Around the world

I had never heard the word “organoponico” until I got hold of a book by Monty Don, “Around the World in 80 Gardens” (BBC 2007). He had a chapter on them. Organoponicos were a form of urban farming developed in Cuba in response to a sudden devastating emergency. When Cuba became a communist state in 1959, agriculture was taken into the hands of the state.  Farming was mechanised and industrialised in the same way as in the Soviet Union. Cuba’s nearest neighbour, the United States, strongly objected to communism and set up a trade embargo which is still in place, and for many years Cuba traded mainly with the Soviet Union, exchanging sugar cane for practically everything else. The Cubans created a state whose excellent education and health services were acknowledged internationally, although the material goods which are considered a mark of success in Europe, such as private cars, shops, restaurants and cafes, were few and far between. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, their trade ended practically overnight and there were no more imported foods, medicines, fertilisers, or fuel. The population began to starve, especially in cities. Organoponicos were a response to this.

The Cubans began to concentrate on growing food for domestic consumption rather than export. They started growing food in allotments and city gardens. It was a community-led movement but supported by the government. Staple crops for calories were still grown in the countryside (remember WWII Britain) and people were encouraged to move from the city to the land, but fruit, vegetables and medicinal herbs were grown in these city gardens. Sage magazine reported in 2018 that around 350 square kilometres of ‘land’ in Havana – rooftops, balconies, communal spaces, derelict sites and parts of the green belt – had been converted into market gardens, and half of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the city were produced in these gardens and sold locally. The author of the article reported it as “the largest conversion from conventional to alternative, organic agriculture in the world’s history”.

It was a startlingly environmentally-friendly way of growing food by the standards of today. Since the Cubans couldn’t import fertilisers, they had to use organic methods such as composting. It was no longer possible to use hydroponics, which rely on chemicals added to the water the plants are rooted in.  Tools were mended, reused and recycled as long as possible, since they were so difficult to replace that nothing could be wasted. They could not use machinery as they could no longer import fuel, so they used human and animal labour, as they had done in the past. It was a very labour-intensive way of growing food, and many of the gardeners had to learn on the job, as they had never done any gardening before.  Most of them were volunteers, who worked for the food they grew and for the good of the community.

The results, as reported by Monty Don, were amazing: in 2005 over 90% of Havana’s fruit and vegetables were grown inside the city limits, in over 7000 separate organoponicos. Each garden had its own market stall. Some began to employ workers for wages as well as using community volunteers, and they started to process things like fruit juice and dried fruit. The gardens gave, and still give, local people access to inexpensive, fresh, healthy food, they give the workers a small but important share in the profits, the market stalls attached to each garden are a place for people to gather, and it has cut food miles drastically. Cuba still had to import some of its food, and there has been food rationing, but overall the method was a successful solution to a particular emergency and a fascinating experiment in organic farming.

Urban farming i.e. growing food within the boundaries of a city among the streets and buildings is a practice which goes back millennia, all over the world.  For centuries, many people in British towns had vegetable plots in their back gardens. Patrick Neill, in his “A Tour through some of the islands of Orkney and Shetland” 1806, pp 6-.7, visited Kirkwall and records that “What was formerly the palace garden is now rented in small patches, or hundreds (as much ground as will raise 100 cabbages) by the town’s people, who plant it with kitchen-stuffs…  In all the gardens which we had an opportunity of seeing at Kirkwall, artichokes were growing with uncommon luxuriance. Cabbages and cauliflowers were also in high perfection…” The idea has become increasingly popular recently, as the world population continues to rise in spite of all warnings, and cities take over more and more of the earth’s surface.

Some forms of urban farming, like the organoponicos, are linked to organic practices, encouragement of wildlife, community involvement, and the reduction of food miles. They are also places for city children to learn that food doesn’t actually originate in brightly-coloured plastic packets. Some urban market gardens include bee-keeping, and many include animals.  There are organisations in the UK for promoting city farms and community gardens, and there are now quite a large number of these. At the moment they tend to stress education, mental health and community engagement rather than being primarily for growing vitally-needed food. They come in all sizes, from quite large farms such as the 100-acre Lauriston Farm in NW Edinburgh, to a tiny project I particularly liked in Thurso (Caithness), where wooden tubs had been placed at intervals along a street and planted with herbs and vegetables. Passers-by were invited to help themselves. There is a similar project in Inverness alongside the river.

