We Bought The Farm

Excess Baggage

Since our return from our travels about a month ago, we have set about the business of downscaling ourselves back into our house.

When we moved out to Brazil, we took very little with us - just an air shipment of about 600 lbs, including what we thought was essential for a 7-month-old baby. We put our stuff in storage and bought everything else we needed out in Brazil. Coming back, we had both an air and a sea shipment. Lots more stuff, including our second child. By the end of August, everything had been unloaded into our fairly small (130 m2) house. And since then we've been tripping over ourselves trying to get moved in. But even with two garden sheds, we just have way too much stuff.

Now, I've probably noted here that I don't watch much television. When I moved to the UK, I gave it up completely. Why pay for a TV Licence when all that's on is "cheese or snow", as National Lampoon's European Vacation so humorously put it. I only let a television back into my house when my wife moved in. Because she insisted, and she is the boss.

Anyway, all of that just to note that, lately, we've become fairly hooked on a television programme - House Doctor. It's silly, I know, but we find Anne Maurice to be compelling viewing. And, having been away from either the telly or the UK for much of the past seven years, there are plenty of back episodes to watch.

One of her big pet peeves is clutter. And it's rapidly becoming one of ours. You watch as house after house full of total crap are taken apart by the diminutive Yank and put into presentable shape for the expenditure of maybe £1-2k. Much of the effect is achieved with a bit of paint, a few accessories and ... the removal of clutter. Either to the tip, or at least to off-site storage.

And so, we've taken the House Doctor's prescription to heart, and we've started a campaign to declutter our house.

Sometimes, this is pretty easy. I tossed my entire MBA oeuvre in one go. All those long weekends spent writing papers or dozing through boring lectures on company accounts and human resources law. Bin. Okay, I kept my dissertation. "Daddy's book", as one of my colleague's kids put it.

I burned up a huge box full of old bank statements and credit card bills. We've got lots more, but I need to sort them.

We've got this great copier at work - scans to pdf files, sends them to you by e-mail. My old tax returns have a date with this copier when I can finally unearth and organise them.

The Mrs and her friend sold some baby stuff at a "slightly used" sale this weekend. Brilliant. We get rid of stuff, and we get paid for it. Kids' stuff!

But sometimes it's tough. Like books. We have lots of books. Certainly more than a thousand, if I could be bothered to count them. Thing is, I love books. I buy them like Erasmus, or at least I did before I imposed the moratorium (which leaks a bit, but is generally holding). Before we moved out, we installed lots of shelf-feet of new built-in bookshelves. Full. We bought additional freestanding bookshelves. Full. We have six more full boxes of books unpacked up in the attic. It's, I admit, a problem.

But where to start? I'm a BookCrosser, but I've never given one book away this way - too much effort, and I don't care where they go. If I'm not attached, I have no problem giving them to a charity shop (as we did with the books that were left in our house by our tenants - except for the ones I kept). But I am attached to most of the books we own. Books I bought. Read. Carried. Nursed. Repaired. Replaced. Where to start?

Books I'm never going to read again. Be real. I put Cryptonomicon in the box. About the New Yorker and Me. Autobiography of a Yogi (unread). Some Vonneguts. Lonesome Dove. I hesitated. I loved Lonesome Dove. A Suitable Boy. I'm making eyes at Pynchon. Chabon. I've got my eyes on some hardcovers that are taking up key living room frontage. 'Tis, the sequel to Angela's Ashes. And Malachy McCourt's book, too. But I haven't pulled the trigger yet. I've got a shelf and a half of books by Australian authors. It's a good collection - one that would be hard to replicate. I'm thinking eBay.

We've got an incredible collection of travel guides. I could make a pretty complete map of Europe out of Lonely Planets and Rough Guides, and probably could pave them over with cookbooks from the same places. I've got Asian tourism covered (Russia, China, Central Asia, Turkey, Pakistan). We've got half a shelf on South America.

What am I going to do?

The answer is, keep focused; keep tossing. Every day, toss more than came in. Today, already, four magazines - out. It's not a lot, but it makes a dent. Maybe if I toss the China Blue Guide, I won't be sent there again. Maybe I can lose the Dutch/English dictionaries I bought when I lived in Antwerp a decade ago. Or the entire stack of Russian books that I bought in anticipation of our move to Moscow (no...can't do that). The books in French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese I'll never get around to reading. Never? See.

