Greetings readers. You might be wondering why I’ve gone a
little quiet here. Do not fear - apart from a few disruptions to my everyday normality,
everything is fine here. I simply haven’t had much time to do any writing
lately as I’ve … been doing a lot of writing. Yes, in a strange twist of irony,
writing my posts about financial resilience somehow enabled me to land in a job
where I write and edit finance articles for a living.
So, working full-time with a group of other financial
journalists hasn’t left me with too much spare time on my hands of late.
It’s a bit unusual working in an office again, having spent
the last five years doing a selection of jobs that have included being an
outdoor woodsman, a builder’s labourer and a wine waiter/barman in a swanky
hotel.
Luckily, the job came just in time. In the last few months
we’ve had a run of bad financial luck, with numerous things breaking down and
requiring costly repair, as well as being hit with various unexpected charges.
To top it all, my wife lost her job when the care home she worked in
dramatically closed down when it was revealed the owner had been embezzling funds
for the past 14 years.
As a result of this we’ve been living somewhat constrained
lives so far this year, which is certainly good practice for the future. In
fact, I would say, by building resiliency into our lives we haven’t really
broken a sweat over these recent interruptions. So, all in all, it’s ongoing
good practice, and my wife has just (today) been offered a new job that pay
better than the last one, so something positive came out of it.
In other news, you may have heard that the UK experienced
some cold and snowy weather last week. The so-called ‘Beast from the East’ mass
of cold Siberian air moved over the British Isles, where it was met by Storm
Emma moving up from the south. Most places got a fair covering of snow,
including where I live in Cornwall, which hasn’t seen so much of the stuff
since the mid-1970s.
Predictably, chaos ensued.
Drivers, not knowing how to handle their vehicles in snow,
crashed cars all over the place, with hundreds stuck on motorways overnight in
freezing conditions and without blankets to keep them warm. The country came
within a whisker of running out of natural gas, and was only saved by burning
epic amounts of coal in power stations. Schools and shops closed, people
panic-bought bread and milk, and a handful of people died.
And then, after a day or two of fun, the snow melted and
everyone was forced to go back to work.
Despite this, there has been a huge knock-on effect on the
food distribution system in the country. When I went to my local supermarket
two days ago the shelves were still more or less empty of fresh food. There was
zero milk, bread or meat to be had, and only a few bits of cheese and yogurt
and ready meals left. On the other hand, there were plenty of vegetables and
fruit and tonnes of snacks and junk food.
The fact the shelves were still bare almost an entire week after
the snow had cleared just goes to show how fragile and vulnerable the food
distribution network in the UK is. Hopefully a few people will have seen this
as a wake-up call to increase their food stocks at home, and perhaps even learn
to bake bread and make other food from fresh ingredients. This time we got off
lightly, next time we may not be so lucky.
Glad I had my bread maker! But our 'local' supermarket also ran out of bread flour, so perhaps people are more self-sufficient than I thought in the upper Swansea valley. They also quickly ran out of fresh veg and most fruit, just some salad stuff left.
ReplyDeleteWe have a delivery of organic fruit, veg and other produce from a local grocer a few miles further down the valley and they didn't run short of produce, sourcing theirs from local suppliers where possible. They even had bread flour left.
However, there is no way they could scale up to supply the population that the supermarkets do. As the fossil fueled supply lines falter, perhaps a gradual change to resilient, local suppliers will follow. Assuming we get the time to do so.
As the snow started to fall I went to buy a loaf of bread from my local bakery (simply because we were out of bread, not because I feared a lack of supply) and found them in a panic. In addition to the one I bought, the lady gave me three loaves for free and said they were having to shut down and didn't want to throw out the bread. So, I ended up walking home with my arms loaded with loaves and looking like a bread hoarder.
DeleteMy box of food from a local organic farm arrived with no problems.
Congratulations on the assorted jobs! Nice to know that someone out there in the world of finance is talking sense.