However, urban farming also has its industrialized, business-oriented side, some linked to the large supermarket chains. If you search the internet for “urban farming companies” you will get a long list of names. These use high-tech machinery, are AI -controlled, use artificial lighting, and hydroponics, where the plants are grown in water with nutrients added rather than in soil. Light levels, humidity and temperature are strictly controlled, and crop yields are high and dependable. The water can be recycled, and the lighting and heating can use LEDs and renewable energy. To save space, the hydroponic troughs can be stacked vertically on slow-moving machinery. These known as ‘vertical farms'.  Another form of hydroponic gardening is aquaponics, where the vegetables are grown in troughs flushed through with the waste water from tanks of fish, helping to clean the water for recycling while providing the vegetables with nutrients from the fish waste. Although it is as environmentally-friendly as possible, it is farming for profit by businesses, high-tech agriculture which employs few people. There is certainly going to be a place for it, but it seems to me that it has one crucial difference from organoponicos; it relies on trade links and long-distance transport. Do not tell me that that all the electronic components for the heat/light/humidity/machine controls, and all the AI equipment, all the parts for the greenhouses and conveyor belts, are manufactured in the UK, or even in Europe. If we suffered a sudden interruption to our international trade, as the Cubans did, urban hi-tech farming would become very difficult.

As of 2020, organoponicos were still an important part of agriculture in Cuba. They may not stand up forever to modern economic and social pressures. The idea is not popular among some political and business circles, for obvious reasons, and there is a will in some circles for it to fail. The relentless rise of the world’s population may be more than it can cope with successfully. But it remains an inspiring example of what can be done in an emergency. Just in case we end up facing one.

I first developed an interest in food security during the Covid pandemic. Living in a group of storm-lashed islands off the north-east coast of Scotland, I already knew that fruit and vegetables don’t always turn up on the shelves of Tesco whenever you want them. However, you knew they would get there when the wind dropped. During the pandemic, empty shelves in the supermarket didn’t happen only when winter gales stopped the container lorries crossing the Pentland Firth. Life without lettuce suddenly became a real possibility.

During lockdown I was shut up alone in my house for long periods and there wasn’t much I could do to pass the time except gardening, starting a blog and surfing the Internet. I’ve always done a bit of gardening, ever since I took over the family vegetable patch when my father got too old. I started to think more seriously about growing some of my own food.

I started to follow the Singapore National Parks board website during lockdown, mainly because I visited my son in 2017 when he was on a two years’ postdoc there. Also it had pretty pictures of the world I could no longer visit. Singapore is a city-state with an area of 719 square km, slightly smaller than Orkney which has an area of 990 square km. However, Singapore has a population density of 8,592 people per square km, while Orkney's population density is 22 people per square km. The Singapore government is making a great effort to grow as much of their own food as possible. Areas between the high-rise blocks of flats where most of the population live have been turned into communal gardens, gardens have been established on rooftops, people can apply for an allotment, and during lockdown everyone was entitled to a free flowerpot and a packet of seeds so that they could grow herbs and salad on balconies. There is excellent free gardening advice on their website.  All these measures apparently have the added benefit of bringing people together, combating social isolation and distrust between the different ethnic groups, and giving the elderly something useful to do, since many of the jobs involved can be done by the less able-bodied.

I also thought about the ‘Dig for Victory’ program in Britain during the Second World War. During WWII, Britain made a massive, sustained effort to grow more of its own food, to waste as little of it as possible, and to distribute it as fairly as possible by rationing. Winning the war required that not only servicemen but also civilians remained healthy. Both sides in the conflict attempted to starve the other into surrender by blockading merchant ships carrying food from outside Europe. The population of the UK was already too high to feed without importing a lot of food, but the aim was to produce as much as possible at home. Fortunately the measures taken worked, and although people were often hungry, Britain never experienced mass starvation as parts of Europe did.

At the start of WWII, the UK had a population of nearly 50 million people (“Wartime Farm” p16) and imported 70% of its food (“Wartime Farm” p.14), much of it from the British Empire or Commonwealth. Farming had been neglected during the inter-war years because the government priority was the financial sector, manufacturing and free trade (“Wartime Farm” p.16-17). Britain imported over 5 million tons of unground wheat plus 400,000 tons of flour and meal before the war (“Fighting Fit” p.180) i.e. 88% of our wheat and flour (“Wartime Farm” p.18). 50% of meat was produced in the UK but a large amount of feedstuffs were imported; all the milk and 94% of our potatoes were produced here, but only 9% of our butter and 16% of our sugar, oils and fats were home-produced (“Wartime Farm” p.18).

