Ferry nice

I do like a ferry. Less so Bryan Ferry, especially since his excrutiating assassination of Dylan songs. I think I was annoyed from an early age by journalists’ description of him as suave, well dressed, style icon etc, largely on the grounds that he wore a suit when he sang. See also Robert Palmer. Although I do like to entertain my mind once in a while by imagining that Isla St Clair married him having previously been wife of Barry White, therefore becoming Isla White Ferry. Which is one ferry I’ve yet to travel on, assuming there is such a thing. I am now anticipating a comment from a ferry spotter who will inform me that the ‘…mainland to Isle of Wight transportation facility is not, technically speaking, a ferry: ferries, according to Huskin’s Guide of 1932 should be no less that 13 cubits in lengh and 3 poles across. It is, I think you’ll find, correctly termed a barge’.

Odd things happen on ferries. 24 years ago I’m sat on the ferry, a little nervous for no reason when a chap sits next to me and starts up a conversation. I recognise him from the bars of my hometown. Sat within a foot of me I am able to become fully acquainted with his tattoos. A couple catch the eye: The Police (an approximation of the cover for Outlandos D’Amour), and Mike Hallett. For those of you have have been living on another planet, Mike Hallett was, very possibly still is, a snooker player, briefly ranked 6th best in 1989. A perfectly solid if unremarkable player, he had the look of a man who ironed his pants, his paisley pants. In the twenty-odd years since, I have yet to see another Mike Hallett tattoo.

The joy of flying is one I only partially embrace, so a few times a year I have the pleasure of a ferry. Last weekend, to Ireland. I haven’t been to Ireland in many years, love it though I do. Last time I ate a lot of chips, the time before I had the mixed blessing of seeing Noel Redding play in a pub on Boxing Day. Mixed, because it was Noel Redding after all but he was playing an acoustic guitar in a manner that recalled my dad’s approach to wrestling the washing from an overstuffed machine. He had the voice of a goat, although marginally superior to that of the lady at his side. Luckily stout was at hand and in quantities appropriate to Boxing Day and a work-free life.

Happily a couple of days later, The Waterboys at the peak of their powers in Dublin, on the run in to New Year, reset the musical imbalance. Almost interestingly, I have only ever met one other person who was at that gig and that is Michael Kelly*, founder of GIY, who I met at the weekend, in Waterford, which was my home for four days and three days.

Peculiarly, the crossing passed with little incident and I saw no pixies or leprechauns on the hour and a bit drive from port to hotel.

I went for the fourth GIY Gathering, held as part of the Waterford Harvest Festival. It was one of those remarkable weekends that revives your enthusiasm, reminds you of the value of doing something.

Allotments are uncommon in Ireland and the grow your own food movement in general not established in the same way as it is on this side of the Irish Sea. Michael spotted this just four years ago when he got the bug and from a standing start fired up GIY. In that short time it has become something very special. And, crucially, very different to what we have in the UK.

Here we see edible gardening as the ugly sister of ornamental growing, the hard working, dull relative. We separate people – you are a gardener or a cook, you are a practical writer or someone who blathers on about the bigger picture. Fun is infrequent.

The topic of how we eat and where our food comes from belongs largely to celebrity chefs and a handful of others such as Sheila Dillon and Tim Lang. We seem to be either lifestyled into desiring just-so food or it’s into the heavier stuff – policy and sustainability.  If you grow something to eat it is because you favour braces or don’t get along with your partner.

Not so in Ireland.

Perhaps it is the lack of a deep history of domestic food growing as a movement that allows Ireland its freedom – the weight of history can be a tyre around the ankle rather than the fuel for motion. Sometimes it just takes a person to put the obvious in place then everyone follows. Either way, what GIY is doing is different and we should wake up to it.

There seems no distinction between gardeners and cooks, those who spend time honing horticultural techniques while others work on setting up global food networks – it is an automatic assumption that if you do something connected with food then you are in the Food World. You are part of the debate. You needn’t have competitions with other cooks to qualify. Food is treated as a plot to plate thing, indivisible.

