Agent Provocateur

Isn't that from a movie? It conjures two images for me. Firstly of some incredibly sexy French woman from a James Bond movie. Or secondly when I think of 'provocateur' I think of the history of the seedy Soho area in Inner London, the Seven Dials and the prostitutes who propositioned.



Both less and more significant, it turns out that a provocateur merely provokes and I might be doing some provoking on May Day in Blackball this year. Some details below

Forum: The legacy of neo-liberalism
Can we think the system or does the system think us?

What should we be talking about?
Workers rights? Money?
Social dysfunction? The planet?
Food? Revolution? Culture?
Housing? State surveillance?

And what action should we be taking?

May Day always seems important and appropriate to me. But this year, it is hard to overstate it's significance. The world around us changes and shakes and the money system turns out to be rusted through. It's time for some careful thinking and vigorous discussion.

Grace has brought me home

Do I really know how lucky I am? I hope so. I hope I make good use of the grace showered upon my family.

This morning online, I read the news that another UK friend is out of work. Specifically, her husband has lost his job. In my mummy world, that is just as bad. She is expecting another baby and they had just moved house. Amongst this group of treasured friends who have worked together, there have been several job losses this year. How come I got so lucky? A New Zealand passport and a place in the sun (well the rain here in smallwettown, but we do get sun as well). How come so many people in the world, on the Gaza strip and in Rwanda for example, are so unlucky?

After I had read my emails I went out to feed the chooks. I'd kept my exhausted son home from school and Friday is a no-paid-work day for me. A whole day with both of my children and food in the cupboards. I looked carefully at my blessings in the garden. Chooks laying every day, kale, broccoli and silverbeet growing for winter and spring, a bed of yams for winter and potatoes in various spots in the garden for late Autumn eating.

I don't find it simple to see the ways in which fortune and fate hit people. I read not long ago of an environmental scientist who believes sincerely that our earth is overpopulated by a factor of seven. That's a lot of people to lose. I admire the gesture of hope and love of each new loved child in a family. I have a particular admiration for my friends Tania and Rachael, on different sides of the globe, who love life so much they want to share their breakfast table with a new little one most years and have done this for a long time already. It may not seem a rational admiration in these straightened times (or ever, from an environmental perspective), but a loved baby is such a positive gesture and yet for many people, I can see that news of babies is going to bring great great fear and the fertility rate will drop, worldwide. In my family, the immediately post WW2 generation is largeish, 3-8 children per married couple. The generation before, the young couples of the Great Depression, they all had families of just two children.

This prospect, not at all hypothetical for many men and women, intensifies a situation which already exists around poor women and abortion. Not a fan of abortion myself, I would march to keep it legal in this country, protecting the lives of women who have a desperate need to terminate a pregnancy. I would like to see the end of unsafe, back street abortions world wide. The presence of safe, clean and legal channels for abortion does not make a woman abort, but it does diminish and hopefully eliminate the power of illegal, literally dirty and unsafe butchers.

[If you are new to my blog and feel cheated by there being hardly any gardening talk and mostly my rants on everything else, I can absolutely see your point. But it may not improve until one day suddenly it does and there might even be photos of the garden. It has happened before.]

fat for the downturn

I read recently that KFC's profits are up in recent months in New Zealand. Then I learnt that pizza chains and other budget end fast food retailers are booming in the UK from this article by Peter Preston. I love the Guardian Weekly title of the article:'Recession is a wonderful gastro leveller'. Here are a few sentences from the article which struck a chord:

Conventional wisdom going into the crunch held that eating out would fade from
everyday life. We'd be back to simple ingredients and verities. ... But it
hasn't turned out like that. You have to look at the way society moves on as it
struggles to function. ... A takeaway isn't a treat, merely a particular sort of
retail therapy. Recession simply means we are eating worse, then slumping on the
sofa. We are supposed to shape up. In fact, we're calling Domino's and ordering
extra cheese.

Preston, armed with statistics I didn't know about before reading his article, debunks some polyanna ideas which were popular in blogosphere last year. It brings to mind another one which I felt unable to thrill to: that in severe economic depression we would start working together as a community better, getting to know our neighbours and helping each other more.

It's not that it is a bad idea. I feel part of my community here in smallwettown and the egg and clothes and childcare swaps, the school gala and the endless raffles which are part of the fabric of my life are treasured (perhaps the childcare swaps more than the raffles, but you get the idea).

It is just that I think it is naive.

Methamphetamine use is destroying individuals and families right now in New Zealand and it was last year and the year before that. Don't even get me started on pokie machine addictions. These are but two examples of fragile communities where the recession will intensify the pain and helplessness, not save through potato swaps.

In a country where cooking and gardening skills have been off the school curriculum for decades (yes I know there are semblances of cooking, usually called something obscure, but have a close look at what the actual learning focus is - let me know if you find meal planning and budgeting in there as I'd be ecstatic to be proven wrong on this), baked beans and McDonalds happy meals are routine default options.

With big business making so much money from our collective lack of cooking skills, I don't see any change in the school curriculum coming, not even on the furthest horizon. The Ministry of Education have spent millions (I betcha anything it was lots of millions) on it's latest school curriculum (introduced 2008) in which students learn to be nice to each other as well as to count. That came out last year and no doubt a number of education consultants were very well paid for it. They probably did have input from the Otago Home Science people (what are they called this year - the university food tech department as another possible clue) who no doubt have some wonderful ideas on how to develop new food products and brand awareness and blah blah get their students jobs in the food industry.

