A Tale Of Two Cities And Two Conferences

Letting the damp out

One week, two conferences.

The first was in London so having only just arrived in Wales from Dorset a week ago, off I toddled back to southern England again. This conference was a weekend “activist” programme organised by Tearfund, a Christian relief and development charity, specifically for young adults.

Hang on, I can just about hear you mutter. Matt Swan might be an adult and may even be said to have a youthful outlook, but surely he can hardly still consider himself in the “young adult” category? I mean he's been alive the same length of time that light has been travelling from the half-molten exoplanet 55 Cancri e, and that's a long time.

The kale just about survived the winter

You're right, and the reason is I was there as a speaker not a delegate. My old friend Becca was the organiser and she decided to ask me to come and talk about how I'd changed my life from the days when I lived in London. I'd said yes a couple of months ago but as the event approached I became a bit nervous about how to express it in front of sixty people. I pulled together lots of photos and scribbled pages of notes which even as I stood up to speak I was half-tempted simply to read out.


But it all came out much more naturally, thankfully, as I flicked through the old photos projected onto the screen and only occasionally glanced at my notes. It was the first time I'd done this and it was a privilege to do it. I think I kept their attention for the forty minutes or so, and got quite a lot of questions afterwards as well as some “thank you's” for encouraging them to keep going with their gardening or their dreams for off-grid living. We all went for a “25-mile meal” afterwards at Lumberjack in Camberwell, oddly very close to where I used to live in London. De ja vu but with longer hair.

Brussel sprouts have been knocked about a bit

The second conference? Thankfully much closer to home, in Aberystwyth. And this time I was just an attendee. It was the Aber Food Forum, an afternoon focused on all aspects of local food. We got to learn about Welsh grain-growing which is a thing (it's not entirely sheep grazing here!) from a woman who makes and sells flour using an actual old water-mill a few miles further south. We heard from students who take “surplus” food from supermarkets and give it to charities. We saw a woman make sauerkraut (it's quite easy!) I was interested to hear from an organic veg grower who has his plot ten miles south of Aber. An MP said a few words. Katie Hastings gave a great summary of Edible Mach and Dyfi Land Share. We heard about the Food Assembly concept, which seems to be a web-based software platform that enables pop-up-style farmer's markets where the consumers have already bought the produce online beforehand, so the producers only need to bring what has been pre-bought. And a local livestock farmer (who also has an important job in the National Farmer's Union) gave some rather depressing thoughts on how Brexit might change things in farming (including the likelihood of many more mega-farms.)


Enough gallivanting for me. I've been back on my land digging in rotted horse-poo today.

Attempts at making our own oat milk have proved surprisingly successful