Archives

We have just had a heatwave in Britain for the second year running. Temperatures reached nearly 40 degrees centigrade in the London area, and well over 30 degrees over the rest of the country, even in southern Scotland. There was no rain for weeks and water supplies were badly affected. Emergency measures have been in place, schools closed, trains cancelled, cool refuges suggested. Only the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, basically the area north of Inverness, have escaped the searing heat. The effect on our food supplies is likely to be serious. Last summer’s droughts and floods affected harvests all over Britain. This year, farmers are reporting serious problems again as a result of the extreme and unpredictable weather. Food security has become a hot topic.

At the same time, the war in Iran, a war which we ourselves did not start and in which we are not officially engaged, has disrupted oil, gas and fertiliser supplies. Farm machinery uses fuel. So do the ships and lorries which move food around the country, let alone the planet. We also face threats from countries who object to our government’s political position on various issues, which could easily, if things escalate, extend to drone attacks and cyber attacks affecting our food distribution system.

In an article by Professor Tim Lang in the Guardian in March this year, he pointed out that we import half of our food. Britain is currently only 54% food self-sufficient and this percentage is probably falling. For comparison, France is 100% self-sufficient, Germany 83%, the Netherlands 80% and Spain 75%. 

All of a sudden, journalists have started writing about the probability of food shortages in the UK and calling on the government to make preparations to guarantee food security. It has been reported that households over the whole of the UK are going to be advised to store a supply of tinned food and other essentials to last three days. (In winter, in the stormy north of Scotland, we already do that.) The MP for Orkney and Shetland, who is chairman of the environment, food and rural affairs committee at Westminster, secured approval for a debate on food security (The Orcadian, Thursday 11 June 2026 page 21). Mr Carmichael has pointed out that for many years, the UK’s food security has been taken for granted, but this is no longer sensible. People seemed to have forgotten what happened during the Covid pandemic. Or what is currently happening with supplies of certain medicines that many of us rely on.

In the Guardian article I learned several things about how our food reaches us that I had never thought about before. As a museum teacher and re-enactor, with a character based on a Tudor cook, I was regularly astonished by how few children could recognise common herbs and vegetables which had not been chopped up and frozen in plastic bags. As a gardener I know how to grow potatoes and parsley. But I now feel ashamed that I have never thought before about exactly how the bulk of my food gets from farm to fork, and what some of the implications of the current system are.

One is Distribution Centres.  Most of us buy our food rather than producing it ourselves. Most of us buy it from supermarkets. Most farmers have to sell their produce to supermarkets. Professor Lang described Britain’s current food supply system as “agrifood capitalism” rather than farming. The priority is profit rather than feeding people, and it is dominated by a few big companies.  Nine large retailers supply nearly 95% of all of our retail food in the UK. And they depend on only 131 distribution centres, where the food is gathered and stored before being distributed to supermarkets. If anything happened to even one or two of them, the country would be in trouble. It isn’t just the climate crisis which threatens our food supplies. There have recently been reports that companies such as Peter Green Chilled, which transports chilled food to several major supermarkets in Britain, have suffered ransomware attacks. Whether by criminals just out for money, or by hostile governments as a modern equivalent of the submarines which attacked convoys in WWII, the effect would be the same on our food supply.

For example, in Orkney, we have three supermarkets, Tesco, Lidl and the Co-op. Tesco supplies almost one third of all UK retail food, and depends on just twenty of these 131 distribution centres. As far as I can see from an internet search, only one of them is in Scotland, near Edinburgh in the Central belt. Lidl has “over 14” centres in Britain, but only one in Scotland, in North Lanarkshire, again part of the Central Belt. The Co-op is the 7^th largest food retailer in Britain. It is not a single company but a complicated conglomeration of individual independent co-operative societies (I got totally lost over their structure and its implications). The Co-op has 13 distribution centres, 1 national, 9 regional, and 3 smaller local ones to provide for remote areas. In Scotland, there is a regional centre in Lanarkshire and a local centre in Inverness. Orkney also has wholesale suppliers such as JW Gray in Kirkwall and James Wilson in Stromness, which supply smaller local shops, and businesses such as hotels, schools, hospitals, etc.  Most of this food gets to supermarkets in towns and cities in big container lorries. In the Northern and Western Isles, they travel part of the way by ferry as well.