The authorities therefore adopted policies to maximise food production at home, and to prioritise certain food imports. They also made careful scientific analyses of how to maximise the benefits of the foods being imported. It was found more efficient for imports to contain more calorie-dense foods such as meat, eggs, etc as these took up less space in transit. (Fighting Fit p.203).  Farmers were directed to turn over as much land as possible to arable farming, and to concentrate on providing the maximum number of calories as efficiently as possible by growing grain and potatoes rather than animal feedstuffs. One acre of land could grow enough wheat to feed 21 people, but only enough meat for one person (Fighting Fit p.204). Not only were pastures ploughed up, but any available odd bits of land e.g. Windsor Great Park. They managed to increase the acreage of arable land from 12 million in 1939 to 18 million in 1944 (“Wartime Farm p.28). They could not, however, produce anywhere near the amount of grain required for the nation’s staple, bread.

The government introduced legislation to force bakers and millers to produce brown bread rather than white, made of high-extraction flour, i.e. flour where the wheat germ and bran were not extracted. This was not only more nutritious but you could get significantly more loaves of bread from the same amount of grain. It was a very unpopular measure, both with the public for reasons of taste and with the bakers and millers for reasons of profit, but it was enforced. The flour was fortified with extra vitamins and minerals to improve its nutritional value even further.

Market gardens grew vegetables instead of flowers.  Since feedstuffs for cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens were largely imported, meat and egg production took a major hit, but milk was still considered important. Hay and silage for dairy cattle came from any available land, such as roadside verges, railway embankments and churchyards.

The general public could not realistically grow enough of the staple foods which provided calories, but they were encouraged to grow their own vegetables – “Dig for Victory” – and given instructions on how to do so. They were also taught how to control pests, how to save seed for next year, and how to preserve what they had grown. If you are growing vegetables seriously, this is just as important as knowing when to stick which seeds into the ground. One problem during wartime was that sugar was rationed, so that it was less easy to preserve fruit as jam. Pre-war most sugar came from imported sugar-cane, but now over 95% came from home-grown sugar beet. Various ways around this were suggested, such as jam recipes including salt or saccharine. People were encouraged to keep bees to offset the sugar shortage. People were also told how to dry vegetables such as apples, or store them carefully.

Children were encouraged to forage for wild fruits and nuts.  Although they didn’t usually collect enough to make a whole meal, they could make a significant contribution to meals based on other ingredients. Children also collected rosehips, which were made into syrup to provide vitamin C for children since citrus fruits were largely unavailable.

Farms in those days relied less on machinery, so there was a shortage of labour for growing food when most of the able-bodied males were serving in the armed forces. As well as supplying as many tractors and combine harvesters as possible, the government recruited women as “Land Girls”. At that point, women in Britain were not expected to do this sort of work, although in other times and places it was perfectly normal for women to work in the fields.

Rationing of staple foods such as meat and fish was introduced. People were expected to fill up, i.e. get most of their calories, from brown bread and potatoes. They were encouraged to eat potatoes rather than bread, as these did not have to be imported, although potatoes were not a totally reliable crop. Nevertheless, the diet of the poor (70% of the population) was enormously improved during the war, and the massive health divide between rich and poor was much reduced. Temporarily – after the war Britain returned to the state where poverty was linked to poor diet (Fighting Fit p.210-211). As indeed we have seen recently.

Today Britain has a population of just over 69 million and we import a large percentage of our food. Food produced in Britain includes most of our cereals, meat, dairy products and eggs. Less of our fruit and vegetables (17% and 55% respectively) are produced in Britain, due to climate, seasonality, and the preferences of both consumers and producers. Tomatoes are one of the most popular vegetables in Britain, but most are imported, especially during the winter.  The UK also imports vast quantities of lettuce. However, even domestic food production and distribution is reliant on imported products such as fertiliser and packaging, so it is not immune to supply chain problems.  And farmers have recently been complaining about a shortage of labour at harvest time.  Weather, pandemic disease, political changes and war have all recently meant that we can't rely on having all the imported fruit and vegetables we have become accustomed to. Maybe it's time to think ahead about how we cam become more self-sufficient?

