Slow Cooker Vegan Moussaka recipe

 Slow cooker vegan moussaka

Make the 'meat' layer as follows: 

Saute (that's "fry") onions and garlic in a pan, slowly. Add a can of chopped tomatoes, some salt and pepper, and some cooked kidney beans (can use a can). I added six sprigs of thyme because we had it. Simmer for a while until it's not runny. I mashed it a bit.

Make the white sauce as follows:

Cooked butter beans (can use a can, I used two cups dry, soaked overnight, cooked in pressure cooker for forty minutes), half a cup of cashews soaked overnight, blended with hand blender. I added some water to make it a bit runnier and three cloves of garlic, fried. Note that this is better than dairy white sauce, and with some herbs and chillies is great for macaroni cheese or spaghetti. This makes too much for the moussaka so I froze half.

In the slow cooker put a layer of potato slices (about 1cm thick, I didn't peel). I sprinkled with oil.

Then a layer of the kidney bean mush - about 4cm.

Then a layer of sliced aubergine - again about 1cm thick, rounds.

Then another layer of kidney bean mush.

Then a layer of white sauce - I recommend about 2cm deep.

Put the slow cooker on high and leave for seven hours or a bit more.

Place

I'm struck by some of my friends' connection to a place - not all of my friends, but some, and especially the newer ones in Gloucestershire. I'm aware that I don't have that sort of connection. In a recent conversation about 'home' it seemed entirely natural to me, and to the person I was talking to, to make a distinction between home as an actual physical place and 'the sense of home' that you have from being in a good state of mind. I think that for some people, at least, this would seem an entirely abstract and artificial distinction, because for them 'home' is unproblematically a place. This, I think, is part of what Bruno Latour is going on about in "Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime"...well, probably, because it's quite hard to understand.

It's hard to avoid concluding that for me, this alienation from place is a Jewish thing. We really are rootless cosmopolitans. At least one of my sons was born in a different country from both of his parents, who were themselves born in different countries from each other. In my wife's case, her father was born in a third country, and her grandfathers (and grandmothers) in fourth and fifth countries.

Jewish rootlessness has deep roots. Jew were sometimes prohibited from owning land, but even when they weren't few Jews became farmers. (The Talmud is full of rules about how to farm according to God's will, mind you.) Even when Jews do become farmers, and there seems to be a move towards this at the moment, it doesn't seem to translate into a deep connection with a place. Trotsky's parents were Jewish farmers, but they upped and moved to a town. Max Yasgur, the farmer who owned the site where the Woodstock festival was held, eventually sold up and his son is a lawyer.

I'd like to cite King Josiah as the culprit. He's the guy who created the pre-Jewish temple-based religion, in which the ancient Judaeans worshipped only one God, through animal sacrifices performed by a hereditary priesthood at a single centralised site - the temple in Jerusalem. No other place mattered at all. Josiah, and then his successor kings, spent a lot of time overthrowing other altars to God, often in 'High Places'. They destroyed sacred groves in which God, and other gods, had been worshipped; they deposed these other gods, referred to in the Bible as the 'Host of Heaven'.

It's pretty clear that until then the Israelites, or whatever name the pre-Jews went by, were keen on sacred groves and trees, and holy places, and that they used them to worship a range of divinities and supernatural beings. After the Josiah 'revolution' all this disappears, and there's only one God to be worshipped, though for a while others continue to exist - sometimes as angels or demons. It's possible that Josiah's motivation was entirely theological, and that the revolution was inspired by spiritual inspiration; but establishing that there was only one God to be worshipped, and that one at a shrine entirely under one's own control, had a political pay-off. The cultural consequence, though, was a divorce from places, and to a lesser extent from nature.

Some of this has carried over into Christianity, but unevenly. The early Christian were good at co-opting local supernatural beings into saints, and turning local sacred sites into 'holy' wells, or putting churches on them. In some churchyards the yew trees, which were considered sacred by pre-Christians, are older than the church. Reformed churches were more like the Jews, and down on made-up saints and holy sites (and very down on graven images). I came across this Calvinist website that goes into great detail about how bad sacred groves are. On the other hand, non-conformist chapels are often named after places in the Bible (Ebenezer, where Jacob's ladder had its foot, and Bethel, and Shiloh, are all favourites) - the same places where the post-Josiah kings overthrew altars and destroyed sacred groves.

