First in the Country then in the Town

Back in September CNN had a story about the rising poverty in American suburbs. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be poor in a suburb. I have experienced poverty in the city and in the country. But in both there are advantages that take the hard edge off poverty. Being poor in the suburbs must be a living hell, they have all the disadvantages of urban living but none of its advantages, and they have none of the advantages of rural living.

Part of my Kitchen Garden

As a young man I lived in Dublin in the late 1980s during the last Irish recession. I lived in a single roomed bedsit in the city centre and survived on welfare. But I managed my money well and took full advantage of the cities amenities. In a small city like Dublin everything was within walking distance, so I had no transport costs.

My big shop of the week was done late on Saturday afternoon in Moore Street, the cities traditional open air market. There was no market on Sunday so all perishable goods like vegetables, fruits and baked goods could be picked up for small money. Traders would accept almost any offer for goods, as soon as the market closed they would have to dump them anyway.

Dublin is full of great libraries, galleries, and museums, which I made full use of. As a young man who liked alcohol the opening of exhibitions were always a good source of free wine and entertainment. In Stephens Green (the main park in the city centre) there would be lunchtime recitals by brass bands, more free entertainment. There were always good buskers on Grafton Street. Cinemas had half price afternoon shows. I was poor but life was good.

Living in the countryside is the easiest option for a poor person. While it does not have the cultural life of the city it has a lot more opportunities for foraging resources. I have written already about foraging firewood (see Windfall in September) but free food is the real treasure on offer in the countryside.

The bounty starts in spring with nettles which make an excellent soup and sorrell which is a good salad leaf. But the real easy foraging comes in autumn, when the hedgerows are full of fruit like blackberries, crabapples, raspberries, wild strawberries etc. My brother is an avid collector of edible wild fungus in autumn. There are lots of neglected fruit trees in the Irish countryside.

All year round wild game can be shot and trapped. The rivers and lakes are full of fish. If you live near the seashore shellfish and edible seaweed are available. In the countryside it’s never to hard to get some land and start growing your own food. It’s always possible to keep to small livestock like poultry, rabbits or goats.

Lots of people will tell you that it's impossible to live in the countryside without a car, but if you are fit and have lots of time a bicycle is all the transport you need.

The CNN story

http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/23/news/economy/poverty_suburbs/index.htm?iid=HP_LN

Bicycles are faster than cars

In the early 1970s Ivan Illich wrote
The model American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1600 hours to get 7500 miles: less than five miles per hour.

My Raleigh Oakland a cheap hybrid

So a bike is a lot faster than a car when you measure all the time required to keep a car going. I ride a 15 kg cheap steel hybrid bike and over level ground, for a sustained period I can get three times the speed of a car on my bike. Over a short journey I can do four times this speed.

Even with a full touring load of 15 kg I can do twice the speed of a car and cover 80 miles a day. And I am almost 50 years old, when I was in my twenties I could cover more than 100 miles a day cycle touring.

If you do most of your driving in a city then the real speed you achieve with your car is probably a lot less than 5 mph. A bike also allows door to door travel, no driving round town looking for parking or walking to the final destination. No sitting in traffic jams. In cities nothing beats the bike for speed.

I bought my Raleigh Oakland in the June for 300 euro, since then I’ve spent about 50 euros on spares and maybe three or four hours servicing and I have done over 3000 miles on it. It will cost about 100 euros in servicing costs to do 6000 miles a year and keep the bike road worthy. I will be doing all own servicing, if I was to pay someone else to service the bike the cost will at least double. But that would still only be 200 euros a year.

A very high percentage of car journeys are under five miles, an ideal distance for the bike. This kind of short car journey with a cold engine uses a lot of fuel and results in a lot of engine wear. Apart from the money saved the exercise and fresh air will leave you feeling invigorated. In the long run you will live a longer and healthier life and save on medical bills.

The bike is I believe humanities greatest invention and as we pass peak oil its importance will only grow. And just to finish here’s Ivan Illich again on the bike.

Cycling on the Great Western Greenway

Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.


Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car.

Home Accounts Software

We have been keeping household accounts for about ten years. To keep control of spending and make sure  we know where the money is going to and coming from we record everytime money goes in or out. For many years we done this with Excel spreadsheets but since the start of this year we have been using an accounts program Simple Home Budget. Cost 29 dollars 95 cents, and available for 30 day free trial

http://www.home-budget-software.com

Cheap Fast Food

A great favourite for dinner in our house is pasta and tuna. Everyone likes it and as the cook I really like it because it takes about ten minutes and very little work to prepare. It is also a very cheap dinner, all the prices below are current Lidl prices. To feed four I use the following

250 grams of Pasta 0.25 cents
1 tin of Tuna 0.80 cents
A few spoons of Mayonnaise 0.50 cents

Boil water, add pasta, cook for 10 minutes. Drain, add tuna and mayonnaise, stir it up. Add a little fresh parsley if you have it. Serve.

Total time ten minutes, total cost 1 euro 55 cents.

The Real Cost of a Sandwich

During the Irish economic bubble I worked for a busy fencing company in a small town. I was the only member of staff who brought a home made lunch to work. All my colleagues went down town at lunchtime, and bought sandwiches in a supermarket deli.

Over lunch one day we discussed the merits of buying lunch versus making it at home. I said that for the cost of one deli sandwich I could make lunch for five days. A colleague suggested the deli sandwich was more convenient. Wrong I said, it takes me about two minutes to make a sandwich each morning. To get a deli sandwich I would have to go downtown, queue at the deli counter, wait for the sandwich to be made, queue at the checkout and get back to the office. This would take ten maybe fifteen minutes.

