Around the world

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.

Limpets and jellyfish, cockles and mussels, oysters and snails… They have gone from being famine food or the food of the poor to expensive delicacies for recherché feasts. They may even become the staple foods of the future.

Before the comparatively recent arrival of modern industrial farming and global transport systems, famine was a constant possibility in Europe, as it still is over much of the world. Only the most privileged did/do not have to worry about starving to death. Farmers watched the sky and their fields and livestock, and prayed to a multitude of gods in an attempt to guard against bad weather and disease wiping out their crops and herds. The brutal demands of unscrupulous landlords for excessive rent and labour often made matters worse. Nowadays , we have the growing realisation that there are too many people for the planet to support in the way we are used to, and food in the future may be very different from today. Invertebrates may be the key to survival, as they have been for millennia in difficult situations. Invertebrates are animals without backbones, about 95% of all animals. This includes cockles and mussels and oysters and limpets.

It is weird to think that many of the foods scavenged in the wild by starving peasants or hunter-gatherers in marginal environments have become much-prized delicacies, or suggested as a possible source of protein for the future. In Orkney, limpets (Patella vulgata) grow on every rock. Limpets were normally used as fish bait but were eaten as ‘famine food’ in bad years. They are considered to be quite nutritious, although rather chewy. Yet in some parts of the world limpets are regarded as a delicacy. On the island of Madeira, they actually have a limpet festival, where the shellfish are served grilled in their shells and flavoured with garlic and lemon.  

I cannot imagine why anybody would want to eat snails (Helix pomatia) if they weren’t starving. I found them just like small pieces of chewing gum in a strong garlic sauce. I wouldn’t serve them at my feast. I would feed them to my pig and roast the pork. Flora Thompson in ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’, Penguin Modern Classics 1973, Chapter I page 24, mentions being sent out to collect snails to fatten the family pig. However, snails have been popular treats for millennia. One of my favourite letters by the Roman writer Pliny the Younger was to his friend Septitius Clarus, who hadn’t turned up to a dinner invitation. It mentions snails as one of the hors d’oevres he had missed. Mind you, the Romans considered sows’ udders and boiled parrot to be delicacies, so one wonders about their tastes.

When Charles Dickens was writing his novels commenting on life in 19^th century London, oysters  (Ostrea edulis) were the food of the poor, in fact, according to his character Sam Weller in the Pickwick Papers, eating oysters was a clear sign of poverty. Oysters are now an expensive treat. Wild oyster stocks have been depleted and we have to farm them, as indeed the Romans did. There is also an interesting debate at the moment about whether vegans can eat oysters and mussels because they don’t have a central nervous system, or whether the concentrations of nerve tissue in various parts of their bodies count as a brain. 

And finally (for now), the most obviously invertebrate of all invertebrates is the jellyfish. When I read in a historical novel about people in 16^th century Japan eating jellyfish, I wasn’t sure whether the author was making it up. But my son was offered fried jellyfish as a special treat while on holiday in Malaysia. He said they didn’t taste of much but they looked like scrambled egg, and he clearly enjoyed them. They remind me of the description of human beings by an alien life form in a Star Trek episode: “big ugly bags of mostly water”. Somehow I don’t think that the future of human nutrition lies with jellyfish!

It’s August, and many people are going on holiday. Some of them will be seeking sunshine, sea and sand in the countries south of Britain. Some of them will be culture vultures, visiting interesting historical sites and taking selfies in front of the ruins. Some of them will be having a staycation in Britain, seeking to calm their psyche by spending time in wild places and getting the benefits of fresh air and solitude, as counselled by many a celebrity blogger and women’s magazine.

Well, they are all out of luck. Planet Earth is groaning under the numbers of humans. The climate has changed and it isn’t safe to go out in the sun around the Mediterranean this summer. Cruise liners now disgorge thousands of passengers at a time at famous cities. Those who go ashore don't get to meet the locals, who are all staying at home to avoid the crowds. They have to shuffle shoulder to shoulder with their fellow sightseers for an hour to get close enough to the historic object to actually see it, let alone take a picture of it. And the wild spaces of places like Scotland are now stuffed full of camper vans (so are their town car parks).

Don’t blame me. I told you so. Fifty years ago. It was clear to me half a century ago, when I was in my twenties, that the world population was rising too fast to be safe. I joined a charity known as “Population Countdown” and we tried to get people to think about it, but to no avail. In 1973 the world population was 4 billion; in 2023 it is 8 billion. Or if you prefer it, in 1973 there were 26 people per km² and now there are 54 people per km².

The result is exactly as predicted: global warming, rising sea levels, changes in weather which are wrecking harvests, flooding low-lying areas and turning marginal farmlands into deserts. Famine, plagues and war over scarce resources are historical constants, only this time we have brought it on ourselves. Like the covid pandemic, we were told it was going to happen, but we refused to listen.

And people still refuse to listen. Not just those who are only concerned with short-term profit or who are simply so woefully ignorant that they cannot understand that yes, it really is happening. There are plenty of well-intentioned folk who believe that becoming vegans and turning down the heating two degrees will do the trick by itself. When I have raised the subject I have met with reactions ranging from an embarrassed silence to quivering hostility. It just isn’t done to speak of it in many respectable middle-class circles.

Eating more plants is a very good idea. Condoms are an even better one.

PS If you want to know more about it, Population Matters have a good website.