ReplyDeleteSo it's not just up here in Dorset that the food supply network's struggling to recover? I went to do my elderly mother's weekly shopping in Dorchester yesterday, and found the Co-op totally bereft of milk, bread & most fruit & veg. The other supermarket had had a delivery but an hour later, half of it was already gone. We live closer to the city and our shops were restocked quite quickly, but I generally have enough in my "storecupboard" - in reality, stashed in all sorts of odd corners; our "developer" predecessor knocked down a perfectly good larder, to my enduring horror - to see us through a month. I keep it like this for all sorts of reasons but mainly because I may be, in fact frequently am, called to said elderly mother's bedside at the drop of a hat. It's amazing how rapidly the household food bill for 5 adults can expand when there's no-one holding the reins & nothing in stock.
That said, I'm old enough to remember other times when the food supply has been interrupted. I was just 4 in the winter of '62-'63, living on the very western edge of Dartmoor. Our village was quite literally cut off for weeks, but no-one starved, although the village just had two tiny shops and a pub; everyone had larders, though some cottages barely had a recognisable kitchen, and people did look after their neighbours & share. We also went through hard times in the early-to-mid 70s, after my father died, so now you'll never find me without a tin of beans and a sack of flour to my name!
Also noticing that the road network round here has suffered enormously from the cold snap, and the council are struggling to keep up with the damage; they're mending one pothole, whilst three others are deepening by the hour as the juggernauts keep trundling through. Another small sign that the downhill slide is gathering pace?
Oh - I don't get to talk sense! There are tow realities in writing, one that approximates truth and honesty, and one that you do for money.
DeleteThanks for the Dartmoor memories. I remember, about 20 years ago, I did some voluntary conservation work there and it began to snow. It got pretty deep, pretty quick, and I could see how people could get cut off there easily.
Yep - everyone should have a larder. Modern life strips out the resilience in people's lives. When I lived in Denmark they were building new blocks of flats and each one had a mini-supermarket on the ground floor. The idea was that nobody needed to store any food and could simply buy it on a daily basis after work. Lunacy.
An - yep - the roads around here are showing a lot of wear and tear and potholes all over the place.
Could part of the problem of supermarket food depletion be that they are supplied from just a few storage and distribution hubs?
ReplyDeleteWe had very little snow here in Swansea but I'm assuming the hubs that supply our supermarkets weren't so lucky.
However, the resiliency that comes from having more such hubs doesn't make economic sense for them and never will. One more reason that the age of the megastore is numbered. We will be forced to eat sensibly, seasonally, healthily and locally once again! I'm looking forward to that.
The supermarket STILL have bare shelves here after TWO WEEKS! I went to Tesco last night and not only were the shelves mostly empty (I a huge store) but the staff were just sitting around having a laugh and most of the lights were off. TBH it was a bit spooky.
Deleteyeah, pictures of snow tells me it's winter in the UK. The stores have no fresh fruits and vegetables? Why should they?
ReplyDeleteI am old enough to remember what fresh vegetables grocery stores had on their shelves in winter back in the 60s, iceberg lettuce, celery, potatoes, onions, carrots, oranges and mealy apples, all stuff that stores well. Any other vegetables you wanted came in cans. Recipes from recipe books of that era all started with "open a can". Some people back then canned their own vegetables in anticipation of winter scarcity.
Of course, doing your own food processing is labor intensive.
Last summer we spent on an organic farm and much of our produce came right out of the fields and the garden we tended. We could pick all the greens we could eat. Only downside was the labor involved. Walk out into the field, pick a big bag full of leaves. Walk back to the house, wash the soil off the leaves, strip the stems off the leaves. Cut the greens up, boil them, roast some garlic to dress them, eat. Wash the dishes. Clean up the kitchen. Two hours are gone. What person with a job has that kind of time?
Same with canning. I picked elderberries in anticipation of making elderberry syrup last year. That took several hours of locating the berries and picking them. Then the task of stripping the berries off their stems. A few more hours. Wash the whole thing. Boil the berries down with sugar. Another hour. Strain the pulp and seeds out of the resulting brew. Decant into jars. Put on lids. boil in a big kettle to sterilize. Oh, and you can't just pick the berries when you feel like it or have the time. You have to pick the berries when they're ripe even if you don't feel like it.
