Sensible food budgets and healthy eating have been replaced this week by the awesome local foods we are going to miss.
Nom nom nom.
Making the most of here
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Worldly goods
Bye for now worldly goods.
We’ll see you again at some point.
May your latest storage space be somewhat less flooded than the last one.
Taunted
Having survived the sometimes-bleak winter, this beautiful weather is taunting us as we prepare to move.
Oh, summertime in the Corbières…
Don’t think we won’t miss you.
Undo
In preparation for taking the car back to the UK, I had to undo this little job. Cars don’t have that nice ctrl-z feature you get on computers, but it was a lot quicker the second time around. I must have actually learnt something.
Also, I’d been looking around for somewhere to buy those light deflectors for the French part of the long drive, and was pleasantly surprised to find these still stuck the old lights.
Alternative Christmas Cards (charity shop books)
Last year, the most enjoyable bit of our Christmas shopping was our alternative Christmas cards and it might be something you want to try for yourself. It’s a bit complex, so I’ve written out the process step-by-step…
- Write a list of people you would usually buy cards for
- Find your nearest charity bookshop
- Buy everyone a book
It’s simple and fun, but you never know what you’ll find in stock and that makes it even more interesting. We spent a couple of hours in an Oxfam Books and delighted the volunteer staff with the total number of books we bought.
I like to look for books I don’t think people would buy themselves, but that they might find interesting. It’s a lot of fun, and a great way to spend time thinking about the people you love. And for people who “don’t do books” there’s usually something funny or silly.
On top of all that, most books in most charity shops costs less than a regular gift card from a supermarket. And the whole cost of your book is a charitable donation, rather than the few pennies in royalties that charities get from most boxed Christmas cards.
You can (and should!) write a message in the front of a book, and there’s a whole load more value in the content than you’d find in any card.
And if I haven’t sold this idea hard enough already, the kind of people who do their Christmas shopping in charity book shops are awesome. It’s a refreshing antidote to the rudeness and madness that takes over the rest of the high street around now.
Photos from Réserve Africaine de Sigean
When my brother came to stay we did some touristy things including a trip to www.reserveafricainesigean.fr
I’m fascinated by the amazing wildlife we share our world with, but usually find zoos too depressing to enjoy. This was brilliant by comparison. It’s not quite wild natural habitat, but it’s pretty vast and I’d highly recommend it. Also my brother’s knowledge of species and the natural world is scarily good, so he was our tour guide.
Two important lessons I learnt:
- If you’re going to see some awesome animals, charge your camera. I was only just getting started when mine died.
- For entertainment, pot belly pigs are on a par with lions, black bears, giraffes and rhinos. They are only beaten by play-fighting Asiatic black bear cubs.
Anyway, here are the few pics I managed to get…
Large and little, Vietnamese potbelly pigs
This is the little one from the photo above
Watching. You.
The early bird…
We left at dawn to do our weekly food shop without losing too much of the day. The views are always amazing on this road, but this time I actually had to stop the car and take some photos on my phone. It’s only by waking earlier enough, that things like this are seen.
In review: A month drinking only water
When we decided to take on this little challenge for ourselves, I thought it would be hard for about a week, and then my body would clear out the caffeine from the system, and by the end of the month I’d wonder what all the fuss was about at the start.
But it didn’t go like that at all.
It wasn’t just the breaking of habit that was hard, but the breaking of social conventions. And although I often find this kind of challenge to ‘normal’ interesting, I didn’t enjoy this as much. Though I’m still happy we did it.
I spent most of the month mumbling “need coffee, need coffee, need coffee” on a regular basis. Particularly when I was trying to get my head around some of this stuff for work. Occasionally I was looking for a glass of wine or whiskey in the evening, but it was coffee that I really struggled without.
The caffeine withdrawal was to be expected. A few headaches and aches, but I can deal with that. What I really missed were the social aspects of drinking tea and coffee. When someone offers you a hot drink, it sends the wrong signal if you just ask for a glass of water. Drinking a cup of coffee at the end of a meal is a way of saying, “let’s talk longer, I’m in no rush”.