The other is stockpiles.  I found a company blog which gives a brief overview of how food wholesaling works in the UK. It is interesting and worth a visit. One important thing in particular which struck me had been pointed out by Professor Lang. It concerns reserves or stockpiles. In order to minimise the amount of storage space retailers require, the system relies on, and is proud of, ‘Just-in-time’ supply. In Orkney, we already know what happens when our normal winter gales disrupt the ferries – empty shelves in supermarkets. ‘Just in time’ doesn’t work so well for us during a stormy winter. Perhaps it is not only individuals who should be thinking about stockpiling food supplies, even if it does reduce their profits by a tiny percentage.

Many European governments are now talking about preparing for emergencies. They are building up stockpiles to keep their citizens fed in an emergency such as war or a pandemic. Switzerland, for example, has a stockpile sufficient to feed its population for three months and is increasing it to a year.  Finland, which produces 80% of its own food, in spite of its northern latitude and short growing season, has deliberately prepared for the possibility of interruptions to supplies of food and other essentials, such as fuel to keep agricultural machinery and food transport running.    Finland also has an amazing government website with detailed and very clear information about what supplies to keep ready for an emergency. It is aimed quite obviously at an emergency caused by invasion by a hostile power but it is very useful as a guide.

All in all, we have a lot to think about at the moment. Our food supply in Britain is very vulnerable to things like hostile action by groups or countries, diesel supplies running low, IT failures, bad weather etc. The question of ‘food miles’ is not only a matter of protecting the environment, it’s also about protecting the actual supply of food itself.

Once upon a time, long long ago and far away, when I was a little girl, there was very little health and safety legislation. Don’t get me wrong; I am totally in favour of health and safety rules (see “Health and Safety at work:  What not to do with a pneumatic drill” Sept 14 2020). But some of the most enjoyable and enriching experiences of my young childhood would never be allowed today.

When I was four years old, my family moved out of a block of flats into a house with a most beautiful garden. It had a lawn surrounded by flower beds, fences draped with bougainvillea and masked with shrubs like syringa and winter jasmine, and a loquat tree standing over an area of worn brick paving. Very soon after we moved in, my father took me out into the garden and taught me how to climb that tree. He was a mountain climber himself, so I suppose it came naturally to him. I spent the rest of my childhood until the age of eleven climbing that tree, and as soon as he was old enough, so did my younger brother, and so did all our friends. One of them built us a tree house right at the top (my father did check it for stability before we were authorised to play in it). Neither our parents nor our friends’ parents seemed to give a second thought to the possibility of our falling out of the tree onto the brick surface below. Fortunately, nobody did. We ate the loquats when they were ripe, had battles throwing them at each other when they were green, pretended one of the branches was a horse, and lay dozing in the midday sun on the platform at the top, surrounded by a low wall of shiny green leaves. And today when I see playgrounds closed because of some fault in the carefully constructed rubber surface beneath the climbing frames, I think of my beautiful loquat tree and the taste of its sweet sun-warmed fruit and my father carefully explaining to me where to place my hands and feet.

During the winter, when it rained too much to go to the beach, we often spent Sunday afternoons at the docks. Nowadays members of the public, even without small children, would never in a million years be allowed to just wander around in a dockyard full of sea-going vessels, stepping over thick mooring cables and the railway lines where the cranes for loading and unloading cargoes ran, or leaning over the edge of the dockside to watch the sea sloshing against it far below. In those days Cape Town docks had two main areas. One was a large basin where the ocean liners, including the ‘mail boat’ which carried most of the overseas post, tied up. I knew that this was how the letters from my grandparents in England arrived. There was a smaller dock where fishing boats, tugs and pilot boats were moored. This was where I first heard of the remote, minute island of Tristan da Cunha, far out in the South Atlantic. The ‘Tristania' tied up here, the islanders' little wooden fishing boat which transported cargoes of rock lobsters. These are still their major export. It was also where the ‘John D. Gilchrist' was moored, the research vessel belonging to the university where my mother worked as a zoologist. But the best thing about visiting the docks was the fact that sometimes the captains of the tugs which went out into Table Bay to help the liners get in safely would allow members of the public to go along for the ride. Oh, what a thrill that was! And for many years of my adult life, in spite of the compensations of a job I loved, how I missed it! No-one could possibly go down to Southampton docks these days, wander around among the international shipping and be given a ride on a tug. Not only health and safety considerations but possible terrorism and the sheer numbers of people around today would prevent it.  

