A Personal History of the Digital Juggernaut

Kale plants blossoming

When I graduated in 1996 I had used email a handful of times, just out of interest really, using my university's email system to contact schoolfriends studying at other universities. I had no mobile phone, in common with the vast majority of people. I took a gap year and spent six months in Jamaica working in schools, churches and youth groups, during which time my only contact with home was with airmail letters and the occasional reverse-charge call to my mum from a public phone booth.

In 1997 I started working in London for a technology company called Psion Software. One lunchtime at the pub a colleague fetched emails onto her Psion clamshell by connecting it to a mobile phone with a cable and dialling up an ISP. It was amazing. This was the future. I bought myself a Nokia 3110 from Carphone Warehouse, one of the first of my circle to own one.  I had 20 minutes a month on my contract. The first call I ever made was outside Charing Cross station one evening to a university friend who also had one, just to try it out. The strange feeling of being able to talk to anyone without the phone being tethered indoors I can distinctly recall.

As I worked with computers all day I resisted having one at home for some time but eventually gave in and by about 2001 I had myself a desktop in my room, connected to a flatmate's router by long wires that trailed through the flat.

At that time I was working in an office up on the 15th floor of Capital House by Edgeware Road tube station, still for the same company (which had since morphed into Symbian). It was there that a colleague first mentioned the word Google, singing its praises over the pedestrian Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves search engines. It wasn't long before I was using it all the time, the internet becoming more and more part of my (and everyone's) life.

A friend who worked for my church as a youth worker was the first person to tell me about Facebook. All the kids were on it he said! I was galled that I hadn't already heard about it given I was in the tech industry.

I did hear about Twitter before a lot of people and signed up on Jan 2007 to give it a whirl (yes I've been on the thing for 10 years). I wasn't so impressed but obviously millions disagreed.

By this time I was working for Skype, leading projects to get Skype working on mobile phones. I got to play with a lot of different smartphones including one called a Skypephone which had a Skype-call button on it. Getting through customs to Israel on a work trip with a whole stash of mobile handsets in my bag took some explaining.

A path under construction

Laptops replaced desktops, at work and at home. Wifi replaced wires and cafes everywhere began to let you use it for free. Smartphones and tablets became ubiquitous and brought the internet, email and social media to our fingertips, wherever we were. People got used to being always connected. Work emails became something you checked at all times, not just in the office. It became mandatory for young people to be on social media or be a social recluse.

This juggernaut of a technological revolution is not stopping and in the course of 20 years has just about changed everything about the way we lead our lives.

I stepped off the juggernaut for a while and began growing veg, yet still use the internet every week to post my blog and look up how to do stuff. Having a mobile phone when living alone in a field does prove very useful even if I can only get intermittent 2G service.

Yet I feel there's a sinister edge to the direction of digital progress with the “Internet of Things” on the ascendancy, let alone roboticisation and armed drones. That'll have to be another blog. In the meantime check out Werner Herzog's film “Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World”, it's wonderful.

Top Cat

The early rhubarb is enjoying the sun

I have to make a small confession. The title of this blog is now slightly out of date and has been for a few weeks, as I am currently living very conventionally on-grid. Yes the joys of a warm house, a fully equipped bathroom and mains electricity are once again mine. The house in question is the home of my girlfriend, conveniently situated just four miles from my land along an A road, which most days I cycle along to and fro on my Trek bike (when it hasn't got a puncture or some ailment with its derailleur, as has been the case recently.)


Of course I still have the potential to live offgrid, and in fact will do so on occasional nights throughout the week, especially as the days lengthen and I can work later into the evening. Then, it'll make sense just to cook a meal and crash for the night in the caravan. The solar panel is still keeping the battery charged and the lights on. The compost toilet is still in functional order. The propane has yet to run out.

So the question is whether you'll allow me to keep the name of this blog as is, or if you think I should make a new one - MattSwanSometimesOffGrid perhaps? Answers below the line.

Half my garden, looking a little bare - give it a couple of months though and it'll be bursting with life.