“Fighting Fit: the Wartime Battle for Britain’s Health”  Laura Dawes 2016

“Wartime Farm” Peter Ginn, Ruth Goodman, Alex Langlands 2012

It’s early November. Winter has come, and the gardening season is over. My tiny vegetable patch is going to sleep. It’s been a good year, in spite of a poor growing season: I’ve eaten fresh potatoes, handfuls of peas, ruby chard, abundant parsley and mint. I still have a small patch of leeks. My only real disappointment has been my new strawberry plants. Beautiful plump scarlet fruits, but when I turned them over, every single one had been hollowed out underneath. Not by slugs, but by woodlice. Do woodlice eat strawberries? Oh yes!

 I think that the most important thing I have finally learned from growing my own vegetables is that every few years your entire crop of a particular plant will fail, even if it has done really well previously. You can make it less likely to happen, and you can prepare for it by planting a variety of crops, but you can’t stop it happening entirely. You just have to learn to put up with it. The history of agriculture is the history of a perpetual struggle. There have always been pests, from birds to potato blight. The images in medieval manuscripts such as the Luttrell Psalter of monstrous birds stealing seed corn from a sack, or boys in the fields scaring birds with slings, are replaced today by photos of thousands of greylag geese sitting smugly in the barley fields of Orkney, which they have just stripped bare. Local farmers have to be given a licence to shoot a specified number of the birds every year. During the mid-19^th century (1845-52), a fungus-like disease called Phytophthora infestans – late blight – destroyed much of the potato crop in Europe. In Ireland, where for political and economic reasons a large proportion of the population were dependent on potatoes as their staple food and no-one intervened to help them, millions starved to death or were forced to emigrate. Scotland was badly hit as well. I have had to give up planting Brussels sprouts or indeed any brassicas, after two really good years, because somehow my vegetable patch has become infected with clubroot. The sprouts stood up to a plague of caterpillars but the virus defeated them. At least nowadays we know what causes it.

The Romans, who didn't know why these things happened, depended heavily on divine intervention. Their staple crop was wheat, and they had a large number of minor gods and goddesses to protect their crops at every stage from sowing to storage, including protection from diseases. A favourite of mine is Robigus who protected wheat from diseases, especially wheat rust, a nasty fungal disease. There are several kinds of wheat rust, the commonest being Puccinia triticina, wheat leaf rust. (Wheat rust still causes significant crop losses world-wide, but scientists have apparently identified a gene which facilitates wheat rust and are hoping to turn it off.) Robigus had his own festival on April 25th, the Robigalia, at which a dog was sacrificed. According to Ovid’s Fasti, the dog represented the Dog Star, Sirius. The weather at the rising of the Dog Star tended to be hot and dry and crops ripened too soon, which the Romans believed made them susceptible to wheat rust (Ovid, Fasti 4.905 – 941).

The most effective way to kill insects, fungi and viruses is to drench your crops in powerful pesticides. However we now realise that soaking your food and your fields in toxic chemicals carries its own dangers, even if it is more effective than sacrificing a dog. If you are a commercial market gardener, however, dependent on the requirements of a supermarket chain to remain in business, you may not have much choice about using chemical pesticides and fertilisers. Don’t forget that supermarket chains feed most of the population nowadays, so we are all involved.

Anyway, pesticides don’t always work. Take slugs, for example. I remember one year after I had taken over my father’s vegetable patch and was trying to grow potatoes, perpetual spinach and French beans. I had a friend who was into organic gardening, so I tried to protect my plants from slugs by encircling them with coffee grounds, crushed eggshells and collars cut from plastic bottles. One set of neighbours invested in expensive nematodes which were supposed to kill slugs the ‘natural’ way. The old gentleman on the other side used the traditional blue slug pellets full of who-knows-what chemicals. All our crops got eaten, without exception. The sight of three rows of potatoes entirely stripped of their leaves, when they had done brilliantly in previous years, discouraged me so much that I gave up growing anything for years. The only thing I have ever found to have any effect on slugs whatsoever is little saucers of beer (I usually cheer myself up by drinking the other half of the bottle, so even if it doesn’t stop the slugs it’s not a total write-off).

Companion planting is another non-toxic method of pest control which I use. I always plant marigolds and nasturtiums among my vegetables. I can’t remember which vegetables they are supposed to protect from pests, or indeed whether they really do anything, but they certainly look pretty and they are self-seeding. My habit of dotting my onion sets around my containers is supposed to help as well. I have just learned that planting onions, leeks or chives among your strawberries is supposed to deter pests. I’ll try it.

The sobering thought in all this is that if you are currently gardening as an amateur in the UK, you can always go down to the supermarket and buy a bag of potatoes or beans. If you have a bad year, it’s disappointing but you won’t starve. But if you are dependent on what you grow for staying alive, it’s another story. You had better have a surplus stored from a previous year, or good neighbours who will share.

There are some services which are essential, in the UK at least. Access to the emergency services via a telephone or a personal alarm. Electricity for cooking, lighting, heating – most forms of heating need electricity to run the pump and controls, even if they are gas-fired, oil-fired, or heat pumps. Banking – it is now impossible to function without a bank account. There are services which you may not be using, but where you still need to deal with the paperwork, like television licences. All of them are now provided by privately run companies. You have to decide for yourself which company is trustworthy and will give you the best value. You have to sign up with the company, and pay for them regularly. Then there are constant mistakes which you, the customer, are responsible for dealing with. This is becoming increasingly difficult, because in order to save money and maximise profits for the shareholders, more and more of these services have to be accessed remotely, either online or by telephone. And this is not always easy or even possible. Often, it doesn't work.

Living on the fringes

Most of the decisions being made by companies about how their services will be accessed are made by people living in big cities. They clearly do not understand that in many areas of the British Isles, services which they take for granted are not available. For example, I live in the Orkney Islands, off the north-east coast of Scotland. A large number of people don’t even know where the Orkney Islands are. I have been asked in a post office in London if they were part of the UK. Recently, I had to change my mobile phone, broadband and electricity suppliers. All of these changes were prompted by an update in technology which is barely supported by the telecommunications in Orkney.

Digital Voice is a good example. All landline telephones are currently being changed to Voice over Internet Protocol or Digital Voice, for good and sufficient reasons. But Digital Voice “landlines” use broadband and don’t work during a power cut. And we get a lot of power cuts, often quite long ones. And large areas of Orkney have no mobile phone signal at all. You can look this up on the Ofcom website. I am not living in an isolated croft with no neighbours – I am not that stupid at the age of seventy-four. I live in a village, the third largest settlement in the island group. Until a year ago, the western half of my village had no useful mobile phone signal. My neighbours did report that they could usually get a couple of bars if they hung out of an upstairs window. I could get a signal by walking down to the beach 50 metres away, unless the weather was stormy (which it often is up here), when the signal disappeared. It didn’t matter because I used my landline when I was at home. So how does an old lady living alone call an ambulance or the fire brigade during a four-hour power cut if she can’t get a mobile phone signal? Fortunately one of the companies has improved its signal, so I switched providers and can now use my smartphone inside my house. I also changed broadband supplier to a company which appeared to have planned the switch better than my old one.

I have also changed my electricity supplier because I have storage radiators and needed to have a smart meter installed. They are discontinuing the radio signal which has controlled the off-peak electricity supply up till now. Many people in Orkney who have had smart meters installed have found that they do not work, because they cannot get a signal. I therefore changed to a company which has a better reputation regarding bills from smart meters than the old one. There are some scary stories out there about people having their bank accounts emptied without warning because the technology wasn’t working. Getting the money back can be a big problem unless you are a celebrity. Finding out which of these stories are true proved to be difficult. Nearly everyone I asked locally was dead scared of having a smart meter. When I get mine, I'll let you know!

You can’t get through to them

All of these changes have required multiple phone calls and emails. None has gone smoothly. I have spent hours on the telephone, pressing first one series of buttons and then another, waiting for 20 minutes or so with silly music playing. I then had to try to communicate with an operator in the face of crackling phone lines, a thick accent, and background noise from an open-plan office. And what about the times you are put on hold while they redirect your phone call to the right department, you hang on for half an hour and then the phone goes dead? Or you wait in a queue, only to be told to ring a different number, and when you finally get through after waiting in the queue yet again, you are told to ring the first number again? Often you have to contact the company over and over again, before you can get through to someone who understands what the problem is, and how to put it right. Frequently it appears that the database on which my records were stored has got scrambled up somehow. I already HAVE high blood pressure, thank you very much! In the past you could go into an office and speak face-to-face with a human being, who could liaise on the spot with someone more experienced if the problem was beyond them. But the offices are gradually being closed down.

