A side-effect of the current Covid-19 lockdown, and admittedly a very high-class problem, is our growing hair, and the likelihood of not getting to the hairdresser's any time soon! The only other similar situation that comes to mind is that of the residents of the village of Oberammergau in Passion Play* year, which, incidentally has, along with so many other events, been postponed.

I, along with one of my five brothers, and my son, were all blessed with the same unusually thick hair. I recall at Hastings College in the early 1970s, I spent a whole hour in the student common room merrily braiding my long hair in tiny plaits. The problem was that my sister-in-law, who I was emulating, had very fine hair, and used this method to plump hers up. When I undid mine in the changing room, I found I had something that verged on a giant Afro, and I crept home praying that no-one would see me.

My son has now resorted to buying a pair of clippers, and my daughter-in-law has done a good job. But I don't think I can risk it, as Cell Block H is not currently casting, and that's certainly the look I'd end up with. That or Magwitch on a bad day.

Two salutory tales:

When really quite small, I found a pair of interesting large scissors (wallpaper scissors I later discovered) in our laundry room (I also found a pack of Robin starch which I innocently fed to the birds, but that's another story). I thought it might be a good idea to cut my hair, as I truly loathed hairdresser visits. However, when I regarded my work in a mirror, it must have struck me that it didn't look too great, as I went and put on my swimming-cap and went out to play for the day. Tea-time came, and Mum stood me on the kitchen table for a strip-wash. When she asked me to take that silly hat off, I refused, at which point she removed it herself, and, viewing the results, gave me a good slap on the legs. The next day I was escorted to Dieter Henri's Salon up the Moor to have a corrective cut, no doubt with the habitual frown on my face!

A few years on, in the late sixties, my brother Jonny came down to the kitchen, where I and other members of the family were gathered, in his Vespa scooter crash-helmet. 

"Why are you wearing your crash-helmet, Jonny?"

"Erm, well, I've been cutting my hair with my new clippers."

"Yeah, so ...?"

"Well, erm, I've cut it a bit short..."

Chuckles from us, as he was a bit of a joker, and we thought this was one of his japes.

"No, really - if I take it off, you won't laugh, will you?"

"Course not," sympathetically.

"Promise?"

"Yeah, we won't laugh, honestly."

At which point my hapless brother removed his helmet to reveal a convict-like dome, resembling nothing so much as a newly-mown striped lawn. And this was in the days long before males in every walk of life went round with virtually shaven heads.

Poor Jonny. We fell about, screaming with mocking laughter.  And for some weeks afterwards, he was to be seen about the streets of Cranbrook sporting a woolly bobble-hat, until his hair grew back.

So be warned!

*​http://www.judithjohnson.co.uk/blog/the-passion-play-of-oberammergau

I don’t eat sugar, so most of the year I don’t eat cake, but  at Christmas time I look forward to making  Christmas cake and puddings with some  excellent (cane) sugar-free recipes. It’s sweet enough with all the fruit, and I get the organic ingredients from  a wonderful  cooperative in Hastings, Trinity Wholefoods.
​
Before the New Year, I like to make one more for the house, and another for my son, daughter-in-law and granddaughters to tuck into on New Year’s Eve. I’ve had a really enjoyable morning mixing these up while listening to Cerys Matthew’s brilliant Sunday morning programme on BBC Radio 6 Music. I love this Twixmas time, when, for those of us who are lucky enough not to be working right through, there’s time for reflection, rest, and respite from the onslaught of life’s busy busy business.

Many of us don’t these days say a religious Grace before eating, but here’s a nice family one from Festivals, Family and Food by Diana Carey and Judy Large:

Earth who gives to us our food
Sun who makes it ripe and good
Dearest Earth and Dearest Sun
Joy and love for all you have done.