Look at those involved at the weekend: Roger Doiron, the man who ‘encouraged’ the Obamas to plant an edible garden at the White House; Pete Russell, who kicked off the OOOBY movement in New Zealand; Darina Allen from Ballymaloe; Paul Clarke the man behind Incredible Edible and Pop-Up Farm; Klaus Laitenberger possessor of the second finest hybrid accent, after Jan Molby; daughter of PaulineAlys Fowler; Joy Larkcom, without whom we’d be eating all kinds of duller salads for a start; and Ella McSweeney** who seems to know all there is to know about everything from farming to doping in sport (we decided that yep, we’d shoot whatever for a medal. Maybe). And many other people besides.

Everything there from making sauerkraut to global schools food networks.

What do we have in the UK? Some great things – Garden Organic among them – but nothing that throws the food world open along its whole spectrum. Without that we may get the odd campaign, the odd veg patch in a school, better food labeling maybe. I’m not sure that’s ambitious enough.

Isn’t the idea for everyone to have access to better food, to want better food, to enjoy cooking better meals? If you are relatively untroubled by money shortages, chances are you learn a wide range of recipes from someone with big tits, someone who’s pretending that if x isn’t completed by 5.30 today something awful will happen and/or someone who used to be famous at something else. It’s not that I’m against big tits (I am one after all) or models cooking….just a little variety and less of a split between growing and cooking would be a huge step forward. There are exceptions of course, Trish Deseine and Xanthe Clay have both written recently asking for the issue of food and how we eat, watch and shop for it to be widened a little, but will their thoughts and ideas be supported by the media and allowed to reach a wider audience?

Who’s helping us grow a little of that food? Who’s helping those relatively troubled by money shortages to dodge dreadful food? Are we all addicted to seeing someone in a house we can’t afford, in a kitchen we’d cover in tea stains in an hour, putting together a meal between visits from their personal trainer? Do none of us care where that food comes from?

Maybe that stuff is boring. It needn’t be, as last weekend showed.

So I’m inordinately excited as I have had a glimpse of how it could be here in the UK.

Disclaimer: I am a patron of GIY. But I am relatively incapable of enthusing about the ordinary, although I do remember really going on about the first Franz Ferdinand album for about five minutes before playing Gang of Four again and reminding myself not to get so excited about tribute bands.

We need an organisation that welcomes and encourages new growers and gardeners, that draws in anyone interested or involved in food, that demands a voice and takes action in the move towards a better food future. GIY may well be it.

I do happen to think that growing even one thing you eat is the shortcut to things happening.

Michael Pollan wrote a truly brilliant piece in the Guardian a couple of years ago. Please do find a moment to read it.

He nails why growing even a little of what you eat can be unimaginably powerful. As well as the food itself, it throws your brain open to the reasons why it tastes so good, why it is ready to eat when it is. It releases your tie to multinational food a little – it says ‘I’m independent’ in a shouty voice. You aren’t waiting for someone else to start solving a broken food system. It makes food part of what you do rather than just what you eat. It might even allow it to become part of who you are.

It also dissolves the split between how you feel and how you act. This is crucial: politicians rarely lead, they respond within a range of possibilities that they feel will get them (re)elected. They are more likely to do something if they feel it is popular.

A few pots of herbs is enough to change every meal you eat. That’s it – you don’t need an allotment or some cutesy balcony in an exotic European capital. It doesn’t have to take time or be hard work. Although it can be if you fancy.

Even those few pots link you up with the seasons, wipes the illusion of eternal supermarket summer, reminds us that rosemary (or celeriac, or…) in winter is no less delicious than basil (or tomatoes, or…) in summer.

Wait until this winter and check out the bill for your supermarket shop. It is a trailer for the future. Even without this year’s shortages brought about by rain and lack of sun here and the reverse in the US and elsewhere, food prices are flying. Resources such as oil and phosphate, on which much of our food is produced, are past their peak, water is under ever more pressure, the soil increasingly depleted. It takes around 9 units of energy to produce food that will give us one unit of energy.

