Where were you..?

Gracchii tagged me in a politics meme, so I thought I'd comply. It's quite interesting to reflect on this, although a pattern definitely emerges. Plus it enables me to get up another post this morning and leave for the library fairly promptly. So here goes.

Where were you when you heard about…

The Death of Princess Diana: I was at home with my parents (this will be a bit of running theme, since all these events happened before or very shortly after my eighteenth birthday). I was vaguely waking up when it started to dawn on my mother that all was not as it usually was on Radio 4. Like many people I suppose, we assumed at first that the Queen Mother must have died and were terribly surprised when it turned out to be Diana. I remember being very relieved that it hadn’t happened the day before, because that would have been on my father’s birthday, and equally relieved that the funeral was on the 6th September and not the 5th, because that would have been my birthday. That probably makes me sound rather selfish, but my thirteen-year old self quickly became tired of the extent to which the nation poured out its grief on a woman most of them had never met, and never would have met. To be honest, I suspect my twenty-four year old self would have the same reaction. Whether the nation would or not is perhaps a more interesting question.

Margaret Thatcher's resignation 22nd November 1990: I was at home, since I was only seven at the time. I do remember it though, in fact it was probably one the first major political events of which I was aware. I sometimes think how odd it is that people of my age have one of a couple of big 'end of an era' landmarks as their first political memory, usually either Thatcher to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Attack on the Twin Towers 11th September 2001: Again, at home, only a few weeks before I left for Cambridge for the very first time. I think I had just come home from work (I was selling ice cream at a Stately Home that summer, the long summer after I finished school) and I was talking to a friend on the phone. My mother came home from the supermarket and had heard about it on the radio in the car, so she just walked through the door and turned the television on. I wouldn’t say this event politicised me, but coming only a week after my eighteenth birthday it was certainly heralded the start of the era in which I tried to think properly about what happens in the world. Even though I used to read the newspaper every day, I don’t think I’d even been properly aware before that Bush was a Republican President and what that meant for America and for the rest of the world.

England vs Germany World Cup Semi-Final 1990: This was the first football match I ever watched. Come to think about it, it is one of only about three that I have ever watched, and most of those seem to have been England vs Germany World Cup/Euro. I was too young to stay up the end so I had to go to bed at half time. I don't think I missed much.

President Kennedy's assassination 22nd November 1963: As I am sure you will have realised by now, this happened twenty years before I was born. Actually, it kind of comes as a surprise to realise it is only twenty years, since it seems to belong to a much more distant era – I suspect as a result of the combination of black and white television and because I don’t remember much until the mid-1990s. I do, however, remember my mother telling me several times that she had as a twelve-year old heard about it from a neighbour walking home from school with her twin sister, and I remember being surprised that something political could happen that had people telling each other about it in the streets. Then of course September 11th happened and provided the same moment for my generation.

I tag Doug to continue this further, largely because I want to see if any of these have any resonance for an Australian, plus anyone else who feels so inclined.

Mauritania

There was a military coup in Mauritania yesterday. I don't know much about Mauritania, to be honest, perhaps a little more than most people, thanks to the particular interest (!) in African affairs that I have developed during the last three years. I know that it is an ex-French colony, a large, poor and predominantly sandy country in West Africa. The BBC website has previously been so kind as to inform me that it is possibly the only place in the world where stretch marks are considered to be the pre-eminent sign of female beauty. It is also the newest oil producer in the world, although that doesn't seem to have played much of a role in the overthrow of its first democratically elected president. Rather than oil, this seems to be about power and the army; the army has been involved in every previous election since independence, and that can be a hard habit to break.

News of this coup struck me particularly hard for two reasons. By sheer coincidence, i was browsing through the archives of my friend Westminster Wisdom's blog yesterday, right before reading the news, and found his piece on Mauritania, which was written in the wake of Mauritania's first 'free and fair' elections in 2007 and comes close to predicting exactly these events. I've also just finished reading Martin Meredith's truly excellent State of Africa, a history of the African continent since independence, a book I would strongly recommend, but which is in many ways a supremely depressing work, since it is in effect a chronicle of the repeated descent of promising countries into cycles of coups, exploitation and chaos. Yesterday's developments in Mauritania show how much these cycles are still ongoing for many countries, however much we might hope that Africa is making something of a fresh start in the 21st century.

So, a bit off topic from my usual posts and not something about which I have a great deal to say, but I felt strongly that it shouldn't pass unnoticed.

On the Joys of Old-Fashioned Vegetables

Purple podded peas had a fascinating and extremely thought-provoking post on the recent growth of in interest heritage vegetables, the possibility that we are all being vegetable luddite sand the advantages (or not) of the prevalent modern hybrid, that glossy and proportionally perfect varieties generally found in seed catalogues and supermarkets alike. It has prompted me to put some of my thoughts about diversity, growing ‘old-fashioned’ vegetables and agri-business into some kind of order, so apologies in advance for topic-theft.

A number of criticisms can (and have) been levelled at the love the average modern organic-goddess displays for heritage varieties of vegetables and organic gardening and her literal and metaphorical distaste for anything with F1 on the packet. A quick flick through the posts that have accumulated on this blog in the last month and a half illustrates the point nicely, I feel. These arguments against a preference for all things diverse and organic boil down (just like my father cooking cauliflower) to one basic point; F1 varieties, pesticides and homogeneity have evolved because they are better than that which earlier existed. In other words, Darwin lives! Traditional varieties simply couldn’t cut the mustard (again, not unlike my father’s cauliflower). More importantly, pesticides and chemical fertilisers are essentially for feeding the growing world population.

