Courgette germinates

Short note to mark that one of the courgette (zucchini) seeds is working. In other news, we bought canes to replace the wooden skewers at the corners of the veg trug. Actual rain this afternoon.

Today's real post below.

A Walk along the Coast

After a week of news reading and writing, it was so good to slip the confines of the neighbourhood and go for a real tramp along the coast to the farms by Seton Castle. Before Benedict Ambrose got sick, we often went for day-long rambles in the countryside that ended with a hearty pub supper before we grabbed the bus or train home. Thus, this was like old times, apart from the route. We have never followed the Firth of Forth so far east.

It was an unusually beautiful day of sunshine, even for the the central-east coast. (Locals who moan that there is no sun here have strangely short memories.) We took no bag and wore fleece jackets we could take off and tie around our waists. B.A. wore walking shoes, and I stuck to my usual chunky red slip-ons, more comfortable for  long walks than my running shoes. It sprinkled rain just as we went out the door, so I exchanged my fine Panama for a French Scouting hat. Carrick c'est chic--except in Britain, where it looks strange, so I tied it behind my braids instead of under my chin.

I stopped to take a photograph of some harebells, also known as Scottish bluebells,  at the beginning of our journey. It is now May, so there are riots of flowers have popped up everywhere. I will add them to this post for your enjoyment. Meanwhile, there were also many people out for their government-approved exercise, and we didn't see any police presence until the end of our journey. The sight of so many couples with children (always two children--not one, not three or more) was heartwarming. They too walked along the coast, exclaiming in English or Polish (Zobacie!) at the view.

Arthur's Seat

One sight of interest was Arthur's Seat, looming orange and green in the distance. Another was the cruise ships and oil tanker taking refuge in the middle of the Firth of Forth, as they have been since the beginning of the lockdown. There was also the Kingdom of Fife, for it was such a clear day we could see the towns on the opposite shore and the Lomonds behind them. Eventually we had a very good view of the Forth Bridge, too.

Benedict Ambrose spotted a St. Mark's Fly, so called because it makes its appearance on the 25th of April, and I duly photographed it. B.A. also thought he saw a cormorant, but it was at such a distance that we were never sure.

One of the features of Scotland is the bright yellow common gorse, and I was astonished as we walked among them and I breathed in the apparently mistakable scent of coconuts. B.A. recited some lines of a poem he wrote about a walk we took on Blackford Hill almost 10 years ago:

V 
Opalescent mist 
Shows, hides, shows the town beneath;
The pale scent of gorse. 



The Blackford Hill walk was in autumn, so perhaps the scent of gorse was pale then. It was not at all pale on this bright sunny day. It reminded me of expensive sun-tan lotion and British children's books about the seaside.

As we walked along, I thought about Wendell Berry writing that tobacco was to his part of Kentucky as the horse was to the Plains Indian, and I asked B.A. what was the East Coast of Scotland's equivalent. As I believe is common to husbands, he didn't entirely understand the question.

"What makes Scotland different from other places, like Toronto for example?" I tried.

B.A. said lots of things, not just one thing, but couldn't name any at that moment.

"The Scots love their old buildings and don't want to knock them down," I suggested.

"Sometimes," said B.A., who is from much destroyed Dundee. "Recently."

One thing that differentiates the Scots from the English (and perhaps third-generation-plus English-speaking Canadians) is that they are not taught to be ashamed of their history and, in fact, they are not ashamed of it, not even the defeats. Don't try suggesting to the Scots that they colluded in the colonisation of the British Empire because, first, they won't believe you and, second, they will be offended. Bannockburn, people. Glencoe. Margaret Thatcher.  

After much thinking, I realise that that which united and defined the East Coast of Scotland for centuries was fish: catching fish, gutting fish, selling fish. Our own last local fishwife (and fishwives were women of honour here, by the way, not a byword for scolding) retired in the 1950s.