Perhaps in the meantime I can distract you with the tale of my new cat. Well, hardly my cat, I suppose, but then it's probably more mine than anyone's. It's a fairly hefty house cat, more white than black, but no longer lives in any house. It's taken up residence in my greenhouse where it (he? she?) can be found snuggled in a dent of its own making in a straw bale that I ordinarily use as a low table. When I approached it at first it bolted off like a shot, but now I can come right up close and let it sniff my finger. It hasn't let me stroke it yet.

I'm going to need the greenhouse soon for my seedlings as my polytunnel is getting pretty full of them, so I may have to block up the hole where it's sneaking in and deny it its comfy bed. Seems mean but the risk of it knocking over (or eating? or defecating on?) my precious little plants is too high.

Potted on the first batch of tomatoes. They're sat on the window sill.

Sometimes I've seen it curled up in one of my firewood stores, basking in the sunshine while I worked the soil, so it has somewhere else dry to sleep. Just outside the store, a wobbly contraption made of pallets with a shower-door as a roof, there's a pheasant carcase which I've seen it gnawing, so at least it is getting something to eat. There are probably enough dead pheasants and live mice around to keep it satisfied.

So what should I name it? Answers below as well, either male or female please till I have somehow established the gender!

Claver Hill

Garlic planted in autumn survived the Welsh winter

This weblog-posting comes not from the heart of Wales, as regular readers have come to expect, but from the northwest of England. Lancaster, to be precise. A small city on the banks of the river Lune as it approaches the Irish sea, it is the county town of Lancashire and indeed gave its name to the county (probably why some southerners have been known to get the two confused.) I come here every so often to visit my family. This time Jeremy Corbyn visited too - not actually to our door, but my mum passed him crossing a street.

Yesterday we made a trip over to the other side of the city, high up where we could get views of Morecambe Bay and the mountains of the Lake District beyond, then over the brow to visit a food-growing project on the lower reaches of Claver Hill.

As the cold wind whipped itself up into gale-force proportions and the light raindrops began to become more frequent, we climbed out of the car and hauled on our waterproofs and wellies. We'd chosen the nastiest day of the week to be shown round the six acre site by Paula*, one of the co-founders of the community project. They were soon to launch a nature trail that followed the perimeter of the grounds so we dutifully followed the laminated map, clinging onto our hoods to prevent them from being blown off, until we reached the sanctuary of the two polytunnels and recovered for a bit.

A jostaberry bud bursts into leaf

Claver Hill Field was formed as a community food growing project about three years ago, to give local people the opportunity to learn how to grow veg and fruit, and to benefit from the produce. It's had various grants to allow the purchase of the polytunnels, some drainage of the field, and the construction of a very decent compost toilet. Windbreaks had been formed by the planting of rows of willow and alder, although it has to be said that the gale was still managing to howl through it. There were plenty of growing beds all over the place, some planted up with salads and brassicas and leeks. A herb area made clever use of a series of baths laid like stepping stones, and even a small boat that will never see the waves again.

Paula, despite the weather, was bursting with enthusiasm and vigour and had an inexhaustible stream of information about the site, but even she agreed we should cut short the nature walk as the gusts grew fiercer. Nature clearly didn't want us to walk.

After our tour concluded we left shivering and wet but with big smiles. It was inspiring to see such a large community growing project that is bringing people closer to the source of their food. May this year fill their field with an abundance of veg!

Last year's kale is now bolting, should I let it go to seed?

* Name changed

Let It Grow

Tomato seedlings of a "tall bush" variety. Not so tall or bushy yet.

And we're off! The sowing season is upon us. March is well and truly here and all growers everywhere are swiftly moving up a gear or two.

Seeds I ordered over winter from Real Seeds and Tamar Organics and stashed in cupboards are now being rudely awakened. I am digging out my plastic sowing modules from the greenhouse, giving them a clean, mixing up the organic compost from Sylvagrow with vermiculite to aid water retention, filling the modules with it and carefully placing a seed or two in each cell. Then lightly covering the seeds with more compost, writing a label with date and type of veg, placing in a watering tray for a while, and carefully balancing it on a suspended plank in the polytunnel that serves as a mice-proof shelf. This is particularly useful as I've been sowing lots of peas and broad beans, both of which the little critters are very partial to.