Not only did it take time to get a deli sandwich, it took time to earn the money to pay for it. Given my rate of take home pay at the time it would have taken twenty minutes labour to pay for a deli sandwich. Add ten minutes to get the sandwich and the total cost in time would have been thirty minutes a day, or two and half hours per week.

It took twenty minutes labour to pay for a weeks worth of home made sandwiches and ten minutes a week to make them. I was investing thirty minutes a week to pay the lunch bill. My colleagues deli sandwiches were costing them at least thirty minutes a day.

In fact it was even more than that, because they usually bought a donut or Danish pastry and maybe a soft drink. In reality the deli sandwich was costing about forty minutes a day or three and half hours a week. Over a year about one hundred and sixty eight hours, or twenty one working days, or over four working weeks, just to pay the lunch bill.

One of the most extraordinary things about the modern world is how much inconvenience people will endure in the pursuit of the illusion of convenience. When you spend money in pursuit of convenience, don’t forgot to count the real cost in time and money. A tank of oil may seem convenient compared to cutting and burning timber. It is convenient to flick a switch and heat your house, but don’t forget all the hours of labour it takes to keep the oil tank filled. When calculating the true costs never forget that time and money are interchangable resources.

Harvesting Sunlight

As I write this I’m sitting in my house it’s late morning on the 7th of November and the kitchen is 22.5 degrees centigrade (71 Fahrenheit). Outside it’s 4 degrees. The only source of heat apart from a tiny amount of my own body heat and the waste heat from the computer I’m typing on, is the sunlight streaming through the windows.

11am November 7th

Our house is only 800 sq foot and well insulated. Most of the glass in the building is in the south gable and when we layed out the building we orientated it to maximise solar gain.

A lot of winter days in this part of the world are like today, under clear skys the nights are frosty and the days are sunny. By harvesting sunlight with a passive solar design, we do not need to light the stove until dark. By the time the stove is lit the house will still be over 20 degrees and a little firewood will keep it warm at night.

If you have already built your house it maybe possible to add some kind of passive solar collection, like a sunroom. If you are thinking of building a new house, think seriously about making you house a passive solar building. Space heating is expensive but sunlight is free.

Passive Solar Design

Solar Gain

Why Scott Olsen is my hero

I grew up during the latter days of the Cold War, and as a European I was always very aware that my freedom from Soviet tyranny was guaranteed by the military might of the USA. I grew up on a diet of John Wayne movies and all that went with that. As a European child of the 1970s my barometer of heroic was the US marines in the “Sands of Iwo Jima”.

As a young man I developed a much more cynical view of US military policy, but I never lost my admiration for the service men and women who had to carry out the imperial military policy. While my generation was lost in a myopic, narcissistic, nebulous, consumerist culture those who joined the military services lived their lives by a different code.

The greatest irony is that the moronic, self centered, robbers barons of Wall Street can only plunder the world because they are protected by the incredible self sacrifice of service men and women. When Thatcher and Regan assumed that every person in society would act to protect their own self interest and encouraged us all to follow that model, as most of us did, the military upheld a different ethic.

While war is all about killing your fellow man and woman, there is at the heart of the military ethic an ancient tribal idea about self sacrifice for the common good. When compared to the self service the rest of have been up to for the last 30 years, there is something heroic about the self sacrifice of service men and women.

Scott Olsen is an idealistic young man, he joined an organization dedicated to protecting his nation and put himself in harms way for the common good. There is no doubt the war in Iraq was a half baked imperialist adventure, dreamed up by the greatest collection of cynical morons that ever governed a great country. All the negative things you can say about the Iraq war are true. And yet that does not detract from the heroic nature of Scott Olsen’s sacrifice in going to Iraq.

The Irish patriot martyr Terence McSwiney who died after 74 days on hunger strike, during the 1919-21 Irish War of Independence, said that “victory in this war will not go to those who can inflict the most suffering, but to those who can endure the most suffering”.

Cut to Oakland, October 25th 2011, there stands Scott Olsen, Marine Corp war veteran, standing in harms way, between the people and the police. Like Gandhi he does not have a gun, he is placid, bearing witness. He displayed physical and mental courage in going to Iraq. That night in Oakland he displayed moral courage. There is a strange serenity about him in the moments before he is shot.

Next moment he is on the ground with blood pumping from his head and the cops throw a flash grenade at those seeking to assist him. I don’t know why Scott Olsen captures it all so clearly for me, it’s just iconic, an image of a society at war with its finest, most idealistic young people.

Lincoln said a “house divided against itself cannot long stand”. We in the western world are now at war with our young people. They are on the streets telling us they have no future living in this system, a system that keeps many of us middle aged and elderly people in comfort. His heroic sacrifice is a measure by which our generation (I'm 48) can gauge our failure to act, when we were his age.

A very wise man about 25 years ago (a year before Scott Olsen was born) told me that for every easy decision we make now, those who come after us will have to make an equal and opposite hard decision. I thought of this when I saw Scott Olsen’s blood, he is paying the price I and my generation were too cowardly or stupid to pay. He is bearing witness to our shortcomings. His suffering calls on us all to act. He is my hero. Ooh-rah

A Bed of Leeks

When we moved into our house nine years ago, I built some raised beds for vegetable production. I have never dug the beds since, just mulched them once a year and used a small hand cultivator to make a seed bed.

The photo shows a bed of leeks on november 1st 2011. These leeks were sown direct in April. I priced leeks last week and at current cost this bed of leeks is worth about 30 euros.

For about twenty five years from the late 1980s until 2009 there was no really cold winter weather in Ireland and an incredible range of vegetables would thrive in the Irish winter. But in the recent two cold winters leeks are one of the few vegetables that survived in my garden.

In our household leek and potato soup is a standard winter dish.