As usual, B.A. could not resist skipping stones on the surface of the Firth of Forth.

There are towns all along the Firth of Forth, most of them former fishing villages or ports. (Oliver Cromwell and his men did a lot of damage to them on his way up north.) There are still some little marinas and shipbuilders. There are also large stone walls to keep the Forth out of gardens, and some of the walls have wooden doors in them, which I love. My great dream is to live in a house with a fan light over the front door and a walled garden with a painted wooden door in it.

I took a photograph of a cat on one of these walls.

Incidentally, these towns are rather humble, which means that even some of the very poor have sea views, if we count the Firth of Forth as part of the North Sea.  There are also local regulations preventing the building of hideous, Toronto-style cheaply built concrete, multi-story condominiums along the coast although (let's face it) the public housing aka council estates are no beauties themselves.

Of course the not-poor have lovelier homes, and some of them have been cleverly built into refurbished old stone industrial buildings. Others were built in the 18th and 19th centuries, and naturally there are Historical Houses of grandeur, including castles.

When we got to Port Seton, we considered having fish-and-ships at Bene's but decided to press on to the farm shop and go to Bene's on the way back. When we got almost as far as Seton Sands, B.A. found the path to the farms, and we turned our faces towards the countryside. Eventually the wooded path led us to great fields of vegetables and to views of Seton Castle. We heart shots a couple of times, but they were not from a rifles but from a propane cannon in the fields, a much noisier bird-scarer than the boiler suit scarecrows.

We followed the path around the fields to a road and then went up the road to a small hamlet of stone farmhouses and outbuildings. We couldn't find the farm shop, so eventually B.A. asked a man who had been mowing grass about it. It turns out that the shop closed a year ago. No farm shop.

Orange boiler suit as scarecrow.

However, we were happy to have had the walk, and B.A. was happy not to have to carry a heavy bag of eggs and organic vegetables. That was, however, the farm shop nearest to us, so it looks as though there isn't a farm shop within walking distance of our home after all.

We were thoroughly tired of walking, so instead of going to Bene's, we went to Seton Sands to catch the bus. Our luck was in--the bus came within ten minutes, and we were allowed to clamber on and sit looking at the Firth of Forth until it was time to go. The journey back was humiliatingly short.

I have suggested that next weekend we walk three miles from the relevant railway station to our truly nearest farm shop and then the three miles back. This depends, of course, on the train schedules and the lockdown. I'm not sure civil authorities deems the support of the county's organic produce essential travel although it should. If they've taken draconian steps to counteract the environmental disaster that is the COVID-19 coronavirus, why not take draconian steps to counteract the environmental disaster that is the globalist food industry?

Over in Poland, Polish Pretend Son is huffing and snorting at his computer reading such a totalitarian sentiment on my blog. But I'm not calling for tyranny: I'm just pointing out the inconsistency.  And speaking of Polish Pretend Son, one of the weirder bright spots of the coronavirus disaster is that apparently smokers are less likely to die from it. This is the first time in my lifetime that anyone has suggested that smoking can preserve your life. I'm sure it will never happen again---or am I?

More photographs for your lockdown enjoyment:

For sale: offers over £8 million.

This is when I said "Let's move here!"

Lomonds, Forth, Port Seton, Vegetables

The Most Vulnerable Person in the Situation*

Nothing so lovely as a tree.

Yesterday was partially healthy, partially not. At lunchtime I went outside for half an hour and tended to my plants. I hoed up weeds between the concrete paving stones that form the paths. Most importantly, I met our downstairs neighbour's southern neighbour. (I mean that the latter's flat is to the south side of the former's.)

My current goal is to somehow learn the names of everyone in our eight-flat terrace building. This is not the easiest thing to achieve, even in relatively gregarious Scotland, because many people like to "keep themselves to themselves." 