If I remember before I leap into eating, I also like to silently thank all those people who have worked hard to grow my food. In this case I’d like to thank those brothers and sisters around the world who produced these ingredients which went into the puddings today:

• raisins from Uzbekistan
• currants from Greece
• sultanas and apricots from Turkey
• prunes and almonds from the USA
• orange and lemon peel from Italy
• pears from Kent
• ginger, cinnamon and mace from the spice-growing nations
• eggs from Britain
• apple and pear juice from the Netherlands
• gluten-free flour from Doves Farm, Berkshire

Lastly, thanks to son Tom, who bakes beautiful loaves of bread, and gives them to us wrapped in greaseproof paper and string. I’ve recycled these to wrap the puddings for five hours’ boiling.
 
PS
Here’s a link to another Johnson Twixmas offering  - it took a lot longer to produce, but equally tasty for bookworms who love a good  creepy tale!

http://www.mj-johnson.com/blog/twixmas-offer-less-than-half-price

A large number of events have been organised, in a spirit of thanksgiving for those who gave their lives in World War One.

The Guardian, 12 August 2018, wrote:

In the early morning of 11 November more than 3,000 bell towers across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will ring out with the sound of “half-muffled” bells, like a slow march, in solemn memory of those who lost their lives.

Then, at midday, bellringers at each tower across the UK will remove the muffles from the clappers and at about 12.30 they will ring open. “The national mood swings then to gratitude and gratefulness and thanks,” says Christopher O’Mahony, president of the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers.

Before 1914 the vast majority of bellringers in the UK were male, but the loss of so many men to war meant many more women took up the role. Today there are between 30,000 and 35,000 men and women bellringers in the UK, and still more are being sought for Armistice Day. The aim is that bells sound not just in the UK but across the world.

The British and German governments are encouraging other countries to ring bells at the same times in the same way, expressing the reconciliation of former enemies in sound. “Bells will ring out across the world to replicate the outpouring of relief that took place in 1918, and to mark the peace and friendship that we now enjoy between nations,” says the culture secretary, Jeremy Wright.

I love the sound of church bells ringing, and I am sure that all the bell-ringers taking part have spent many hours of dedicated hard work in preparing for what has been billed as a celebration, one hundred years on, of the first Armistice Day, when peace was declared at the end of a most terrible war.
 
"A passing-bell, for those who died as cattle" - in the words of Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth.

However , I have very mixed feelings about this. I spent seven years, in my spare time, researching a book on those named on my local war memorial, not to glorify, in a nationalistic way, the wars in which they died, but to record their suffering and their loss to their community. I believe I might have done the same, had I settled in Germany, for the local war memorial where I lived. My understanding, strengthened by accounts I've read of wars of all kinds, is that soldiers and civilians suffer on all sides, regardless of who it is judged initiated hostilities. I am currently reading the excellent A War in Words: The First World War in Diaries and Letters by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, in which the authors note that little over a month after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, five empires were at war and millions of soldiers were mobilised, all the nations involved convinced they were fighting a defensive war, forced upon them by someone else.

With the current toxic climate in Britain, I expect plenty of flag-flying and jingoistic drum-banging by right-wing nationalistic elements, along the lines of 'our boys died for our country, and now it's being taken over by _____ (insert perjorative xenophobic term)'.  It would be as well to remember that Britain and her allies called on the men of their colonies and dominions to join the fight, and that many did so and lost their lives - these included men of the Caribbean (the fathers of the Windrush generation who we have seen treated so disgracefully in recent times), Africans, Indians (including Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs), Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians. The Neuve-Chapelle Memorial  in the Pas de Calais, for example, commemorates more than 4,700 Indian soldiers and labourers who lost their lives on the Western Front during the First World War and have no known grave.  Chinese labour corps were brought in to clear away the debris of that war, including thousands of abandoned and decaying corpses.

Harry Patch said: "War is organised murder, and nothing else." Can we in all honesty and decency celebrate the end, 100 years ago, of one war, when so much of humanity is still undergoing appalling atrocities world-wide, in some cases being killed with weapons manufactured in Britain and being sold for profit, disregarding any other principle? The In Flanders Field Museum in Ypres has a banner hanging over its exit gate listing the wars fought throughout the world since 1918. I'm sure it's grown considerably longer since the first time I visited.