Good Free Things

Open University courses

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/free-courses/full-catalogue?fbclid=IwAR33h-PBjGuIzjArbPw-9JSXSpcetmsoXzZvsEODu0CYfLxHLIKb-SQ0wTk

Future Learn online courses

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses

Yale University online courses

https://oyc.yale.edu/

Free online permaculture course
https://www.permaculturewomen.com/freepermaculturecourse.html?fbclid=IwAR29R0tBhH4N3SRIMdika5LBrwkdw8BKNDdFpxYmY6P9cCy_6hIV0w7B78A

Free ebooks

https://ebookfriendly.com/free-public-domain-books-sources/?fbclid=IwAR33FtyIW-sZhBNe4C7xnj7toKhnsbILvgQm6EgbMqBpf2dobIoi9GnGu9s

https://archive.org/details/folkscanomy

Music books - sheet music
https://archive.org/details/fakebooks

Free Culture - music, courses, books, etc

http://www.openculture.com/

National Theatre Free Streaming on Thursdays

https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/at-home

HAMPSTEAD THEATRE AT HOME
https://www.hampsteadtheatre.com/whats-on/hampstead-theatre-at-home/wild?utm_source=wordfly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=GuardianLivestreamAnnouncement&utm_content=version_A&promo=3003

Stage shows, musicals and opera you can watch online now for free | WhatsOnStage
https://www.whatsonstage.com/london-theatre/news/stage-shows-musicals-opera-free-stream-online_51198.html

Wild Voice Wednesdays: Anti Viral Virtual Voices
https://www.facebook.com/events/s/wild-voice-wednesdays-anti-vir/632501180648088/

10 of the world’s best virtual museum and art gallery tours:
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/mar/23/10-of-the-worlds-best-virtual-museum-and-art-gallery-tours

And more here:
https://artsandculture.google.com/partner

10 virtual tours of the world’s most famous landmarks
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/mar/30/10-best-virtual-tour-worlds-most-famous-landmarks

Great Bands at Womad 2018

Things we liked:

Jazzanova
Hanggai (Mongolian rockers)
Ladama (Latin American feminist band)
La Dame Blanche (Cuban singer)
Leftfield (live house music - we missed out on that whole thing the first time round)
KermesZ a L'Est (mad Belgian brass punks playing mainly Balkan music, with lots of street theatre and comedy)
Bollywood Brass Band with Jyotsna Srikanth
Dobet Gnahore
Mr Jukes
The Undercover Hippy (sort of reggae/ska, politically engaged lyrics)
Tuuletar (amazing Finnish acapella women)
Jiggy (Irish folk-rock)
Meklit (Ethiopian)
Too Many Zooz (live electronic music played on baritone sax, trumpet and drums/percussion)
The Dirty Bourbon River Show
Thievery Corporation

RSA report on Cohousing

So I read the RSA report on cohousing - see here - and my main take-away is that it wasn't really about cohousing. There's lots about what is broken in the UK housing market - in particular, the lack of actually affordable (as opposed to "affordable", now a term with special meaning that specifies a discount from overblown market rents rather than a relationship to disposable income), and the poor terms and conditions that apply to renters but not so much to mortgage buyers. There is quite a lot discussion about forms of tenure, with particular emphasis on mutual ownership, rental co-ops, a community land trusts.

That's all very interesting (really, it is) but most of the report misses the point about cohousing, which is that it is form of occupancy, not a form of tenure. The cohousing community where I live, and most of the others in the UK and the US, is primarily based on owner-occupancy, though there are some private renters (living in homes owned by individuals, not the community or any other institution) and some lodgers. The tenure is more or less bog-standard leasehold that you'd find in many blocks of flats. In Northern Europe there are lot more rental-based cohousing communities, with the community (or a housing association) acting as the landlord.