However, I was soon back inside working on an investigative article that will cause a sensation and, no doubt, unhappiness to some now but will, hopefully, bring increased happiness to all later. Research during the lockdown is difficult and frustrating, and searching for turds in the sewage is a dirty and depressing job. However, it is also as absorbing as a puzzle, so I was still poking around in odd corners of the internet until midnight. My stinky task was interrupted briefly by supper and a film. In the film evil triumphed over good, and then was itself defeated by a worse evil, which the viewer was supposed to think of as good. 

No wonder, then, that I went to bed sad, and my dreams were haunted by my work. When I woke up, I didn't want to get up, and when I got up, I didn't want to wash the dishes. Fortunately, I had enough discipline to put on my shoes and go out to visit the apple blossoms and my plants. This improved my day greatly, and then B.A. kindly did the dishes, so that improved it even more. I made my coffee and sat down with Wendell Berry, who discussed "Peaceableness Towards Enemies." This was a long essay, and I had many thoughts, so I had to trot out discipline again to resist opening my laptop before reading another chapter of Baltic out loud. 

Beside me B.A. patiently made no complaint as I made weird noises for ten minutes. I once sat on a bus behind chatty and exciting Poles (I think--I hadn't heard Polish spoken in decades) the entire distance between London and Edinburgh without the slightest idea what they were saying, and it was punishment for my sins. But when I got off the bus, I met B.A. in person for the first time, so it was worth it. 

In "Peaceableness Towards Enemies," Berry blasts the 1991 Gulf War, which I remember for two things. The first thing, which I remembered just now, was my horror of seeing the 1991 bombing of Baghdad on TV presented by newscasters as if it were something fun and exciting. The second thing, which I remembered first, was a photograph of charred Iraqi bodies in tanks in the desert. It was clear, from the rhetoric and photos of the time, that Saddam Hussein's forces had not the ghost of a chance against American military might, U-S-A, U-S-A.  

This leads to the horrible, but in hindsight inevitable, thought: box-cutters. 

But Berry wrote his essay in 1991, so he didn't know about 9/11, although he was prophetic about other things. Look at this, for example, as we sit under virtual house arrest:"War always encourages a patriotism that means not love of country but unquestioning obedience to power." 

I have, by the way, witnessed some lack of social distancing in my neighbourhood, and I would literally rather go to jail than call the police to tell them. One of the horrible things this and other countries have witnessed is the eagerness of people to call the police on their neighbours for not always following these arbitrary rules. It's not always a Parisian falsely accusing a priest of celebrating "clandestine Masses" ("clandestine"--in France!), but it's always despicable. 

The phrase "new world order" turns up early in "Peaceableness Towards Enemy", as does Berry's protest against globalism. This messes with my categories, as I connect yelling "No blood for oil" with the Left and worries about the "new world order" -- to say nothing of opposition to globalism -- with the Right. Possibly one reason why people like Berry so much is that he blows up these outworn (and originally from the French Assembly) categories. 

I have many complaints about how the "Left" makes natives of a place feel dispossessed by telling them that they don't really belong there, or at least not any more than the person who arrived yesterday, but this would be outside the limits of Berry's essay. I would like to point out, however, as I am setting aside the concepts of "Right" and "Left" for the those of "Powerful" and "Powerless" that one way the "Powerful" have demoralized and distracted the "Powerless" is by setting large numbers of [also Powerless] strangers suddenly in their midst, e.g. the resettlement of Protestant Scots in Catholic Northern Ireland.  The British were not alone at doing this: at one point Portugal ensured that Macau was policed by Angolans. 

(My worldview is still very much determined by a workday afternoon encounter between me, a burly Polish shopkeeper, and a drunk young Scot who had just told us to speak English. Who was the most vulnerable person in that situation? I because I'm female and foreign? The Pole because he was  foreign and English was his second language? The Scot because he was drunk and, I'm relatively sure, the victim of the forces of post-industrial British history?**)

Back to Berry, but only briefly, because B.A. and I are walking to a farm shop while the sun is out and the wind is down. Berry's description of American poverty, which is cultural and social as well as financial, is very important and what both Mother Teresa and St. John Paul II were trying to get across to people eager to make themselves less themselves and more American.  