How many parents who balance the home budget through careful rationing of expenditure, fruit and vegetable growing and cooking from scratch do you think they consulted? I know they are around because I count them among my friends locally and internationally and also amongst those I admire in blogosphere. We share our knowledge, our successes and failures and learn from each other. There is not money to be made from marketing us. We work collectively and cooperatively and our exchanges are not of cash.

Just the beginning

I think there is more politics coming up on my blog. Today I read Rod Oram's Sunday Star Times article on the recent jobs summit in Auckland. He describes how some very sharp person surnamed Grant talked about the four phases of the rapid change we have experienced we had gone through and we are about to go through the fifth one: social unrest and protest. And no one bloody took serious notice.

Which given what is going on in the streets of Europe at the moment, gives me cause for wonder. Kiwis don't put up with everything all the time. she won't always be right. Thinking about how long ago the anti-nuclear agitation and the 81 spring bok tour was, perhaps we are moving towards an awakening, a thinking about what is right and who we want to serve in an earthly fashion.

Cos I do agreee with the protestors that the workers did not create the current financial crisis so why should they be losing their jobs to bail out shareholders?

We've already had major bank nationalisations globally. Will the ideas of national state assets ownership and some more radical worker ownership of factories come to the fore again?

inside outside world

Today I remained inside my house for the entire day, excepting feeding the chooks twice and hanging washing out once. The purpose was to keep my children inside in the warm and to cosset and coddle my son out of his wheezing into improved health.

I will not even pretend it did great things for my sanity. The children were fine, within the usual realms of children challenges. Once again, the problem was the house. I need to leave the house. Every day.

So while I was inside more than ever, no longer discussing the financial literacy of the nation's youth with the local MP but instead teaching two young children how to share, then insisting on the sharing, more times than any non-parent might imagine.

I sneaked in some reading, but although I am enjoying Catcher in the Rye, the endless monologue of a depressed teenager isn't hugely uplifting. I read the weekend papers almost exhaustively, ignoring the milk spilt on them and blocking out the origins of the green shrek toothpaste smeared throughout my daughter's hair. I read about the woman behind a new book called Love in a Headscarf and found her blog. Spirit21 is my new must-read, a British Muslim woman thinking and analysing and living outside the square. Her header says it all:

'They built me a box to live in and painted my
caricature inside.
They said "this is you".
I said no thank you, I'd rather be me'

In my inbox today, the electronic version of the latest magazine of the (NZ) Labour History Project, formerly known as the Trade Union History Project. One of the best articles in this magazine was by David Grant on Mark Briggs and Archibald Baxter, conscientious objectors in World War One. Whereas Baxter wrote a wonderful memoir which I recall reading as a teenager (partly while in detention ha ha ha), Briggs was an ordinary working class man whose life has not received much attention until now. I copy here Grant's final two paragraphs from the article:

Mark Briggs will be best remembered for his experiences during
the First World War, and rightly so. I contend that Briggs was not a hero but
an ‘ordinary’ man caught up in extraordinary circumstances, events that
he faced with enormous moral courage. He and the other transported
objectors were tortured in varying degrees in the most astonishing incidence
of State-sanctioned cruelty in this country’s history. Forcibly taking the
14 men, without warning, to the front line to cure them of their
insensibility represented the nadir in the State’s bigotry towards legitimate
dissent. Twelve of the 14 succumbed to the army’s wishes, some in the most
trying of circumstances. In a poignant irony, one, William Little, was
killed within 18 days of becoming a stretcher bearer.

Baxter and Briggs prevailed, making them New Zealand’s
first successful dissenters, succeeding against all odds in a young,
immature, subservient, insecure and martial society that feared
nonconformity, even more so under the stresses of war. They stood at the apex
of the State’s intolerance towards such dissent. They are key in our
tradition of anti-militarism that includes Moriori leader Nunuku-whenua;
Taranaki’s Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi; the brave young working class
men mostly from the West Coast and Canterbury who protested against
compulsory military training when it was first introduced in 1911; the
anti-conscriptionists of World War One; other pacifists before and in the
early days World War Two, and the myriad of antiwar activists who emerged in
the nuclear age. Briggs and particularly Baxter (through his book) became
heroes to many of these later activists. They are exemplars of the cause of
war resistance in this country, men of courage, spirit and principle, to be
lauded in the same breath as Te Whiti, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and
Nelson Mandela.

Grant also has a book out on these men and I'll be down at my local library making sure they have it/have it on order later this week. The Labour History Project website is here. Here on the Coast we have our very own labour history project and this is our website for the Blackball Working Class History Museum.

And the garden? I read in the (Christchurch, NZ) Press in the weekend an article by some uber-capitalist stockmarket enthusiast bemoaning people becoming hysterical about the market and planting vegetables instead of shopping. Like women who ask too many questions, lets paint sensible people who aren't conforming to the way the big boys want us to bail them out by describing them (me, probably 'us) as 'hysterical'.

I didn't get to get my hands dirty today, but I did consider the view from the study window. Since I moved the temporary chook shelter, I get a much better view of the far corner where we have planted cabbage trees over our children's buried placentas and a few blackcurrant bushes. The chooks have been clearing this area nicely and I think there is room for a plum tree this winter and - given how I get to see it so well from my computer now - some spring bulbs.

4am

Isn't there a song with the phrase 'four o'clock in the morning'? I can sort of hear it in my head but not the rest of the song.