The distinguishing feature of the occupancy is really the self-management. Other developments have shared facilities. It's a common feature of high-end developments (pool, gym etc.). Old-style US condominiums have residents' association rooms and facilities, and shared laundries seem to be common in US apartment blocks (though not in British ones). The new commercial 'co-living' set-ups like The Collective have them too.

The difference is that in co-housing these are managed and maintained, and cleaned, (for the most part) by the residents themselves, and it's the organisation of this that means that people are necessarily entangled and involved with each other. Not everyone is equally involved, but it seems to be true that the more you put in, the more you get out - at least in terms of loneliness reduction.

Our community has frequent (thrice-weekly) communal meals, prepared and cooked by community members through a rota, to a rolling meal schedule, in a communal kitchen and dining room that is beautifully maintained. The eating together is important (though not every cohousing community does it), but it's the self-management - the rotas and the inevitable shift swaps, the menus, the food buying - that keeps people entangled with each other. The upside of cohousing, the connection with other people, is exactly the same as the downside - that you are inextricably bound up with other people.

When my partner and I tell our friends about it, they often react that they wouldn't like to have all of those obligations...and they might be right. In one sense, the people in cohousing are just like everyone else. There isn't a common ideology or philosophy. Not everyone is particularly generous or self-less. Some people are involved with wider communities, some aren't. What distinguishes them is their ability to tolerate these obligations, and that level of entanglement with other people and need to take the views and preferences of others into account. I suspect that this is a not such a common characteristic, especially in Britain, especially now. If I'm right, then cohousing won't be a cure for loneliness, at least for many people - though it is a good vehicle for those who are that way inclined. It's probably worth noting that even in those Scandinavian countries where it's well established and relatively easy to establish the proportion of the population that lives in cohousing remains below 5%.

Walking on Sand

The sand is scorching, even through my white plastic sandals. I am six years old.

I am sitting on a towel, underneath a red and white beach umbrella. I’m shaded from the direct sun, but it is still very hot. I am resting my narrow back against my Daddy’s shin. I push my hands into the warm sand, scoop some up to let it fall through my fingers. Just below the surface the sand is damp, cooler.

The beach is a low thrum of sound. Dark men in straw hats walk up and down with enormous ice boxes on their back. They are calling in Italian, but I know that their rhythmic cries and songs mean that they are selling ice creams and cold melon.

I have finished my ice cream. My fingers are sticky and I am still very hot. Mummy and Daddy are reading their books, dozing. The sea is fifty yards away, through a few more ranks of towels and loungers and umbrellas. I tell Mummy and Daddy that I want to go in the water; they say I should turn round and wave to them when I reach the sea.

I hop and skip across the burning sand. At the shoreline the sand is cool, soothing between my toes. I look back at the red and white umbrella. I know Mummy and Daddy are underneath it, though I can’t see them in the bright sunlight. I wave, turn and wade into the water. I am wearing a red and white hat with the name of the resort and a picture of a friendly smiling mouse.

The sea is warm, gentle. I submerge my shoulders, enjoying the feeling of buoyancy. I watch some young men playing football with a red and white beach ball. I walk out of the water, back on to the cool wet sand. I know that I just need to walk back in a straight line, the way that I came down to the sea, and there will be Mummy and Daddy.

But I can’t see the red and white umbrella, or Mummy and Daddy. The faces of the people on the beach are blurred. My severe myopia will not be diagnosed until later in the year.

I walk up and down on a short stretch of the waterline. Soon Daddy will come to find me. But he does not come. After what seems like a very long time I start to cry.

Instantly I am surrounded by kind people, moved that a child is crying. They speak to me in Italian, and though I don’t understand them, I know they are kind. One takes my hand, and a big group walks with me along the beach, calling to help me find Mummy and Daddy. And here they are, and I cry some more and then I stop. There is much thanking and patting of shoulders, and the nice people go back to their own beach towels.

***

And now another little brown boy stands on an Italian shore. The early morning sky is cobalt blue. Now the sand is not hot. The boy’s feet sink its icy chill.