But here are the points he wants to get across about war and peace:

1. "We have destroyed the capacity of war to improve anything."

2. Peaceability is "a proven possibility."

3. We should establish a "peace academy" with "the same prestige and standing as the military academies have."

4. "We must learn to prefer quality over quantity, service over profit, neighbourliness over competition, people and other creatures over machines, health over wealth, a democratic prosperity over centralised wealth and power, economic health over 'economic growth'."

Somehow those thoughts are so much more attractive when Wendell Berry says them than when red-faced, gasping Greta does when having a meltdown. Poor girl. 

*The question that was banged into our M.Div. student heads during "Introduction to Christian Ethics" was "Who is the most vulnerable person in this situation?" Everything at my theology school was taught with a big dollop of Lonerganian critical realism, so this was something that had to be deeply considered, not just answered with slogans. The answer could be surprising. In one situation the priest-professor suggested, the answer was the dead person. 

**One of the sadder things about the Scot is that what he said was "You're in Scotland, speak English" in English, not Scots. I could go on at great startling length, but instead I'm going to have a shower, put on clean if worn clothing and go for a walk to the nearest farm shop to spend over my comfort level on eggs. 

   

The Martian

American resilience on Mars

Yesterday was much healthier. I transplanted the later-sprouting broad beans; I took a lunch break; I weeded the gardens; I knocked off at 6 and went for a walk with B.A. It was short, as we wanted supplies from Tesco. We had to wait for about 20 minutes outside. There's a new queuing system, apparently, but for all that it was harder to maintain "social distancing" in the store and many of the shelves are bare again. Perhaps Thursday evenings at 7 are a bad time to go.

We ate supper watching The Bookshop, which is much, much slower than The Martian, our Wednesday night fare. I absolutely loved The Martian, which looks like a sci-fi Western, but is really an old-fashioned film about American problem-solving and derring-do. If you don't know, the premise is that an American astronaut, played by Matt Damon, is left for dead on Mars, but he is very much alive.

"I would have given up at once," Benedict Ambrose remarked. If forget it this was before or after Matt Damon performed surgery on himself and stapled the wound shut.

"That's because you're not American," I said smugly although I, too, am not American. (I have American ancestors, though: there was some border-crossing over two centuries in that part of the family.)

To be fair, though, nobody who would give up at once would be permitted to become an astronaut. I am sure that, when there is a real Mars mission, NASA will pick the astronauts on their characters, part of that being the ability to solve problems and another part the refusal to quit.

I loved the problem-solving in The Martian, as well as its excellent "problem, recovery, worse problem, recovery, even worse problem..." plot structure. Were it not for the swearing, I would recommend it to my writing students in a heartbeat. Apart from a salty joke that went over even my head (I think) and the swearing, it is entirely family-friendly and may inspire gazillions of children to become scientists, if not astronauts and, above all, to not quit.

The Martian also features growing food on Mars. That part was extremely cool.

This morning I got up a bit later than usual, made my coffee, went out to visit my crops and the apple blossoms, and reread "The Problem of Tobacco" before sounding out another chapter of Baltic.

"The Problem of Tobacco" is rather exciting because it reveals that the Great Literary Ecologist of the 20th Century is or was a tobacco farmer. Thus, Berry comes to grips with the moral implications of the near-certainty, in 1991, that tobacco is toxic. He points out early on that a lot of other things, like car exhaust and cocktails, are toxic, too.

The moral dilemma is that that tobacco, while lethal to some people, has sustained generations of  other people. Fortunately for his community, but unfortunately for other farmers, by 1991, tobacco was the one kind of crop that was good for the soil, farmers, their culture, their community, and their wallets. This was because of the "tobacco program" that preserved tobacco farmers from the unhelpful dog-eat-dog competition between other kinds of crop farmers.