Though we lack the real ceremony of tea these days, the time taken to boil the kettle, make drinks to everyone’s taste, allow time to cool and then to savor, still offer the space in which interesting things are said. Come to think of it, I once started a business/social-enterprise over a cup of tea, and I’m sure it wouldn’t have happened over a glass of water. Most of the conversations that have best changed my life were over a cup of tea or coffee. Sure, there were enjoyable conversations when drinking alcohol too, but the plans that turned to action were always the ones involving caffeine. Our marriage even, if we trace it back to the start of our relationship, began while drinking tea. Cup after cup of tea. There were conversations that lasted whole days and stretched on into the early hours of the morning. I wouldn’t want to be without those.
So in review…
My sleeping has definitely been worse since I’ve been drinking caffeine again, and I’m drinking a fraction of the water I was drinking before, which I need to work on. But I’m happy to have these drinks back in my life. I’ve learnt more about their real value by testing my own limits, and one day I may repeat the experiment if I find myself taking them for granted.
Money bits…
Between us we drink about 8 Euros of coffee a week
Alcohol is sporadic, but it works out about 25 Euros a month
So let’s call it 60 Euros saved.
WaterAid donations work in £GBP so I’ve given a nice round £50.
Preparing for the house of tomorrow
I’ve been thinking about technology of late and the world our boy will grow up in. Many of the things we can barely imagine already exist as working prototypes today. I’ve felt myself dismiss new technologies like Google Project Glass as quirky and unnecessary and wondering why people need anything other than a good old fashioned keyboard and I have to kick myself out of this aging process.
In 15 years time, things like those glasses won’t just have passed the prototype-early-adopters phase, they’ll be old news. They’ll look about as modern and exciting as a Nintendo 64 does today.
He will never know what it’s like to get a computer for the first time, or the Internet for the first time, and the one thing I can’t get out of my head is that he may never get to (or need to) drive a car.
Think about cars. Either resource scarcity and compounded global economic crises render cars un-affordable, or the human race manages to solve some of its current problems and another 17 years of technological development make self driving cars the norm. I doubt you’ll need to own a self driving car. Just imagine how cheap it will be to run an electric powered taxi service when you don’t have to pay a driver’s salary. It’s not the world as we know it, and it’s not a world in which anyone will be able to offer advice about living well. He will grow up among pioneers.
We can only do our best to prepare him for a world we will never fully understand.
I come back to this verse often in my day:
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
“For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams”
In our quest to live a simple live, we must not fail in preparing our son to live in a complex world. We must provide him with opportunity. He will choose the level of simplicity he wants for himself.
We can’t possibly hope to educate him in a system we won’t ever fully understand, but then my parents didn’t educate me in the Internet. They gave me the opportunity to work it out for myself. With plenty of worry and a reassuring amount of trust. They didn’t know I’d miss whole nights of sleep trying to get websites to render properly in Netscape Navigator then go to school and piss about in IT lessons that I thought were a waste of time. The education system wasn’t ready for a world with the Internet. And only the time I spent breaking the rules helped me to prepare for the world I live in.
While I can show him the value of carving a spoon with a knife and his own hands, I must also show him the value of printing your own spoon with a model you’ve made on a computer.
If someone had put it on YouTube I’d be linking to a song right now. But you’ll have to settle for the lyrics instead.
I can see we’re really close to something
It’s a feeling so near
But I got no time for the Luddites
Always lookin’ back down the track
Saying, “Can you spot one more detail, Jack.”You gotta live in this world, go diggin’ the new
Live in this world – boy, tran or girl
Live in this world, oh, get diggin’ the newCrashing head-on into the future
It won’t even leave a dent
Just walk in like you own it
Remember, it ain’t set in cement
It ain’t set in cement.
A month of only water
This challenge to drink only water for a whole month is proving to be really, really hard. So this quote found on Explore is a welcome motivator…
[T]he real value of a real education [has] almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
‘This is water.’
‘This is water.’
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime.