We Bought The Farm

January Progress Report

I'm a big fan of the Path to Freedom website (although I find their home page a bit busy). I particularly like the way they have been measuring their progress along the path. They publish some pretty detailed data about their efforts on their Facts and Stats page.

This past month, we've started monitoring our own progress. Benchmarking really, although benchmarking while making a conscious effort to move forward, so progressive benchmarking?

I started by keeping a detailed account of our spending habits on groceries this month. I wasn't exclusive - whether we bought nappies or newspapers, washing-up liquid or organic meat, I put it on the list if, to me, it was "grocery shopping."

We found the results somewhat shocking - particularly how much we are spending. But I've decided not to publish that number, although I'll benchmark it and calculate percentages from it in future.

Here are some data I will share. First, I thought we had done a pretty diligent job of shopping at farm markets, through the box scheme, with local shops or direct with producers (a friend has a rare-breed pig farm; we buy her pork), but look at how it breaks down versus the supermarkets:

Even with diligent effort, we didn't even manage 30% spending in these more responsible ways.

I made a breakdown of overall supermarket spending, and found that by far we are shopping most with "supermarket A" - the big one (I don't feel I should really be doing their market research for them).

To me, this really reflects the value of individual transactions. Stock-up trips to Supermarket A account for nearly a third of our overall spending.

I broke down supermarket spending further into "ethical" and regular shops. In my book, Waitrose and The Co-op are both more ethical businesses than the other UK supermarkets. Both have shared ownership schemes (the Co-op is owned by its members, and Waitrose is part of the John Lewis Partnership, which is beneficially owned on behalf of its employees). Thus I consider spending money in either store to be a better way to maintain social capital, although I have issues with shopping at both. Nonetheless, this is one relatively positive benchmarked metric.

To be honest, I didn't think we would enjoy keeping track of all of our spending over the month. I thought we would do it as a one-off, just to see how we were doing. But we both found the results so interesting that we've decided to keep it going, and next month we're going to add a tracker for "% organic" and one for "% alcohol".

I'll report back on the spending index, too. We had numerous overnight guests at home last month, so I've done a "man-day" count and divided the total into a per-man-day value as well (kids count the same as adults for now). That's another measure I'll index and report.

Our goals would have to be to keep making progress toward more socially responsible modes of spending - local, direct-from-producer, organic. From a frugal point of view, we'll also be looking to get the per capita spend down. We'll win here if we start producing from our own garden (still a muddy mess this winter) and start adding more value at home (home-brew, bread making). I did make a big dent in outlay this month, as I packed lunches using homemade bread on all but two days, reducing my usual lunch spend of £50 per month down to just £5. Sure, some of that goes through the food budget, but it was less in any event than I usually spend, and I had more control over the contents.

Of course there are trade-offs to be dealt with. We've moved our son off of baby formula, which will save us money, but organic milk will cost us more than regular, so we may not have net benefits.

One plus, I managed to lose 5 pounds last month. Not quite my target, but not bad by any measure.

Miles To Go

This past weekend I finally did something I should have done ages ago. I paid a guy to come out to the house and sort out our wireless network. I've had the hardware in hand for months, but have never managed to get the configuration working properly. Apparently, this was the result of too much network baggage left over from our last ADSL installation competing with our cable installation. The guy managed to iron out all the wrinkles by uninstalling everything and then building it up step by step. In all, it took him about an hour and now we've got Internet downstairs nearer the hub of family life. As I've wasted many an idle hour trying to sort this out, I consider it money well spent.

This, in turn, has enabled me to do some more CD ripping. With the laptop tied to the cable modem, I catch holy heck if I spend too much time upstairs in our study. My wife starts to complain of "seeing too much of the back of my head". But without an Internet connection, ripping CDs doesn't really work, since you need access to the Gracenote database to save typing in all of the titles yourself. But now we're portable and the PC has moved downstairs.

All of that has enabled the joy of rediscovery. On Sunday I ripped a couple of Miles Davis records - Kind of Blue and 'Round About Midnight. Now I've got them available on my iPod for my commute. Which really takes the edge off the morning.

I reckon I bought these discs in the late 1980s while I was at university. I've listened to them over the years, but we didn't have them with us in Brazil, so it's been a few years at least. And now I'm delving into the back catalogue and finding treasures such as this, as well as some other cool jazz - Dexter Gordon and John Coltrane have made the leap; Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Monk and Ornette Coleman are on the shortlist.

And all this stuff was there on the shelves for the taking, waiting for me to slow down and listen again. With finds like this, I can say I'm looking forward to looking back.

Breaking the Armlock

This morning's Guardian has a wonderful article on the power of the supermarket chain Tesco. The article focuses on the strong-arm tactics of the supermarket giant to grow its business to the point where it now commands £1 of every £8 spent in British shops. That's astounding!

Supermarkets argue that they are just giving the consumers what they want. But read this article...read how Tesco's enters the markets. Read how it is buying itself big, then bigger. What Tesco's does with its pricing is driving the smaller retailers off the high street. The question is, how far can it be allowed to go on? Remember Wal-Mart in the US. How many small towns with dried-up Main Streets have I visited? The life is sucked out of the small towns. Competition disappears. And what happens when there's no competition?

I don't want to be too alarmist here. Tesco does what it does quite well. It wouldn't be where it is if people didn't shop there. We shop at Tesco's (among others), and it does serve a purpose. But it does come down to choice and education. Cheaper isn't always better.

The article pointed to a campaign I was unaware of - Breaking the Armlock. Their point is pretty simple - the bigger the supermarkets grow, the more powerful they become - not just vis-a-vis consumers, but also with farmers, suppliers, local governments and even the national government. As they become more proficient at manoeuvering the machinery of power, it becomes harder for individuals - consumers - citizens to have their way. Thus, Breaking the Armlock aims to challenge them in the halls of power. And it's backed by some pretty powerful players in the NGO arena.

This month, we're doing an experiment to track how much we spend on groceries. This will include our organics deliveries, farmers' market spend and even (if I get around to it) the homebrew kit I buy. I'm sure we do better than we used to, but having some kind of baseline to work from gives us some idea of how much progress we might yet make. We're not yet ready to say, "F#&% corporate groceries!", but it does pay to watch where you spend what you spend.

A Month in the Country

The country of Work, that is. I've been back to work for a month now. Can't say I'm thrilled, but I'm coping. It's difficult climbing down from something as novel as two years in Brazil back into our lives here in London. And it's not just the novelty. It's the money. My take-home pay has been roughly halved.

I'm not sure that's such a good thing - even with "downshifting" we have high fixed costs (especially our mortgage, which has gone up with UK interest rates). We're basically going to be just treading water month on month for a while. Running the rat race. Running to stand still. I noticed during my "sabbatical" that our "burn rate" was about twice as high as I expected it to be.

But what else could we do? For tax reasons, we need to endure this set-up for a while. There's an expression - don't let the tax tail wag the investment dog. In this case, that would be very bad advice. I would encourage every US homeowner to be familiar with the US tax rules for selling your home (pdf). The US rules are generous but you have to follow them or you could lose out big time.

My wife could go back to work. She worked before we left (before the kids were born). But the UK treats families poorly in this regard. You get relatively little help for child care - it's not deductible, which is insane. And it's paid for with expensive post-tax money, which makes it hard to break even, which is why it should be deductible. She would need to be a big earner to justify this. She could do it, but at what cost? It's been wonderful to have her as a stay-home mum for the kids, and I'm inclined to believe it would be better to keep it this way. Of course, she will have other reasons for wanting to work.

I guess that's enough insight into our family dynamic.

At bottom, then, the month in the country rolls over into a new month, again and again. Lather, rinse, repeat. What did you get for it? Time is money. Not enough. Never enough - it's a horrible compromise. Time is time. Sigh. Off to work, then...

The Right Tool for the Job

Here's a conundrum. What counts more toward downshifting? Buying a tool to do the job and doing it yourself, or paying someone to do the job with the same money and not being encumbered by the tool.

In this case, I bought the tool...a circular saw. I need to make some mods to our bookshelves that requires cutting up a bunch of MDF. I figure it would have taken a contractor a half a day to do the work, plus materials. It will probably take me a little longer, but in the end, I'll have the saw in the cupboard, ready for the next job. I paid £62 for the saw, which is easily what I would have paid for labour.

What else could I have done?

I could have lived with untidy shelves, the status quo ante.

Or, I could have made the cuts with a hand saw I already have in the toolbox. It would have taken ages (some of the cuts are the length of the bookshelves), but it would have been cheaper. It probably also would have been sloppier, but it doesn't matter - the mods shouldn't be visible when the work is finished. I did decide to do another project with a coping saw rather than buy a jigsaw, since I couldn't envision another use for the jig and it's a small job.

I think tools might be a special case in the clutter wars, since they enable more work to be done; more self-reliance. In fact, having the tool, now, I can start to think about other projects, especially shelving, that I might want to install.

I also thought...maybe some day I could get involved with a tool-sharing program. I think this is a great idea - a collective that makes better use of tools that normally sit idle.

Box Clever

We've signed ourselves up for an organic box scheme. I have no hesitation about paying extra for organics, although I do feel a bit of remorse that this is not necessarily local (they have some tropical fruits in the boxes), and that it's not exactly CSA either.

Since we've been back, I've been a regular at our local Saturday Farmers' Market. I expect to continue shopping there, although I'm sure we'll cut back as we try to cope with the variability of what comes in our Thursday box. This week, it's apples, Brussels sprouts, carrots, cauliflower, cucumber, kiwi, leeks, oranges, potatoes and tomatoes.

I look at the box scheme with some ambivalence. The delivery is a plus (the time savings alone!), and the price seems reasonable. I find our Farmers' Market to be overpriced. Not that I begrudge farmers a fair price for their produce - certainly not! - but I find the complaint that supermarkets are gouging consumers to be a little rich coming from farmers who charge the same or more for their produce in the market, where they've cut out the middlemen.

I'm going to play this by...mouth?...and see if we want to stick with the scheme or maybe move to something more community-focused.

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!

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.

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. "

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.

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!

Nightcap

In keeping with the frugality programme, I made a resolution to work my way through our collection of exotic liquors and liqueurs with the aim of reducing cash output on alcohol and reducing the storage space required from those “typical products of the region” that have wound up cluttering our dining room shelves.

Here’s an idea of what’s to come: Krupnik (Poland), Ouzo (Greece), Metaxa brandy (Greece), Sambuca (Italy), Strega (Italy), Vin Santo (Italy), Limoncello (Italy), Genever (Belgium), Gammel Dansk (Denmark), Supercassis (France)…

And there’s more. Lots more. Whiskies, rums, brandies, cachaças, some stuff you’ve heard of (Drambuie, Frangelico) and some you probably haven’t.

Like last night’s trauktine, from Lithuania. Lesley brought home a sampler of Lithuanian drinks during her brief visit in 2001. Last night I had 50ml of Malunininku trauktine. It’s a bitter, and at 50% alcohol it was an effective nightcap. Taste? Bitter. Herby. You don’t gulp this one down.

Toward Simplicity

One pledge I am making on our return to England is to start to downshift and downsize my life. I want to start making do with less, and doing more with what we already have.

The 50% pay cut is one motivator. Another is the enormous collection of stuff that we’ve accumulated over our lives. We were astonished at the amount of junk that was brought back to our house from storage. And on top of that, there’s something like 75 more boxes to come from Brazil and maybe another ten that my father wants to send over from the US.

Some ideas are to consolidate on books and CDs – to enjoy more of what we already have. If you’ve read me for a while, you know that I buy more than I read. I should start trying to even that balance. And spend more time getting to know the albums we already own.

Beyond reading, I hate getting rid of books – especially ones I’ve paid for - but there are plenty about which I can honestly say, “There, I’ve read it, there’s no point in that taking up shelf space indefinitely.”

There will be other ideas coming into play, too. I’ll write about them under the “Another Way” topic.

Wonderful News

According to this BBC article, the much-hated Skye Bridge tolls are going to be eliminated later this year. The tolls were imposed, then raised, as financial interests gained control of the crossing from the UK mainland to the Isle of Skye.

In the week the bridge opened, in October 1995, the government-run ferry service stopped: the only efficient means of getting to Skye was the bridge. This might have been uncontroversial had the toll the private companies levied not been the highest, per metre of road, in the world. The one-mile crossing now costs £5.70 each way. (Source)

There's a long chapter in George Monbiot's Captive State, and you can read a condensed version of his account here. It's an interesting and humorous story of government obfuscation and a citizen's determined fight for daylight and freedom from a punishing tax.

While I'm on the subject of Skye, twentyeight is a reasonably new weblog documenting a couple's efforts to restore and live on a disused croft on Skye. Not updated that often, but inspiring to this would-be farmer.

More on England's Housing Crisis

This article from Saturday's Guardian about proposals to build new housing in Southeast England provides a lot of useful background and hits many of the same notes I touched on in my posting of April 27th.

Could, Would, Should?

The Guardian headline reads:

Thames Gateway could house 50% more, says report

The gist. If the planners had done their job, we could squeeze 30,000 more housing units into the redeveloped Thames Gateway "wasteland" of England than the current plan envisions.

If you've ever flown into London at night, especially over the Channel over Belgium, you see a swath of land almost entirely lit up. Brussels meets Antwerp or Ghent and then there's the black band of the channel and then the lights of London emerge in the distance before the continent fades out.

By many accounts, London is desperately short of housing. Experts say the UK needs to build new cities, or turn existing towns into cities, in order to defuse the housing time bomb. The UK needs to house an additional 2m people by 2020 in hundreds of thousands of new housing units. Big chunks of Essex, Ashford and the area around Stansted airport should be developed. New types of housing, catering to new family realities, will need to be built. New rail corridors need to be built to bring these people to London [the government claims that these new developments should not be "bedroom communities" for London, but centres in their own right, but still they plan high-speed rail links, bowing to the realities].

Back to the headline: the Thames Gateway could accommodate 30,000 more units. Maybe home to up to 100k people. But is could should, or would? Is London really the place to focus all this development? Won't this just over-concentrate the population in the already overpopulated Southeast? Won't this just continue to tax the already heaving infrastructure to the point of failure? Does alt.pave.the.world still exist?

I'll declare an interest. We are London homeowners of 2001 vintage. Our home has appreciated nicely, modestly, in the intervening period. But I'm not afraid of this new housing for its market-defusing capacity so much as for its promise - that the UK will continue to respond by plan to demographic projections in an attempt to keep housing affordable. Even with high-speed rail, these houses aren't going to replace my 20-minutes-to-Waterloo connection. Not without the investment of tens of billions of public pounds into infrastructure that essentially sustains this London-centric explosion. By the time they've built it, we'll have sold on to someone who needs this convenience more than us. But London will continue to suffer while the knee-jerk feedback curve lags decades behind the present reality.

Costs in London are already outrageous - food, housing, education, child care - it all contains a built-in London weighting that, even with allowances, makes London unaffordable for the young or even the older public sector employees. The UK is doing nothing to incentivise people to move out of London, to help take the weight off of the Capital.

What about incentivising the Northwest instead? What about a focus on Liverpool, or Manchester, or Birmingham, or Scotland? Sharing the load? What about relaxing fuel duties so that covering the additional distance from London is not so punishing? Or is that just un-Green? What about preferential tax treatment for small enterprise that chooses to settle far outwith for the social benefits, creating jobs in the countryside, keeping people settled out of the cities?

I'm no expert here. I just find the kind of imagination that proposes cramming even more people into one of the most crowded parts of Europe to be a bit lacking. Just because we could?

Illich Revisited

In porting my site over to MT and updating the static content, I found that a lot of the Ivan Illich links had gone stale. Penn State University's full texts were taken down, which left me wishing I'd archived them locally. Fortunately, the Google Cache had some traces, and from there I was able to find a couple of new sources:

First, an Illich Page by David Tinapple. He has links to Tools for Conviviality, Deschooling Society, and Energy and Equity, as well as some resources including recorded interviews and notes from the Oakland Roundtable in 2002.

Second, I found a full text of Medical Nemesis at the amazing Soil and Health Library, from Australia. This book is in copyright, but out of print, so the site maintainer has provided a means for an individual to read this book under Australian copyright. You'll figure it out.

I think the Soil and Health site is so cool, I'm going to stick in on my permalinks section. Just now I'm browsing the site maintainer's own book, Gardening Without Irrigation.