Berry's proposed solution to the moral problem of tobacco is the replacement of the tobacco crop with food crops which would be sold to local communities. What the individual can do to make this possible is "to start buying produce from local farmers."

Yesterday I put in an application to a local farm to be one of their new customers. They had lifted their ban on new customers during the coronavirus crisis. They are about 18 miles away. There is a closer veggie box program (11 miles), but they aren't taking new customers yet.

There are a lot of neat things about this chapter, including the description of community life for tobacco farmers, the declaration that we are "an addictive society," and that one of our unhealthy addictions is the automobile. I am highly sympathetic to all of that, and the last one is easy for me because neither B.A. nor I, for various reasons including character flaws, can drive.

Let me just say from the beginning that although I think it is admirable to get through life without owning a car, it is not admirable not to know to how to drive. B.A. took lessons but never took his test. I never took lessons at all. Bizarrely, I have taken firearm lessons, but not driving lessons. I can't drive, but I can shoot. I am not sure when I will rectify this odd lacuna. Perhaps never.  But at any rate, we are living proof you can keep yourself employed, fed, watered, exercised and entertained without owning a car---as were my maternal grandparents to me.

My grandfather bicycled to his work, about 10 minutes away, and my grandmother walked to her pin-money jobs and took the bus on her shopping expeditions. And here's the thing. Tobacco did kill my bicycling grandfather, but my smoking, walking grandmother was quite demonstrably more healthy than my non-smoking, driving grandmother. They both died in their 80s, but I believe my non-driving grandmother had the healthier life--despite the tobacco, which she quit cold-turkey in her late 60s.

I have a lot more to say about automobiles and "The Problem of Tobacco" but I see that it is past 10, so I must get to work.

Good Necessities vs Bad Luxuries

Visiting the relics of my patron saint is a GOOD luxury (arguably)

Yesterday was a dull day in that I worked through lunchtime and all the way to dinner time without any gardening or laundering or cooking or going for a walk or any of that good stuff. (It was cold and raining by 6 PM, too, which was an added disincentive to going outside.) And, sadly, I didn't get two whole articles done: there was a lot of consultation, translation, clicking around, and research dead ends. Blah.

French, I discover, is weirder than Italian although, contemplating localism again, more important than either Italian or Polish for one week of the year I am in Quebec. 

However, I again resisted the dopamine-rush of the internet until 8:30 AM this morning. I washed the dishes, made my coffee, took it outside as I visited my plants, and then sat down with Wendell Berry's 1993 "A Big Bad Idea", which meant the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). I see via wikipedia that GATT led to the creation of the World Trade Organisation.  

The message of this essay is that governments are serving Big Business instead of the ordinary folk the governments are supposed to protect, acting even as the "attorneys" for Big Business as opposed to a curb on their acquisition of everything. The result is that the freedom of farmers and the ability of any ordinary person to grow their own food is greatly diminished. 

Berry writes, "The issue here really in not whether international trade shall be free but whether or not it makes sense for a country--or for that matter, a region--to destroy its own capacity to produce its own food. How can a government, entrusted with the safety and health of its people, conscientiously barter away in the name of an economic idea that people's ability to feed itself? And if people lose their ability to feed themselves, how can they be said to be free?"

A year or so ago, I became interested in the ideas of "preppers"-- people who plan well in advance for natural disasters, keep six months' worth of tins around, and have "bug-out bags". (They must be feeling very pleased with themselves now.) One of the beliefs of preppers is that cities will become violent hellholes when the food supply chain is inevitably interrupted. Fortunately, our area did not become a violent hellhole the week the supermarket shelves were stripped almost bare. But my thought is that there would be no reason to panic over food if we town-dwellers all arranged our lives so that we could grow at least some of our own. 