Anyway, while I'm up, more on my life.

Yesterday Fionn and I planted his broccoli. It is getting quite late for planting here, but worth a go, especially if the alternative is throwing the seedlings out. Before we planted, I emptied a 40 litre bag of sheep poo on the garden site, added blood and bone, kinpack sheep dags soil conditioner and dolomite lime and then dug it all over. We've planted the broccoli plants fairly closely - about 20cm apart, but I'm figuring that with the intense amounts of plant food we've given them, they should thrive. I'm not thinking too much about my frustration with broccoli last winter - when my six year old announces he loves broccoli and wants to grow some, there ain't no way I am squashing his enthusiasm.

I also made green tomato chutney. I haven't tasted any yet but am, naturally, hopeful that I haven't wasted my time trying to emulate Barbara Kingsolver merely for all noses to wrinkle when the chutney comes out.

While I was being so clever, I made ratatouille with the gifted field mushrooms, the aubergine which was on special and with our own red tomatoes and (green) zucchini. We had that for tea after snacking on smoked chicken sandwiches for much of the afternoon. A grateful person connected to FH's work gave him a home smoked chicken which we all enjoyed.

The other thing we did was Fionn and I went to the Warehouse. If you don't live in New Zealand, The Warehouse is a huge shop full of all kinds of supposedly cheap things. It makes a big song and dance about being NZ owned and having NZ made products, but the reality is that most of it's stock is made in China. Children love the Warehouse. I'm less excited but as I woke up feeling strong and brave, off we went to buy stationery, a new alarm clock and to research mugs (and from the other in the party, to oggle hot wheels cars).

Lots of very cheap mugs, generally under $5 each with some packs of 4 (that I didn't like) for $6. I realised that all red mugs were ruined because they all look like those Nestle mugs and yes surprise surprise I am a nestle boycotter. So two mugs of pretty floral patterned-ness went into the trolley. But wait. There's more. On the way to the Hot Wheels aisle, I saw a stand of 'urban revolution' branded items on remainder sale. Ha ha ha the irony. I bought, for $2.97 each, some rather styley mugs which were almost definitely made in China, but which had printed upon them, spanish text about Cuba and a romantic photo of a Cuban car and building. So in the capitalist temple, I bought remaindered mugs of probably sweatshop origin which glorified Cuban life, the socialist state which eschews capitalism.

I also bought some daffodils as I had to because they were called 'Sandra' which I've never seen before. It says they are polyanthus type, which I don't understand at all in relation to daffodils. I'll have to raise them in pots on concrete to reduce the likelihood of slugs eating them. By Spring, our garden will be a-slime with slugs and daffodils are a favourite food of the slimeys. So last year we had anemones because they were called St Brighid and this year is my turn. Haven't seen any flowers named for Fionn or FH.

While I was making a mess in the kitchen yesterday, I also got to listen to the second of Margaret Atwood's lectures on debt. Yesterday was debt and sin. Fasicnating stuff. This link gives more information and has the podcast of the lectures.

In a few hours, so long as I don't forget, overcome by the challenge of making school lunches and getting organised after having been awake in the middle fo the night, Brighid and I have a meeting with our local MP. Our local MP is Chris Auchinvole and the fact that he is a National MP hinders me not. He is paid to work for our electorate and I have some work for him. I've been reading and learning about loan sharks. I first started to learn about loan sharks when I saw the Ken Locah movie "Raining Stones" back in the early 1990s. For a nice, sheltered girl like me, it was a powerful eye-opener. Raining Stones is seet in Northern England but I've been finding out about loan sharks in New Zealand, about people in vulnerable situations being loaned money at interest rates of 8% PER WEEK.

Before the last election, there were noises being made about two things related to this topic. The first was a move to limit the interest rates which could be legally charged as parts of Europe, Australia and the US have done. The second was for the government to fund financial literacy education for New Zealanders. I have a particular interest in the effects on vulnerable young people of poor financial skills and knowledge and today I have several suggestions for Chris Auchinvole. I don't know that he is very important in parliament but I aim for him to be better versed on this topic and hopefully inspired to make a difference in some way, locally or nationally.

If I organised my blog nicely, there would be several different posts instead of this one altogether. There would also be a lovely photo of my green tomatoes freshly picked and then another one of the chutney in jars also looking lovely. Perhaps photos of the packet of daffodils and of the MP and of Margaret Atwood or her book and perhaps an image from the movie Raining Stones. But I'm not that kind of girl. You'll know if I ever do acquire such skills as downloading photos as suddenly there will be more photos than text. It's not on the near horizon though.

summer, recycling

Summer is so beautiful, especially as January passes, that I almost fear to write, to acknowledge that the days are passing. Fionn is at his grandparents' at the moment and thus early mornings here are very quiet. Last night we went out to dinner and then walked along the beach. Brighid and Favourite Handyman both collected pieces of wood for the raised bed gardens and carried them back on their shoulders. Brighid wore a very beautiful smocked dress a friend had made for her and gifted when she was born. With a full skirt and a bow at the back, it is similar to the dresses my mother made for my sister and I when we were small. This one had spaghetti and berry sauce down the front and was wet from the sea around the hem by the end of the evening. It was made with love and she had fun while wearing it.

I bought some chicory seedlings the other day and now have to prepare a spot to plant them in. I sowed chicory seed last year but none of it germinated.

