Dave's blog

For a gardener and a garden writer there is precious little about gardening on this blog. It is not because I don’t do any but more because I sometime wonder how much interest there is in reading about someone else’s gardening.

However, maybe I’m wrong? Maybe some of you would like to hear about my gardening exploits? Please do comment if that is the case and also please tell me about your gardens. What are the challenges you face (I know my biggest one is lack of time!)?

I’m lucky enough to rent a place where we share a ¾ of an acre garden with the landlady.

It is a big but, by and large, a well set out garden with a mix of lawn areas (some with bulbs), a small orchard, some wild borders, mixed shrubs and a vegetable patch. As the space is shared at first just had a veg-patch and lawn and the landlady hires/hired a gardener for the rest.

The vegetable patch was very overgrown  despite the fact that it is situated in one of the shadiest parts of the garden. You couldn’t get to the raspberries or much of the soft fruit. Last year we tried to grow a lot of things with a really mixed success. The soil for the small vegetable area had been dug and left to leach which meant there was no life in it and very little nutrition.We did improve this by laying down card and mulching over with compost. The worm population has rocketed as a result and the weeds are more manageable.

However it is simply too dark for most things, especially those plants which prefer much sunnier climes such as tomatoes and cape gooseberries. Even our leeks and brassicas struggled.

Then there were the pests, what a hungry pheasant didn’t go for the pigeons, mice and we suspect the gardener did. When we netted over the Brussel’s sprouts we found we’d simply made a trap for small birds. Slugs were also a bit of a problem but thankfully not as bad as in some other plots I’ve had.

So equally not wanting to feed or kill off the local avian population I had a rethink about the patch. I decided that traditional vegetable growing was perhaps best somewhere else. On this plot it seemed to make sense to put in a mix of shade tolerant plants, mainly perennials as seedlings rather than seed. As we plan to move in a couple of months this makes perfect sense as I want to leave something positive behind.

So I pruned and moved the traditional perennials like blackcurrants, gooseberries, raspberries and rhubarb. They are now less prone to getting infested with weeds and they can have a tight net over them. Last year they were dotted all over the plot which not only took up room but also made it difficult to grow anything around them.

Alongside these I’ve put in some more unusual perennials such as Chinese artichokes Stachys affinis (these are very tasty and do well in the shade), oca or oxalis tuberosa,  ground ivy Glechoma hederacea (makes a good tea) and sweet cicely Myrrhis odorata. It is a work in progress and I plan to sow or plant many other things in that bed – mainly salads and herbs.

The sunny patio area outside the house now has a couple of large planters with potatoes. The tomatoes may go here but I think we’re not going to get a crop of them this year as we plan to move in July.

The landlady has let me have a bit more of a reign of the garden and I’m now planning to put in a small wildflower area using a shade tolerant wild flower mix. However I need to be careful as the gardener is quite grumpy and seems a little protective over the garden at times.

So that is garden number 1!

Numbers 2, 3 and 4 coming soon…

The prose below first appeared in Alan Moore’s underground magazine Dodgem Logic back in 2010. Dodgem still stands as my favourite publication I’ve ever worked for. I felt humbled as I wrote alongside the likes of Josie Long, Graham Linehan, Stewart Lee and of course the great Alan Moore himself.  I feel privileged that  I am one of few, if not the only writer, to have worked for a comic book legend like Alan and BBC Gardener’s World magazine. 

Sadly the magazine is no longer being printed, there was talk of an online edition but alas nothing has, of yet come of it.

Well, enough of my rambling, I hope you enjoy it and I promise I will write about gardening in the next blog!

One cell of a guy

Imagine you are a being for whom life moves incredibly slowly.  So slow in fact, that four billion years for us humans would feel like just 24 hours to you. Perhaps you are an incredibly slow being in a culture remarkably like ours; it might sound implausible but does make explaining vast expanses of time rather easy.

So as this incredibly slow life form, you decide to go on a 24 hour, epoch stretching drinking binge. It New Year on your slow moving planet and you intend to celebrate. You roll up at a bar on New Year’s Eve at 12 midnight, a good 24 hours before the clocks are set to strike and herald in the New Year. You notice a screen is showing a rolling news programme called ‘Planet Watch’.  All that seems to be showing on the screen is a planet of newly formed rock, inhabitants of which will later call earth.  Not much seems to be happening on the surface cam down on earth, the planet looks pretty hostile.

You sink your first beer slowly (even for you), you look up at the screen; the planet now seems to have solidified and water flows over the surface.  You find a newspaper to kill a bit of time, it’s still the small hours of the morning and the bar is all but empty, there’s only you and a pale, unfriendly barman in a faded t-shirt.

After two hours of crosswords, sudukos and another beer you gaze back up at the screen, you notice a clock on the corner reads 3.12am.  At last there seems to be something happening on the surface cam.  Something seems to be swimming about in the water, well floating at least and it kind of looks alive.  The miserable barman has the sound turned down on the TV so he can read his book.  You approach him to ask to turn it up; he shakes his head and lifts up his hand, not moving his eyes up from the page.  You slump back down in your seat, defeated.

You strike up a conversation with an old guy who’s just wandered in, it’s 3.44am. A Newsflash appears on the screen, ‘LIFE MAKES ENERGY FROM THE SUN’, there’s some expert talking in the studio about how monumental this is for the life of the planet.  You miss most of what’s being said as the old guy seems intent on telling you all the brands of cigarettes he’s ever smoked and how their packet designs have changed over the years.

At 5.20am you look up and the screen reads ‘ONE CELL OF A GUY’, the bar staff has now changed over, the sound has been turned up once again.  You watch for a while as an expert explains how there is bacteria on the new planet.

Nothing seems to happen for hours and the news programme keeps repeating the same footage over and over. The same tired interview with the same scientist plays again and again. It gets to the point where you can repeat it word for word, which you do so to anyone who walks in the bar, this doesn’t make you very popular, by now you’re quite drunk.  It gets to lunch time and the screen is still showing the same footage, nothing has happened.   By 3pm you are really drunk and you fall asleep in a quiet corner.  You awake to find the same interview and the same footage, nothing has happened, you think you must have only dozed off for a second but the clock reads 7.30pm, its been the same for hours!

The evening begins and the bar starts to fill, by now you are shit-faced and you order some food and a coffee – the food and caffeine sobers you a little and gives you just about enough clarity to focus again on the screen,  it’s a little after 9pm and the planet looks frozen.

It’s now 9.07 the planet thaws, it looks like things have finally changed, something with more than one cell is wandering the earth – animal life has begun.

You sink another couple of beers the night really begins, you get lost in conversation, somehow despite the amount of alcohol in your system you have command of the table you’ve been sat at all day and all night and the time just flies.  ‘IT’S A RAT RACE – THE FIRST MAMMALS ARE HERE’ flashes on the screen but by now you’re caught up in the bar, singing away with your new found friends.  Out the corner of your eye you see at 11.40pm dinosaurs have become extinct ‘god, that seemed quick’ you think to yourself as the jukebox plays your favourite song.

The countdown to the New Year begins, it’s 11.59 you catch your last glimpse of the rolling news, ‘MAN APPEARS’ it reads.  The clocks strike midnight, the planet is bang up to the modern age and you’re hugging complete strangers.  You never get to see what happens next as someone turns the TV off.

What a creature like this could observe on our planet is very difficult for us to imagine, whole species would come and go in a blink of an eye.  Human life would barely register, ‘civilization’ as we know it would have only existed for a fraction of a second.

What is clear from seeing the world on this time scale is just how long life remained as single cell life forms.  The earth has been dominated by single cell life forms for over 3 billion years, for any observer this would have been pretty dull.  In the vast scheme of things animal life is really very recent, very newly evolved. Some could argue that despite our complexity we are still very much like our unicellular ancestors. We do share a lot of their DNA and it is thought that we carry 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells. That is, we are host to countless bacteria in our guts, on our skin and in every colonisable part of our body.   Even our human cells have parts, or organelles, still very much like ancient bacteria.

What’s more our habits as a species are in a way very much like much similar organisms.  Bacteria and viruses tend to cluster around a food source, exploit it, breed like mad, exhaust it and then die or move on.  Humans, as agent Smith in the matrix put it “multiply, and multiply, until every resource is consumed. The only way for you (humans) to survive is to spread to another area.”

History is littered with this kind of behaviour. Consider the story of Easter Island, its inhabitants flourished and built up a complex and ordered society. However, they were not a society with much forethought –they stripped the once forested island of trees for fuel, building materials and to aid the building of the islands characteristic stone heads. This exposed the island to sea winds and not only eroded farmland it also prevented their only means of escape from the impoverished landscape.

Take a look at a city from the air and you can see once again our bacterial like behaviour in action. Most cities began by clustering around where food would have entered the city – the rivers, London growing up around the Thames being the prime example.

This has changed in recent years as oil has become our main resource, we rely on it and other fossil fuels for almost all facets of life.  Most importantly our food system heavily relies on fossil fuels, especially oil, and it is running out.

Just like bacteria we are breeding at a phenomenal rate but unlike these single celled life-forms we have nowhere to move to once all the resources have gone.

We Homo sapiens, the only bi-pedial great apes are capable of predicting future events such as these. We know that our days of limitless energy are numbered; we know oil is coming to an end yet at present we don’t really seem to be doing anything about it.

The burning of fossil fuels goes on unabated, changing the environment beyond measure, putting our very existence as a species at stake.  One scenario predicted by climate scientists suggests a phenomenon known as runaway climate change.  This predicts frozen methane usually locked up in the oceans, or in the permafrost of countries such as Siberia, will defrost compounding the action of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on the earth’s temperature.   This will send temperatures soaring far higher than that capable of sustaining life or, at least, far higher than temperatures capable of sustaining multi-cellular life.

Archaea, ancient bacterial like life has been found in the most inhospitable parts of the globe, in glaciers, in the hot vents of the ocean floor and even in volcanoes.

The planet was theirs for 3 billion years, and if we continue they way we are it looks like it might be theirs again in the not so distant future. Perhaps they’ve been in waiting for an idiotic species such as ours to appear to manipulate the planet and reset evolution back to their advantage?  Let’s face it there not many other rational reasons why we are act the way we do.

However, I’d like to think, we ARE more evolved than bacteria and we DO have our own will.  I’d also like to think evolution is set to play out to produce even more complex life on the planet, life beyond the current limits of our imaginations.  But in order for this to happen we have to stop acting like our ancient single cell ancestors and make the future of this planet a multi-cellular one.

Last night I took some time off and sat down in front of the TV. It was a programme about the Romans. The programme started with a full ten minutes of the presenter telling us what she was going to tell us about. Following this she told us about what she said she was going to tell us about. Then when it came to the third part, telling us what she’d just told us. At this point I dozed off.

I woke up to a world that confused me, it was a world I didn’t really understand. In front of me was a very thin blonde woman with enormous eyelashes, bright red lipstick, a beehive haircut and an electric guitar. She was strumming away to a song which I couldn’t place as rock, folk, pop or anything I’d heard before. Behind her was what looked like a masked villager from the Wickerman dancing in a way only really seen in Art rock bands. I had not come across this person before, I could say if I liked the music or not.   Something glued me to the screen – what I saw was far removed from anything I’d seen for a while. In this post nap daze an Andean forest dweller may have been less bemused by a meat raffle in a pub in Crawley. It wasn’t until the end of the song that I realised she was singing in English rather than the mix of unheard of languages I was hearing.

The band that followed had electric guitars and leather. I thought at least this would be something I understood. Half way through the song however I heard myself say ‘I can’t understand a bloody word they’re saying’.

Then it dawned on me, I am getting old! There’s no doubting it. I’ll be 40 in a little over 2 years. I’m a father and a teacher, a grown up!

I’m not the irresponsible teenager I used to be.

How did this happen? When did music stop sounding like the Pixies, the Stone Roses and Jesus and Marychain? When did I get old?

I don’t mind so much, getting older has its benefits. I don’t have the hangovers I used to. Mainly because I don’t drink like I used to! I can’t, any more than half a pint gives me a two to three day hangover. It’s much easier for me to drink juice or water and wake up clear headed.

I no longer feel the need to go to a gig, jump in the mosh pit or stage dive and wake up bruised and battered.

I don’t go to parties in the middle of nowhere with no real plan of how I’m going to get home.

There hasn’t been a time in the last few years where I have woken up at a festival surrounded by strangers that all knew my name.

I don’t work in a crappy job only really living for the weekends.

No, none of these things happen anymore. I don’t miss these times but I do look back fondly to some of them.

Getting older means I can enjoy time with my son without thinking I’m missing out on something else. It means I can enjoy spending time in the garden or going on country walks. I can enjoy a slower pace of life.

Although perhaps I might do one more solo gig, go to one more festival, I might even meet up with friends and have a bit of a party this summer. I mean a couple of drinks might not hurt, 40 is the new 20 after all…

This featured in the Source magazine a  year or two ago, a recent forum post prompted me to resurrect it – hope you enjoy.

Last summer I visited Monkey World, a picturesque Dorset home to mistreated apes and monkeys from across the globe. To my amazement I saw Capuchin monkeys picking blackberries and an Orang-Utan sifting through a lawn of mixed weeds, including noxious creeping buttercups, to pick out harmless clover.

I was amazed by this as Orang-Utans are native to Borneo & Sumatra and the Capuchin to Central or South America, yet they can pick out plants seemingly unfamiliar to them and recognize them as food. Add this to the fact that both the primates in question were in captivity for most of their lives and it begs the question, how do they know what to eat?

Coming from a species of higher ape, more commonly known as human, I have to wonder how I and my species would fare in the jungles of Borneo? Would I be able to distinguish food plants from poisonous ones?

It is tragic that we seem to have all but lost touch with this ability. At one time we would have perhaps innately known what was food and what might have us running for the nearest toilet, or worse still, the nearest hospital. I have heard rather dubious claims that people are ‘drawn’ to plants, yet I have known people ‘drawn’ to groundsel and ragwort – both highly poisonous plants! The truth is perhaps has a lot more to do trial and error than it does with a ‘magical’ connection to plants. Although I would not recommend it, picking a little at a time, not so much it would poison us and waiting to see the effects would be a perfect way of finding what was edible and what definitely wasn’t. We must have got it wrong at times but those who did cut themselves out of the gene pool and wouldn’t have passed that information down to their offspring.

Add this passed on knowledge to the lack of outside distraction, no TV, no internet, magazines or even books and our ancestors would have been able to be much more ‘in tune’ with their surroundings. Subtle clues plants give us would have not been lost on them. As we fill our heads with the latest celebrity gossip or how to use our mobile phones, theirs would have been buzzing with seasonal knowledge of the plants around them (and no doubt who was sleeping with who in the next tribe!)

So what can we do to regain this lost knowledge? Well the way I learned was to walk around with an expert who’s Grandfather had taught him. This triggered off more study and I bought myself Richard Mabley’s Food for Free and a few field guides of wild flowers, mushrooms and trees. I would cross reference my finds in as many books as possible and would use websites such Google images as a visual resource and plants for a future as a written one. Plants for a future is a fantastic website, any plant imaginable is on there, it’s where I learned you could eat both Himalayan honeysuckle berries (not to be mistaken with regular honeysuckle!) and fuchsia berries.

I now teach wild food and run courses in Totnes, Devon. For me it is a fascinating subject and when I’m hanging from a tree filling a bag full of fruit I know I’m in touch with my inner monkey!

I made the decision a while ago that, rather than a typical gardening or allotment blog, I would have my blog as a kind of online diary and a place to put short stories and bits of comic writing that may not necessarily fit in with the main website. It seems to me there are plenty of gardening websites around and if you want gardening or foraging advice from me or Andy, the main website www.selfsufficientish.com has so much information there is really no need to put it in a blog.

With an online diary like this you do have to make a decision of how much of your life you add to it.  My trouble is, it is easy for me, tucked down in rural Devon, to forget that anyone reads it at all.   Which begs the question, do I really want EVERYONE knowing all my business at the click of a mouse?

Until relatively recently I didn’t really consider this, it wasn’t until  I chatted to people who seem to know a lot more about my life than I’ve told them. I felt a bit uncomfortable with this, it sounds really snobby but I couldn’t help thinking ‘well I didn’t really write that for you?’.  I mean do other bloggers out there write for the kid who serves them at their local shop or for that neighbour you nod to but know nothing about?

Aside from this I generally write if someone has pissed me off, I’m feeling sorry for myself or perhaps when I’ve come up with something silly. When things are going fine or I’m busy on some project I don’t really write much.

So, like a lot of other bloggers, not only is there a slightly skewed view of me on the net, I’m the bloody one putting it there!

Then there are the spammers. I’ve poured my heart into the odd blog post only to find comments by people selling carpets or dodgy websites.  I get an email when people comment and sometimes I think ‘oh it was that post, I hope I’ve reached someone’, then all I get back is ‘want to see xxxx girls’ from some dodgy Russian, not really what I had in mind.

I will however continue to blog, it is not only a cathartic and enjoyable experience to write, it’s nice to know people read it. I don’t care that it’s not a huge amount of people; it’s just nice to know some people do, I just sometimes wish I could choose them

Being new parents Ellie and myself have been trying to decide what we are going to do about childcare and work.  She studied at Oxford, she’s got one term of a PGCE to finish, she’s a trained gardener, she’s fluent in 3 languages, and she’s an artist and an accomplished musician.  In short she can earn a hell of a lot more than I can as a writer and a gardener.

So this has brought us to the conclusion that we will share the childcare and work either 50-50 or Ellie will take the bulk of the earning whilst I take the bulk of the childcare. This suits me really, I’m used to staying at home and I’ll try and write in the gaps in between looking after little Douglas.

I mentioned this arrangement to someone at the local college where I sometimes teach and was shocked at their response, ‘Oh I see, you will be the woman’.  I bit my tongue at the time but I’ve been fuming about it ever since.  Why the hell does it need to have a gender? Why is it the housewives role? Why is it seen as emasculating to want to look after your own child rather than entrust him to a stranger! Is money really more important than bringing a child up!!?   Where does this outmoded attitude come from?

I don’t want to be one of these fathers that never see his children and I don’t want my child to go motherless either. Sharing both responsibilities makes perfect sense and it takes the stress off both of us for both jobs.

It has always seemed to me that there are far too many needless divisions between the two sexes.  We are currently governed by a moronic old school boys’ network who not only have no idea about modern women I doubt if they really know what it is like to be a man in the modern world. Brought up divided from both women and how men relate to women they are like children with no real sense of the world. I have to wonder if it is from this backward government that this attitude is leaking into the rest of society.

I would like to think we were progressing as a society, moving forward rather than back towards attitudes of the 1950’s. Why shouldn’t a man bring up his children in a perceived woman’s role without thinking he needs to justify it. It should just be accepted as a workable arrangement and left at that. If I want to be the main person who looks after my child then do I really need to justify it!?

A couple of day’s ago Emma Cooper posted this blog asking for pieces of new writing, fiction or non-fiction inspired by fire. Well, it had been a long time since I have written a short story but I felt like stepping up to the challenge. So here is my story, set in the not so distant future in a time where fire is outlawed. It is a little silly in places but I hope you like it.

He opened up the instant fire and poured it onto the carbon logs in the fire place.  The flames began to dance, lightening up the corners of the room. It provided no heat, just a light glow as the microscopic particles reacted to the oxygen in the room. He remembered the fires of his childhood before they were outlawed. Real flames and real heat, heat that burnt logs, logs that could give you splinters or break your back if you were eager to pick up a large one.  Not like the wood of today, logs made from reconstituted carbon that never burnt because no real fire would ever touch them.

He glanced at his phone, “You’re going to be late Charlie” it said to him after registering his eye movement. He always had to have the latest gadget, this phone was advertised as the ‘Best friend you never knew you needed”, it virtually read your mind. It picked up on subtle changes in heart rate, pupil dilation, increased fidgeting all those small subconscious signals you wouldn’t even know you were making. It tried to fulfil all the needs you never consciously knew you had.

“I’m fine, I know what I’m doing”, he retorted, slightly indignant that a machine was giving him orders once again.

“No, you were day dreaming, you will be late, it normally takes you 5 minutes 43 to get out the door from the state of unreadiness you are in, judging by the weather and the traffic report the journey will take you 14 minutes 24, you need to be there in 15 minutes, you must sacrifice brushing your hair to get there in time”

“I’m not going, shut up!” said Charlie, his eyes fixed on the fireplace.

“He’ll be waiting, you made this appointment a long time ago”, the phone answered in its usual chirpy way, always helpful, always knowing and ALWAYS a pain in the arse.

“OFF” he commanded, smiling to himself that his electronic tyrant could be silenced.

A raindrop spiralled down one of his thick grey curls building in size until it left its human host for the surface of one of the cafes bright orange plastic chairs. He looked up from the cracked screen of his ancient phone melancholically staring out of the rain soaked window.  Rubbing his calloused fingers over his thumb rhythmically he wondered how long he should wait and if he had enough credit on his phone to check Charlie’s whereabouts.

“Credit status” he said into his phone expectantly.

Welcome to Tesco phones for you, I think you would you like to check your credit status?

“Correct” He answered as if he were speaking the lines of a well-rehearsed play.

Would you like to hear abo…

“No latest offers” he butted in before the phone could finish

“Wo…”

“No”

“What, abou…”

“No”

“Then how abo”

“No”

He sighed and waited knowing what was about to come next, his hands covered the phones speakers but still a muffled sound could just about be made through the hard skin and ingrained dirt.

“Brusha, brusha, brush our teeth, brush our teeth…” the phone sang, he closed his eyes and waited for it to finish before taking a sharp intake of breath only to exhale,

“Option 1, Credit Status”

“You have no credit”

He dropped his head into his hands, head-butting the phone as he did so.

The sun had now set completely, he looked up at the clock it clicked on the hour telling him it had just turned five o’clock. He remembered back when he worked the same hours as the rest of humanity. He would pray for the days when it got dark after five, when the city streets were lit by the rays of the sun rather than the incandescent glow of the street lamp. He wouldn’t have to drive, he felt safe to walk home in the light, and there were fewer places to hide in the daylight, the city felt safer.  The fake flames licked the fake logs and he remembered, he remembered meeting him for the first time, when things were somehow worse but somehow much better than they are now…

“What’s this?” he asked looking at the knobbly tuber with the numbers one to twelve written on it.

“It’s a potato clock?”

“Why are you giving it to me?”

“Well, every morning I get a potato clock, I’ve got a draw full of them so now I’m giving them to you”

The screen flickered across his face; it was a face of confusion

“You get a potato clock every day, who gives them to you?”

“You’ve got that data-entry glow haven’t you, how many hours have you been on that screen?”

He looked up at the strange curly haired figure in front of him, his dark eyes looked mischievous and alert, a rarity in this place. He studied the figure longer, his clothes looked like they’d come out of a charity shop bargain bin. His shirt was brown with a bold stripe across the front, a tennis t-shirt rather than the regulation white most wore in the office. He looked down to see a pair of corduroy black trousers rather than cotton and dark trainers rather than shoes.

“HELLO!” a voice came from above the shoes, “Every morning I get up at eight o’clock, a potato clock, up at eight, a pot tate” He breathed a sigh, “Jesus, why do I bother”

“Ha, ha, ha”, the laugh came from nowhere, he giggled uncontrollably, he started to cry with laughter.

“That is such a bad joke” he struggled through the tears looking at the corduroy clad man.

“Okay, okay” you looked like you needed cheering up.

The friendship began there, with of all things, a potato.

He got up from the plastic chair, the chair behind him wobbled as he did so spilling tea all over a young man who could do nothing but glare at him.

“Sorry” he said in almost a whisper but the apology did not appease and the young man looked away in disgust.

He walked up to the counter finding some change in his pocket whilst being sure not to inadvertently put ALL the pockets contents on the counter. He forced a smile and walked out into the night.

They worked side by side as data entry clerks, scanning endless ‘competition forums’. Charlie dealt with the cat food contract and Daniel with the dog food.  Both contracts only differed by the animal, the data otherwise exactly the same. The pair realised it was a scam, a bogus competition to get data on the lives of unsuspecting pet owners. Someone would win a year’s supply of pet food but the data they supplied was worth a lot more than that! The tragedy was the people sending in the forms believed they would send into someone who cared.  Old women would send in pictures of their pets that had long since been dead, the photos showed a cat or dog surrounded by the fashions and the trappings of ten years earlier, or more!

The pair would stick the photos around their consoles and laugh at them, sometimes drawing on the cats or dogs, anything to break the monotony.  Management split them up like naughty school children but they just became more devious, scanning the pictures and emailing them. Then one day Charlie walked in to find a picture of his face on one of the dogs on ever console in the room.

They were both sacked on the spot.

After the job ended they signed up to a string of employment agencies, always working together but never holding a job down for long.  They packed curtain rails and got sacked for making a giant igloo out of the boxes in the middle of the warehouse.  They were sacked racing pallet trucks, crashing them into the aisles, the list went on, like a pair of uncontrollable schoolboys making up for a life of tomfoolery they’d missed out in their real youth. It didn’t take long before they became black listed and the jobs got worse and worse and worse.

There final job together was cleaning the decks of docked ship dubbed Club vomit. Every night the ship opened its doors to a visiting underage clientele from around the globe. It was well known in every language school and every 14 year old from Dusseldorf or 15 years old from Stockholm would descend on the ship for its cheap, sweet and very alcoholic booze.

The results were as obvious as they were messy.

The ship was old and wooden, a relic from a bygone age, gutted and decorated in full faux pirate splendour.  It was a tacky paradise for anyone wanting their first drunken, clumsy sexual experience in its plastic crow’s nests or life boat hideaways.

The two hated it and tried to get the sack but the boss was so grateful of any help he put up with all their bad behaviour.  There was nothing they could do wrong. They would turn up late, but the boss would just dock their pay and let them do what little they could before the club opened. They tried to break things but everything was plastic and unbreakable, even the drinks came in plastic containers impossible to break open.

Then one day something caught Charlie’s eye under the table. He couldn’t make it out at first it looked like a little cardboard box, with a picture on the front.  He crouched down to get a closer look. As he did so he landed straight into a thin line of what he hoped was a spilt drink and nothing worse.  He didn’t let this distract him, instead reaching for the little box.

. The front of the box had a pitcher of a ship, not unlike the one they were on may have looked like year before. Down one side of the box ran a small strip of sandpaper.

“It can’t be” he said to the air and shook the box next to his ear.

He hadn’t seen anything like it for a couple of years; it must have come from one of the Nordic countries.

“Matches!” said Daniel hungrily, his eyes dancing again with that mischievous glow.

“No Dan, we can’t, getting the sack is one thing but matches. These could get us ten years!”

“Oh where’s your sense of fun!”, Daniel cried out snatching the matches of him with a large grin on his face. He flipped the tap of the oversized barrel on the counter containing neat vodka it trickled a long line down the length of the boat, snaking its length as the boat gently rocked in the calm waters.

“You’re on your own with this one mate, this is dangerous and fire has been illegal since the last riots, you know that more than I do!”

His words were lost; Daniel seemed lost in a dream grinning from ear to ear.

He looked up from the fake fire, remembering what he had tried to lay buried years ago, remember the night the city last saw fire, real fire.  The boat burnt for a few brief moments before it sank beneath thick black smoke and molten plastic. He had found out later that Daniel had thrown the match from the shore, escaping with his life but not with his freedom.  CCTV cameras had caught the whole thing; there was no getting out of this one.  Perhaps that’s what he wanted? Charlie always knew Daniel never really knew when to stop, that’s what made him such equally good and bad company, you had to live on your wits, escaping or fleeing trouble not avoiding it.

Was it all really a joke to him? Did he care as little as it seemed?  Perhaps

His thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door, his felt his heart in his mouth,

‘Would he come here’, he thought to himself?

He slowly got up off the sofa, and stood motionless in the middle room wondering what to do next. The knock became more urgent.

He wandered down the stairs to his shared front door, knowing the knock was for him.  He opened the door to see a note scrawled in what looked like Daniels writing.

“Look in the brown bin”, it said in bold black letters.

He puzzled for a moment holding the note in his hands, turning it over a couple of times as if it new mysteries were about to be revealed.  When he was sure all he was instructed to do was look in the compost he made his way over to the side of the building where his compost bin was kept.  He opened it hesitantly.

There on top of festering kitchen waste another note in the same handwriting revealed a new instruction, “Not this one, try the one for number 4b”

“I could be he a while?” he said to the air hoping someone, well hoping Daniel would answer.

He crossed the street and wandered down the alley were 4a and 4b kept their bins. He open the first.

“This is 4a the note said, back of the alley”

He walked down the back of the alley, treading in something as he moved though the gloom, it reminded him of the pirate ship and he chuckled to himself.

He opened the second bin where a box sat on the kitchen waste.

“Open me!!” the box exclaimed with two exclamation marks the size of its lid.

He open the box to see a potato with two hands crudely drawn in marker pen pointing to the numbers one and eight.

“A potato clock” he said to the night, hoping Daniel would hear.

He called out a few times but only dogs and angry neighbours answered him. He soon realised it was pointless and gave up the chase making his way back up to his flat.

He put the potato on his coffee table and sat back in the sofa, reaching for his mobile as he did so.

As the phone erupted into life he glanced at the fire, he’d never seen it look so vivid, so bright, he’d never smelt it before.  The phone played its usual start up tune and he went through his usual charade.

“Play messages later, access emails later, go to address book”. The phone complied and he commanded “Call Daniel” As the phone rang the smell filled his nostrils.

“I can smell fire” he thought to himself as he looked up from the phone.

“I CAN SMELL FIRE!!”

364 days ago, or to put a date on it, the day after Boxing Day last year, I was traveling back from a Christmas in Somerset when I received a phone call from my landlady.  She let me know that a plumber had been called to the house on Boxing Day to stop a leak rushing from a burst pipe.

I came back to complete devastation, the carpets were soggy, water dripping from the walls, draws full of water, books wet through (including the first Self Sufficient-ish Bible off the press), the place was a mess. I was glad to be on my own so I could sort the place out at least a little and shield Ellie from the worst of it.

Things didn’t really improve that quickly, the landlady took two weeks to bring us a domestic dehumidifier. This was so ineffectual it seemed a bit like she’d asked an elderly man with a bucket to empty a very large lake. Friends and family did come to the rescue and we lent a further dehumidifier, towels to soak up the carpets and even some replacements for damaged belongings.

The house inevitably got very mouldy and it was pretty unpleasant to live there for a couple of months.  We did eventually have a carpet cleaner come round, a brilliant bloke called Adrian from the Amazing Adrian Carpet Cleaning Company, highly recommended for anyone in the South Hams! He got the house somewhat in order and we tried to continue with things.

I finished my book, handed in the last edits of the manuscript then out of the blue my feet started to swell. A few days later, now the beginning of March I was taken into hospital with a Nephrotic condition later diagnosed as a serious kidney complaint known as Minimal Change Disease.  I came out of hospital on the Thursday and on Sunday the landlady served us an eviction order.

This was a low point.

I tentatively went back to work and slowly got better.

Then some good news, Ellie found out she was pregnant!  It was a mixed blessing as it was unplanned and at the time I was still fairly ill. Ellie had quite bad morning sickness but we muddled through and looking back the over-riding feeling was real joy that we were to soon be parents. A little scared maybe but generally happy about it.

Then more disaster as Andy got ill with the same condition as me.  The disease wasn’t thought to be genetic before so now I had two things to deal with, a sick brother and the likelihood that my unborn child may have the same condition.  I visited him and tried to phone as often as I could to reassure him through the worst of it. He too responded to the meds and he too slowly got better.

My book was released in May and we moved home to where we are now, a lovely, but slightly derelict cottage with one of the nicest landladies I’ve had.

