Home and away

I love to go away and I love to come home.  A week in Devon, staying with my sister, helping to look after my brother and giving my parents a hand.  Being able to do this is one of the many reasons I gave up my big job.  When it works, and last week was a good week, it feels very right.  I know I am making a difference and to see the pleasure my brother takes in our company, to see my sister's children and stepchildren, to see my Dad smile with real happiness at a trip out he could not have taken by himself, to help my wonderful mum feel she is not alone, to chat with my sister and her partner when every one has gone to bed and to snatch an evening with my son and his wife, looking at the scan picture of their developing baby,  all of these things make me feel good, make me feel like myself.  But I missed Ian and I missed home and it was good to come down our drive, to see the view encircling me, to walk the garden and to sleep in my own bed with my own person.

The garden is racing along without me.  There are tulips and mounds of fabulous foliage in the side garden.  There are nettles and docks and bindweed and ground elder wherever I look.  Today I am focussing on the tulips.

And the swallows are back.  For a couple of weeks I have seen them in the skies above the field but today, for the first time, I saw one fly in and out through the door of the old stone pigsty where they have nested every year since we came.  I stopped and waited for a while, hoping to see them come again, but they were wheeling high in the sky above me.  I shall just have to keep my fingers crossed.

Coming back to the garden

I never garden in winter.  I can't really see the point of winter gardens with dogwoods and snowdrops even though I have plenty of both.  In winter I come inside and read and knit and crochet and write.  I hate getting cold and wet in the garden and I quite like it every year when the time comes when everything stops growing and there is nothing I can do.  It is done for another year.  Close the door, light the lamps, pull your chair to the fire.

This year however I have turned my back on the garden in a big way.  Usually in winter I do at least some thinking and dreaming.  By January I am starting to engage with the idea of gardening and I might read about gardens or spend time making up plant lists or musing about what to do in one area or another.  This year I did none of that.  I had lost my gardening mojo.  I had fallen out of love.

I think there were two strands to that.  One was the extent to which over the late summer and autumn I had begun to feel deeply unsettled and "out of place".  That is principally to do with my father's increasing ill health and my own desire to be part of what happens to him and my mother as they face this stage of life.  I can see that my presence helps them, both practically and emotionally, and living five or six hours away I was constantly aware of the tug of love and guilt and the need to be somewhere else.  It is hard to garden with passion when you feel like that.  That has settled down to some degree as we have found ways of supporting them that depend on significant scheduled visits rather than daily proximity.  The other strand was a gardening reason.  I am very aware that what I call a garden is really a field with some very early planting in it.  I feel my way towards what I am trying to create.  Mostly my vision holds strong enough for me to be able to see it even when others can't, with the occasional patch when the whole thing blurs and melts like running wax.

Three things happened last year which challenged my sense of what we are making and which made any claim to vision seem ludicrous.  The first was a visit to Beth Chatto's garden which I blogged about here. This really rocked me by making me feel that my garden was not a  place to walk into. I realised that there was not enough enclosure and that in embracing the openness of my hillside and the beauty of the views I was in danger of creating a vantage point, not a place to wish to be in for its own sake.  Partly in response to that I set to work to produce an area of meadow to walk into.  You would not believe the work I put into that.  Creating an annual meadow is not for the faint hearted.  I dug and raked and attacked perennial weed and sowed and watered and dug up docks.  The result was deeply, unsettlingly mixed.

Some parts were just glorious.  Some parts were just a mess of docks and couch grass.  I did not take any photos of those bits but there was way too much mess for the effect I wanted.  So I came towards the end of summer knowing that I needed to do something different but not really knowing what it was.  And then the third thing happened.  Ian and I went to visit Veddw, the garden created by Anne Wareham and Charles Hawes on the Welsh borders near Monmouth.  I loved Veddw.  I slipped into it like a fish into water or a swallow into air.  I felt very much at home in it.  The hillside site, the dense, lush planting, the sharp lines of the hedges and the overflow of self sown plants all contributed to a feeling that this was what I was trying to do: to create a place which could be nowhere else, which was a hymn to the place, a world founded in a place.  Anne and Charles could not have been more hospitable.  Veddw could not have been more beautiful.

