The Pushover

A perfectly inclined slate rockface to sunbathe on. Shame there wasn't any sun.

It was late on Sunday night. I was driving home along “my” A road and as I approached the final bend a stationary car on the other side flashed its lights at me. I slowed, and saw more vehicles up ahead, and a few people stood by them. Something was not right. I slowed to a halt and it was only then that I realised that one of the cars was on its side.

I called out of the window if they needed any help but was told that no one was hurt and was ushered past by one of them. It was just 100m to my track entrance so I drove down and then walked back with my head-torch to see what was going on. My neighbours Huw and Reese* were there and a few people I didn't know. The sideways car was still on the left-hand side of the road, with its underside facing the other side. It wasn't clear at first who owned it, but eventually I worked out that it was a woman who had a young girl with her. She explained that she'd hit the side of the road and lost control. How they both managed to escape injury as it somehow span onto its side, and then how they actually got out, I have no idea.

This is the first achocha fruit in my polytunnel. It's supposed to taste like sweet pepper when fried

Huw had taken charge and convinced everyone that we should push it back onto its wheels and get it going again. So four of us got our hands on the roof and began to rock it, once, twice, three times, and on the fourth shove it went over with a thump. It was then apparent it wasn't going anywhere - the front wheels were both twisted. But now it was halfway across the road, blocking traffic in both directions, so someone else got in and managed to drive it a few feet to the side of the road.

At this point a policewoman showed up. Huw offered for the car to be parked temporarily at his, to get it off the road. I caught up with Huw and Reese, I hadn't seen Huw for some weeks. We were all in a kind of giddy mood due to the unreality of the situation. It seemed the perfect traffic accident to be involved in - no one injured, it was right next to home, and we had pushed a car over. On the main trunk road to the Midlands. In the dark. 

And the first ripe blueberry I've ever had on my plot!

*Names changed

Miracle Material

Thyme flowering

Water pipes. Drainage pipes. Hosepipes. Compost toilet (a.k.a. a wheelie bin). Polytunnel skin. Plant pots and modules. Watering trays. Watering can. Wheelbarrow. Water butt. Water barrel. Sheets to keep weeds down on paths. Sheet to help keep rain off the firewood. Tarps to keep other things dry. Transparent bags to keep my produce fresh in. Outdoor chairs. Base of the greenhouse. Handles of tools. Crates to carry veg around in. Buckets. Shopping bags. Food packaging. Toiletries packaging. Water bottles. Parts of the caravan, car, computer and mobile phone.

Any guesses on what links all the items in this long and tiresome-to-read list?

Sweetcorn just keeps growing taller

You got it. (Did you?) They're just some of the items I own that are made of or contain some form of plastic. It's the miracle material that since its conception in the mid-19th century has become absolutely ubiquitous. Imagine life without it. It must be possible - humans seem to have managed for most of our existence with wood, metal and stone. But once someone figured out how to make that black stuff that spurted out of the ground into a lightweight solid that could be fashioned and fixed into any shape, there was no looking back.

A frog loitering outside my polytunnel

It's even getting to places where you can't even detect it. The cosmetics industry in their wisdom have begun to impregnate their products with tiny microbeads of plastic, no doubt because customers everywhere have been clamouring for such a new ingredient in their toothpaste. But the thing we all know about plastic is it does not break down naturally. Billions of microbeads disappear down the plughole and end up in the sea where they end up in the bellies of the descendants of the marine life that died millions of years ago eventually to form the oil that was used to make the damn things. The US and other countries have banned them, but so far it's still legal here.

Some of this week's harvest - cabbage, turnip, broad beans and kohl rabi

Oil is nothing if not versatile. And, unfortunately, finite. The world is aware that burning it as a fuel is a major contributor to climate change hence the efforts to switch to greener alternatives (except for the British government which has increased subsidies to oil and gas companies thus inviting the politely-worded wrath of the UN's Climate Change Envoy this week). But I am not aware if anyone is giving any serious attention to the problem of what to make stuff out of when oil wells eventually run dry. Perhaps they'll invent a plastic that never perishes so we won't need to make any more things but just pass on our possessions from generation to generation. This wouldn't work under capitalism of course. Time to reinvent our global economic practice and brush up on our metal-working skills while we're at it?