Lastly, I suspect our current Tory government, whom I regard as being very much part of our current toxic social and political climate, will be playing the 100th Armistice for all it's worth, as an opportunity to parade their ideology and views on British values. Will this include a commitment to improving conditions for those ex-servicemen and women who now live by begging on our streets (an echo perhaps of the thousands of ex-soldier tramps of the 1920s), suffering from PTSD, and refused universal credit?  Will the government continue with their verbal attacks on EU leaders, portraying them as the enemy of British interests in the Brexit negotiations, often adopting scandalously insulting language from WW2 for a cheap soundbite in the Mail, Sun or Express, and generally directed at our German friends? Will they give due credit to the contribution the European project has made in bringing peace to Western Europe since 1945 - where for so many centuries the blood of fallen soldiers in ongoing conflicts has fertilised  its land? Will they work harder to solve the issue of the internal borders on the island of Ireland, where peace accords, fought so hard for, are in danger of collapsing? 

I honour with reverence and gratitude the men and women who suffered and died in World War One, and I also have great respect for all the thousands of volunteers up and down the country who have been busy organising events for this one hundredth armistice, however, I for one don't want to see Theresa May's or any of her cabinet's long faces at the Cenotaph on 11 November.

LINKS: 

Harry Patch on the War:
http://noglory.org/index.php/multimedia/video/540-harry-patch-and-the-pointless-mass-murder-of-the-first-world-war

Homeless ex-servicemen
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/least-13000-hero-soldiers-left-11847000

Former servicemen pensions:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/up-300000-brave-former-servicemen-13488569

​2018 Armistice Day events:
https://armistice100.org.uk/events/

When we moved out of London in the 1980s and bought a cottage in a Sussex village, we planned to grow organic vegetables in the large area of rough grass at the back. This overgrown garden had many years previously been a market garden, containing two old apple trees (Jubilee variety, perhaps planted for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee), and the earth was a lovely dark loam. My husband did most of the design, laying out and upkeep, but I assisted with digging, weeding, growing and transplanting seedlings, slugging etc. We had a very large area, growing a wide range of crops, from beetroot to sweet corn, broccoli to potatoes, saladings, courgettes etc.

After decades of cultivation, there wasn’t any treasure left to discover (it had at one time been the site of a mediaeval fair, I believe, so past gardeners may have turned over some interesting coins while digging), but during our ten years there, we did find a few tiny dolls’ heads, game counters, pieces of clay pipes, etc, even a bullet case, which may, who knows, have dropped from the skies during the Battle of Britain?
Towards the end of our time at the cottage, on an afternoon when I felt very low in spirits and in need of some sign from the God of my understanding that, essentially, all was well, and all would be well, I sent up a silent but heartfelt prayer while digging over a bed right at the bottom of the garden. The very next spadeful turned up a tiny china dove.

I cherish it still.

The American anthropologist Margaret Mead once wrote: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever does.

In the current climate, when so many of us feel almost overwhelmed by the cataclysmic changes occurring all over the world, many wise voices, Robert Reich amongst them, are urging us not to give in to the paralysing feeling that it’s all too much, and there’s nothing we can do.

One small change we have recently made in our house is to close up a loophole in our commitment not to eat factory-farmed meat. We have for years, as much as our domestic budget allowed, bought free-range meat, and have only used free-range eggs for decades now, but we had continued to eat meat when out and about in establishments where there was no claim made about how the animal was reared.

I won’t go into the horrors of factory-farming - there is plenty on the internet*- but share a couple of thoughts. To any woman who has gone through the intense tenderness of early breast-feeding, I think we can all empathise with a sow that is constrained in a metal pen while her piglets are allowed constant access to her teats, literally tearing them into a bloody state. And I recall an acquaintance who through economic misfortune was reduced, late in life, to collecting cracked eggs from a battery-farm barn. The smell was so overpowering, he said, that he frequently had to exit the barn to vomit.

We decided last autumn that we would henceforth buy organic meat wherever possible, given that organic farmers, committed to not using antibiotics routinely, have to give their animals more care in respect of room to breathe and roam etc.  This meat naturally costs more, so we agreed to eating smaller portions - no great imposition, as we are already a family that by choice generally has more veg than meat  on a plate!

