BurnedThumb

 El Duende
Grief lives in my house
like dry rot infesting the timbers.
It has taken up residence
in the cellar, where I do not go.
I pretend there is no such space.
But he sits there, smoking coltsfoot tobacco,
and brewing a bitter tisane of rue
and wormwood, hyssop and dill.
Too much indulgence, he says, in sweet things
like joy and kindness, all the fruit
of sunlight and fresh rain, have done me harm.
It is time to take my medicine,
time for a purge, a cleansing.
Hell mend ye, he says. And hope.

Oh, the news, the news. It looks as if we have hit the point of no return in so many ways.I have been in despair, over politics, race, feminism, the climate, the state of poetry (don’t even ask), and I know I’m not the only one. And yet.

I came across this site https://www.lowimpact.org/ . It was a very cheering read, full not only of good ideas (those are ten a penny) but accounts of people and groups actually doing good things, making real changes, getting real results. It reinforces experiences I’ve had before, that there are plenty of people in the world who are better than the stories we see in social media. People who protested in their thousands when the Windrush scandal happened, demonstrating that the government cannot simply rely on us being as racist as the newspaper headlines. People who save their local green spaces. People who are creating new ways to work, teaching people new skills, adapting our houses and technologies to be less destructive. Scottish people who responded to the Westminster ban on our parliament paying the settlement fees for EU residents by volunteering to crowdfund it themselves. Housing associations who responded to Serco’s treatment of asylum seekers by withdrawing their licenses to manage those properties. New online magazines to give platforms for groups who find themselves marginalised in mainstream publications.

There is good stuff happening all around us, but we don’t hear it so much, and there are some good reasons why not. One is that anxiety is important for survival, so bad stories always need to make more impact. But there are two others more substantial. One is that none of this is enough. We are close to irreversable on many bad fronts, and the trends are really not encouraging overall. We need to do more, all of us collectively and individually, and we can’t afford to let ourselves off the hook.

But here’s the killer. The stories all focus on individual responses, whereas the big problems are structural. You can’t reduce car use if you can’t afford to live near your workplace. You can’t use public transport if there isn’t any, or if flexible working and childcare arrangements don’t fit in with what services there are. You can’t reduce your plastic use if manufacturers won’t make things without plastic. You can’t reduce your heating use if your landlord won’t put in an efficient heating system or double glazing. And there are vested interests in keeping us guilty and apathetic, rather than informed and proactive. If they believe we don’t know or care, they will be able to avoid making the large-scale changes we need, and lay off the blame on us. And we’ll be able to tell ourselves we can’t make any difference anyway. 

But here’s what we can do. We can become better informed. We can seek out local initiatives that are making things better, and support them with time, money or votes as we are able. We can spread the news and refuse to back off. And we can hope.

And in this spirit, here are my tributes to some of the people and groups who have given me hope this year

•  @seraphima who has tweeted the whole of the Grenfell enquiry, reminding me that this iniquity might so easily be swept under the carpet, and won’t because of people like her
• @CaptainKim  who alerted Scotland to Serco threatening to lock asylum seekers out of their homes with seven days notice
• https://noserialnumber.org/ who are making a genuine attempt to tackle the anomaly that artisan-produced sustainable products have to be priced out of the reach of ordinary people
• https://www.thewillowherbreview.com/ providing a platform for diversity in nature writing  
• https://theselkie.co.uk/ a  magazine for those excluded by gender, disability or mental health issues

And on that note, we can go into the longest night, shortest day and holiday celebrations of all sorts, with a glimmer of hope that maybe next year some of this will bear fruit. Have a very happy Christmas and New Year!

I have been taking photographs of the garden now that the season has come to an end, with a view to planning for next year. In some ways it has been a lovely year, from the first flowers in spring

to the hot summer, which turned out to be so good for the bees and butterflies.

But in other ways frustrating. Much as I loved our holidays, I hate to be away when the garden is at its most demanding, and I struggled to keep up with the watering. Also, the harvest mite (known around here as the beery bug) had a very good year, which seriously limited my ability to be outside from july to the middle of September.

The results weren’t too bad, on the whole. The tomatoes did very well, although Moneymaker rates very low on the flavour front, and I shall go back to Harbinger or Ailsa Craig next year. The first lot of cuttings I took thrived, but the later ones failed completely, and I’ll need to have a better strategy for keeping them cool and damp until the first roots form.

I will need to take more care with sowing seeds, too. I’m used to having crops fail as the seeds are eaten by birds, and the young shoots by slugs, but it didn’t happen this time, and things needed thinning out badly. The new rose disappeared behind over-enthusiastic borage, evening primrose and extremely vigorous marigolds. There were even some volunteer nasturtiums self-seeded from last year – it was a jungle for weeks.

Most of my intentions are to keep doing what I’m doing, only more carefully, but there is one new project in mind. Early in the year I planted a bog myrtle,which seems to have settled well, in spite of the rampaging borage around it, and I’m hoping to use the leaves for dyes next year – they make a yellow that used to be regarded as iconic by Highlanders. But I’m also hoping to sow some seeds of heather and blaeberries – the bilberries or whortleberries of down south – to grow round it, with yellow flag and meadowsweet in the wetter ground by the pond. It will mean doing battle with the crocosmia already in residence, though, and I can see that being a problem.

I’m also planning to encourage the chickweed that turned up for the first time, and to move the rogue dandelions that turn up in the lawn to an overlooked bit of garden behind the shed. If anyone saw the weed colonies I am nurturing here they would probably wonder what I was doing, but they are so useful as herbs, I can’t get enough of them. There will be more plants for colour and scent, and for drying in the winter, but most importantly, more time and attention, and more room for everything to give its best.