But I have been lucky. Now at last in my old age, I am living in a place where if I fancy a boat trip, I can go for a ride on a ferry to one of the islands, as easily as hopping on a bus. The smell of the sea, the little ship bouncing over the waves, throwing up spray, the long wake creaming out behind, the jaunty little red pennant – lovely!

Probably the most unusual experience of my childhood, by today’s standards, was being taken to my father’s workplace. He worked in a medical laboratory and on a few occasions he had to go in on a Sunday.  I often heard him discussing his day’s work with my mother, who had a degree in zoology and had done a year as a medical laboratory technician during WWII as her war service. I am quite sure that he would never have taken us anywhere near live viruses or bacteria, but I was thrilled to see laboratory benches cluttered with strange equipment, to smell the various chemicals, disinfectants etc, and to watch him making bits and pieces of equipment by bending glass tubes over a Bunsen burner. In those days laboratory glassware wasn’t ready-made and disposable. You had to know how to make your own pipettes and things, and there was a whole roomful of people who washed and sterilised them after use. Of course, there wasn’t a computer in sight. This was the 1950s. Even pocket calculators hadn’t been invented – people used slide rules. I knew that my father worked to combat really bad diseases such as polio and smallpox and this was the place where the fight went on. No way would that be allowed today, and quite right too. But now in my old age, when I have my annual flu and Covid jab every autumn, I think of my father and that lab, and his part in the ongoing fight.

I am totally in favour of the law protecting children from really stupid parents or abusive employers or public carelessness. It is tragic when a young child is killed in a preventable accident. But I do owe some of my dearest and most formative childhood experiences to situations which would never be allowed today.

To those accustomed to the graceful Palladian villas of so many 18^th century aristocrats, Strawberry Hill might come as rather a shock. Taking medieval tombs and church doorways as your inspiration and deliberately aiming to make rooms as gloomy as possible, is certainly a different approach. No wonder its fragile, sickly creator woke up with nightmares. One of them was his inspiration for the first English Gothic Horror novel, ‘The Castle of Otranto’.

Horace Walpole (1717-1797), its creator, was the youngest son of Britain’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. He was known especially for his collections of art and antiquities, for his novel, and for his forty-eight volumes of Letters to various friends and relations, which are a mine of information about aristocratic society in 18^th century England. And for his weird tastes in interior decorating …

Young Horace sat as an MP in the House of Commons. His father’s influence got him a number of undemanding but well-paid posts. In 1748 he acquired a small plot of land beside the Thames in fashionable Twickenham, and in 1749 started converting the existing house into an over-the-top summer residence. During the winter he lived at number 11 Berkley Square in Mayfair, which is still a very up-market area. Fortunately, due to his influential papa, Horace was rich enough to indulge his taste for trompe l’oeil, papier mâché imitations of stone mouldings, and Flemish stained glass imported at vast expense.

I was a little startled by my first sight of it. It is anything but symmetrical, and outside it is covered with odd towers, turrets and battlements, and barley-sugar chimneys, but I soon decided it was charming, although I still prefer Marble Hill House.

My personal favourites among the rooms are the library and the gallery. In the library, the bookcases have pierced Gothic arches based on a feature in St Paul’s Cathedral. I am totally amazed by the gallery, which has a papier mâché ceiling and canopied recesses, with gilded, white-painted imitation fan-vaulting. When I saw it, it was spectacular, flooded with sunlight. It is hung with magnificent paintings, not, unfortunately all the originals of those on display there. Sold off to meet family debts in 1842, these are now widely dispersed, although efforts are being made to reassemble them. The paintings throughout the house are a mixture of those owned by Walpole, such as ‘Catherine de Medici and her Children’; some, like the Munz painting of the house in the Red Bedchamber, are on loan from other museums and art galleries; and some are facsimiles, such as ‘The Ladies Waldegrave’, which is actually in the National Gallery of Scotland. But it gives a general idea of what the house looked like.