Now the market for recycled glass, plastic and metals has collapsed world wide, stories of recycling centres struggling to stay afloat are making the papers frequently. For me, living in a place which is a long way from anywhere, I think it is an opportunity to ask some different questions about recycling. Everywhere I have lived in the last ten or so years, we've been talking about recycling. Good services, bad services, improving services. The range of recycling services seems a badge of how enlightened a council is. For a city dweller, putting the recycling out, applauding the council or berating them according to their level of collection, is a pleasant way of feeling green.

But why the hell should we feel better about shipping plastics to China (how much fuel is that, not to mention how much fuel to get it all to whichever port it leaves New Zealand from) instead of putting them in our own local landfill? Is China not doing enough of our dirty work by producing clothes and toys and electronic goods cheaply and sweatedly, to feed our consumer desires?

I would like to see a lot more focus from the council here in smallwettown on composting. Food waste is one very significant portion of household waste that need never leave town. For many people, given that we live in a low density housing area where hardly anyone is in a flat without a bit of garden, most of the food waste need never leave our gates.

There is nothing saintly about my supermarket consumption. Nothing at all. We don't buy readymade foods like packaged pizzas and fish fingers, but we do seem to acquire a significant amount of packaging waste each week. There is no waste packaging from my home made kefir, but come term time, I do humour my son who has no tv and generally wierd parents and who especially asks for bought yoghurt not the home made kind for school. I say no to him about 8005 times per week, so the odd yes to yoghurt does not constitute ridiculousness to my mind. We usually buy bottled beer, but when I know we are having guests or will drink a rigger in a day, then I go to the fill your own liquor shop. They have Harrington's Wobbly Boot on tap for $9 a 2 litre bottle and it is a very nice drop.

There is more I can do to reduce packaging coming into my home and with a little more steel resolve, those reductions will become permanent. But I've stopped thinking that the council needs to collect all my crap and send it to China. Frankly, I hope everyone will rethink the way that we treat China as our lower class relation, servant and dumping ground.

The loneliest pub

Well probably not the very loneliest, but I wanted quite a lonely one.

I didn't want to organise a babysitter and go out for New Year's Eve. I wanted some peace and quiet and an opportunity to read. I didn't want to stand on lego, or answer the phone or change nappies or referee disputes or collect washing or make food. So on the afternoon of 31 January, I set out for town with an eye to a pub which would serve wine and not be so grotty that drunken pensioners would leer at me and also not at all in the public eye. Small talk was not part of my plans.

I settled on Revvies, an Irish theme pub which I've never been to before. Merciful choice. It was populated scarcely and by tourists. Inside, I found a table where I could face away from the television and could not be seen from the street or the bar.

So I got to have two glasses of wine and read New Zealand Books and no one interrupted me at all. It was bliss. I also fitted in a quick look at the latest Guardian Weekly. I used to subscribe to New Zealand Books as a student, back when I used to read lots and believed in supporting New Zealand literature-based initiatives. It's time for a return. There was much to enjoy in NZBooks and what grabbed my attention first was a review of a book on the history of male homosexuality in New Zealand (Chris Brickell, Mates and Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand) and an article on the facing page of Peter Wells' response to the book in relation to his own experiences of being a gay man and gay activist in New Zealand, particularly in the 1970s. Wells found it fascinating to read of a history of gay activity in New Zealand before his time, as he hadn't been able to sense it as a young man.

This prompted me to recall a piece I read in Steven Eldred-Griggs new book, Diggers, Hatters and Whores about the goldfields of New Zealand. I've only read bits standing in the bookshop so far but Mum tells me she has it for my birthday next month. Eldred-Grigg is not one to make evidence a requirement for his historical claims and I expect I'll have more to say once I've read the book. But anyway, he suggests that homosexual intercourse was common on the goldfields. Rose Tremain had this as part of her novel set on the goldfields of the West Coast of NZ, The Colour and I just hadn't thought of it before. So I suppose it is perfectly likely and indeed probable but as for evidence, well I spent a loooooong time looking through records of life on the Central Otago goldfields as a postgraduate student and I never once found anything. Perhaps my eyes were closed to the signs.

This talk of the homosexual 'ancestors', as Wells terms, it also brings me to my disappintment in the Pope. I know this is no surprise to discover that the new Pope is extremely conservative but I still find it disappointing. In his recent speeches he has condemned homosexual intercourse and condemned the use of IVF treatments and of many contraceptives. It makes me angry. It makes me angry to think of the way in which Church leaders of many Christian persuasions use God as their excuse for defending and indeed encouraging homophobic behaviour and discrimination against homosexual people. Because I hold no truck whatsoever with any idea that God requires us all to procreate in heterosexual monogamous marital units. As for the idea that it takes a band of supposedly celibate single men to guide us in this practice... I hold my Catholic heritage close to me in many ways, the rituals, the social justice teachings, the memories of a suburban childhood otherwise terribly tame but for a bit of incense on Sunday mornings. But I feel so alienated from it by these terrible statements of Papal nastiness.

As I write, the morning of the New Year has dawned. I woke early and began writing in the dark but now I can see outside, outside to the stormy weather though the lightning has stopped. The poultry palace is still where it should be, which is what I check first after a stormy night.

I am going to give up book group this year and to concentrate my energies on writing more and on growing our little local writers' group. I have designated 2009 the year of my sewing machine simply because I have one and I also have a large pile of things to be mended or altered on it. I am considerably more interested in reading and writing at the moment than sewing though.

