so it's not as fantastic as it could be and we did drive all the way there to do it, but still!

I pledge to plant many more trees in future. I think one thousand would be a good number. Imagine that! :)

Hen's Angels

2008-03-06T16:10:00.002Z

Tap tap tap tap... the rhythm of beak on welly. You get used to it after a while. That and the gentle murmur of clucking. It's actually quite soothing.

We are four girls from Brighton come to Henfield (yes, really!), to help Linda with her few hundred (thousand?) chickens for the day. They are everywhere you can imagine, roosting on piles of dust-laden furniture, atop decomposing vehicles, in barns. Imagine a post-apocolyptic-Mad Max-style future, after the world has become over-run by chickens. Imagine a surreal version of those easter egg hunts they put on for kids. At Hen Heaven the hen's can lay whenever and wherever they like - sometimes in some very obscure places! A lot of the birds have stopped laying altogether, meaning they would be dead if they hadn't been saved by Linda. In fact almost all of these birds would have been killed by now if they weren't here. Unfortunately they can shit wherever they like too and we had the thankless task of scrubbing and scraping and getting covered in chickenshit dust.

Linda made us omelettes for lunch. I have been vegan for over a year. Obviously I had thought about this before coming. I can see no ethical argument against eating these eggs, but it still felt strange. Even as I ate the omelette I questioned if it was the correct thing to do. Am I still a vegan? What does that title mean? Should I follow guidelines in order to call myself that, or am I to follow my own ethics? Is there a word for my new dietary behaviour? Perhaps it's time to leave these labels behind, but of course that doesn't mean I am to change my principles.

I became vegan because I want to live as much as possible in accordance with the principle of non-harm. I would not eat eggs from anywhere else. Even 'free-range' does not really mean ethical - the birds have marginally more room but they still get slaughtered after a certain age. I had been hearing about Hen Heaven for a long time and know a few otherwise vegans who eat these eggs, but I still wanted to come and work here and see them for myself before I ate them. My pondering continues.

The Power of Voluntary Actions

2008-02-07T18:09:00.002Z

I have been helping a friend with her finances. She called me up yesterday and we got to talking about volunteer work, which I see as the heart and soul of money-free living.

I volunteer a lot - probably enough for it to be considered a full-time job. I work in a cafe, a bar, a library, a food co-op, an allotment (in theory) and do a lot of environmental work which includes putting on events, researching, writing and attending a staggering quantity of meetings.

The thing is, when people ask me "what do you do", I don't know what to say. Aside from the fact that I question the whole notion of "what do you do?" meaning "where do you work?" and all of the underlying assumptions that includes, I genuinely don't feel like I "go to work".

I don't look at my five hours of "work" in the cafe, for example, and think - hang on, I've just done five hours work which at minimum wage would mean I earned about (whatever it is at the moment) and that means I have to consume X amount of food and drink today in order to feel like I spent my time well. I think what I'm aiming for is to contribute to everything I take from - but with time and energy rather than money. I don't have a way of working out how much of one thing equals another. I want a volunteer-run, not-for-profit cafe/bar to exist, therefore I will put as much energy into it as I can.

It's because people do this that things like that do exist. If everyone measured their time according to tangible rewards there would be no social centres, community projects, activists, or affordable not-for-profit spaces... only a lot of Tescos. I know there are a lot of 'clone town' / 'ghost towns' now that are just a lot of Tescos, but I think there is also a movement against all of that which is pro-community, and community involves (to me) putting in time and energy just for the love of it, because that's the kind of community we all want to see.

The Landfill Prize

2008-02-01T16:20:00.000Z

Somebody posted a link to this site on an e-list. I have been wondering what I would nominate for the Landfill Prize.

Looking at the nominations so far, I think I would award the prize to...

The £150 toothbrush
- "The Philips Sonicare Flexcare brush comes with it’s own ultraviolet-light sanitising equipment, as well as a whole lot of other bells and whistles. But a survey by Which? in November 2007 found that it performed only as well as a £3 electric brush. Ordinary manual brushes can prove just as effective as high-end electrics if used properly, adds the survey."

Amazing.

I used to work in a fancy dress shop in Brighton. I loved it apart from the boss, who has since sold the shop. The new manager offered me some work there again recently. I was tempted, it seems a much healthier working environment these days. But as I looked around the shop, taking in the dozens of small plastic, flashing, glittering, sparkling, novelty items and the huge array of pvc clothing, giant rubber boots and life-sized skeletons, rubber bats and inflatable parrots I realised a shocking fact: there are a huge number of businesses that are fundamentally unsustainable. What on earth will small businesses like this one do when plentiful cheap oil starts to run dry?