Stranger touches include a slanting asymmetric doorway into the library, which guides the eye towards the (umpteenth) gothic fireplace, and sliding wooden shutters at all the windows because Walpole didn’t like curtains. He thought they got in the way of the beautiful stained glass and the carefully chosen views of the landscape surrounding the villa. He collected china and miniatures, medals, and odd things like Cardinal Wolsey’s hat and King William III’s spurs. His appearance wearing a wooden cravat to meet his guests seems even odder. It was intricately carved from limewood by Grinling Gibbons (the original cravat is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum)

Twickenham was a fashionable place, in the 18^th century and his house became something like a modern tourist attraction, as indeed it is today. On trend, he found over-tourism to be a problem; as time went on, he complained that he was getting too many visitors.

Walpole never married, and was somewhat effeminate in appearance. He had no children outside marriage either. There has been much speculation about his sexual orientation; we shall never know for sure. General opinion was and is that he didn’t have much interest in close personal relationships of any kind, although he had many friends both male and female. In spite of his poor health (he had gout and rheumatism for many years) he lived to be 79 years old and died a natural death. At the age of 74 he had inherited the title of Earl of Orford from his elder brother’s son, who died without a male heir.

When he died in 1797, the property passed briefly to his cousin, Mrs Damer, and in 1811 by entail to the Waldegrave family. Both Walpole’s niece and great-niece had married into the Waldegrave family. It was sold by the Waldegraves to the de Stern family in 1886, and by them to the Catholic Education Council, who still own it, in 1923. The house is leased to the Strawberry Hill Trust and is open to the public. Unfortunately, the 7^th earl of Waldegrave was a spendthrift with no artistic tastes who sold off Walpole’s collection of antiquities in 1842. Fortunately, Walpole had published a detailed catalogue, so we know what was there originally. There is now a Strawberry Hill Collection Trust which exists to locate and if possible, return objects from Walpole’s collection, and to advise on the care of those still at the house.

Perhaps one shouldn’t visit Strawberry Hill on a sunny May Day with an old school friend, friendly guides and a large number of obviously harmless tourists. It didn’t really have a sinister atmosphere. But I can see that at midnight during a thunderstorm, with the floorboards creaking and a draught blowing your candle out (in the 18^th century there would definitely have been draughts), it would be easy to imagine a mighty apparition appearing at the head of the stairs to deliver a threat of awful doom…

I ‘m not actually interested in games. Not since I grew out of childhood Snakes-and-Ladders. I don’t mind playing a few games at Christmas, but it is the social interaction not the mental exercise which gives me pleasure. And contrary to what appears to be public opinion, I didn’t have my personality erased on the eve of my 70^th birthday. I never have been and I’m still not interested in games.

I do like learning languages, so I signed up to improve my German with Duolingo. I’m using the free version, so my sessions are punctuated with advertisements. That’s fair enough. They started with advertisements for clothes quite unsuitable for my age, but they now seem to have realised that I am an old woman so I keep getting adverts for brain-training. “Specially for Seniors”, they coo. “Keep your brain active”. “Prevent Memory Loss”.  Do the idiots not realise that learning a language is just as good exercise for your brain as playing silly games, with the added bonus that that you end up speaking it?

If I indulge myself with a copy of a weekend newspaper or a magazine, there is bound to be a section at the end with brain-training puzzles. If I’m sitting in my GP’s waiting room, if I’m sitting in an airport departure lounge, if I’m sitting on a bench waiting for a train, the people around me are no longer reading a good book or a magazine as they used to do. They are all staring at their smartphones playing puzzle games, for the good of their brains.

Sometimes it seems to me as if the entire middle-aged to elderly population of Britain is obsessed with the idea that if they don’t keep doing brain-training puzzles, they will inevitably develop Alzheimer’s. Am I the only person whose ageing brain is getting more than enough exercise trying to keep up with running my everyday life, using technology that is constantly changing and frequently malfunctions?

I have just had to buy a new laptop with Windows 11. I still haven’t figured out how to do all the things I did for years using Windows 10. Even worse, I spend a lot of time turning down offers to do things I don’t want to do at all. They pop up at odd moments all over the screen.