I'm still knitting away on the last piece of Fionn's sleeveless hoodie, even though it might not fit him. After that, tempting though a new piece of knitting might be, it is time to make the curtain out of a blanket for the front door which I planned last winter and which I want to be ready for this winter.

I have more plans for the garden than I can write down...! The development of the area near the chook run out of grass and into a tree and bush dense area with mulch underneath is progressing nicely, with the aid of my three Brown Shavers who peck and scratch for their suppers very well. That is my biggest garden project for the moment.

Happy New Year!

recession

All positive love and sunshine today then, obviously.

Today I learnt on the radio that the US government has pumped lots of money into the banks so that they are able to lend money more easily because the big problem is that ordinary people have stopped spending in America. They want the banks to be able to extend credit.

Today I learnt on the radio that in Australia, mortgage defaulting is on a significant rise and that in New Zealand, rent defaulting is on a significant rise.

Today on the radio they played an Elvis Costello song about how the army entices young men from poor backgrounds into the army in tough economic times.

Today in the late afternoon I spent time with the people running a programme for young disaffected people who are interested in a career in the miltary or fire services. I heard of how the military services provide widely encompassing support for its people.

Today I thought of my brother joining the army at sixteen. I remembered being the pacifist sister and slowly coming to terms with the good things the army offered and continues to offer young people.

Big price to risk paying though.

While I was listening to the radio, I made hunza pie, a dish using cooked rice, silverbeet and egg to make a pie. I am grateful again that we have chooks and silverbeet in our garden.

I am still coming to terms with the nature of the pain and the changes our community will experience as the global downturn and financial markets crisis makes it's impact here in smallwettown. I knows that material life will change for many and I suspect that we are well placed for job security to feel the pain less than others in our town, our island, our country. What I still wonder is how we will live in an interior way. How will I make sense of these changes? What will be right and wrong? If there are not enough jobs to go round, then which jobs should change? Should we stop having children? (I will personally but that's not what I mean) A society based on endless growth has a clear rationale, even if it isn't one I am ion full agreement with. A society forced to retract - well what is the rationale for that society?

Collectivism

I object to being labelled as selfish when I voted for freedom and personal responsibility. It bothers me that people do not see the bondage socialism brings/represents - I struggle when thinking people like yourself are so clearly pro-left. I wonder if I'm missing something.

The quote (slightly paraphrased for clarity of meaning outside the original longer paragraph) is from an email from a friend this morning. I know she reads here and hope she won't mind that I've copied her words as the prompt for responding to her thoughts here. They feed into some other related topics which I want to thrash out myself.

I come from a working class and small farmer background. I also come from a solidly national voting background on both sides. I remember as a small child in pyjamas waiting in total silence as we watched the news at six o'clock to find out if Dad, a freezing worker, would go back to work the next day. The strikes sometimes lasted many weeks and they were not empowering for my father. He has often said that there is nothing wrong with capitalism, just that he is on the wrong end of it. My maternal grandfather was a big fan of Robert Muldoon. He owns all of his books. I do believe that he is also quite proud of how the farming industry responded to the dramatic changes when the sector was deregulated in the 1980s.

I grew up Roman Catholic, one of a tiny handful of Catholic children in my class each year. There was no Catholic school in the area at the time and so we were all at the local state school.

Ideas about the deserving and undeserving poor were clearly stated as I grew up. The underserving also seemed to include those late to Mass. I cannot tell you how completely undeserving I am these days.

What is freedom? Freedom to have sex with multiple partners? Freedom to abort in the second trimester? Freedom as a GP to charge as much as one wishes? Freedom to educate ones child wherever one wants? Freedom of speech? The freedom of a decent wage? Freedom to use high or low energy efficiency cars and other appliances?

What exactly is insurance? Is it only a private concept, paid for by ourselves as individuals to protect us against everything which might go wrong and cost money? Is it something which is partly or fully paid for in taxes so that a family or individual might not be ruined by the misfortune of an accident which stops the person from working for a time.

Health care. Who should bear responsibility for our health? Is the collective use of taxes to support our population into the best health possible, irrespective of the person's ability to pay, a moral and financial priority?

Whose children are they? Should our education system be geared to provide the best possible opportunities for all children, regardless of their home resource? Can this be done in a way which also respects and supports those who wish to opt out of institutional education provision and teach their children themselves?

These are just some of the questions which I find relevant to my decisions when I participate in my democracy, our democracy. I am sure there are more which I haven't yet remembered tonight. Where I come from cannot but inform my position, but it is not a position of received assumptions.

I am going to leave my responses to these questions for a separate post later this week when I have had more time to reflect. Going back to the original quote, where the idea of bondage to socialism is raised, I would for the moment suggest that we are in bondage to something. Whether we are in bondage to fate, to God (I realise the believers will consider us all to be so regardless of choice whereas others will see this as the same as bondage to fate - I mean that if we are governed by the teaching of a God, then that is a form of bondage), to an earthly master or to the thrall of marketing images in a consumer society, all of these things are indeed a form of bondage. It is not a matter of not being in bondage as human beings, but how and to whom we are in bondage.

We all must bear personal responsibility for our lives and for our decisions and for our responses to the decisions of others. It is true that ideas about personal responsibility differ and can be shaped by political ideology. I am very wary of the idea that any political landscape prevents personal responsibility.

More another time. Please feel very welcome to post comments on this post. Anything which sharpens our ideas on what we want to give and receive in our democracy has to be good.