His clothes are wet, and his teeth are chattering. He is wearing an orange life jacket. Heaps of wet rags are scattered all along the beach. There are people lying at the edge of the water. Their limbs bob lazily back and forth in the waves. 

The boy cannot find his Mummy and Daddy. He cannot understand Italian, or English. Perhaps he speaks Arabic, or Tigrinya, or Kurdish. He cries. Soon the kind Italian people will come, and help him find his Mummy and Daddy. Won’t they?

Against Decluttering

I picked up a cutting from the Architect's Data File, and it was all about decluttering and de-materialization and microhomes/tiny homes. It was linked to some material about building regulations and minimum space standards, and to the ideas of 'futurist and author' James Wallman, responsible for the book and blog 'Stuffocation'.

Normally I'm a sucker for this sort of thing. I've said more than once that we go on holiday to get away from our own stuff, because so much of it nags us to do something - fix it, put it away, do the thing that it represents, remember that we bought it in order to take up a new activity that we haven't got round to...you get the picture. As a Green I know that our lives are full of shit that we don't really need, or even want, or have space for, that cost resources to make and will leave toxic traces behind when we eventually dispose of them. I watched the original 'Story of Stuff' film.

But now I'm thinking about the flip side to all this. If capitalism wants to sell us stuff (whether we need it or not) why is it paying consultancy fees to Wallman? Because it doesn't care whether it sells us stuff, and because it quite likes a future where we give it money but it doesn't have to give us stuff.

I'm not the first one to think about this, obviously; this article argues that in handing back 'ownership' of our things to the companies that sold them to us, we are effectively going to back to the middle ages, when all property belonged to the crown, and the rest of us just had some limited rights to use it.

But I still want to give two cheers for ownership over the 'experience economy'. In the old days, when I bought a physical book, or physical DVD, they were mine to do what I liked with. Sure, there were copyright restrictions, and that blurb in the front of the book about it not being re-lent or re-sold without permission, but unless you were involved in parallel imports it didn't really matter. I can give a book (or a DVD) to a friend, or take it to a charity shop. If I pay for a film on Amazon Prime (or Google Play, or anything else) I pretty much can't. Google offers me the choice of 'renting' the film or 'buying' it, but in neither case do I own it in the same sense that I did the physical item. Even though the marginal cost of producing the 'digital experience' that is a streamed film is close to zero, I pay almost the same for it that I would pay for a physical item, and I can do less with it.

In the Economics textbooks that I studied at school there was a lot about the supply curve. As the price of a thing rises, more firms enter the market to produce it, so that the price eventually falls back to an equilibrium representing the marginal cost of production (I may have rushed that a little). In real life capitalists move heaven and earth to stop this happening, and much of what you get taught in business school is stuff that ought not to be of any use if classical Economic theory was true. Barriers to entry - patents, regulations, licensing rights, state-protected monopolies via 'outsourcing' contracts...if you need a refresher it's all nicely set out in Guy Standing's book The Corruption of Capitalism, which re-introduces the Economic meaning of 'rent' as unearned income.

Nevertheless, the trajectory of economic and technological development over the last few years has made the fiction of the supply curve a bit more true. Globalization, competition from China, the increasing automation of physical production, and the increasing software component of physical goods has all helped to ensure that the marginal cost of producing stuff is also tending towards zero, even if it will never actually get there. Stuff is getting cheaper, and competition from low-cost no-brand producers is a constant concern for big branded manufacturers. Chinese Android mobile phones are pretty much as good as the more expensive branded versions; the after-sales service is not much good (but actually it's not much good from the big brands either, for the most part) but there's pretty good free support from other users via the web.

Hence, I think, the increasing emphasis on things-as-a-service, and on rolling back ownership of things we thought we had bought. Warranties and licence agreements that are breached if we try to repair or enhance the things; software that acts against the interests of the apparent owner; Delightfully, Amazon rubbed our noses in it by deleting, of all books, Orwell's 1984 from the Kindles of customers who thought they had bought the book.