A useful plastic cover for my warmth-seeking vegetables

Taxman

A moth I unearthed

I have had the dubious honour of being preached at by Gordon Brown. This was some years ago now in a church in Brighton and time has mellowed the memory. I have no idea what he spoke about. I can't even remember if he was Prime Minister or only Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time. My only vivid memory is of him leaving with his cortege immediately after he spoke, well before the end of the service, which struck me as a little rude as he hadn't mentioned that he would disappear early. But I suppose when you are Very Important you get to do things like that. He probably had some financial crisis to sort out I suppose.

The sweetcorn are hitting the roof

One of the things he did whilst in power was to introduce Working Tax Credits which are somehow still in place today, just about. They are like a benefit for low-income working people, but administered by the tax office not by Social Security. I bet HMRC loved that: “You mean we have to give them money, not take it away?!”

Anyway, when I plunged from my higher-tax-bracket income in London to earning a pittance as a market gardener in Wales, I became eligible. And so I've been claiming it since 2014, except when over-wintering at Pilsdon (because volunteers do not count as working people, apparently.) It gave me an extra £50-ish a week which has been very helpful. However this spring they did not start paying it again, instead making me provide them a full audit of my financial and business affairs to assess whether I was in fact eligible. And, they decided, I am not.

On what basis? On me earning too little.

I would not like to meet this slug on a dark night

Strange as it may seem, if you don't earn enough you don't get the extra help. Equally of course, if I earned a lot I would also not be eligible. What the earning threshold is that I am stubbornly below, they don't say. I suspect it's a clever ruse of George Osborne, our current Chancellor of the Exchequer, to stop paying it altogether to anyone.

So I asked them to reconsider, and they came to the same decision. My self-employment is not “commercial” apparently. They don't care that I have reduced my living costs to remain within the little I do earn (not counting the tax credits). Now I've appealed to an independent tribunal on the grounds that market gardens do not create much profit and take a lot of hard work, and this should be taken into account. We'll see what they decide.

Harvesting the lettuce for my salad bag deliveries

Music Sweet Music

On top of Aran Fawddwy, highest peak in southern Snowdonia

Have we all slipped sideways into some parallel universe recently? One where Britain is not in the EU, David Cameron is not the Prime Minister, and Wales is the best football team in Europe? It seems quite possible that before the year is out, Germany, the US and Britain will all have a woman in charge. Or maybe we'll slip into another less palatable universe where Michael Gove is Prime Minister, Donald Trump is the US President and Europe's far-right parties begin to take control. Then it's probably time to head for the hills. (I'm already here.)

Despite all the political shenanigans taking place, life does have a habit of just carrying on much as it did before. I'm still growing veg and selling it on Wednesdays to the veg box scheme and on Fridays to local people, hotels and shops. I still keep inflicting this blog on the world every week. And I still play organ on Sundays at the church down the road. Last Sunday Anna joined me there on the violin.

Cwm Cywrach

Between us we formed about a third of the congregation, and as each hymn was announced we had to spring up, leave the tiny congregation which became even tinier, hurry to the back of the church and climb the steep stairs right to the top where the organ is located. Once we'd got our breath back we could begin to play. Fortunately the minister usually reads the lyrics of the first verse to fill time till the music starts.

The organ at the back of Mallwyd church

The musical side of things is picking up a bit for me here. I've been asked to play organ for a wedding at the end of July. When I went round on Monday to meet the couple and agree on what music to play, I was taken aback to find they were the same people from whom I'd collected a huge heavy wardrobe for Anna about six weeks ago, she'd found it on EBay. This is in a good-sized village twenty minutes drive away from here. To make it even more disconcerting they had moved house since then, but just across the road.

The vicar has kindly lent me a key to a village hall with a piano in it. It's not far from where Anna lives, so we've already been in and practised some violin/piano duets. A piano is a very different beast from the organ and one I feel a lot more comfortable on.

Mange tout and turnips from my garden

I've also started giving weekly piano lessons to a neighbour's daughter. She's keen to learn which helps me a lot. It's interesting seeing how she pieces together how the written notes match up to the keys in front of her, and attempt to control her fingers to play the right ones.

As a helpful reminder to me of how hard it is to learn musical notation, I recently came across an entirely different form of written music called “Sol-Ffa” which is apparently popular in Wales. There are no horizontal lines, no dots. Just four rows of letters, each one relating to a different note of the scale (Doh, Ray, Me, Fah, Soh, La, Tee), and a general instruction for what key to play it in. No obvious way of knowing whereabouts to play them on the keyboard, which fingers to use, or how long to play each note for. I think I'll leave that till I've mastered the Welsh language.

My first calendula flower to open