Shelter belts

I can't bear to discuss the election. The news is so awful and I am disgusted with a significant percentage of my fellow New Zealanders. Oh. Oops I am discussing it. Two more details then. Firstly, where are the brain cells of the green voters of West Coast-Tasman? 1800 of them gave their candidate vote to Kevin Hague, the green party candidate who was likely to get in on the party list anyway but who had no show of winning the electorate seat. And by what margin did the Labour candidate lose to the National candidate? 935 votes. Secondly, even worse than National winning the election, they are dependent on the ACT party for a majority in parliament. Act only got 3.6% of the vote and yet they are in parliament (5 of them) because Rodney Hide won Epsom. People of Epsom, hang your heads in shame. I suspect the ACT party have some quite intelligent members, just incredibly selfish ones.

So eventually, some time round lunchtime, the fog of my gloom began to lift. The chooks are now back in the mended Poultry Palace which is now living up the north-west corner of the section. The feijoa trees are in the chook run and hopefully they all enjoy the experience.

Yesterday I transplanted my two bay trees from pots into the new garden space which used to be the chook run. I planted some beans and made a bamboo teepee for them to climb up. I planted a zucchini and some lettuces and three kale and some anise hyssop, garlic chives and borage. I covered the soil around the zucchini with grass clippings.

One of the blueberries looks quite unhappy. I've weeded the blueberry bed and covered that with grass clippings and watered it with seaweed brew. Tonight I added the ammonia-sulphate (I think) which I got from the garden a while back. The garden beside it is going yellow on the edges, even of the thyme. So I'm believing Linda Woodrow (the goddess) more and more that mulching with woodchip is bad for plants which like nitrogen. So more grass clippings all over that and then seaweed brew on top. I added chopped up comfrey and some sheep poo and more water to the remaining brew. It can pootle on making me liquid fertiliser for a while yet. Exactly as long as it takes for me to find more seaweed I expect.

The new garden in the old chook spot is very exposed to the wind. So I bought 10 metres of shade cloth and Favourite Handyman made two windbreak fences for the garden. One on the west side and one on the east. He is truly very wonderful, my Favourite Handyman. I also bought punnets of marigolds, alyssum, rainbow chard and great lakes lettuces to plant out in the new garden. Too windy to plant today but they can wait.

Last night we went down to the beach with friends and ate and drank round the camp fire while we watched their fireworks. It was a lovely evening and I'm keen on repeating it often this summer, though obviously without the fireworks.

a weekend of promise

It's gorgeous here this morning, the beginning of a beautiful (though cold) weekend. Last night we let off fireworks which was fun and today I hope we will repair and relocate the chook run to around the fruit trees at the top corner of the back lawn. Then I'll be planting out my lovely new 10sqm garden.

Even more importantly, we'll be voting. Go left New Zealand! I shudder to think what a National government would do to our most vulnerable (not to mention their ignorant and misguided policies on other aspects of our economy and society) in a recession.

Tenth anniversary of the Hikoi of Hope

Susan St John has spoken powerfully and with her usual passion and integrity here. I need to research politcal party responses to the Child Poverty Action Group's campaign before polling day.

Things I wonder

Madeleine Bunting wrote an excellent piece on the adoption of breast cancer as a kind of commercial commodity in a recent Guardian Weekly. I read it in the paper version but can't find it online. She noteed the hoopla surrounding breast cancer week in the UK, with pink ribbons, pink t-shirts and other high profile pink paraphernalia. She also noted the total silence on the possible causes of breast cancer. Those hormone disrupting plastics, food additives and other commodity based suspects can't be packaged up and sold as a PR feel-good advertising package.

So it was with some loathing today that I noticed that in our local supermarket we currently have a double layered advertising caboodle in the bulk foods section. Alison Holst, who has guided thousands of New Zealanders through their early and later days in the kitchen, currently has her name to most of the bulk foods section in 'New World'. No doubt she gets paid handsomely for having her motherly face plastered over the top of containers of scroggin and pine nuts up and down New Zealand. Today it was all through the lens of pink. All the labelling and display posters had been changed to pink and even the bulk foods bags are currently pink. I bought pink Tim Tams earlier this month and thus gave the breast cancer charity ten cents to their worthy cause. Some might suggest that Tim Tams are the kind of processed food that people anxious to reduce their cancer vulnerability would do well to avoid.

So I do hope that all this fundraising and awareness raising saves some lives. But I'm also with Madeline Bunting - the packaging is rather suspect.

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I wonder what the point of my carefully made meal plan and prudent food shopping this morning was. Given that I worked late and ended up buying fish and chips for tonight's dinner. $54 at the supermarket for food which should last us until next Tuesday/Wednesday, apart from another milk trip. $19 at the chippie for food which filled us without laudable nutrition for one meal only. Tomorrow is black pudding, baked beans, veges, rice. I'm thinking I should cook it in the morning. If we have another late arrival home, we can eat the pre-made dinner cold.

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The chooks are trying to roost in their new day home. They do look funny falling off the pungas. Favourite Handyman is going to adapt a saw horse for their portable roost. The odd chook is still odd. Today's egg was shell-less and barely recognisable as an egg. FH suggested killing her now as the books and our learned chook-owning friends suggest she is egg-bound and will most likely die anyway. I guess that is forward planning. Of a kind. She seems quite happy, just underperforming egg-wise.