It bears saying, too, that while the manufacture of things is subject to this cost curve, I don't think the same applies to the creation of 'experiences'. The latter are much more likely to involve human labour (even though some it will be robotized and automated, I suspect the premium experiences will involve humans, almost by definition) - and on present experience, not very well paid human labour. And it's not necessarily true that the ecological footprint of experiences is less than that of stuff - especially not if that experience is a carbon-heavy trip to Kilimanjaro, or a cheap flight stag weekend in Tallinn.

And let's come back to those microhomes, where this began. Is it really true that millennials and others are embracing smaller homes out of a values-driven rejection of stuff and clutter, or is that rejection actually the consequence of smaller homes? So-called 'luxury flats' have minimal storage space nowadays - one reason for the huge boom in out of town storage. It's not only piles of meaningless plastic crap that you don't have room for; it's also your parents' photo album, and your grandmother's candlesticks. Letting go of some of these items, even when they are not in frequent use, is an emotional process. It's nice to think we are freer because we're not burdened with stuff, but are we also giving up a bit of ourselves? Erving Goffman's famous account of total institutions drew attention to the way that inmates are stripped of their identity-defining personal possessions. Something to think about the next time you hear someone waxing lyrical about decluttering, and dematerialisation, and 'x as a service'. And while we're at it, let's have a look at James Wallman's house.

Crowdfunding an arrangement for the Stroud Red Band

Hi All,

I would like the Stroud Red Band to have the song of the Jewish Partisans, 'Zog Nit Keynmol', in its repertoire. That means we need an arrangement for the particular set of instruments that we have in the band; the London Big Red Band has the same set of parts, so they will be able to use this arrangement too, and any other band that we make it available to.

We already had Di Shvue, a famous Yiddish socialist song, arranged for us, by a nice composer-arranger called Lewis Wolstanholme. We'd like to get him to do this arrangement, and he's going to charge £60 - so this is a very small crowdfunding exercise. If it works we can get some other tunes re-arranged for the band.

If a few friends of the band, or people interested in the history that the song represents, would kick in £5 we will be there in no time! Just go to this crowdfunding page and make a small donation.

Thanks,

Comrade Jezza

The Stroud Red Band set list

 The Red Flag
Kasatchok
Down by the Riverside
Power in a Union
African Market Place  
La Cucaracha 
Solidarity Forever 
Bandiera Rossa
Bella Ciao 
The Homecoming 
The Internationale
Di Shvue

The Narrative Fork: a new literary term?

The idea of 'unauthorised' sequels to works of literature isn't exactly new. Scarlett was a sequel to 'Gone with the Wind' published many years after the original. There are lots of James Bond sequels by several authors who aren't Ian Fleming. Following the release of Harper Lee's rather late sequel to 'To Kill a Mockingbird' the New Yorker published a quite amusing article on this theme.

A new development, though, is a sequel which ignores previous sequels - as is the case with Alien 5. I think we need a word for this kind of thing, so I am proposing the term 'Narrative Fork', by analogy with the forks in Linux distributions. A narrative fork is a 'sequels branch' which can be defined by the titles in the main stream of sequel from which it deviates. For example, there could be a narrative fork from the Harry Potter series, branching between book two (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) and book three (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), in which one of the main characters from the series is killed. Further sequels in this fork would have to remain consistent with each other, but not with the other branch of the fork.

There, I hope that's clear.

A Grauniad article listing some epidemic-related fiction

Available here. Leaves out some of my favourites, including both the book and the film of Blindness.

Kvass

I made some kvass. I'd had it from a stall in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, and it had stuck in my mind as a nice not-too-sweet soft drink.

I mainly used this recipe but I also followed the 'raisin in each bottle' technique from another recipe. I bottled it in PET water bottles and I gave them a good squeeze before I screwed the lid on. Even so they fermented a lot, and several of the bottles exploded, a bit like in this video.

Still, the kvass was nice, if not exactly like the one I had in the USSR. It was a bit darker. I suspect that this mildly fermented drink is a bit like what the 'small beer' that they drank in the middle ages was like.