The immediate objection to this is "apartment blocks" or "blocks of flats" and my glib answer is "guerrilla gardening" and "allotments" (personal spaces in community gardens). Guerrilla gardening is a lot more hopeful than allotments, for most, for the waiting list for allotments around here is long. In fact, it will be years before one becomes free. But B.A's maternal grandfather had an allotment, and he grew onions, potatoes, leeks, broad beans and, in a greenhouse, tomatoes. 

My own thoughts inspired by "A Big Bad Idea" are as follows:

1. How nice if we could have a Creation party, i.e. a party in favour of sustainability that wasn't directly opposed to Catholicism but, indeed, pointed out how very anti-ecological chemical contraceptives are. Perhaps we could call it the Reality party. 

2. The UK was right to leave the EU if the EU was running roughshod over the particularities of British farmers, fisherman, craftsmen and such other people. 

3. It really is important to support local organic farms and also to begin small scale organic farming.

4. I wonder who owns the local farmland and what crops grow there?

5. Good food & good work versus bad luxuries/expensive distractions.

Number Five is a challenging one. Whenever anyone suggests that the urban poor would be less unhealthy if they were taught to cook (assuming they have stoves/ovens/hotplates/fridges) from scratch and eat more vegetables, a host of commentators go nuts. The way the food industry is set up,   they say, it is cheaper to buy prepackaged microwavable food (assuming you have a microwave) than to buy, store and cook vegetables. This may be true: I'm not sure. (And if so, that itself is damnation to the food industry.) When I anticipated the stripping of. the shelves, I bought tins of canned tomatoes and beans--storable vitamins and protein--and they did not seem expensive. 

So I feel that I am taking a risk by pondering paying MORE for food, good fresh or bottled food, and less on "bad luxuries" and "expensive distractions." 

The nearest example of a bad luxury is the takeout Thai food we ordered on Saturday. It was both expensive and unsatisfactory.  Expensive distractions include movies at the cinema; pay-per-view television; ever larger, flatter television screens; and foreign holidays. Foreign holidays can also be a bad luxury: I am invariably grumpy for the first day or two days after travelling to an unknown place. Poor B.A. Barcelona was lovely and interesting, but the anti-tourist Catalans may rejoice, for I shall not go back to Barcelona. 

Meanwhile, I am very conscious that I have singled out the bad luxuries and expensive distractions of my own neighbours. However, although my origins are different from my neighbours, I make about as much money as the other homeowners, or less. Their bad luxuries and distractions are often mine, too. The lady downstairs worked, before the pandemic, in a hotel to make money for "extras" like chocolate and cruises. I asked her what the attraction of cruises were, and she explained that it was the entertaining floor shows and the going from port to port. She thought it was a good way to see places and decide if they were worth further exploration. I can see that part of it--that's exactly how I felt about my Contiki tour to Italy in 1998.

Good work, by the way, includes gardening and repairing stone walls, and anything else humans did for millennia before they were herded into factories. 

But no more about this, for I see that it is 9:33 AM, and I want to do some gardening before work. 

"We must learn to live at home."

I have less and less to tell my parents on work days. Yesterday I once again rebelled against the tyranny of the computer by taking my coffee outside to look at my plants. I read Wendell Berry. I read a chapter of Baltic (not understanding all the words--I'll have to find that notebook). I put the last of the laundry in the washing machine. (B.A. later hung it up outside to dry.) I began work early.

I had a truncated lunch break.  I gave up on three of the runner beans and planted zucchini (courgette) seeds in their pots. I sowed radish and lettuce seeds in the Trug as I am unhappy with their siblings' slow development in the raised garden. Then I went back to work.

We were late to our 6 PM walk again, this time because I wrote to the man who sold me the dead runner beans seeds. Our walk was, therefore, just around local streets and avenues, but I cannot complain as many of the houses and building were pre-1939 and charming. The cherry trees and apple trees are still in blossom. There are Scottish bluebells in profusion in a local garden.