It took a couple of months after we got home for the experience to begin to take shape in my head and what took shape was a slow and sad realisation that what I am producing here is not a garden, not as Veddw is a garden, not the garden I had in my head.  What I am doing here has no cohesion.  While the side garden has its own beauty and the kitchen garden its own functional charm, the field which we have slowly and laboriously brought into cultivation is not yet a garden.  The little orchard works.  Today, full of daffodils and early leaf, it is a good place to be as the trees begin to establish.

At certain times of year the cutting garden is a paintbox of colour.  Where we have created totally new planting, like the long bed in the lower part of the field which we call the native tree bed, the planting is, I think, good.  I am good at repetition and flow and at propagating and creating new plants that will fill emptiness on a scale which still daunts me after years of city gardens.  But there is no doubt that the most beautiful thing in this garden is the view and always will be and somehow the shapes I am trying to paint on the landscape are not producing that powerful sense of a heightened world which comes to you in the best gardens, which came to me standing in the Gravel Garden at Beth Chatto's, amidst the topiary at Levens Hall and looking down from the inscribed seat across the grasses and hedges of Veddw.

So I went away all winter and hid.  As spring came I wrote to Anne whose thoughtful, careful reply gave me much to think about.  Ian made me a willow hurdle for the side of the compost heap which once again proved that the functional can be beautiful.  Now I am not quite sure what to do.  Do I want to abandon my idea of creating something here?  No I don't, although I might have to accept that it will be a series of smaller creations rather than a world of its own.  It is quite likely that I simply do not have the wherewithal in time and talent to create something on the scale which I imagine.  I emerged after a long cold spring and found that the daffodils in the orchard and round the swing lifted my heart.  I laboured over planting them for three successive autumns and suddenly this year they were everywhere just as I had imagined.  I find I can't give up the idea of my garden even though part of me would like to throw in the towel, so I am feeling  my way towards something, although it may be something different to what I had imagined.

The key I think is in the meadow in the bottom third of the field.  At the top of the field you need to let the view sing and we have taken out some tree growth as Anne suggested so from the high point the view across the valley to the farms and the hillforts is king.  In the middle section the orchard and the cutting garden and the vegetable plots provide a unity which is functional and satisfying and which in a way is quite true to the people we are and the interests we share.  But in the bottom third of the garden you have the chance to lose the glorious tyranny of the view.  If I can find a way of walking into it, of getting lost in it, then I might be able to make the whole garden make more sense.  Last year it didn't work but I might have done it wrong.  It is a huge task.  There are docks galore this year, making much of the area a scruffy wasteland.  At the moment you can see all of last year's disaster, squared, and none of the small scale triumph.  The native tree bed runs along parallel to the boundary hedge and is full of lovely things but it looks adrift from the rest of the garden as it has since it was dug and planted three years ago.  A proper deep meadow with waist high grass and wide paths might be the answer.  Or it might not.  Karen came today and reminded me gently that she has been coming for most of the time we have been trying to make a garden and can see quite how much we have done.  I couldn't quite engage with her properly about it but she did cheer me up.

The jury is out.  I have sown poppies on the fire sites.  We have put Round Up on the docks.  I am digging up dandelions in the cutting garden.  I am feeling my way.  We can always put the whole thing back to grass and bring in sheep.

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?"   Robert Browning, Andrea del Sarto", line 98.

Living below the line - the final day (for me at least)

Somehow we have made it through to Friday.  I am torn between excitement at what I will able to eat tomorrow (shallow me!) and a strange feeling that I could carry on doing this for ages.  I eat my porridge made with water and carefully scrape out the last of the cheap pot of natural yoghurt to go with it.  I barely notice that my morning drink is hot water rather than tea.  Then I whizz out to yoga class, both as a distraction from thoughts of food and to share experiences with my yoga teacher who is the only other person I know who is doing this.