I was still under treatment at this time and I suffered a bit from it, getting quite bad side effects from the long drawn out dose of steroids. Everyone tends to think that steroids will give a man breasts or facial hair for women but these were corticosteroids which made me manic when I was on them and just plain depressed when I came off them.

I was at a big low when Andy’s book came out which smashed sales of mine to pieces. As if to rub salt in the wound at one point I asked for my book in Waterstones, they didn’t stock it but they did stock my brother’s book, in fact it was in the top ten best sellers of that week.

You have to dig deep at times like that, I am now happy for him; he has written a book that has caught the public imagination. However I don’t mind admitting it, I was jealous as hell.

Come the end of summer, I go back to my teaching job. Not long after my return word gets to me that the job may not be there that long and I may have to reapply for it. Then this changes to a contract until November, then a few weeks later I’m told I may be there until April, then it changes back, then I’m told the place might close down.  At this point I give up worrying about my teaching job and decide it might be time to start thinking about a bit more freelance work until a more secure job turns up.

Then in November baby Douglas is born.  Nothing really prepared me for it and I still can’t quite believe it now. I find it almost impossible to put into words, it seemed like after the cloud of the preceding months there was at least a silver lining.

So now, 12 months from the start of the big pile of shit that began with a burst pipe, I can’t help feeling a little cautious of the coming year. I dread to say it can’t be as bad as last year but I really don’t want to tempt fate.  I might be plain awful, it might be amazing.

What I really want from next year is it to be uneventful, nice calm non-descript months rolling into the next.  I want this blog to have entries about the weights of vegetables I’ve picked and dug up. Perhaps a few nice baby stories, maybe even a foraging tale or two but most of all I hope it has nothing about bad health, nothing about landlords and nothing about flooding!

Well, he’s here! It was a long old process, as births often are, but our first child finally arrived at 8pm on 15^th November 2011. We’re going to call him Douglas Tom Arthur Hamilton. I know what some of you may be thinking about his name, I thought it myself when I saw those initials but no, he isn’t named after the universal reagent 1-O-(4,4′-dimethoxytrityl)-6-aminohexanol often abbreviated to DTAH. Hmm, bit of a geeky joke that!

His name, in part, is influenced by Douglas Adams. However, this was really as Ellie was looking through our books reading out names of authors until we hit on one we both liked, rather than us both being obsessive fans. It could have been different if she’d stopped at Martin Crawford or Charles Dowding (or Kurt Vonnigut for that matter!).

My bad tummy did progress throughout his birth which meant I puked when the ambulance arrived at the hospital and puked not long after he was born.  Despite this I still held Ellie’s hand throughout the delivery and just about held it together to pretend I was feeling fine (although I think she saw through it). Once he was born they handed him to me and any illness I felt just vanished. I just looked at him and cried with pure happiness, everything else just melted away. If it wasn’t for Ellie shouting ‘oi, show him to me!’ I would still be just sitting there staring at him now.

We both managed to sleep last night despite Ellie’s contractions. I feel slightly on a knife edge today, he is definitely  closer to showing up since yesterday, bar waters breaking Ellie is showing all the signs, including frantic nesting (she’s hovering next door as I type).

Today has been very strange; we actually went into town on the bus earlier as Ellie wanted some last minute supplies. We bumped into a friend who asked when the baby was coming, to which we replied, well probably later today!

I think the nerves are getting to me, either that or I have food poisoning.  We popped into a cafe for a cup of tea in town and I’d I had to pay two visits to the toilet. The owner gave me a bit of a glare when I came out, a bit if a ‘what have you done in there!’ look.  We left shortly afterwards and got the bus home, Ellie having contractions and me clutching my bubbly guts. Perhaps its just some kind of sympathy pain.

Throughout the day I’ve been getting bits of work come in. One editor let me know my article was due today.  I frantically put it together and considering the circumstances it wasn’t too bad.

I’ve been pretty distracted, I’ve been trying to put things together but nothing seems to be coming out (other than this blog). I can manage an invoice or two but when another editor asked me to drop her an outline for an article it made me stare at a blank curser for around 2 hours counting the gaps between Ellie’s cries of pain. I have to get her (the editor) something by the end of the week which should be an interesting prospect considering we will have a screaming infant on our hands very soon.

Ellie’s also had work in, someone wanted to talk to her about putting on a wild food walk for kids. I was about to pass the phone over when she had a really strong contraction.  She’s going to call back in a couple of weeks.

Then half an hour later someone called for me to put on another wild food walk (must be after the TV appearance I had).  I was really distracted during the call and for the life of me I can’t remember what I agreed to. No doubt putting a walk on for £2.39 and a bag of crisps.

It’s now the evening, things are still as they were. It’s become a new normal. Just waiting…