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Some of the remaining leeks are going to seed. Leek seed heads are so very beautiful - I'm definitely letting at least one grow to it's full glory. My parents arrived here this evening and I proudly showed them round our section. They are quite bemused by our training of wild blackberry. I have quite a few germinated sunflowers now. And two beans. Progress on transplanting kale and lettuces yesterday has been undermined by Brighid who thinks seedling pots are to be emptied, filled and moved around with like sandpit toys. We're not getting on well in gardening terms at the moment, my daughter and I.

Gardening Monday

'Labour Weekend' in New Zealand is in the latter part of October each year and is the traditional time to plant tomatoes, pumpkins, beans and other frost tender plants. People where I live often wait a bit longer as Spring is slow to kick off here. I've planted a couple of tomato plants outside but am in no hurry to finish planting. I planted two pumpkins this afternoon and about 65 onions. Then the children and I transplanted lettuce and kale seedlings into pots. They need to get bigger before they can go into the garden.

I've also permanantly lifted the roofing iron from the compost experiment out the front. I'd layered horse poo and pea straw and fabric scraps and shredded paper and then put roofing iron over it all and weighted it down with bricks. There are worms in there so some activity but actually it was too dry in there and so not huge break down. I watered the newly exposed pile with seaweed brew this morning and no doubt it will rain several times this week. The zucchini seedling I have earmarked for this spot is not big enough to transplant yet but most likely will be in a week's time.

I've used last year's strawberry protection frame (made of wire mesh) to go over the top of my rocket seedlings and the big pot which houses my calla lilly. Brighid caused merry havoc with these pots earlier and was furious when I put them out of her grasp.

Favourite Handyman made a splendid contraption for the chooks today. A large (perhaps two metres in diameter) circle of wire mesh with two bamboo poles crossed and attached over the top to lift it by. Then we pegged shade cloth over the top. We moved it (and very light it is too) to Brighid's Forest (small patch of pungas and a cabbage tree) and then put the chooks in there to feast on the long grass and weeds surrounding the trees. Great scheme though I'm about to discover how to get them out soon... I put some water in a bucket inside the circle for them and in summer could easily make a laying box to pop in there and then they could live there for a few weeks. But at the moment the idea is that they live there in the daytime only. I do appreciate not having foxes in New Zealand - it does make housing chooks much easier.

Of course the term "Labour weekend" is a stupid fallacy. It is supposedly a celebration of good working conditions in New Zealand or something like that. But it was deliberately divorced timewise from the traditional May Day labour movement celebrations which are found all over the world. Robbing it of it's political and historical context. The West Coast is the birth place of the union movement and we have celebrations relating to this at Blackball on or around 1 May.

On the subject of politics, I heard Kim Hill running the election debate last night. You'll be able to find it if you look on the National Radio menu. I am a huge and longstanding Kim Hill fan. It's a great incentive to cook on a Sunday night if I get to hear Kim Hill handle our politicians with skill and verve like last night. My favourite line was after Jim Anderton spoke and went something very similar to: "That's the great thing about having Jim Anderton on this debate. It's like going on an archaeological dig."

carrots amd banks

I have some carrot seedlings.

This is progress.

I also have radish seedlings but they are easy peasy. Carrots are both yummy and difficult to grow. Fingers crossed.

I transplanted chamomile seedlings this morning.

The chook run has indeed dried out and lost its boggy aspect. Big rain predicted for tonight but hopefully the cover will suffice to keep the run mostly dry.

I think I should read The Grapes of Wrath. Still have my head in a spin over the bailouts.
My socialist mate tonight reckons that the current events are healthy and that renationalisation of banks is a good outcome. I'm adding his thoughts to my pondering bowl.

apocalypse theory

Conversations with my brother in law in the weekend have made me realise that I need to really get to grips with where I stand on current apocalypse theory. Not university origin academic paper type apocalypse theory where I read everything available on the subject and then make my own careful and carefully objective summation and consideration of the issues at stake.

This is rather practical and I need to make these decisions without spending half a lifetime reading academic papers.

I have, like many far more erudite people before me, noticed that there is a strong tendency in human nature to perceive apocalypses or apocalyptic events as a part of our stories. I first encountered it as a seventeen year old doing my final high school year of history when we studied Reformation England and I learnt about millenial cults and also about predestination. My teacher, a man I recall with considerable respect for his wry observations, explained the idea of predestination to us. After telling us that the idea of predestination was that everyone is born either detined for heaven or hell, he observed that he'd never met a predestination follower who didn't believe they were going to heaven.

Well actually I first encountered apocalypse theory a few years earlier when a 13 year old boy told me the world was going to end in the year 2000. He was really frightened, and still a shade too young to suggest that while time was running out he really should get on and shag every young woman in town like that fellow Andrew Marvell.

Religious people have apocalypse stories aplenty. The Second Coming never ever ever centres on the possibility that Jesus already came back down again to be a cleaner in South America and ended up running a needle exchange programme in Bolivia and forgot to save the rest of the world.

But religious people do not have the last word on apocalypse stories and beliefs. If you are not religious but a bit of apocalypse is what you fancy, then I highly recommend getting involved in environmental agitation. You don't need to agitate to anyone else particularly; read enough on global warming and depleted food stocks and genetically modified seed and you'll be quite agitated without even leaving your seat at the world wide web.

The nuclear bunkers were a form of apocalypse fear. I think there was more going on in the seventies than that but I was too caught up learning how to use the toilet instead of nappies around that time. I remember macrame and the Pope being assasinated but that's of limited usefulness to this topic.