Fifty Shades and the sadomasochism of everyday life

Lots of women are reading 'Fifty Shades of Grey'. Really really lots. They read it on trains, on planes, in airports. Quite a few of them complain that it was badly written and that it was a struggle to read all five hundred pages, not to mention what a drudge it was to read the sequels. Some compare it adversely to 'The Story of O', which was much more literary, apparently. Few mention that it was any sort of turn-on.

What's unusual about Fifty Shades is that it's S&M for women. Although it's often taken for granted that womens' sexuality is somehow linked to masochism, there isn't much evidence of this in the form of material actually aimed at women. There's a huge amount of material designed to gratify male masochism. S&M permeates 'straight' male porn, and non-porn or 'soft porn' depictions of sexy women. Fetish clothes and props like whips and riding crops abound. These objects have more or less become signifiers of sexualisation. Images of men being dominated by leather-clad women with whips are commonplace in fashion photography and in music videos. What was once a slightly shameful 'outlaw' sexual orientation is now heading for the mainstream.

What is behind this? I think that sexual masochism, for both women and men, is a response to the increasingly complex demands of modern life. Everyday life involves ever more choices. Some of these are trivial (like which of 27 different kinds of milk to buy), but they still take up brain resource. Others are both very difficult to make and of great consequence – how to save sufficient money to avoid an old age of misery while still managing to live somewhere decent enough to bring up a family. This paradox of choice has been much commented upon. It's been observed that the richer you are, the less time you seem to have – because having more money means that more options (even for pleasure) are open to you, competing for your time and mental resources.

Everyday life involves more role conflict than it used to. We are parents for longer, because though our 'children' have their own ideas about how to dress, socialize, and spend their time earlier than their predecessors, they are financially dependent on us until much later in life, because the demands of the education system, the labour market and the current housing market are much more cruel to them. We are children for longer too, because our parents live longer than their predecessors, surviving the physical ailments that used to kill them to 'enjoy' a life of declining mental faculties and social disadvantage in a culture that does not celebrate or value old age. The flexible labour market means that our jobs are not secure, the 'delayering' havoc of repeated waves of management consultant-led reorganisations have done away with the expectation of a career path, and a self-managed career means both frequent job changes and lots of effort to demonstrate 'good attitude'. And that's at the same time as being a good parent and a dutiful child.

There are a few palliatives to this. A few people can manage to practice mindfulness and meditation, consciously and actively clearing this stuff from their minds when it isn't helpful or appropriate – but this is really hard word that takes a lot of training and effort. Activities that offer total engagement and 'flow' can do the same thing via physical discipline, which some people find easier than mental training. Joyful submission to a religious system cuts down on lots of choices and gives strong guidance on how to resolve those that remain. For those looking for a quick fix, safely bounded fear of the kind offered by a horror film or apparently dangerous theme park ride can provide a few hours or minutes of relief by focusing the mind exclusively on present circumstances.

And then there's S&M sex. Sexual arousal provides the focus on the moment, and sexual submissiveness provides the abication of responsibility and the demands of role. Under the control of another, it's possible to escape from all those choices and conflicting demands. For the time of the session, the submissive is completely absorbed in their own feelings, of both pain and pleasure. It's been suggested that the these two sensations are linked rather than opposites, that the distinction between them is not as clear-cut as sometimes supposed – or that at least some people have their wires crossed in such a way as to confuse the way that they experience pain and pleasure.

That may be so, but I think the pay-off from sadomasochism is primarily social and cognitive rather than physiological. The benefit is the freedom from choice and responsibility; pain is the price that the submissive pays in order to lend versimillitude and make it feel like the freedom is genuine. That's what the props are for too – the whips, the bondage, the fetish clothing. They are necessary to sustain the fantasy, in the same way the price of a lottery ticket is needed to sustain the brief fantasy of winning the lottery. Having nasty things done to you, or being forced to do nasty things, is proof to yourself that you really can't make any choices, and are therefore genuinely 'free' from your responsibilities.