My banks are another rich source of brain-training. Some of them provide me with a paper certificate for the tax man if I go in and ask them. Some of them send me one online in a tiny format that I can’t read on my smartphone. I have to download it as a pdf, then take a screenshot of the pdf and email it to myself, save it, paste it into a word document and print it. I can just about manage to pay bills and transfer money using online banking, but anything more complicated means a trip into town to the local branch for some help, at least the first time I do it. If the bank closes that branch I shall have to change banks. Every so often they change the format in their app so I have to hunt all over for the bit I need. And banks keep on taking each other over.

I wanted to get into my account with my broadband provider. It displayed a message in one corner saying ‘BLOCKED’. I had to text my son to ask if this meant that someone had been trying to hack my account or whether it was probably just the website playing up. On another occasion Firefox blocked me from logging on to our local library’s website on the grounds that it was unsafe. Next day it was OK again!!!? I’m always horribly aware of the presence of hackers, scammers etc out there, just waiting for me to press the wrong button in an unwary moment, so this kind of thing really ups my stress levels.

And although my current electricity provider is the best I have ever had, my smart meter has been sending my bill in two halves, a week apart, for months. I have already written about the extensive research I had to do to understand how my smart meter worked.

Summer is not just a time for long sunny days in my garden. It’s the time for renewing my house and car insurance. I have to spend days carefully going through the documents emailed to me line by line to make sure that the person issuing them hasn’t made any typos that invalidate the insurance. Or made a mistake because they are new to the job and don't understand how to input some of the data onto their database. On one occasion I had to go to my garage and get them to telephone the insurance people and talk them through it. Yes, these things do happen. Remember that poor old lady who recently got prosecuted over a typo in her car insurance? My nightmares every year at renewal time are not unrealistic.

Train tickets, plane tickets, tickets for events all come online nowadays, and have to be downloaded to your smart phone so that a QR code or a bar code can be read at the entrance. Each one has to be downloaded in a slightly different way. I’m really surprised how well I have managed the recent examples – I didn’t need to scream for help. And I'm pretty good now at checking in for flights online, within the UK. When I tried to do it on a trip to Germany and they wanted me to include my passport photo, I had no idea how to do it and had to queue for hours at the airport.

The nearest person I can ask for help is 15 miles away in Kirkwall, at the computer shop. The only computer shop in the whole of Orkney. In the past, bills arrived by post, printed on paper. So long as you could read and write and do elementary arithmetic you could manage your household affairs. If there was something wrong with your bill you rang up. People complain nowadays about being kept hanging on in a 30-minute queue while the phone plays ghastly music to them. That’s after you have guessed which button to press in each of several sets to get to the department which will help you. Or not: the last time I tried ringing a company up I was answered by an AI which wasn’t working properly and kept sending me round in circles. In the past you didn’t have to navigate your way around a website that keeps changing its layout and periodically malfunctions, nor remember or store safely an infinite number of pin numbers and passwords. You didn’t have to have a smart phone so that you could do 2-factor authentication. I believe there is a way to do that without a smart phone but it sounds even more complicated. If I understood my friend's complaints right.

For those who are very familiar with modern technology, it is probably convenient to be able to pay your electricity bill on the train, or organise your house insurance during your coffee break. But I don’t suppose it is only the elderly who struggle constantly to deal with all this, lose money they can ill afford, and even end up in trouble with the law.

All in all, even though I never play the recommended games, I reckon my brain is getting enough training to keep it going even if I live to be a hundred and fifty years old.  Auf Wiedersehen!

I was going to write about food security again, but the piece I ended up with was so depressing that it kept me awake at night worrying about the situation. I therefore decided to give the subject a rest for a bit and try something quite different. I have always been fond of books and reading; when I was a child they called me a bookworm. At the moment there seems to be a lot of interest in reading and books in the news, and I remembered a delightful book I discovered a few years ago: “Blurb Your Enthusiasm: an A-Z of Literary Persuasion" by Louise Wilder (2022). The author was a professional writer of copy for book jackets. She had to hook a potential reader's interest in 150 or so words, describing what the book was about without giving away the ending. She was clearly extremely good at it. I like very short pieces of prose, or indeed poetry like haiku, where the writer can say something important or beautiful in the fewest possible well-chosen words. At the time, I tried writing a few blurbs for some of my favourite books, just for fun (I'm not claiming my efforts were any good, mind you). I decided that books might be a more cheerful subject for the time being, so here they are: some of my favourite books. I do recommend them.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austin (1813) (Of course)