When we bought our first organic free-range chicken, the flatness of the breast (no growth hormones!) was noticeable. It looked and tasted like the chickens we used to have on the table when we were children. It also had no red burn-marks on the legs from excreta-saturated barn-floors. It’s actually more economical to buy  a whole chicken and joint it for casseroles etc than to buy portions, and the carcass makes great chicken-stock for soups, rice dishes, etc.

The second part of our commitment was not to eat meat when we were away from home unless it was clearly labelled as free-range, so actually we just eat vegetarian most times. The Toby chain’s a good option when travelling - they’re all over the place, and you can have a lovely plate of fresh veg and the vegetarian alternative to the Carvery meats - there are usually three choices including a vegan one.

So a win-win-win result! Less cruelty to animals, better health, increase in self-esteem resulting from sticking to our principles, and lastly better taste: we tried some of Helen Browning’s Organic dry-cured bacon for lunch today, and Martin commented it was the best bacon sandwich he’d  ever eaten. Praise indeed!
 
*For an obviously authentically-researched fictional account of factory farming chickens, try Martina Lewycka’s novel Two Caravans.
 
 

​I've struggled to write my blog since the bombshell of the vote for Brexit in June, and in the face of all the suffering and upheaval around the world - not just in Syria, but in so many other places. I would sit down at the keyboard to write something, only to falter half-way through - my thoughts seemed irrelevant and simplistic. With the further shock, in November, of Donald Trump's elevation to President-Elect, I felt even more paralysed,  by the constant flow of bad news.

But the most hopeful messages I've seen of late, from the sane voices of people like Caroline Lucas, George Monbiot, and Brendan Cox, exhort us to do what we can, where we are. I've joined the Green Party this year, and made contributions, where able, to charities which are out there doing the necessary work on the ground, both here and abroad. I hope to keep an open mind, make an effort to be informed of the facts, and offer service, where I can, to help others.

I took down my kitchen calendar off its peg yesterday to copy the birthdays onto my new one, and as I went through it I was reminded, once again, that while the larger joys and sorrows of mankind played out in the wider world, I was fortunate to have my annual share of good things, the everyday activities that make my world go round: haircuts in the kitchen, yoga classes, visits to family and friends, and hospitality reciprocated, fellowship with like-minded others, shopping and cooking, reading and cinema, music, occasional trips to museums and exhibitions, walking and talking, feeding the birds, working and resting, the sadness of those who we have cherished passing away mixed with the celebration and shared love of my niece's wedding, an old friend's 70th birthday party - the list goes on!

I try not to take these things for granted, knowing that there are many who don't benefit in the same way. I write a gratitude list every night before I go to sleep, and in the last year the gifts of being a grandmother have featured - our beautiful grand-daughter shows us, as my son did when he was a child, a picture of what we so often forget: the wonder, merriment and joy of living in the now, of bearing no grudge or bitterness in the heart, the pleasure of munching on plump raspberries ...we adore her!

I write at least three things, and very often there are more, but what crops up most are the basic building blocks of life, that we all must surely need in common: a quiet, peaceful, warm, dry, safe home; three nutritious meals; good health (which, if we have it, we can count, if we are wise, as the equivalent of having won the lottery every time we wake); doing our allotted work as well as we can; and a loving, kind, tolerant, patient companion (in this case my husband) - with whom I share so much laughter, still, after 40 years together. Life is not all plain sailing, but these things have got me through the difficult painful times, along with the help, as I believe, of something far greater than myself.

Of all the Christmas films I annually cry over (including It's A Wonderful Life) which  encourage me to accept the things I cannot change, I naturally treasure most that which personifies my own cultural heritage and sums up the hope of finding redemption from darkness and hard-heartedness - Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol. Whatever your higher power is, or is not -  'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower', the love that will not let you go, or just what is larger than your individual existence, then I pray, in the year to come, as Tiny Tim does, "God bless us, every one".