This has usually been presented as the domain of high-status men (as depicted in the film about Cynthia Payne 'Personal Services', where all of the clients seem to be generals and high court judges), but it now seems to work for lots of men, and as the success of Fifty Shades illustrates, for women too. We've all got too much responsibility and too many choices now.

The consequence is that S&M comes to stand for the kind of transcendence from the everyday that sex used to represent. When music videos represent a woman as sexy, she wears leather or latex and waves a whip about. Whereas once a sitcom would get a laugh out of allowing a couple to be discovered having sex, now it depicts them as having S&M sex. When an advertisement depicts an executive having a session with a prostitute in his office, she is a dominatrix. For many men, the props of S&M have become quite literally fetishes, in that they are imbued with the aura of sex even though they are not sexual objects.

Ultimately this is bound to lead to disappointment. As  S&M becomes mainstream, it loses the power to offer total absorption. It's one thing for Madonna to suggest that she is a bit of a dominatrix in her personal life as part of maintaining her fifty-year-old 'edginess'; when Kylie Minogue not only incorporates S&M scenes into her stage act but is also is photographed at a charity event with a pair of nipple clamps we've entered a new phase.

The extent to which S&M is already a familiar theme in advertisements suggests that this process is well under way. Eventually that whip will remind you to buy shoe polish rather than take you out of yourself.

There is another reason, too, why S&M sex is not a useful escape route from the pressures of everyday life. Acting out domination fantasies actually takes a great deal of care and attention. Few people really enjoy serious amounts of pain and discomfort. There is a thin line between sustaining the pretence that the submissive has surrendered control and actually hurting. As the anti-porn feminist Andrea Dworkin, and lots of others more sympathetic to S&M have noted, it is the submissive who is really in control of the S&M session. But where can the submissive find someone who is up to this difficult task? More men might be inclined towards submission, but there isn't a corresponding increase in the number of women who want to play the role of the dominatrix. They're all out looking for their own Christian Grey.

S&M is not an escape from the pressures of everyday life but a dead end, an engagement with yet another set of roles and responsibilities to be negotiated. Maybe it would be different under socialism...

Alcoholic ginger beer

No claims for originality here, except that I have metricated and reconfigured the amounts to fit my saucepan and fermenting vat.

To make 10 litres of  ginger beer: 

• Use 0.36kg of peeled and grated ginger root, 2.1kg's of sugar, 2.5 lemons - juice, but also zest. 
• Boil and simmer all ingredients in a large pan for 30 mins (enough to get really lovely ginger taste). 
• My biggest saucepan is 5l, so I do all the ingredients in that much water then pour into fermenting barrel, and top up with cold water.
• Make sure water is lukewarm and add 1 sachet of champagne yeast - I bought it on ebay for next to nothing.

Wait 7 days. Bottle, leave for further 7 days at room temperature. 

This is actually the most tricky part. I use plastic water bottles, and I make sure I squeeze them when bottling to allow room for expansion. I tried bottling in glass once and was lucky to escape with my life. 

After seven days chill and enjoy!

According to the original recipe the finished product will be around 4 - 5 % proof. Not sure if this is true, but it has quite a kick anyway.

Documents in my reference library

A random collection of links to documents - not all favoured, just a place to keep the links so as to file the hard copy (sometimes in the round filing cabinet).

http://neweconomics.org/publications/the-art-of-rapid-transition

 http://www.climate-change-jobs.org/sites/default/files/1MillionClimateJobs_2010.PDF

 http://neweconomics.org/sites/neweconomics.org/files/From_the_Ashes_of_the_Crash_1.pdf

 http://neweconomics.org/sites/neweconomics.org/files/The_Ratio.pdf

http://neweconomics.org/sites/neweconomics.org/files/A_Green_New_Deal_1.pdf

http://clients.squareeye.net/uploads/compass/documents/Good_Banking_webReady.pdf

http://clients.squareeye.net/uploads/compass/documents/Compass%20Banking%20WEB.pdf

http://clients.squareeye.net/uploads/compass/documents/Compass_Plan_B_web.pdf

http://www.lithium.com/pdfs/books/Lithium-The-Science-of-Social-eVersion.pdf

http://www.haringey4020.org.uk/report

http://www.atkearney.com/documents/10192/4b98dac5-0c99-4439-9292-72bfcd7a6dd1

Shut that door!