As The Stranglers said, something better change. Maybe everything. And with oil and phosphate going as they are, we have only a choice about whether to lead it or be led.

GM has never lived up to its billing, so let’s not start on that nonsense, even if the push for it increases. We have no lack of food globally, just a system skewed so as to make it look like we have. Inequality of access and inequality of suffering are the problems. Boring isn’t it/aren’t I.


If you ar reading this you almost certainly have access to food and energy. It almost certainly comes at somebody else’s expense. If you can eat better food and do so in a way that wakes us up to what is happening as a result then it will be a huge step to a fairer, better food system. I’m boring myself now.

I promise I’m not playing Joni Mitchell while I write this. Talk Talk actually***.

So, at last, a food organisation that belongs to cooks, growers, farmers, nosy sods, policy makers, activists, that acts as an umbrella for novices and experts, that encourages collaboration, international networking, big thinking and action.

And do you know what: all those people, all those ideas, and all those opposing views (don’t be thinking it was a big love in) and none of that competitive horseshit that plagues the food/gardening media in this country.

Inexplicably we don’t have such a thing in the UK. We soon will.

Or we could gather in our separate rooms as we do at the moment and presume that which ever room we’re in knows more than those in the rest of the house.

Like many, I wondered how a GIY organisation might hope to cross the Irish Sea when we’ve been doing it forever but I now have no doubt it will happen. It will happen because they have it right where we do not.

And it’s an invitation to everyone to add something themselves.

 

 

* Michael has the look of someone who has just done something they shouldn’t – in this case he had consumed a basinful of ale in relief at the first day passing without hitch.

** Ella hosted the weekend, and in launching the event set the tone by announcing that her first taste (astwere) of me was my insufferable cock. We finished the day in the pub, very loud band playing. As I am a gentleman, I won’t tell what the topic of conversation was but the music cut without warning just as Ella said very loudly ‘TINY COCK’ across a now quiet bar. Tumbleweed, Walter Brennan walking out of swinging doors and much shuffling of feet. My year was made.

*** That’s not actually true. I WAS listening to Talk Talk (the one with literally the finest harmonica playing there ever was) , but I AM actually listening to Joni. Blue and Hejira back to back as it goes. And perfect they are to, so sod ya, hippybashers.

  • Nothing wrong with a bit of Talk Talk, still a regular on my player (I loves that Mark Hollis solo one too). Anyway, I wasn’t going to talk about music, I was going to tell you to lay off the Isle of Wight ferry jokes! Cheeky bugger. I’ve spent many many hours spiriting away the time on those boats, are you waving a red rag at me?!

  • Good piece, Mark, very thought-provoking. Here in France the situation seems to be slightly less serious than in the UK, though I feel the next generation doesn’t care about any of it. Hence I am practically forcefeeding these notions to my 3 boys!

  • Interesting and thought provoking. Never did understand why Brian Ferry got all the attention after all Brian Eno was far more original if not as photogenic and he did lose Jerry Hall to Mr Jagger, still he could have ended up in the audience on Strictly!.

    I agree that the sooner we stop believing in ‘Perpetual Summertime’ and ditch the strawberries (tasteless mush that they are) at Christmas, the sooner we may start to connect back to Seasonality.

    Enjoyed it immensely

    PS I believe you can still get a hovercraft to the I.O.W thus avoiding ferries!!

    • Glad you liked it…and one day my lack of arse will be on strictly, simply so my daughter can laugh at me on tv as well as in real life

  • You’ve very much nailed what was so special about the GIY Gathering, that crossover between eating, growing and the politics of it all, so comfortably done. The sight of a theatre FULL of gardeners sitting listening to a panel discussion on climate change and the food chain made me want to cheer. I didnt of course, I sat and listened quietly, like everyone else. A very fine thing it all was and I hope we can manage it in the UK.
    Oh and psst… I gave a talk too, by the way…

    • You did indeed give a talk…and it was, nauseating though it is to say it, really brilliant. although as Ella McS pointed out, benefitted greatly from my wise interjections

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