Cashback live in Little Downham

Last Saturday night we took a cab from Ely over to Little Downham to see local heroes, Cashback, play a wild gig at the Anchor pub.

Cashback play Johnny Cash songs and the man in black would have loved the band. They played with passion and soul, the joint rocked!


Large amounts of Greene King were drunk, people danced on tables, rock 'n' roll in the Fens, you really can't do better.


We stumbled out of the pub just before twelve and enjoyed a high grade hangover the next morning. Was it worth it, well yeah! Looking forward to the next one.

Things I like: Public Libraries (no. 1 in a series)

My use of Public libraries has passed through three distinct phases: childhood, adolescence and middle age.

Childhood

As a child, Saturdays usually involved a trip to Swiss Cottage library in Camden with my sister and father. I don't remember much of those trips, except for a sense of the building's spacious, curvy, modernist design .

Later on we moved a few miles across Camden to Kentish Town. Kentish Town's library is a fraction of the size of Swiss Cottage. Our Saturday morning visits continued, now supplemented with regular trips with my new primary school.

I was a poor reader at the time of moving to Kentish Town, well behind most of my peers and classroom chums. To remedy this situation my father spent time each and every morning working slowly through children's books with me. Gradually my reading improved until, quite suddenly, something clicked and I was quickly in the grip of a voracious reading habit.

This sudden, unexpected, improvement in my reading raised the suspicion of my teacher who eventually suggested I was cheating somehow. My parents were called in, they explained the situation and won an apology from the teacher.

From that point on nothing could hold me back and I soon finished off anything worth reading in the children's library (ok, mainly Enid Blyton and The Hardy Boys, but hey, a kid's gotta start somewhere!)

Adolescence

At the age of 13 I requested a ticket for the adult library. I can remember vividly the day I said a farewell to the children's library. "I'll never step foot in there again" I said to myself and looked instead to the vast (to my eyes) rows of bookshelves in the adult library.

My first book was 'War of the Worlds', followed swiftly by 'Day of the Triffids. I rarely ever spent my hard earned pocket money on books, why should I? They were all there waiting for me, for free!

By about the age 16 my trips to the library grew less regular. My tastes had become more eclectic, I craved the underground, Beat poets, Situationist manifestos, Wilhem Reich and Emma Goldman, none of which Kentish Town could supply. The magnificent Compendium books in Camden Town became my home-from-home. I left the library system.

Middle age (yeah, that's me now)

Two decades later, with the birth of my son Harry, I returned to the fold. The Saturday trips, now to Ely library, began again and as Harry swaggers around the children's section I can check out the new releases.

It was like meeting up with a long lost friend. Libraries! What fantastic places...I can take book home for FREE and return it if it's not up to scratch, fantastic

A new addition in this web age are online library catalogues. I can now order just about any book I want (via the inter-library loan scheme if not held by my library) and wait patently for the happy email announcing the arrival of my book. Just how cool is that?

So there we have it. I like public libraries.

Transition notes - 19 July 2008

Haven't got much time this morning, off to the Castle to climb with Harry.

• last night's mini-meeting of Ely Sustainable City / Transition Ely (whatever we're called) was inspiring, fun and very creative
• I saw blackberries on sale in Waitrose, packed in plastic, driven 100 miles plus across the country from Kent. Hey folks! Blackberries are FREE and grow all around Ely, open your eyes, go pick, pies for all!!
• our neighbour's sugar snap plant - I have never tasted sugar snaps like this. Crunchy, refreshing and soooooo sweet. It is true what they say about locally grown food.

Anyway, got to run, have a fab weekend.

A fenland allotment in July

So, here it is, our allotment! Some work to do, as is obvious from the pics below.

Still, a lovely view of the Cathedral to the south and much potential for barrels of lovely veggies to feed our hungry stomachs.

Expect more posts on this soonest.

Peak Oil activities

I've so many thoughts, ideas, questions and feelings I want to get down on the subject of oil-depletion, peak oil, the post-carbon world...call it what you will.

I'm trying to see how I can group my posts under headings, which will hopefully help to clarify things.

Here's my working list of Peak Oil activities (POA):

• budget - work out what we have, what we spend, where we can cut-back, where we can save
• growing food - starting with the back garden, moving on to the allotment (when we get one), a spot of guerilla gardening and even the balcony at work. All using permaculture design techniques.
  
• activism - mainly focused (for now) on Transition Town (city!) status for Ely
• theory - applying Ken Wilber's Integral AQAL approach to all this
• psychological / spiritual development
• physical health
• clear understanding of the facts, theories, options
  
• more, more, more, there must be more but that's it for now, dinner is calling!
  

First steps towards sustainable Ely...

Tonight I joined three other Ely residents to watch a video dealing with how Cuba dealt with its very own Peak Oil crisis after the collapse of the USSR. The video is called 'The Power of Community' and is very much worth seeing.

I could write a lot more here but I am tired and want to be fit and full of energy for tomorrow night's climb at the Castle.