The alternative is to do it online. My experience with attempting to book hotel rooms, train tickets, and flights has discouraged me from even trying to do this. And from what I have heard, many other people, including people of working age who are trying to sort things during their tea break or on their commute home, have trouble with this. Some websites are just badly designed or “not working properly that day, please try again later”. Sometimes you cannot do it yourself, you have to have help from someone trained to understand how the system works, even what technical terms to use. I am happy to send in my meter readings, pay bills, and buy a few things via Amazon, but the thought of trying to sort out a serious mistake online seems quite unrealistic to me.

And I really hate the recorded suggestions you get at the beginning of every phone call, suggesting that you should go online instead of waiting to speak to an operator. If I wanted to do that I wouldn’t be making a phone call.

There is no help available

Many companies don’t have engineers in remote areas like the Orkney Islands, or their engineers only come here intermittently. Often there is no local technical person you can pay to help. Finding out who is the right person to ask for accurate information is often very difficult. When I first heard about the Digital Voice changeover, nobody seemed to know what to do if you could not use a mobile phone for backup during a power cut. I had to write to my MP and he found out who I should be speaking to. I recently wanted to find out what sort of signal smart meters used, and whether it was available in my village. An internet search gave me a totally misleading impression of how smart meters work. Especially the AI generated answer. And I rang all sorts of local organisations and nobody had any idea, nor even any idea who to ask. I only found out when I changed electricity suppliers and they told me what signal their meters used.

Many organisations offering services, such as banks, are now legally barred from giving you any advice about what decision to make. You are supposed to get ‘independent’ advice. Where from? Not all charities have people available who are capable of giving it on particular services (one charity has recently told me, twice, that they didn’t know anything about my problem). How on earth is an old lady with no previous experience supposed to make an informed decision?

The most vulnerable are affected most

These problems impact unfairly on the most vulnerable in society, the elderly, the disabled and the poor. Can you imagine trying to fight your way through all this if you are severely dyslexic? Suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome? Being treated for depression or anxiety? On the sort of income which takes people to food banks? Let alone if you are elderly and have hearing or sight problems. And being poor means that every mistake which these companies make can be a catastrophe, since if they overcharge you, you can’t afford to wait for them to repay you.

As for the IT skills which the elderly famously lack, going on a six-week course on basic ‘how to use the internet’ for the elderly doesn’t give you the ability to solve specific problems as they come up. Being of working age means that your employer is likely to keep you up to speed with the latest major changes, and you can always lean across to the person in the next desk and say “How do you do this?” We used to do this when I was still working, and I really miss it.

It’s a mockery to suggest that people can be enabled to ‘live independently’ under these conditions. Since there are no longer enough carers and social workers to go round, due to public service funding cuts, it means that family members or friends have to fill the gap. Assuming they have the time and the skills themselves of course.  If you don’t have anyone capable nearby, you are in trouble. And not everyone is up to writing to their MP or ringing up Trading Standards.

What kind of society are we living in?

It is time-consuming, frustrating, highly stressful, exhausting, even frightening at times, trying to make sure that you are not cut off from essential services these days, or lose half your savings. What kind of society are we living in, when our most vulnerable members are being made to struggle so hard to do so?

It’s been an unusual beginning to the year in Orkney. We have had the worst weather in years. In the middle of January we had five days of snow, a rapid thaw which flooded the fields and the roads, followed by strong gales. And power cuts of course. Mid-February and it’s more of the same. The snowdrops are out – under another 6 inches of snow which is due to last for 5 days.

Orkney is used to coping with winter. Everyone knows there will be power cuts lasting for hours, and that they need to have an alternative source of heat, either oil-fired central heating or a backup stove burning wood or coal. (Sorry, Environment, adequate affordable storage batteries are not available yet, I did enquire). Other essentials are a camping gas stove, tinned food, and an LED lantern or candles. A mobile phone is a must, plus a battery charger to call the emergency services when the internet and the landline phones go down. Tough luck, of course, if you have no mobile phone signal in your area, which many of us don't. Oh, and a battery-powered radio to keep in touch with the situation. People are very good about keeping an eye on elderly friends, relations and neighbours, and fetching milk and prescriptions for those who can’t get out. The council snow ploughs are pretty efficient up here, and the farmers are brilliant about helping out, using their tractors as snow ploughs, even taking the district nurse to an elderly patient in a tractor when her car got stuck.