Muswell Hill has lots of 'health shops' - we have a Planet Organic, a Holland and Barrett, and two vitamin shops. Last week I went in to one of them -- the delightfully named 'Panacea' -- to ask the staff there to shut the door. It was a cold day, and they had the heat full on with the door open.

I politely (really politely) pointed out that wasting heat and energy like that wasn't good for the planet, and that their customers might just possibly be the sort of people who cared about that sort of thing. The staff agreed, and said that they'd like to shut the door if only to keep out the traffic noise, but that the manager insisted that they keep it open so as to signal to customers that the shop wasn't closed.

So I asked for the manager's contact details, and phoned her and had another very polite conversation. She said she understood my view and hoped that I understood hers, but that she'd talk to the owner about it.

Yesterday I went past again. The door is now shut, the staff are even happier and more helpful, and there didn't seem to be fewer people in there. Hats off to Panacea for listening to customers!

And now I feel a campaign coming on...the nice manager in Rymans tells me that he'd like to close the shop door, but it's head office policy to keep it open.

Dogs lost and found

Always wondered whether those 'Lost Dog' notes posted on trees ever resulted in any dogs (or cats, or parrots) being found. Why should the routes taken by the lost dog correspond to those taken by the note-posters? The latter must put them up in what they consider to be their own locale but they probably don't ask the dog if it has a similar mental map. Or they didn't, before it got lost.

Delighted to see that a note posted on the gates of my local park has now been updated with 'Found - Thanks!' written across it. So they must work, at least some of the time.

The sad death of Michael Jackson

The only comment I've found worth reading was this one by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian - about the false dream of celebrity.

My first reaction on hearing of the death of MJ was one of sadness - yet another case of someone who seemed to have it all but found no happiness as a result. One day on and I'm already fed up with all the coverage.

Is this what they really meant?

From the website of the Edwardian Radisson Hotel at Heathrow:

"We believe in doing business with a clear conscience, so we're careful not to waste either your time or our resources in planning an environmentally responsible conference, meeting or event."

Delightfully honest.

Museum of Agriculture and Food

Yesterday I went to the Science Museum - in the first place to see the 'Japan Car' exhibition and then since I was there, to take in the 'Wallace and Gromit' exhibition. I like Nick Park's animations and was hoping that there would be some mock-ups of Wallace's daft inventions. In fact the exhibition was terrible - not much in it at all, apart from a few of the little rooms from the films. The 'Japan Car' exhibition was not much better; considering it was subtitled "Design for the Crowded Planet" it didn't have much by way of interesting innovation about sustainable transport - just some cars, really, which I suppose should not have been a surprise. Apart from the fact that some of them were small, one was fuel cell and one was electric, not much to detain me.

So having schlepped across London, I thought I'd at least take in the Agriculture gallery. I am reading the Fontana Economic History of Europe, and am in the middle of the brilliant chapter about technology. Although it's very well written it has no diagrams, so I don't really appreciate some of the points it makes about ploughshares, mouldboards, and whipple shafts. I rather hoped that the Science Museum gallery would help.

But it was a real disappointment. None of the exhibits look like they have been touched since the 1950s. There are some shabby dioramas of tractors and harrows, with yellowing caption boards. There are a few little models of tractors and 'native' ploughs, though not much by way of explanation. And the overall story, in so far as there is one, is about the 'agricultural revolution' of the eighteenth century in England, and then the advent of diesel and petrol tractors in the twentieth century. Nothing about the neolithic revolution, irrigation and hydraulic civilisations, or medieval agriculture.

So why isn't there a decent museum of agriculture and food? There's enough to put in it, and it's clear that people are interested in that sort of thing right now - look at the food programmes on telly, the Victorian Farm programme, the interest in home growing. And until there is one, perhaps it would be worth starting a virtual museum of agriculture?