Self-basting

Being far from "home" (wherever that is), I miss the traditional foods of Thanksgiving, but an article in the New York Times about industrial turkey production was enough to turn my stomach.

Once slaughtered, the turkeys have to suffer one more indignity before arriving in your grocer's meat case. Because of their monotonous diet, their flesh is so bland that processors inject them with saline solution and vegetable oils, improving "mouthfeel" while at the same time increasing shelf life and adding weight.

The last turkey I cooked was an amazing bird - an organic, free range bronze turkey from Eastbrook Farm in the UK. It was so big it wouldn't fit in our oven, so I cooked in on the Weber grill - nearly 4 hours of indirect cooking made the moist smoky, gamy turkey the centrepiece of the most memorable Christmas feasts I've ever had. Once you've gone heritage, you'll never go back.

On a related subject, I heard a headline on the news about the US food industry and bioterrorism. I have such a hard time getting my head around the rectitude of a food "industry" in the first place [I know, a necessary evil] but I cringe in thinking about the more onerous requirements heaped on it in the name of food safety. Signs that there's something wrong in the world.

Fast Food, Slow Food

Via the comments thread on this post at Metafilter, a slice of suburban American scariness on this Halloween.

With the doors closing at 11:00 PM on Saturday evening the Town of Herndon police closed the line waiting to order at the Guatamalan import, Pollo Campero, at 8:30 this evening. Prior to this I was told the line had extended to over three hours.

[...]

Anyway, for those who like to wait in line, I should mention that we had just left the Cheesecake Factory in the Tyson's Galleria after being told their line was ALSO two and one half hours long.

You may draw your own conclusions.

Re-installing an old version of windows

Something I came across via Robot Wisdom today bore a striking resonance with something I was reading in The Timeless Way of Building only this morning.

Christopher Alexander writes of the function of windows. How the shape, structure or "patterns" of a living window differ from those of one that is not alive. He writes:

For instance, a WINDOW PLACE is stable, and alive, only if many other patterns which go with it, and are needed to support it, are alive themselves: for instance, LOW WINDOWSILL, to solve the problem of the view and the relation to the ground; CASEMENT WINDOW to solve the problem of the way the air comes in, to allow people to lean out and breathe the outside air; SMALL PANES to let the window generate a strong connection between the inside and the outside.

If these smaller patterns, which resolve smaller systems of forces in the window place, are missing from the window place itself, then the pattern doesn't work. Imagine for instance a so-called window place, with high windowsills, fixed windows, and huge sheets of plate glass. There are so many subsidiary forces, still in conflict, that the window place still cannot work, because it fails to resolve the special system of forces it is supposed to solve. [...]

Jorn posted a link a propos the recent heat wave in the UK. A scientist at Imperial College London comments:

"Many of us have forgotten how to correctly use the sash windows so carefully installed by the Edwardians and Victorians to maximise airflow."

Read the rest of the article for a reminder. It's telling how we can lose hold of good technology in our pursuit of "better" technology.

Water Log

Via Robin at ambiguous.org, a link to a rainwater harvesting system, with in-line links to other harvesting resources. I concede...it's...sexy.

Our twelve hundred square foot roof captures on average 3600 cubic feet (27,000 gallons) of water per year.

This system [...] cost less than $1,500.

Ivan Illich Dies

Ivan Illich, a onetime Roman Catholic priest who, through a steady flow of books and articles preached counterintuitive sociology to a disquieted baby-boom generation, died on Monday at his home in Bremen, Germany. He was 76. (From the New York Times obituary).

[Update: new source for obit, now in NYT archive]

Ivan Illich on Development

Development based on high per capita energy quanta and intense professional care is the most pernicious of the West's missionary efforts - a project guided by an ecologically unfeasible conception of human control over nature, and by an anthropologically vicious attempt to replace the nests and snakepits of culture by sterile wards for professional service. The hospitals that spew out the newborn and reabsorb the dying, the schools run to busy the unemployed before, between and after jobs, the apartment towers where people are stored between trips to the supermarkets, the highways connecting garages form a pattern tatooed into the landscape during the short development spree. These institutions, designed for lifelong bottle babies wheeled from medical centre to school to office to stadium begin now to look as anomalous as cathedrals, albeit unredeemed by any esthetic charm. --Ivan Illich