When visiting a friend on Thursday I was alarmed to see he had 15cm-tall broad bean seedlings in modules looking very healthy, and which were in fact already being “hardened off” i.e. placed outside during the day to get used to the cooler outdoor air. They must have been sown a few weeks ago already whereas mine only got pushed into the compost this week and have yet to sprout.

I do have a small tray of tomato seedlings however, kept safe and warm inside Anna's house, along with my second batch of onion seedlings that look like they may be going the same way as the first batch - getting droopy without thickening up and reaching straight upwards. They sit next to a tray of mixed lettuce seedlings, just beginning to emerge, and my ten potatoes slowly chitting, or producing sprouts out of their heads.

Onion seedlings a bit droopy

Apart from sowing, I've been shifting and sifting poo. Shifting it from my neighbour's pile of rotted horse manure, putting it into sacks which Anna and I push through a thorny hedge to be loaded onto my trailer on the other side. And sifting it back at HQ Polytunnel, removing all the naughty weed root systems buried within it so my soil doesn't get infected with them. Then shifting it again, wheelbarrowing it off to the garden to be spread and dug in, or just left on top of the asparagus bed. It's slow, smelly, messy but necessary work, and I'll be glad when it's over!

Darley Abbey in Derby, on a recent weekend break

Let's Fill This Valley With Veg!

A wind turbine spins above us despite the light snow 

On an exceptionally wet Sunday afternoon we gathered in the Bowling Club hall. This is our go-to place for gatherings. It's where we had our fundraising dinner for a shed for Edible Mach. It's also where we do the packing for the weekly vegbox scheme. But this time it was for something a bit different - it was the Mach Maethlon AGM!

Mach Maethlon is the not-for-profit company that oversees the vegbox scheme and the other two food-growing projects based in Machynlleth - Edible Mach and Dyfi Landshare. It's the company I recently became a director of, joining a team of six. And although I've been involved for three years now, it's the first time I've made it to an AGM (usually I'm still down at Pilsdon Community so I miss it.)

Before the AGM kicked off there was a Seed Swap. I doubt many companies' AGM's start with a Seed Swap. Anybody could bring along surplus veg seeds they might have and take some others in return. Some of these seeds people have saved themselves from veg they grew last year, thus promoting a healthy local self-reliance for veg production (reducing the amount of new seed bought from corporations each year) and encouraging strains of veg that adapt to the local climatic conditions. Other donated seeds were unused commercial packets from previous years. I ended up taking a few packets including some locally-saved seed: parsnip, sugar snap peas, garlic chives and New Zealand spinach, from three different growers.

My seed potatoes are still merrily chitting away. I'll plant them later this month

The meeting was public and so there were several other faces there apart from the usual crew which was fantastic. We sat in a circle. Katie, the Chair of the directors, led it but various people presented the different projects - what's been achieved in the last 12 months, what shape are the finances in, and a recent SWOT analysis done by each project's committee. It was great to be reminded of all the stuff that's happened in just one year (e.g more customers in the veg box scheme, a beautiful new Show Allotment by the Town Hall, people leading veg growing sessions in local primary schools) and look forward to achieving even more in the year to come.

Funding was raised as an issue for Edible Mach and Dyfi Landshare, as it's getting harder to find funding from organisations to pay for the part-time staff who coordinate these projects, as well as for the materials. A lot of time goes into preparing funding applications which may end up being unsuccessful. Crowdfunding is another route that has been employed already but this also takes up loads of time.

Sadly the onions I sowed in February have not done well.
Maybe I let them grow too quickly at first and they got "leggy". Also the compost was not fresh.

We then had some break-out sessions to brainstorm various ideas such as field-scale crops, revitalising the local council allotments, working smarter with other local organisations, and running cooking workshops, and then fed back all the ideas to the main group. What struck me is how much enthusiasm there is here in Mach for local food, even on a miserable soggy Sunday!

So I've sown some more!