Here’s a press release from Transition Town Tooting about yesterday’s wonderful Trashcatchers’ Carnival….
Tooting Trashcatchers Carnival stops the traffic.
Traffic on Tooting High Street came to a stop today when the Tooting Trashcatchers Carnival came to town! Over 800 participants from local schools, community groups and clubs took part in this unique carnival made almost entirely from household rubbish. Over 1 million plastic bottles and shopping bags, half a million crisp packets, half a ton of renewable willow and half a ton of materials were collected over a six month period to create this extravaganza. Check out the great piece on local ITV News… and this film, filmed from the Turtle, which gives a flavour of the event…
Totnes legend poet Matt Harvey has just posted, as part of his occasional ‘mattmail’ email newsletter (which you can subscribe to on his website), a rather wonderful poem about slugs. Matt is an old friend of Transition, and did the equally wonderful piece for BBC Devon about TTT a while ago. Given that slugs are an oft-discussed subject here at Transition Culture, I thought you would enjoy this…. Matt is the Wimbledon Tennis Championships’ official ‘Poet-in-Residence’, so expect to hear more from Totnes’s favourite export in coming weeks. I love slugs being referred to as “bold-as-brass brassica editors”…
The Ministry of Food: thrifty wartime ways to feed your family today. Jane Fearnley Whittingstall. (2010) Hodder & Stoughton and the Imperial War Museum.
I hadn’t heard of this until a couple of weeks ago, when a group of folks visiting from the US dropped by, en route from London, where they had visited an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum called ‘The Ministry of Food’ (which runs until January 3rd 2011), gave me their copy of this book. Having read this book, I will definitely make a point of going to see the exhibition next time I am in London. The book is the exhibition catalogue, but it is also a superb stand-alone publication, offering many useful insights on how the British people managed during the war, how the Ministry of Food successfully promoted the Dig for Victory/Kitchen Front campaigns which kept the country from starvation, and, ironically, led to the healthiest population in the country’s recent history.
As regular readers will know, I get very excited about good compost. It is one of the most exquisite things on earth. Words like ‘crumbly’, ‘friable’, ‘rich’, ‘humus’ and ‘moist’ verge on the erotic for me, and from comments posted here previously, I know many of your share my enthusiasm for the ‘brown stuff’. Therefore, the pictures I am about to show you verge on being ‘compost porn’, an entirely wholesome way to set the collective pulse racing. A bit late in the season, I finally tracked down a local farmer with well rotted muck for my raised beds. Often such a request results in a load of barely rotted, nettle-filled stuff you have to leave to compost for a couple of years. However, I had little idea what exquisite compost fate had in store.
I never would have thought, until I had spent some time immersed in the world of permaculture and growing my own, that a large pile of rotting manure could be a source of such pleasure. There is something utterly magical about the biological processes that go on in a pile of decomposing organic matter, as the microfauna and bacteria alchemically transform it from one thing into an almost entirely different thing. It really is something worth getting very, very excited about.
How might our response to peak oil and climate change look more like a party than a protest march? This site explores the emerging transition model in its many manifestations
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Traffic on Tooting High Street came to a stop today when the Tooting Trashcatchers Carnival came to town! Over 800 participants from local schools, community groups and clubs took part in this unique carnival made almost entirely from household rubbish. Over 1 million plastic bottles and shopping bags, half a million crisp packets, half a ton of renewable willow and half a ton of materials were collected over a six month period to create this extravaganza. Check out the great piece on local ITV News… and this film, filmed from the Turtle, which gives a flavour of the event…
Totnes legend poet Matt Harvey has just posted, as part of his occasional ‘mattmail’ email newsletter (which you can subscribe to on 