I think this argument against heritage veg misses some major points. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that I believe unequivocally that diversity is to be valued, not only in a relative sense, for the advantages it can give, but for its own sake as well. There is a practical aspect to this – I find it hard to believe that diversity doesn’t give some kind of protection against diseases, climatic variation and sheer bad luck. Some varieties are also unquestionably better suited to some local conditions than other. But I was also struck by the aesthetic dimension to diversity. Quite simply, a more diverse world seems structurally more appealing. Who wants vegetables that all taste and look the same? Modern palates are dulled enough as it is. Every autumn I search in vain for apples in local shops that aren’t granny smiths, coxes, great red waxy things or golden delicious, when I know somewhere in Britain can be found hundreds of varieties, each with their own taste, texture and smell. For followers of Darwin (and no, in case you were wondering, I don't deny evolution), it should not be forgotten that according to evolutionary theory more species should evolve as others die out, thus maintaining diversity, unless of course some great deus ex machina comes along and screws the whole system up as successfully as humans have done.

Beyond these questions of diversity and evolution lurk the spectres of profit and choice. Promoters of modern hybrids write as if consumers have had a free choice in selecting the restricted range of varieties currently on offer. They haven’t. They have been presented with a limited selection, often sweetened by reduced prices, and have had little choice but to take it. This choice has not been based on the needs of the allotment gardener, but on ease of mass production by a decreasing number of seed companies operating on an ever-greater scale. Cooks have been told that they should prioritise appearance over taste, the perfectly round tomato with a thick-skin that travels well in lorries over the local, bumpy, fragile fruit with the amazing taste. No-one has ever asked me which I prefer. Nor should it be forgotten that seed companies have a huge amount to gain from producing hybrid varieties where the seeds can’t be harvested by grower to produce the same type, because then gardeners require new packets of seed every year. I am astounded by the moral integrity and commercial bravery of companies like Real Seeds which appear to be trying to put themselves out of business by encouraging gardeners to collect their own seeds.

On the need for modern farming methods in order to feed the world, all I can say is that a couple of years ago I lived with an Ethiopian student of agriculture who was writing a masters thesis on how organic production was ultimately a more sustainable way of feeding central Africa. I read his thesis and talked to both him and his friend from Uganda. His conclusions weren’t quite ready to change the world, but what has vividly stayed in my mind is their anger over the companies who had their countries dependent on buying seeds, buying fertiliser and pesticide every single year, when huge percentages of the population were living on less than one dollar a day. Their frustration about how the need for cash to buy new seed every year has tied even small-scale producers into producing cash-crops for export was truly memorable. Their point? Does the West really think that Africa has never come up with its own ways of dealing with the pests, diseases and weather patterns that it has had to live with for millennia? Sure, they may not be doing a great job right now, but that is precisely because diversity and sufficiency on a community level were key ingredients in traditional methods of agricultural risk management.

In some ways talk of feeding the world is irrelevant. I’m not trying to feed the world. I’m trying to feed myself. And if everyone was given the space to do that, maybe feeding the world wouldn’t be such a problem.

101 Ways To Reduce Your Carbon Footprint: Date a South African

After nearly three years of being in a relationship with a girl from the third-world (no, really, ask your nearest consulate), I have gained new and unlooked-for insights into the extent of restrictions on international travel for those not in possession of a Western passport. As a result, I think I have come up with an excellent system to reduce the collective carbon footprint of Europe by targeting that most modern of carbon-evils: The Budget Airline. I'd like to share it with you.

Cheap flights are, in many ways, good. Travel abroad is good, interesting and fun, and I challenge even the most obsessive eco-worrier to claim otherwise. Increased contacts between neighbouring countries are good, culturally, economically and politically. For those of us living in lovely England, sunshine is good. But the carbon output, less good. What I propose is that we try and stop people taking short flights for no particularly good reason, trips that would have never existed if the flight hadn’t existed for 1p (plus tax). After all, these people aren’t really missing out if, ten years ago, it would never have occurred to them to take this trip.

To regulate this, I suggest that everyone prove that they really, really want to take the flight in question, that they have a genuinely good reason (like, for example, not having seen the sun for six months) and are not just acting on a passing whim. Perhaps this means that travellers in future will have to plan a bit more in advance, fill in a few forms explaining why they want to travel, even pay a small surcharge to show they really, genuinely, actually do mean it. In extreme cases, they might have to travel to a nearby metropolis to speak with representatives of the country they want to visit. Of course, to prove that they’ve been through this process, I anticipate that a small stamp or sticker would have to be placed in the applicant’s passport. We could call it a visum, from the Latin for ‘a thing that has been seen’, reflecting the fact that it would need to be checked before the visitor would be allowed in the country in question. In this way, more people would be encouraged to holiday without using air travel or at least reduce the number of short flights they take to one a year, and the money paid for such visa* could go towards other ways of reducing carbon outputs, yet no-one with a valid reason for travel would be penalised.

Brilliant, eh?

*Yes, I do get a thrill from a correctly conjugated Latin plural.

Concerned about Cape Town

A bit off topic this. I had fully intended to write about recent (and highly successful) yoghurt making, but instead I wanted to put up this (taken from the fabulous South African cartoon strip Madam and Eve http://www.madamandeve.co.za/). It discusses the whole problem of the current xenophobic violence in SA better than I ever could.



For those who don’t have a handy South African around to explain mysterious words and phrases (like pointing out that ‘Robot’ means traffic light and is therefore a perfectly reasonable word to paint on roads), ‘Umshini wama’ is the name of Zuma’s anti-apartheid theme song.

It means ‘Bring me My Machine Gun’.