Patty has eaten quite similarly to me but she has had chick peas as well as lentils and a small amount of nuts.  I think she has purchased these with the money I chose to spend on yoghurt, which has been my only dairy.  She had intended to make baked potato the centre of her main meals but found that potatoes are just too expensive.  It is interesting to see just how much conversation the whole challenge has produced, both in the class and online.  Quite a few people in the class have not done the week in terms of living below the line but have spent time and effort thinking about how it might be done. I think that the exercise of really trying to work out how to make it work is worthwhile in itself if only in that it opens your eyes.  Another friend and her husband haven't been able to do it this week but are intending to do it together next week.  I am quite sure you can produce more variety if you can share your money but it is still a challenge however you come at it!  The moral support of doing it together is also a great idea although Ian has been very supportive in taking over cooking for him and his dad and in giving up alcohol and cheese himself for the week so that I don't have to sit and watch him!  I think I would have found this almost impossible if I had been preparing for other people the food that I like but couldn't eat.  This way I have been able to behave almost as if the only food in the house is the food in my bag in the pantry.

On the way home I stop and forage some wild garlic from down by the river in the bottom of the valley to put in my lunchtime soup and to use in my evening curry.  You see wild garlic foaming with white flower down by the river bank at this time of year.  All parts of the plant are edible: flowers, leaves, stems and roots, and it tastes strongly of garlic, the stems and leaves more so than the thin bulbous root.  The smell is so powerful it is filling the kitchen and I might have to put it outside.

Lunch is the last of the vegetable soup with dal in it, finished off with torn leaves of wild garlic.  The impact on the soup of the green leaves is surprising.  The taste and the texture are sublime although I am now smelling very strongly of garlic.  I have got into the swing of thinking in a foraging way now and I bring in some lemon balm.  Chopped up fine, the leaves make a faintly lemony change from the inevitable hot water.  At the end of lunch I am hungry and feel a bit desperate for more food, particularly fruit.   I would kill for an orange.   I go away to spend some time on the laptop and an hour later I find I am not hungry.  I wonder how often I keep on eating when, if I allowed my food to digest a little, I might find that I don't after all need any more food.

Just as earlier in the week,  I find that at about 4 o' clock I am truly, unignorably hungry and I finish the last of the onion bhaji mixture to make some tiny bhajis as snacks.  That keeps me going.  Dinner tonight is a fragrant biriani, made with cardamon, cinnamon and star anise to flavour the rice and chopped onion, carrot and parsnip.  I actively enjoy this one and am pleased to find that there is some left for tomorrow.

So, that is it.  The last of the meals has been eaten and I am nearly done.  Here is a stock take.

What have I missed?  Eggs, cheese, fruit, bread, wine, probably in that order.

Have I been hungry?  Perhaps a little but not really, although to prevent hunger I have had to be creative with fried porridge and ground elder!

Is there anything left?

Yes, here it is.  Quite a lot of porridge oats, rice and some lentils.  All the vegetables have gone, including the celery which I bought as an evening distractor from cheese.

Would I do it again?  Yes I would.  It has made me think about food buying, cooking and waste in a new way.  I don't think we are generally wasteful or spend a huge amount on our food.  We cook everything from scratch so we don't buy ready meals and frozen puddings.  Yet even so I have been astonished to find how much I spend on my normal diet and how little I can spend and survive.

What have I learnt?  That feeding yourself for very little is possible but that it is repetitive and restrictive in ways which we have long forgotten in our society.  That Indian cooking seems to provide the best template for producing tasty, interesting and nutritious food from cheap ingredients, especially if like me you like strongly flavoured food.  That being unable to spend much on food means you can just about manage if you stay home but that many of the small and larger pleasures of life are closed to you: the cup of coffee in a cafe, the slice of cake with a friend, the takeaway pizza,  the evening with wine and beer in a bar or pub.  That I can do it.  I really thought I might not be able to and part of the reason I didn't ask for sponsorship (besides the fact that we are constantly being asked for sponsorship for one thing or another) was that I did not want to let people down or be overwhelmingly embarrassed when I gave the whole thing up on Wednesday, unable to resist the lure of the cheese sandwich or the cup of tea or scampi and chips and a pint in the pub.