Anyway, the reason I have to think about how far down the greenie apocalypse path I am, is that I have to decide whether I think the world is going to fall into an abyss literally without oil to line the cogs of post-industrial society, or whether we are going to keep on cycling on economically. Undulating hills of economic growth and retraction. Or a tsunami.

My brother in law who visited in the weekend denies being a National Party supporter. Indignantly he tells me that he voted for Lange's fourth labour party. hmpffffffffff. He spent much time telling me that indeed he and some nutter who sent me an email about kiwisaver are correct that now is exactly the time to be understanding the wisdom of investing in high risk kiwi saver portfolios. He wasn't being ironic.

So am I going to put faith in the peak oil literature and go off grid, put my money under the mattress and find a grain which will grow here in smallwettown? Or put my faith in large financial institutions and invest in a high risk kiwi saver portfolio? I've got chooks, leeks silverbeet and if you ever wanted confirmation that I was overly influenced by watching The Good Life, I'm even growing chamomile in order to make my own herbal tea this summer. I think the soundest decision I can make is to grow my own hops so we can get drunk independently of big business.

Andrew Marvell with his fancy To His Coy Mistress poem, was definitely looking for a root, in the parlance of university life outside of the lecture theatre. Here in these could be maybe apocalyptic days, sex is still a wonderful thing, but a piece of hop plant root to prepare for home brewing days would be the icing on the cake.

Newcastle Peoples Choir

a movement that sings never dies

I went to see the Newcastle Peoples Choir sing this evening. They are a union choir from Newcastle, NSW, Australia and they were fantastic. I loved their singing, the words of their songs and I especially loved how at interval they all came out and chatted with the audience. With everyone in the audience. I took my cousin Mary with me and they brought her a cup of tea before I had even worked out where the tea trolley was.

I also got to introduce Mary to another local friend whose uncle taught Mary (now 82) when she was at primary school. My friend has a late model video camera and is keen to talk to Mary more. So that should help me get going on recording Mary's wonderful stories.

We did more cleaning today. I was grumpy again. Tonight's concert lifted my spirits enormously though.

I have a lot of questions about the current global finance thing. If the governments are bailing out these huge and hugely troubled financial institutions, then where are the governments getting that money from? I'm thinking there must be more borrowing going on at some point, this time by the governments? what about when government coffers run dry? The governments bailout thing seems to be being held up as the panacea. I can't see how it is that simple.

I did manage a little gardening. The best thing about hanging washing out is I leave the house via the back door to hang out washing and that all looks virtuous and necessary and sometimes nobody bothers to come out with me. Once I'm out, I get the washing on the line double quick and then skive off gardening as long as I can get away with. Sometimes this is minutes, occasionally it is hours. Today I planted two new strawberry plants in the new garden patch with the silver beet and borage. I kept reading how strawberries love borage so thought I'd better give them a chance to be companions. This bed is now quite closely planted and I'm finally starting to get that gorgeous sea of foliage look that permaculture books often have on their front covers and which until now I've not even come close to achieving in my own garden.

pipeline

Afghanistan.

Iraq.

Georgia.

So there are some powerful people who think: Culture can burn, we want oil. Guaranteed oil.

AT ANY COST

That's how it feels to me.

Where to fit it all?

The vegetables that is.

My onion seedlings have germinated well and now I am left with the small issue of where to plant them (not yet but at some point in the medium term). In the shower yesterday I decided that they could go in the bed earmarked for the potatoes and the potatoes could go in buckets and perhaps in a few marginal spots around and about. I problem solve well in the shower in my opinion. Once upon a time I used to plan my work day in the shower. Now work doesn't get a look in beside the garden.

The new hot fashion item on the vegetable scene seems to be ullocas or earth gems. I have almost definitely spelt ullocas incorrectly but have no text in the house to check it against. They are like colourful potatoes and are from South America. I want to grow them of course but there really is no room. One day there will be but until then I can only create so much new garden each year.

I got out Companion Planting in New Zealand from the library for the fifth or so time today. Which is where I discovered that garlic and strawberries and brocolli all hate each other. No prizes for guessing what I've got hanging out together in one of my garden patches. Perhaps I should purchase the book for consistent reference.

Today I ordered three brown shaver point of lay hens for delivery to our small town on 22 August. 2008 that is. Words are inadequate for my pleasure at this. Now we have to finish the poultry palace before the 22nd, but that is quite do-able.

I've been pulling entire swiss chard plants out instead of harvesting leaf by leaf lately in a bid to free up room for the brocolli.

It's the dog eared end of winter and we're out of wood. Out of beech and oregon anyway. We still have some kiln dried pine offcuts from the mill but they burn too fast, certainly for overnight warmth. Great kindling though. So we're burning coal, like bad citizens and like many if not most people in our small town. It is a lot cheaper and it also has a deadline. After 2010, Solid Energy will not be supplying coal for residential use. Better we send it to China of course than retain the ability to keep New Zealanders warm. Apparently they are different kinds/grades of coal but I remain unconvinced. Then I think of the Green Party's opposition to coal mining and my issues with that in terms of local employment and then my head spins too too fast. It is true that low income households in our town, many of whom live in poorly insulated rental accomodation, would not be able to afford to buy wood for the whole winter. Oil prices are of course impacting on wood and coal prices.

I've been blogging for a year now. It was the school gala on Saturday and I remember that last year's gala was about third post. I've stuck at it for an entire year! Not completely surprising given my penchant for waffle - blogging is another outlet for my endless stream of babble.