I'm part of the Transition Brighton and Hove Business and Economy Group. This is just the sort of thing I envisage us being asked for help with. I just don't know where to start. Our whole economy seems totally unsustainable, not just individual businessses. One thing that gives me hope is that we are fully addressing this conundrum as a group. I feel like we're taking the problem seriously and not just looking for the easiest answers. I just hope there are some answers out there for us to find.

Freedom to Protest?

2008-01-20T19:18:00.000Z

Something about protests makes me want to drink. I went to a march and demonstration yesterday about the freedom to protest and erosion of civil liberties. This is something that left unchecked will eventually affect all of us, so why do so few people care? The encroaching authoritarianism of Britain goes largely unnoticed. Oppressive laws are so accepted that people often think things are illegal even when they're not, like squatting and hitch-hiking. People talk about "criminals" as though they are this certain breed of people, not like "us", who need locking up.

Two people at the protest got arrested, one for indecent exposure (mooning a cop), pretty silly maybe but does he deserve to go on the sex offenders register for it? I'm pretty well behaved at stuff like this. I tend to do mostly what the police say, but I do feel like a coward a lot of the time. Blindly obeying authority is what's getting us into this mess.

At Climate Camp last year people were getting arrested for really trivial stuff, like walking on the road, carrying a bicycle repair kit which contained super-glue and for refusing to give police their details. You don't have to give police your details unless there are very specific conditions, like if you're arrested. He was released straight afterwards. Police were also taking people's phones and writing down the numbers. Crossing the field behind the camp on mass we were confronted by a hoard of riot police, some on horse-back. Several people were injured. Many of the police had removed their identifying numbers, masked up with balaclavas and were just swinging their batons at the crowd. Mango is currently suing the police for sexual assault after one of them put his finger in his anus through his clothes during a stop and search. Why was he stopped and searched? He was changing his shoes.

It may be true that we're not living in a completely authoritarian dictatorship, but this is not the free, democratic society that a lot of people think it is.

After the protest I wanted a drink. First time this month I've been tempted but I'm sorry to report that I caved in. I didn't just fall off the wagon though, it was more like a swan-dive. My body is currently wreaking revenge.

Waste

2008-01-18T21:30:00.000Z

Today I hit upon an ingenious idea: Sharing the cost and space of our recycling box. Ok, now this may not seem like such a radical move, but what you have to bear in mind is that we're the only people in our whole block of flats that have one. That means that the other... however many people, are just throwing everything away.

You also have to bear in mind that I have an almost pathological hatred of waste. Seeing someone throw something useful away makes me come out in giant itchy boils. That's why I squirm so much.

It seems to me that our society sees increasingly less as useful. If something is broken, we throw it away. If we've had something for a long time, we swap it for a new one, upgrade. What is important to many people is not that they have everything that they need, but that they have the latest version, the newest fashion or just a better one than their friends. Most of the time it's not even stuff that we need. I don't *need* a television, a hairdryer or humorous quirky ornament on my shelf, so why the hell do I have them?

One thing I am currently rather pleased with is my recent reduction in waste. I compost religiously, even though I don't have a garden. I re-use as much as possible, like taking empty plastic containers to a creche for kids to build stuff with. I haven't had a new plastic carrier bag in months as I collect them from hedges and fences. I refill my olive oil, washing-up, etc bottles and bags for rice and lentils. I've found people who will recycle bottle tops, corks and some other stuff so I collect them too and take them to the appropriate places. Any tat or clothes I don't want goes on freecycle or to the free shop at BUCFP.

the consequences of all this obsessive diligence are that it takes about a month to fill a dustbin liner between the two of us and that we're only using about a third of the space in our recycling box. It seems like a bit of a waste, which as you know, I hate.

I have written a small notice, complete with doodles, pictures and colouring in and I have pinned it to the notice board downstairs to try to encourage some of my neighbours, few of which I have ever met, to share the space and cost of my box with me. I live in hope.

Escaping from London

2008-01-14T23:30:00.000Z

I missed it by two minutes. How annoying is that? I ran all the way from Victoria tube to Victoria coach station and saw a load of coaches, including mine, pull out just before I got there. This was after I decided not to take the bus from Whitechapel to Victoria, instead 'playing it safe' with the tube. The Circle, Hammersmith and City and most of the District lines were down (for those not versed in London speak that means almost all of them), meaning it took almost an hour and a half to make what should have been a fairly quick journey. I decided to see things in a positive light. This was an opportunity for an adventure. I would not pay National Express an extra tenner to get on the next coach and I would most certainly not get a train. I would take the opportunity to investigate something I've been pondering for some time: Is it possible to hitch-hike out of London?

If you are the kind of person who often finds yourself missing coaches from London to Brighton then you may want to take notes...

The plan was simple: buses are only 90p a journey with an Oyster card and there's a cap after £3. I would take London buses as far south as possible and then hitch from wherever I ended up. I was armed with four large maps which put together show the entire London bus network, including an enlarged central area (you can get these free from the travel office at Victoria). After 30 minutes of studying them I found my route. The number 2 (which I managed to get on for free!), the 468 and the 405 together managed to get me all the way down to Redhill. I got off the last one early and stuck out my thumb. Success! After only around 10 minutes a lovely couple in a rickety jeep stopped and picked me up. They took me all the way back to Brighton and the whole journey only cost me £1.80. :)

Foiled by Cake

2008-01-09T22:25:00.000Z

It was a vegan strawberry and peach cake that did it. It broke my will. It stared at me all day while I worked in the cafe, but I ignored it. I thought I was stronger than the cake. Why is my willpower so much weaker when I have friends around me? It's not peer pressure, nobody wanted me to do it. They were quite encouraging actually. I was working with Dave, who has given up sugar. He wasn't supposed to eat the cake either, but he managed not to. Not like me. I scoffed it in a cafe meeting while my friends looked on in horror.

So, I must regrettably announce that I have broken my New Year resolution. I have partaken of wheat. Sometimes, I really shock myself.

The alcohol and caffiene bans are still in full-force until the end of the month. I will not relent.

The Vegetable Dilemma

2008-01-06T18:29:00.000Z

In an effort to further green my food intake I've decided to try and go local and organic for the majority of my veg. Trouble is, organic food can be pretty pricey. Am I going to manage on my ever-decreasing monetary supply?

Since I gave up supermarkets around the middle of last year I've been getting my veg from a mixture of places, mostly the Open Market which has very cheap fruit and veg, a fairly large selection and friendly staff/owners who recognise and reward their 'regulars'. Trouble is, the business is local but the food gets shipped in from all over. So it's a lot better than Sainsbury's, but I still don't feel like I'm doing enough.

After a bit of investigation I have found that there are a few veg box suppliers, some of whom supply local stuff. It's all quite confusing though as some of them are apparently mostly local, but not completely and some are mostly organic, but not completely. I know I should probably just phone them all and quiz them but somehow that seems quite daunting, especially as to my shame I really don't know a great deal about vegetables - except what they taste like!

Today I decided to try another angle: Local farmers markets. Brighton has three per month, all in different places. Today was the one near Hove station, so I plodded over there to meet my friend Beth, who knows about such things already.

Unfortunately - or maybe fortunately, as it helped curb my spending - a lot of the stalls were selling cheese, eggs and other stuff that I don't eat anyway as I'm vegan. I've also decided to complicate matters somewhat by giving up wheat this month as an experiment to see if it will help with my breathing troubles. Apparently wheat is the second most likely allergen after dairy. There was one stall selling lots of fresh, nice looking vegetables though. I had to ask how much stuff was, as although it was labeled I'm not seasoned enough to know what a pound of carrots looks like. They were very friendly and helpful though so I bought a variety of stuff from them. I wanted to ask questions about how they grow stuff and how organic it is but it just didn't seem appropriate for some reason. Isn't that silly? A big bag full cost £7 which I guess is pretty good for what it is, but I'm used to spending about £4 and my total weekly shop rarely exceeds a tenner. I still have to buy a few things from the market like mushrooms and ginger but I am happy that I have nice locally-grown chemical-free veggies to eat for dinner.

I'm starting to think the only way to get cheap, local, organic, healthy food is to grow it yourself. Another New Year resolution: learn to grow food.

A Blank Page

2008-01-05T23:39:00.000Z

There is never anything so exciting, terrifying and ominous to a writer as a blank page. What shall I do with it? What will it become? Will it end up utter shit that in five minutes I'll delete or scrunch up in the bin? I hope not.

I intended to start this blog on the first of January. A hangover postponed it to the second and I've spent the past three days trying to find a sequence of words not yet taken on blogger that I could stand to write under for the next... however long I keep this blog for. I have settled on this one which, as you can see is, 'A long way from Eden'. A lot of the thoughts that squabble for attention in my mind tend to be about what's wrong with the world and why, but don't let that put you off reading, because I think about solutions a lot too. As my thoughts take shape I want to document them, along with the changes that I make in my own life as a consequence.

There are four main threads running through my life that I want to share with you:

My work with Transition Brighton and Hove (find out what that is -->here<--).
My own journey to a greener way of living, with any problems or frustrations that brings up.
The Art of Money-Free Living - Is it possible to live without cash? I've been gradually reducing my need for money for the past eighteen months and I intend to find out.
My interest in the workings of capitalism and the connections between social, environmental, political and spiritual issues.

Well dear reader, I hope we shall be very happy together over the next year. Check back often and please feel free to leave me comments so I know that you're still out there.