But I can walk away now, back to my scrambled eggs and my wine and my meals full of protein, unlike the families for whom this is the only way of life.  And I expect it is the fact that I could walk away at the end of the week that has helped me do it.  I don't really think that what I have done makes any difference to anyone except me, although I will be sending to UNICEF the sum of money that I would normally have spent on food for the week.  (In the end I decided to give the money to a local foodbank.) I hope others do it and think about it.  If enough of us did the same maybe we would make a difference.  Perhaps just thinking about it might make a difference.  I really don't know and don't believe that there are any easy answers.  It really has been interesting to talk to you about it and to hear your thoughts about the whole thing.  I also know lots more about cooking like this as a result of your suggestions and ideas, so thank you for taking the time to think and write about it.

So let us finish as shallowly as we started.  Tonight I am going to stay up until midnight and drink a glass of cheap fizz to celebrate doing it, finishing it, being alive and living in a beautiful place surrounded by plenty.

I wish I didn't smell quite so strongly of garlic.

Living below the line - Day 4, a bit of foraging

A bit of creativity today.  Breakfast as before and it seems almost easy.  Reluctantly I have to admit that I feel better in the morning after a night without my usual glass of wine.  I wouldn't have said that I feel in any way bad normally.  I only have a glass or two.  I don't wake hungover or bleary eyed.  I get up cheerily enough and get on with my day.  But I do think that, whether it is the vegetarian diet or the absence of wine, I am bouncing up in the morning with foolish energy.  Something to think about.

I worked all morning in the garden digging over the cutting garden.  The sun shone, the daffodils sparkled and all the trees seemed to have decided to burst into leaf, tiny and vividly green against the mostly bare skeleton of the tree.  Again I don't know whether it is the lack of protein in this very restricted week but I did find myself tiring quite quickly and developed a passionate yearning for a cheese sandwich.  I had a break from digging to help Ian move some brushwood, tramping backwards and forwards to the fire site.  It did not help with the longing for a cheese sandwich.  So I decided I had better do something different for lunch.

Mountainear had suggested that ground elder and wild garlic could be foraged at this time of the year.  Green stuff is something I have been missing.  I had rice and dal left over from yesterday but I finished it off this time with some chopped and torn ground elder leaves, choosing the youngest and most tender from one of our many patches of perennial weed!  Just need to start making inroads on the newly burgeoning nettles and dandelions now.

I didn't say it looked appealing but it tasted pretty good.  Even so I had to come away from Ian eating scrambled eggs and sit outside with my lunch in the sun.  I am so looking forward to eating eggs and cheese again.  Meat, oddly enough, I am not missing at all.

The secret with eating like this seems to be have some sort of snack and to eat food which is quite strong tasting.  I made some more onion bhajis as a snack in the late afternoon from the remains of yesterday's batter and then a big spicy soup for tea incorporating what was left of the dal.  I thought I would have a go at transforming some of the thick leftover porridge from this morning into a version of croutons, simply deep frying spoonfuls of porridge in some of my oil.  They didn't look like croutons but they provided a bit of crispiness and texture.  Two bowls of soup provided a filling dinner and then I whizzed out to Welsh class, distracting myself from any thoughts of food.

On the way home I realised that I still have two tins of tomatoes (31p a tin) in my week's store so I have liquidised one of them to make a tomato juice.  This is the first thing I have drunk all week which has not been water and it tastes overwhelmingly delicious.

So that is day 4.  I am in so many ways glad that tomorrow is the last day.  Bread, wine, cheese and eggs are all at the top of my list of things I will be delighted to have again.  But I also feel as if I could do this for longer now that I am beginning to understand how to produce things from very limited ingredients that are interesting and edible.  I might even adopt this way of eating for a couple of days every two weeks or so now that I have proved to myself that I can.  I will take stock when tomorrow is over.  It is always possible that I might never eat another lentil.

Living below the line - Day 3 - not scavenging in bins

The morning routine is going fine.  Porridge and yoghurt and hot water seem perfectly ok for breakfast.  I do miss my lovely home laid eggs if I think about it but if I just get up and get on with it all is fine.