B.A. added extra canned tomatoes, kidney beans and a bell pepper to Monday's leftover bolognese sauce, and it became chili con carne, minus chili. (We thought the leftover tomatoes were leftover salsa, thanks to the jar I had stored them in.)  We watched an episode of "Chef's Table" (a Brazilian ex-punker chef) and the last episode of the first season of "The Chosen."

B.A. went to bed and I unwisely looked at social media and discovered I had been wronged. This kept me awake for hours. In the end I meditated on Our Lord's advice about someone taking your shirt (give also your cloak) and walking the extra mile if a member of the Occupying Army makes you carry his pack, and that greatly helped.

This morning I woke up thinking about reports about people in their 30s and 40s suffering coronavirus-related strokes, which had frightened me very much, and decided not to go back to being furious. B.A. and/or I could be dead by the end of the next week (God forbid), and therefore I would rather be as happy as possible this week.

I enjoy finishing at least two stories for work a day, so work is part of happiness. But maximal happiness these days is getting outdoors and, to be honest, eating supper.

"We must learn to live at home" comes from Wendell Berry's essay "Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse," which includes a number of principles for saving the planet, all of which are about "thinking locally." Berry explodes the "Think globally, act locally" slogan, which amuses me.

As I seem to be following the psychological pattern of other English-speaking people (at least) in their response to the crisis (beginning with the family pack of loo roll I bought before we went to Poland in February), I would not be surprised if tens of thousands of people are also reading Berry for the first time. Certainly these essays seem tailor-made to this particular ecological crisis we are living in.

"Global thinking is not possible," says Berry, which makes me feel better about weeping over New York on 9/11 while being merely sorry for the Bombing of Baghdad in 2003. (Thomas Aquinas writes about localism, in a way, in his Summa Theologiae when he discusses precedence in love.) He thinks the only way to save the planet is through thousands of small acts done by locals, and that the locals will do these things if they feel affection for the place they live. To learn to love the place they live, they should get out of their cars (or off their horses, a lovely ideas) and walk through it.

And this is true. B.A. objected to buying a flat where we live until we had to, and now through our daily walks, he has come to admire it. My affection for the place has increased, too, and when B.A. went to Tesco I asked him to pick up the local newspaper. Now I really want to know where we are.

My notes upon reading "Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse" are as follows:

Forced localism has increased our knowledge of and affection for our area.

Our area still has countryside and farms nearby, and so is still a good candidate as a locally sustainable community.

Migration and tourism have, on this occasion, endangered the world and this country.  (This is not to pick on China, as I am also thinking of luxury skiing holidays in the north of Italy. And that is also not to blame those who go to Italy to ski: it is an observation of an unintended consequence. Also, my parents were/are principally endangered by unwitting people who brought the virus back to their neighbourhood from Iran. )  

Could inherent xenophobia (for which the ordinary 20th century Briton was thoroughly mocked by more privileged/cosmopolitan Britons like Agatha Christie) be a defence against plague? (Not my original idea; I read it somewhere.)

How local is local? Last week B.A. and I walked about 3 miles from home before turning back. We have in the past walked a little over 5 miles to central Edinburgh. When you can't drive, local really does mean local.

The virus has driven many people, at very least in the English-speaking world, to gardening. Why? To be sure of food? To get out of the house? To get into the sun? To increase endorphins? Because, robbed of our usual distractions, we are reverting to what humans are supposed to do?

Not having a car means we go on foot.  Being frightened of public transport ensures it.

And this morning, I thought: Is our lockdown sustainable? That is, really, can we "learn to live at home" in a radical way?

B.A. and I are very, very fortunate because it looks as though we can. I will be very sorry if I can't see friends in Poland and Italy until 2021, but it won't crush me. At this stage of my life, I am impatient with sightseeing for sightseeing's sake, and therefore have little interest in travel unless it is to visit friends or improve my languages. My preferred freedom date is, therefore, February 2021, which is when I plan to stay with my family in Canada for a month.