There are problems, of course. When the weather is this bad the ferries and planes are unable to run, so essential medical supplies and visiting medical specialists can’t get here. People can’t get to hospital appointments for which they have been waiting for months, not just appointments at hospitals off-island, but appointments at the local hospital too. Fresh food can’t get through – the butcher in Stromness had to close at one point because their freezer was empty. Even Tesco has been running short of fresh fruit and vegetables, let alone the Outer Isles community shops. The ferries from the Outer Isles have to be cancelled, so do bus services during the worst periods, and the Churchill Barriers have been closed much more often than usual, so people who don’t live on Mainland haven’t been able to get to Kirkwall. Schools have to close, of course.

But think about what people had to put up with in the past. There was no electricity, and imported coal and oil did not arrive until the 19C. In the past most people in Orkney relied on peat, but the poorest people couldn’t afford it. They could only light a temporary fire to cook their food, and their homes went largely unheated throughout the coldest weather. Orkney has had no trees for millennia, and they scavenged brushwood, heather stems, and other bits and pieces such as seaweed and animal dung (see A. Fenton “Country Life in Scotland: our rural past” 2008 pp82-3).  Orkney in 2024 has one of the worst levels of fuel poverty in the UK, we pay far more for our electricity than most of the rest of Britain, and with the rise in fuel prices the poorest are already in dire trouble. Food banks have to supply electricity vouchers as well as the food itself. But most people do have electricity, even if many now have to be very careful with it.

In the past in the Highlands and Islands, the houses of even quite well-to-do people were built of unmortared stones with earth floors that quickly turned to mud when it was wet. Some houses were even built entirely of turf. In Orkney, stones were placed under the feet of furniture if the soil was damp to prevent rot (John Firth 1974 “Reminiscences of an Orkney Parish” p13). There were often no windows, and no chimneys. Men and women in Orkney sat in tall straw-backed chairs which protected them from draughts but were low to the ground. The smoke from the hearth escaped through a hole in the thatched roof, placed to one side of the fire so that rain or snow didn’t put it out. A lot of the smoke didn’t escape at all, but hung just above the level of people’s heads when they were sitting down. Sore eyes were very common. And the houses were very damp. In wet weather, liquid soot often ran down the walls and dropped off the roof (Firth 1974 p13). Nowadays big efforts are being made to insulate houses, but there are still many people living in picturesque old cottages without adequate insulation or heating. Even in modern insulated houses like mine, condensation and mould are constant problems. There’s a big market for de-humidifiers.

James Omand in “Orkney Eighty Years Ago” which describes life c.1830 talks about men wearing straw leggings. These were wound around their lower legs to keep them warmer and drier. There was no plastic for waterproof Wellington boots and macs. Samuel Johnson (page 41) talks of “brogues” made of rawhide or poorly-tanned leather, stitched so loosely that they protected the feet from stones but not from water. Presumably these are the same as the “rivlins” of the Northern Isles. Indeed, in 18^th and 19^th century Scotland many people went barefoot even in the worst weather (Dorothy Wordsworth “Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D.1803”).  Are we a load of wimps nowadays?

We may have problems getting our laundry dry in this sort of weather, but at least we can do it indoors and use a washing machine. Burt (“Letters from the North of Scotland 1794” page24) describes seeing women in Inverness doing laundry in freezing cold weather by stamping on it in tubs of water down by the river, barefoot and with their clothes tucked up, and their feet and legs red with cold. And we don’t have to go out to the cowshed or a hut at the bottom of the garden if we need the loo, either.

While supermarket shelves may be half empty for a few weeks and stocks of meat and fresh vegetables running low, at least we are not reduced to drinking the blood of our cattle. I.F.Grant (“Highland Folk Ways” 1961 p300) records that in a bad winter people used to bleed their stalled cattle and boil up the blood with oatmeal. Burt (pages 204-6) also records this practice, and says that bleeding combined with insufficient winter feeding weakened the cattle so much that they couldn’t stand up and had to be lifted by groups of neighbours.

When I think of conditions in the 18^th and 19^th centuries in the north of Scotland, I feel ashamed to have been grumbling about being stuck in a warm house for a week. Although it should not be forgotten that there is a fast-growing minority who are being forced back into these conditions by current economic policies, most of us should remember that things could be a lot worse.