Today I am going to meet someone for lunch.  I have explained what I am doing and we have agreed to bring a boxed lunch with us and to eat outside.  My lunch is the remains of my curry and rice.  I suddenly have an insight into what it is like to be someone whose relationship with food is simply that of "food as fuel". I know several people like that and I imagine it saves a lot of time, but because we love food in our house I have always been interested in cooking it, eating it, thinking about it, planning meals for special occasions and using food to bring people together around the table.  This lunch is pure fuel.  I don't enjoy it.  I don't not enjoy it.  I just eat it.  There isn't quite enough but I am not actually hungry.  I drink lots of water but am really longing for a cup of tea.

My friend thinks that it can't be that hard to do what I am doing.  We are allowed to cook?  Wouldn't it be more of a challenge if you had to scavenge from bins?  Yes.  It would.

I decided this morning that I had to find something to make a difference in terms of the texture of my food so when I made my morning porridge I made it thicker than usual and left some to have a go at making some sort of fritter.  When I get home, still longing for a cup of tea, I squash the porridge together into little cakes and fry them in oil until they are crispy on the outside.  Sprinkled with salt they are the first snack food I have had.  It sounds disgusting but they were really quite nice. Ian and I sit on a bench in the sun while I eat them.  I would absolutely love to go out tonight for a drive through our beautiful countryside to a village pub.  There I would have scampi and chips and drink beer.  Ah well.  Push the thought away and shut the lid on it.  I am more than half way through now.  By the end of the day there will be only two more days to go.

I need to cook something for my evening meal that feels interesting and tasty.  I am wondering whether flour and water will make a batter sufficient to allow me to make onion bhajis.  I could make some dahl with the lentils and possibly find something growing in the herb garden to liven up the rice.

Well dinner was actively good!  I made onion bhajis, using my oil to fry spoonfuls of onion and batter mixture.  I used my flour, some curry powder, salt and water to make the batter.  I also made lentil dahl and plain rice.  The introduction of the crispy texture of the bhajis really cheered me up.  Now I just have to see if  I have created lentil overload again!

I have found today hard going until tonight's meal which showed me that if I really try to cook I can produce the sort of food I would be happy to eat on any day  of any week.  That is some small consolation for not being able to go to the pub!

So a bit of a headache again through the earlier part of the day which has been banished by a largish evening meal; a realisation of how eating frugally really restricts your life as well as your diet; a general sense that I am digging in, determined to do it now, and a reminder that the plainer the ingredients the more you have to work at translating them into something good.  So far Indian based dishes have been a godsend.

I am glad to be doing this but I will be pleased to get to the end.  That is my greatest luxury, that it does have an end.  Now for a drive and a walk in a beautiful evening.

Living below the line - Day 2

Bounced up this morning and had my porridge and yoghurt, washed down with two mugs of hot water.  I did find my bowels working a bit of overtime.  More than that I shall not share.  I decided to go to yoga this morning instead of to my usual Tuesday evening class, both as a distraction and in order to compare notes with Patty, my yoga teacher, who is also living on £1 a day for the week.  The class was good.  Patty and I established that we were probably overdoing the lentils.  I nearly fell asleep in savasana, the relaxation pose, but that is nothing new and I don't think I can fairly blame the porridge.

Afterwards I went cheerily into town to go to the chemist's.  I was crossing the road from the carpark when I  was blindsided by an overwhelming desire for a cup of coffee and something to eat.  I don't know if that was a response to the fact that I don't go into town very often but when I go on my own I often buy a newspaper and sit in a coffee shop with a coffee and a piece of chocolate brownie to have a bit of time to myself.  That was certainly what my body and my mind seemed to be expecting!  There are so many coffee shops in Mold that there was temptation at every turn so I rushed in and out of the chemist and scuttled off before I found myself sitting with a cup of coffee in front of me.  It was a hefty reminder of how easy it is to spend.  The money I would have paid for a single cup of coffee would have taken more than half of the £5 which is to feed me for the week.

Lunch was easy and early.  I had two bowls of the lentil soup and was definitely not hungry.  I did though long for a piece of fruit, an orange or a banana, or a tiny taste of something sweet.  I don't have a sweet tooth and I would not have expected the absence of anything sweet to be so noticeable.  I think if you did have a sweet tooth you would need to provide for it, even if only through buying a few raisins or a packet of cheap biscuits.  Otherwise the absence of any sweetness might totally sabotage your resolve.