Five sisters, whose nearest male relative is a distant cousin, desperately try to find themselves husbands before their father dies and leaves them in poverty. Under 19^th century English law an entailed family estate could not be inherited by a daughter, and upper-class girls had very little chance of earning a respectable living. Elizabeth Bennet’s beautiful dark eyes and sparkling wit as she dances her way through her own and her sisters’ courtship mask this harsh reality.

2. Martial’s Epigrams (CE 86 – 103) translation James Michie, Penguin Classics

Very short poems by a right-wing Roman misogynist, ranging from the pastoral through the risqué to the absolutely obscene. You have to admit that they are clever, even while you cringe.

3. The Pride of Chanur – C.J.Cherryh

What is it doing?

How do you talk to a life form whose brain is wired up so differently that its behaviour is incomprehensible?

Is it a he or a she? Or both? Or something else?

This and other questions are explored in this description of half a dozen species trying to interact in intergalactic space when they all have different languages, different cultures and different agendas.  (And some of them have six parallel brains). With a neat illustration of sexism thrown in.

4. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins (1859 – 60)

A young Victorian woman with money but no effective male protector is the victim of a particularly hideous form of identity theft.  Feel the fascination of the most delicious villain in literature as he winds her and her friends in his toils! Can the hero rescue her and foil the dastardly plot?

5. The Influential Mind – Tali Sharot (2017)

A manual by a well-qualified neuropsychologist on the unethical practice of using the latest scientific techniques to manipulate people. If you want to know why you are frittering your money away on things you don’t need, or voting for a government that is going to make your life hideous, this is the book for you.

6. The Kingis Quair (the King’s book) – James I of Scotland (15^th century)

It's springtime, and a captive Renaissance prince falls in love at first sight through the castle window. Patchy, but the good bits are well worth searching for. Oh, and you will have to look up some of the words, it’s written in Early Scots. But they are rather beautiful words and images.

7. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley (1932)

Do you want to see the world that modern politics is leading us to? Here it is. Children brainwashed into being compliant citizens as they sleep, recreational drugs to keep people docile provided by the state, humans beings bred in bottles to fill specific jobs – the perfect capitalist society.

8. Come, Tell me How You Live – Agatha Christie Mallowan (1946)

Gentle nostalgia – I just caught the very end of this era. British archaeology abroad seventy-nine years ago, when surveying was done with theodolites and photography meant spending hours in an improvised darkroom in an atmosphere of noxious chemicals. Archaeologists had to make the effort to learn the local languages because English had not yet spread worldwide, and it was accepted that you would spend at least a few days rushing between a stifling tent and a hole in the ground because of the local stomach bug. But the thrill of finding a small piece of brightly-coloured pottery at the bottom of a deep hole remains the same today.

(9) Dryden’s Translation of Virgil’s Aeneid  (1697)

Publius Vergilius Maro (70 BCE – 19 BCE), commonly known as Virgil, celebrates the destiny of Rome to rule the known world (and the divinity of the emperor Augustus) in this epic poem. A thrilling tale with plenty of battles, shipwrecks, gods and goddesses, and a trip to the Underworld, although the hero is rather nauseating. I suppose it shows me up as a total low-brow, but having been forced to read it in the original for a public exam, I would say that Dryden’s exquisite poetic style is much better than the original Latin.

(10) The Angry Chef – Anthony Warner (2017)

Or how not to be influenced by influencers, and it doesn’t just apply to trendy diets.  Anthony Warner, a biochemist turned chef, debunks many of the current wellness diets, providing a screamingly funny template for the influencers’ personal profiles. However, his message can apply to many other areas of pseudoscience as well. It does require the reading level of the average Guardian reader, especially the chapter on coconut oil and fatty acids (perhaps that’s just me) but it explains some useful scientific principles quite clearly. Anyone who did not get a biology A-level/Advanced Higher should get a copy at once.

I could suggest many more, but I think that's enough for now. Have fun!