Good-bye to Amazon

Local.

Another lovely sunny morning, if chilly. I have again broken my morning dependency on the internet by going outside with my coffee to visit my plants and then returning to sit down with Wendell Berry.

Today I  reread his essay "Conservation and Local Economy." Then I read a chapter of Baltic na głos  (out loud), which would not really be in the spirit of localism, were it not for the fact that the largest group of my non-British neighbours are Poles. As I've mentioned before, Polish is the most frequently spoken language in Scotland after English and Scots. (The census counts Scots as a language.)

Yesterday morning I read Berry's "Conservation is Good Work" and made notes in pencil. My brief summary is that both conservation movements and government are inadequate to protect and preserve  nature, and that personal responsibility and household economy are necessary. We should think of nature as Creation and our home, not as "the environment". We should buy products and hire services locally. We shouldn't buy anything we don't need. We should do as much around the house and garden as possible ourselves, and when we can't, we should ask a neighbour. We should take our recreation locally instead of travelling hours and hours to national parks. We should grow our own food or eat locally grown food. We should buy good products rather than bad ones.   

I wrote my own thoughts underneath this list, and the first one was No More Amazon. This was not an extremist objection to the rainforest but a consumer's vote against Jeff Bezos' economic machine. I'm confident that if we all stopped using Amazon, he would be left with enough money to buy a small farm and grow organic vegetables for a grateful community.  

A related note is Buy only things made in the UK,  and try to buy them within walking distance. As we discovered when we went to buy a speaker for my laptop, this is easier scribbled than done. There is also our tea, coffee, and chocolate habit. We are not giving up tea, coffee and chocolate; maybe I could add "Buy only foreign things shipped consistently to the UK since 1650 at latest." That covers coffee. It still doesn't cover computer do-dads. 

Fortunately for us, there is a bookstore (just) within walking distance. Naturally it is closed for the pandemic, but it has a sign offering book delivery. To help keep the shop going, I will order my next book from it. Should we win the lottery, I will consider opening a bookshop in our own neighbourhood.   

Another note is Charity should be local, too which may be a controversial idea, since I grew up with Unicef boxes and therefor the idea that our charitable gifts should go first to the developing world. I had quite a shock in a Catholic church in Hesse when I saw a sign asking for charitable donations to poorer parts of former Eastern Germany. Money for Europe? Whaaaat? But obviously one can give both locally and internationally.  

This morning's ideas were similar (more about shopping and walking locally) but I added "Learn more about local history, geography, industry, farming, ecology" and, terribly disturbing to our way of life,"Join spiritual life of local parish." To put this in perspective, we only darken the door of our local parish church if there simply is no other Mass we can get to. The irreverence, which B.A. points out is not the priest's or congregation's fault but the fruit of V2, makes us wriggle with shame. However, perhaps it would be edifying to attend lectures and day-long retreats and so on there, should the government ever allow its doors to open again. 

Meanwhile, I didn't do much else yesterday besides work. I lost a lot of time hearing, discussing and debating Pope Francis's St. Mark's Day homily, which I don't think equated all missionary efforts to the much-hated "proselytism," but others do. More newsworthy was the Italian Bishops objection to the Italian government maintaining a ban on public masses while allowing factories to open and extended family to mingle. 

I did a lot of laundry, as rain is forecast for the rest of the week, and I watered the lawn and gardens.  At 6:30 PM, we went for a very short walk, its brevity my fault for working late. We had spaghetti bolognese for supper, and we watched both an episode of "Chef's Table" and Episode 6 of "The Chosen". The "Chef's Table" episode was set in Lima, Peru and included an Andean woman praying to Pachamama. "The Chosen" had no reference to Pachamama whatsoever, as you could guess. \

Lunchtime Gardening Update: Gave up on three of the never-germinating runner beans today. Planted courgette seeds in their pots. Planted more radishes and lettuce, this time in the Trug.