Straight from lunch to the hairdresser's.  Yesterday I tried to tell Ian that is was perfectly possible to have a treat which was not foodbased, although I would admit that, as a family of cooks and food lovers, a meal out, a piece of cake, a slice of homemade bread are the things that spring to mind when thinking about treats.  With all foodie treats off limits, I decided that I would divert myself with a change of hair colour.  My lovely hairdresser was slightly bemused at first but soon became very engaged with the idea.  So here I am with much blonder hair than usual illuminated here and there by pinky purple streaks in the lower layer.  I really like it.

I arrived home famished (in the spoilt Western sense of the word I know).  Evening meal was the remains of yesterday's vegetable curry and rice.  It was fine although once again I feel as if I have not eaten quite enough.  That is odd because I think my hunger is satieted.  It is the absence of variety which is making feel like I need or want something else.

I am planning to make up some very thick salted porridge tomorrow and have a go at frying small slices of it to produce something a bit like a rice cake.  Well that is the outcome in my imagination!  It may simply produce fried porridge which is a totally disgusting idea.  I am finding that the texture of all the meals I have eaten so far is very soft and similar and would love to find a way of having something with more crunch without consuming the only carrot I have left!

Once again I will need to get through the evening without a glass of wine and some cheese.  Well I did it last night so I must be able to do it again and Ian is abandoning wine and cheese for the week (although otherwise he is eating normally) as a gesture of support.  That is a real help.  I am not sure I could resist the urge to join in if I saw him with a glass of red and some crackers and Stilton.

I will add a bit to this at the end of the evening but so far, so good.  Well the end of the day was harder today.  I really fancied a glass of wine and had to go and have a bath to distract myself.  Followed this up with two sticks of celery and a glass of water.  And so to bed...

Living below the line - Day 1

In a less than energetic start to the attempt to live on a £1 a day for five days, I don't get up until nearly nine o' clock.  Yesterday I went with a friend to Wonderwool Wales, a festival of all things to do with spinning, dyeing, weaving and knitting.  It was a great day out and I came away astonished at how very little I know.  I  have rediscovered knitting in the last couple of years and think I am reasonably competent but I now see I am just paddling on the shores of a vast ocean of expertise and passion.  So I came home with a small amount of wool and a sense that perhaps I should have bought more.  This is a better sense to have than that you have bought stuff you could not afford and will not use!

Last night I decided that, before launching into my challenge for the week, I should go down in a blaze of glory so had chocolate brownie and half a bottle of wine.

So here we go.  I weigh myself, although weight loss is not what this is about.  It is simply one of the many things I want to know.  10 stone 7 lbs, sadly a couple of pounds more than the last time I weighed myself.  It must be the chocolate brownie.  Ian brings me a cup of hot water in bed instead of the usual tea.  Surprisingly it is fine.  I love my cup of tea but I do drink it very weak so perhaps that makes the transition less of a shock.  Then it is porridge made with water with a dollop of natural yoghurt.  It's not very exciting and it does make me wish I could have a good handful of blueberries with it, but it is ok.

Lunch is red lentil soup.  This is something I make all the time so I know how to do a good one.  It is a bit odd to have to forgo the usual bread and butter with it so I have a big second bowlful to make up.  It is also odd not to have a piece of fruit afterwards and my tastebuds are telling me they fancy something sweet.  Sadly I have nothing that could be called sweet so I finish with a cup of hot water.

I find that by mid afternoon, while I am not actually hungry I do have an indefinable sense that I could eat something.  I am not sure how much of that is missing tea.  I do also have a very slight headache.  In the end I decide that I will have a mug of soup and straight after having it I fall asleep for half an hour.  For the evening meal I decide to have vegetable curry which is basically chopped onion, carrot and lentils with a bit of curry powder.  I have it with plain rice and cook enough for there to be a meal for tomorrow too.  It is perfectly fine and I finish the meal quite full.  I am still missing a cup of tea and a couple of squares of dark chocolate though!

And so through the evening.  There is a definite problem with wind, from all those lentils I suppose.  Curiously I haven't felt at all bothered by the absence of my glass of wine or cheese and biscuits.  So it is so far, so good although I am pretty sure the lack of variety is going to be oppressive.

We shall see.