But this much I know...we will prevail over clutter. We have to. We would like to sell our house some day. Maybe next year. Take control of our lives again instead of letting our possessions own us. Maybe we'll even get rid of the telly. The House Doctor takes her own medicine!

O Globo, where art thou?

Since we left Brazil, my on-line subscription to O Globo has continued even though I haven't paid for it. Alas, no more, it seems. They've found me out.

Actually, I reckon my landlady might have been responsible for this continued link to the heart of Brazil's media. The bill was in her name, and I think she must have taken the easy course of not cancelling the services on our apartment. I don't think she'd have the first clue of how to change my password, which was, well, 1234.

But in the past few days my e-mail has gone dead and my daily news bulletins have lost all of their customised subscribers-only content.

It would have been cheap enough to continue this (about $10 per month) if I were so inclined, but it's not to be. Back to the cheap seats.

Buying the Farm

I've just finished reading Stanley Crawford's A Garlic Testament. Subtitled "Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm", this book follows its author, his family and his friends through the year of toil and reward as they live close to the land, growing garlic and a few other crops to be sold in local farmers markets and craft fairs.

Crawford's book is about much more than truck farming. Its chapters are snapshots of the seasons in context, of the rhythms of life on the farm. You follow as he experiments with garlic cultivars and techniques of cultivation (a crop for which little published information exists), learning both from his mistakes and his accumulated wisdom. Because he knows garlic, you learn more about it than you thought there was to know. You grow up; grow older with him as he takes a more circumspect view of his own life. How, for instance, he moved away from the hardcore organic farming he intended to practice when he "dropped out" in the early 1970s, through a more input-intensive farming, and then back to something not quite certified organic, perhaps, but both practical and natural.

You share his guilt for his own involvement in the march of progress, but also his remorse; his healing. "Here's what I've learned from my life", he seems to say, "and want to pass along - because it's worth passing along." Crawford may have dropped out, but this whole book is about his participation in his life and times.

I loved Crawford's account of mucking in with the annual maintenance of the acequia - the irrigation watercourse. It's not the hard work - it's the simple presence of the old acequia, held together by a sense of community; an appreciation of its utility - that makes this section so engaging. Crawford admits it may not be the most efficient means of irrigating his fields, but he writes from a place where tradition and community matter more than efficiency. I understand he's written another book on this subject, and I'm tempted to look for it as well, when the moratorium on new book purchases is lifted.

I must have bought this book when it was first published in 1992. I found my old bookmark on page 150 (the book is about 240 pages). I can no longer remember why I set it aside back then, but I wonder if it would have made any difference to the trajectory of my career.

I missed out on the final chapters, when you sense Crawford drawing in his experiences into some kind of a philosophy and celebration of the farming life. I doubt I was receptive in those days to his message of rootedness. I was a world traveller at the time, moving from project to project with my heart set on seeing the world. Rural New Mexico no doubt would have seemed a small place to me.

And yet here I am today, thinking along the same lines as Crawford. I've seen the world - it's big, it's out there. And I'm more ready now to find my own place in it and start growing roots like his. Thus the name of this blog...thus, the project.

Thankshifting

The fourth Thursday in November is just like any other day here in England. Gives the sentimental Yank in me saudades for a long weekend and oyster dressing. Alas, it's off to work for me today.

But still, I feel the need to celebrate this holiday, and to raise my multinational kids with an attachment to and awareness of their American roots. To make up for the gap in festivities, we're going to have Thanksgiving this weekend instead, inviting some English friends (and their kids) over to celebrate a thoroughly American holiday.

While we were over in the States last month, I picked up a box set of the Peanuts holiday specials. They're bundled with some additional materials, so we've got a decent introduction to the Pilgrims and Indians for sharing with the kids (and even the Great Pumpkin stays in season a little longer).

Speaking of pumpkin, well, it's kind of a challenge to put together a Thanksgiving dinner over here. Not impossible, mind you. While you won't find Thanksgiving trimmings, the stores are already stocking Christmas turkeys. And we've managed fresh cranberries, and I'm going for a second pumpkin this evening (think I know where). I've given up on finding canned pumpkin, but in the process have learned how to make pumpkin pie from scratch, and it's mighty good.

One thing we probably won't manage is fresh oyster meats for the oyster dressing. Oh yes, I could just buy them on the shell and shuck away (and I still might), but I do miss the convenience of picking up a pot of oyster meats at a place like Wholey's in Pittsburgh and bunging the whole pot, liquor and all, into a crock of dressing. That's living. That's Thanksgiving.

Le weekend

Monday's Guardian had an article about commuting to England from France. Turns out people are already doing this.

I'm not sure it's that practical for us. I can envision doing something like two days from home, two days in the office, one trip per week across the channel (looks like it would cost £50 each way, so a little more costly than my current season ticket, and I'd probably need to stay in a B&B over here). But, look what you get - fantastic shopping (there are some excellent shops in Boulogne), cheap wine, raising the kids second (or third) language, and...

And I found a five-bedroom house can be had for as little as £85,000, or roughly £15,000 less than a two-bedroom terrace in Ashford.

Now that's interessante.

The waiting begins

This evening we bottled up our Christmas ale. Haven't decided on a name yet, but we like "Bleak Midwinter Ale".

It took us about 2 hours (x2 people) to do the handiwork (hats off to the Mrs for soaking off all the labels and giving them a pre-cleaning earlier in the week). We wound up with 33 (nearly 34) bottles - not a bad yield.

I batch-primed with half a cup of table sugar (maybe not the best, but that's what there was). Papazian recommends 2/3 cup but I find that overcarbonates for British Ale styles. We even had a few "grenades" in the last batch, which ruined the bathroom carpet in our old apartment.

I took a fg reading of 1020 at 20C which strikes me as a little high, but there was a lot of malt in there. Tastes good - tastes right...let's hope the bottles were clean enough.

And now we have to wait...I reckon three weeks, minimum. Should be ready to go just in time for the holidays. We have to be careful not to give it all away, or I'll be back to square one with emptying London Pride bottles again.

I'm inclined to rebound on this batch and get another going in the fermenter - maybe in a couple of weeks.

Three Weeks With The Amish

Well, sort of. I've just finished reading Bernd Längin's Plain and Amish: An Alternative to Modern Pessimism. It's a wonderful profile of life in America's Amish Country (principally Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania).

I grew up in Pennsylvania, but didn't know much about the Amish apart from, well, Witness. There's a reason for that...the Amish keep to themselves, of course. The less the Englischers get involved in their lives, the better. We went out to "Pennsylvania Dutch" country on our last visit to the US, and I was intrigued enough to pick up this book.

In this book Längin, a German journalist who specialises in research of communities of ethnic Germans who live outside of Germany but maintain their German culture (and there are, interestingly, a good number of these), is given broad access to the Amish through his stay on an Amish farm in Indiana. He also travels to other Amish enclaves in the US and visits their homeland in Switzerland. His story intersperses chapters about all aspects of Amish life - faith, work, family - with chapters about Amish and Anabaptist history from its origins in the 1500s.

At times the book is a little more detail than you maybe wanted - long lists of German family names that are typical in particular regions of Switzerland or Alsace, descriptions of obscure early Anabaptist martyrs that even the Amish don't seem to know or care much about. But to make up for that you have some engaging descriptions of what daily life is really about. Life in a one-room schoolhouse. Gelding a horse. What it's like to sit through a 6-hour church service, or tough out a -40 degree Indiana winter (equally cold in Fahrenheit or centigrade). And the translation is excellent - a most readable book that doesn't get lost in esoterics despite its "about Germans, by a German, for Germans" framework.

Life is simple and the work is hard, but that's the point of being Amish. I can't say it made a convert out of me, but neither is it really that unimaginable - living a simple life with strong faith in the next life. The book makes the point several times that the Amish aren't really evangelising outside their faith - their own existence is their witness.

And to you, too!

Our office uses a knock-off brand of Post-it Notes called "Stick-it Notes".

Parabens!

I've removed this entry.

Don't Get Around Much Anymore

My in-laws are in town this week, so for the first time in ages it's date night for Mummy and Daddy. Not feeling terribly anxious to travel to central London (despite today being "Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé!" day), we're going to stay local and have dinner at The Fire Stables.

What are we doing to our kids?

This morning's Guardian has a shocking article on the growing number of prescriptions of anti-depressants, stimulants and other mind-altering drugs to children. According to the article Britain's rate of prescription to children is "soaring faster than anywhere in the world".

The article cites numbers from two recently released studies:

The first compares data on the prescribing of all psychotropic drugs to children from 2000-2002 in the nine countries where the drugs have most sales. In the UK, prescriptions have risen from around 400,000 in 2000 to more than 600,000 in 2001 and then to more than 700,000 in 2002, an increase of 68%. The rise in the UK is higher than in the US, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Argentinia, Brazil or Mexico.

...

The second study looks at the growing use of antidepressants for children in the UK over the 10 years from January 1992 to December 2001. The rate at which the drugs were being prescribed to children rose by 70%.

The studies seem to correlate well. About a 70% increase in the number of prescriptions. And they quote Dr Ian Wong in one of the studies:

Dr Wong and colleagues warn that "children are not small adults" - because they are growing, their bodies react differently to medicines. Although the drugs have been tested in adults, very few have been trialled in children.

Now, I for one am sceptical of this whole ADHD racket to begin with. How is it that this "disease" now afflicts 3-5% of all children? This is from the US National Institute of Mental Health site.

Symptoms of ADHD will appear over the course of many months, and include:

Impulsiveness: a child who acts quickly without thinking first.

Hyperactivity: a child who can't sit still, walks, runs, or climbs around when others are seated, talks when others are talking.

Inattention: a child who daydreams or seems to be in another world, is sidetracked by what is going on around him or her."

Wait. Isn't that a pretty good description of childhood in general? Aren't we supposed to find a balance between nature and nurture where we let our kids run with their instincts and teach them to know their limitations - for their own health and safety? And here we want to medicate these kids into some kind of passivity? No, sorry, I don't get it.

I'm not saying that ADHD doesn't exist; that there aren't hyperactive kids. I would rather believe that in the vast majority of these cases, we are medicating rather than parenting, or teaching. We take the easy way out because it's easier to sedate, or stimulate, than to discipline, to teach. Read what the doctor said again - "children are not small adults". We need to be there for them, to protect them from destructive stimuli, to teach them in and out of the classroom. I think it borders on neglect to let a pharmaceutical replace good parenting, and I'm sure I'm not alone here.

All of this said, I don't see myself as a crusader here. Maybe more like a voice of reason - someone who assuredly will challenge any suggestion that my kids will live better through chemistry.

Down in the comments, Renee makes an excellent point, and I'm going to let her have the last word. She writes, "People often forget that just because we can remedy something doesn't mean we should. "

RDWHAHB

When we moved to Brazil in 2002, I left my brewery behind. I figured that the Brazilian weather would not be well suited to making the kinds of top-fermenting home brews that I am accustomed to producing. And while I still think that's somewhat true, I have learned that Brazil makes some excellent ales, especially those made by Baden Baden in Campos de Jordão.

Anyhow, this past weekend I finally got around to "opening" the brewery again. This consisted of digging the vessels out of the shed and giving them a good cleaning to chase out the cobwebs and who-knows-what-else, then making a visit to a local homebrew shop to pick up a new kit - Woodforde's Nelson's Revenge.

I'd like to move away from straight kit brewing (I did buy some extra spraymalt and Golden Brewer hops to make some "betterbrew") into the more demanding "upstream" activities of mashing, but for the present our storage space and kitchen limit me to kit brewing.

So, Sunday night I fired up the brewpot and made my first batch of beer in three years (the last batch was called "The Baby's Bottle", to commemorate our daughter's birth, and her third birthday is this Friday). This morning it was blubbing away through the airlock, one hopes on its way to hoppy perfection.

Is home brewing economic? It probably depends on how often you do it and how much DIY is involved. My kit cost me £16.95, plus another £3 for the DME, something for the hops and some supplies (sanitiser, bottle caps). About £25 for the batch, which should make 32 pints (4 UK or 5 US gallons). Buying bottle conditioned real ales can set you back a fair penny. This weekend at the local supermarket, I saw 12 bottles of Fuller's London Pride for £14.99. I reckon 32 pints should yield me about 37 bottles. If it were Pride, that would cost me about £45.

But then there's labour and energy inputs. We're not done yet - brewing is the easy part, bottling is a pain. Lots and lots of washing up to come. I've diligently emptied about 40 bottles of the above-mentioned Pride - not the worst part of the job, mind you. But those will need a thorough hot wash, delabelling and then a sanitising and a clean rinse. Probably 5 hours work in total. Then three weeks of bottle-conditioning.

On the bright side, we're looking at a Christmas ale which should measure in somewhere north of 5% abv and be extra hoppy.

Revitalising the countryside

The Scottish government is taking a promising step toward keeping the rural economy alive - relocating government agencies to areas with "fragile" local economies. According to this press release, two agencies with 18 jobs in total will be relocating in 2005. The Crofting Building Grants and Loans Scheme will locate to the Hebridian Island of Tiree, while the Central Enquiries Unit will relocate to the highland community of Kinlochleven, which suffered the shock of the closure of its major employer, an alumin(i)um smelter, in 2000.

"We are committed to dispersing public sector jobs across Scotland. We want to see all areas of Scotland benefit, while ensuring we spread the benefits of devolution as much as possible to give a boost to areas that need it.

I think this is brilliant - why should government agencies concentrate around the capital? Certainly, there are advantages to forming centres of excellence and centralising support functions, but there are also advantages to keeping jobs and infrastructure dispersed throughout the country. I wonder how the civil servants see it? At least for Tiree, this is a new agency and the staff will be recruited locally.

Incidentally, I had a chance to visit Kinlochleven in 2001 when I walked the West Highland Way. I had just finished my MBA and was planning my next career move, and for a while I considered the possibility of taking on a project up in Kinlochleven to open a micro-brewery in specially converted premises. I gave up the idea as economically larger-scale than I was ready for, but I am pleased to see that the project has borne fruit - er, beer.

Treasure Trove

Via Metafilter, some wonderful news. The Paris Review is finally opening up its archive of more than 300 "Writers at Work" interviews, under the odd heading "The DNA of Literature."

Founder and former Editor George Plimpton dreamed of a day when anyone—a struggling writer in Texas, an English teacher in Amsterdam, even a subscriber in Central Asia—could easily access this vast literary resource; with the establishment of this online archive that day has finally come.

Wow...it's taken them a LOOOOOONG time to realise that the Internet might just make this cheap and easy, and even today the whole archive is not available - so far, only the interviews from the 1950s are on-line, but they're aiming to get the whole set up by mid-2005. And if it's not the whole PR archive, at least it's the most interesting part, and it fulfills a long-standing wish of my own.

Medical Hubris

An article in the New Yorker of January 12, 2004 (see - I am reading them) had this quote from contributor Atul Gawande, a popularising physician whose stated aim is to explain how medicine works. In an otherwise interesting column on the eradication of polio, Gawande makes this modest claim for his profession:

There is, nonetheless, a kind of greatness in the elimination of a terrible disease. We as a civilization have a few things we can accomplish of genuinely lasting significance for mankind: we have built no pyramids, no Great Walls to stand for thousands of years. It is, instead, through medicine that we may create our enduring monument. The eradication of smallpox and now, perhaps, polio, will stand as our pyramids.

Eradicating polio would be a remarkable accomplishment. A "kind of greatness" I admit. I had the chance to meet Jonas Salk back in the 1980s, and I was impressed by how many people introduced themselves simply by thanking him for his life's work. Still, I think Gawande might just be claiming a little too much immortality for his own profession. His shoulder-standing enthusiasm allows him to overlook his profession's complicity in damaging the people they claim to be helping. Medicine's monumental ruins will no doubt also include such accomplishments as thyroid radiation, thalidomide and ADHD; the map strewn with pharma tribes - Prozac Nation, Ritalin Nation. These would-be pharaohs and emperors are too in bed with big pharma to be enthusiastically setting their legacy in stone. Physician, heel thyself!

The Persistence of Comment Spam

I remain a committed advocate of mt-blacklist to keep my comments clean. I get far more spam commenting than I do from legitimate sources. Starting from the list published by Jay Allen (mt-blacklist's author), I'd grown my own list to 2500 entries. But Allen has rules to keep his list from becoming inadvertently malicious. You can send him links, but only one link per e-mail, and who's going to do all that screening? Allen himself shies away from the task. Even though it only takes a short while to police your own site with blacklist, I reckoned there have to be better ways out there.

Sure enough. Some good samaritans are doing our work for us, and sharing it with others. Google on blacklist.txt. Remember - other programs use a blacklist and not everything you find may be compatible with mt-blacklist.

I found my first lists at Hollowcube. He linked to a couple of others. I copied them in. I found more spam lurking deep in my comments. I've added them in. And now my blacklist is up to 4752 entries. Remember - some of those block LOTS of sites with one regex.

There are some drawbacks to this. Some people may add key words that you wouldn't (the word 'sex', plain old 'sex', was blocked by several lists that presumably will never drift to that subject; one list blocked 'blogspot.com' and 'msn.com'; one blocked 'www.fda.gov' for some reason). You need to go back and re-edit the list, and with 4700 entries, this is a pain and there you are, looking at lots of the most demented ideas out there on the web. Okay, I find it kind of amusing...

One shortcut - by no means infallible - is to despam your clean comments and see if it picks up anything you wouldn't otherwise have banned. You don't actually have to delete these comments - just note down the expression matches and delete them from your blacklist using the 'List' page. If your blacklist is eliminating or preventing your legitimate dialogue, you need to reconfigure it.

Of course, if you're lazy, there's nothing to stop you from linking to someone else's blacklist (I suppose). But then you're relying on them to keep you clean, rather than shooting down the universe of spambots that have already found your comments.

So, having done a bit of heavy lifting, I'd like to add myself to the list of people who are sharing the wealth by posting a link to my own blacklist. I'm sure 4752 isn't the longest list out there (try this search to see), and I intend to keep mine growing. I hope you find it useful.

The end of farming as an economic proposition?

This morning's Farming Today programme on BBC Radio 4 called attention to the problem of rising land prices in rural Britain. Here's the blurb from what will otherwise be a very short-term link:

The price of farmland across the country is soaring, and it's "lifestyle buyers" who are driving up the value. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors says prices have risen by 30 percent in the last 12 months and are due to peak shortly when the reformed system of farmers' subsidies kicks in — and then they'll steady out. On Farming Today RICS' rural spokesman William Tew explains how agricultural land is now worth on average £10,000 per hectare — pushed up by non-farming buyers for whom 'location, location, location' appears not to be an issue. Local authorities own a significant amount of agricultural land, but many of them are selling off these land assets, meaning would-be farmers with no capital can't get a foot in the door. Hertfordshire County Council isn't selling the ten thousand acres it owns and Charles Franklin, its Principal Land Agent, thinks other authorities should be holding onto their land too. Mike Potter farms his dairy herd under the Gloucestershire Rural Estates Scheme, renting his land and buildings from the County Council. He tells Caz Graham it's the only way he can keep farming.

I've heard numbers like this before - £10,000 per hectare. That's $7489 per acre in American terms, and that's a lot of money.

[incidentally, did you know that Google can do unit conversions? If you type 1 hectare = ? acres, Google will tell you the answer)]

Anyway, that's up about US$1000 per acre from the last time I posted on this topic.

Run some numbers. Cereal yields per hectare. Call it 5.5 tonnes. Income? £223 / acre? Plus subsidies? Another £80 under the new scheme? Plus what...what do I know about farm economics? Anyway, £300 per acre is £750 per ha. Gross. Deduct costs. Consider take-home pay. And the land is selling for £10000. How are you gonna pay to finance that?

Look at the mess this causes. We who live in the city can sell up our modest homes for an absolute packet and trade them in for some rural farmland (presumably with a house on it) and still have some money left over. Meanwhile, farmers who are struggling to break even are faced with an enormous bill for acreage that they'll never be able to pay for from the proceeds of their labour.

The ramifications are pretty overwhelming. Britain's "Cheap Food" policy must rely heavily on imports, since pricing land into the cost of food (as you have to do, say, when you eat out in London) makes "cheap" a nonsense. But isn't it a nonsense that it's cheaper to buy lamb from New Zealand than the UK?

As the man quoted above, the only way he's going to stay in business is as a tenant on government-owned land. That's in effect a subsidy, is it not? I mean, the article the free market (the "lifestyle buyers") would give the council more for the land than the tenant. So the local councils - some local councils - are taking the opinion that it's more important for rural Britian to keep on farming, even if it's a non-economic proposition.

Should farmers own the land they farm? Is there a difference between being a farmer and being an agricultural worker? Would people enter the professsion as workers rather than as owners? How can a system like Scotland's croft tenancy contend with issues of price pressure on the land?

No, I don't have answers. I wish I knew more. An area for one aspiring smallholder to research.

Saying Goodbye to Old Friends

Since leaving Brazil, I've been on a real downshifting kick. I've almost completely stopped buying books, for instance. We have too many unread for me to justify further filling the shelves. I've also stopped buying CDs for the same reason. It's time to get closer to the existing library. And I've been making some headway in that direction.

In that vein, I've just taken the decision not to renew my subscriptions to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. For the first time in more than a decade the relentless influx of magazines might slow down a bit.

This isn't the easiest decision for me. In a sense, I've always subscribed to the New Yorker. We had it when I was a kid, and as soon as I went to university, I entered my own subscription, which I've kept up all these years. And I've been taking the New York Review for a decade or more.

But as much as I have a history with these magazines, I also now have an enormous backlog to clear through. I probably have six months worth of New Yorkers and two years of NYRs. I've been trying to clear the backlog by reading the most recent first. It helps a bit - you can skip over huge swaths of election coverage (a long profile of Howard Dean, for instance) and cherry pick coverage of the Iraq war or Darfur. I want to keep current, but I also have to be a bit more judicious with the use of my reading time.

I have to say that this decision has been made easier by my recent displeasure with some of the New Yorker reportage. I find their editing to be slipping. An article by Bill Buford called "The Pasta Station" in the food issue was just indulgent and poorly structured (I thought he was an editor himself, but maybe he's stepped back). Bourdain did the restaurant scene in Kitchen Confidential to such at extent that I wonder if Buford hasn't bothered to read him, or if maybe he thinks imitation might help to sell more books.

There's also been a rise in unnecessary obscenity. Why "cow shit" and not "cow dung" in the text of an article - it wasn't a quote. And IIRC, Buford's article used the "F" word in a context where it was completely unnecessary, just salty (again, Bourdain gave us plenty of this).

The NYR is another story. I've just not got the time to plough through it any more. I'm taking the London Review of Books, which is a country cousin to the NYR. I can't claim to read it religiously (apart from the classifieds!), but I find it less important to do so. I think I've just lost my taste for "lit crit" or "book chat" or whatever much of it turns out to be.

These two magazines were pillars of my reading. They've brought me many hours of pleasure. My long summer in Syria I read them from cover to cover. I probably knew more about what was going on in New York that summer (1992) than most residents. But now I'm letting them go. It will save me nearly $200 per year. And on the bright side, I've still got a mountainous backlog to get through.

I've just received the last NYR, and the New Yorker runs out in January. ¡Adiós, amigos!

A little joy

I was halfway home with my copy of Saturday's Guardian newspaper when I noticed the large print at the top: free DVD of Cinema Paradiso, a film I loved so much I had recently contemplated buying on DVD. I sat right down and watched it on Saturday afternoon.

Wow! I was just thinking how much unanticipated joy that must have brought to British households this weekend.

I did a little looking around and found a Media Week article on this promotion.

Marc Sands, Guardian’s Marketing Director said: “The Guardian has always had huge success with CD covermounts and we’re sure that this DVD – a popular film with all those who love cinema – is the logical next step.”

Count me as one "value-added" reader!

I'm back

My 100-day "sabbatical" has ended and I'm back to work from today. I found it really difficult to blog while travelling - lack of access, lack of time, keeping track of two kids. I reckon I might manage to post a little more often. I hope I've not lost my already small readership.

So, back to work!