Without having some sort of industrial, petroleum-driven process to do all the work for you, being self sufficient in food is no small task. You kind of have to quit your job if you have one to have all the time to do all that work.
the 22 billion energy slaves go on strike when it snows. I think most of us would feel ambivalent about living life without them.
Hi Wolfgang. How true. Nobody should expect summer fruit and veg in winter but almost everyone does.
DeleteI've taken to pickling boiled eggs recently. It turns out to be very easy and I just use old jars. Buying eggs in bulk is also quite cost-effective. Beyond that, I'm experimenting with fermenting cabbage and other vegetables.
This year I'm not bothering to grow tomatoes or other annual food plants in our back yard. Last year's were a disaster given that it's almost impossible to stop them being eaten by slugs. Instead I am planting fruit bushes (the space is really a very small concrete yard with a few tubs of soil here and there).
Of course, if I lived closer to my woodland (or in it) I would be trying to meet as much of our food requirements as possible from it - but that doesn't look likely for at least the next couple of years...
Hi Jason,
ReplyDeleteWe're in the middle of harvest right now. It is a job that gets bigger, but also easier to handle every year. But because the process becomes easier, we also harvest and preserve more food every single year so the workload remains. The larders are almost chock full, as is the firewood stores. The thing that really worries me is that I see few if any other people pursuing such a strategy. Of course, this can also mean that I am way off the mark too! Wouldn't that be nice?
Was the electricity supply to your place maintained throughout the storm? I assume that you have a wood burning stove of some sort? Do you use your charcoal in that? Even here with milder winters where snow is only an occasional visitor, far out, firewood is still everything over the winter as much as water is over the summer.
Congratulations for the new job too - for both of you.
Chris
Hi Chris. It sounds like you are really building up some resiliency there with your food and fuel. Like you, I'm also concerned about other people. there's only so much you can do in terms of making things as safe as possible for your own brood, but what about others?
DeleteNo problems with the electricity supply. People are often surprised to hear that Britain has one of the most reliable grids in the world (for now), and I can't ever remember experiencing a blackout, although apparently they did happen in the 1970s. I'm sure that will all change in the next few years as things get more fragile.
We have a wood burner in the house that we burn logs in. I don't use charcoal except for (outdoor) cooking. The main problem is that my wife and I have different internal thermostats. She wants the heating on 24/7 and I want it off. I think it's because of her Italian blood, compared to my Norseman blood.
Congratulations on the salaried employment - always most useful!
ReplyDeleteInteresting to read about different experiences of the Beast from the East as regards food supply in Britain.
No problems at all here in East Anglia - shelves full, delivery vans running. Full steam ahead.
Is it the peripheries that have suffered the most interruption -the low-income post-industrial areas that no one really cares much about about?
Or would that be reading too much into it? Just a matter of distribution hub location?
All the best
Xabier
Hi Xabier. Supplies have now finally been fully restored to the supermarkets here. I am starting to think that some of the shops deliberately used the disruption to cut costs. Cornwall - one of the UK's (and, indeed, Europe's) poorest regions, has only 500,000 or so residents, but gets some 5 million visitors, most of them in the summer. Apparently the supermarkets lose money here outside of the tourist season, so any excuse to halt food shipments presumably saves them money.
DeleteInteresting to watch these things if you are paying attention.
Hey Jason,
ReplyDeleteMate, two words - good luck! I wonder about your natural gas supplies given the diplomatic situation. Dunno.
Interesting. Blackouts are common here, but the area is in a remote spot and trees can fall across powerlines and take out sections of the grid. Not being attached to the grid, I barely notice such events, but hear of them. I actually took out the local power grid one day many years ago by accident and that was an expensive accident which I had to pay for.
Ouch. Mate, I have experienced couples arguing about internal house temperatures down here. My wife and I are on the same page, basically because we both physically bring in the firewood and understand what a humongous task it is and so there is no argument about running the fire out overnight. Most of the wood heaters sold down under wont burn overnight anyway because of the pollution restrictions. Only the really old wood burners can pull that trick off.
Chris
I don't think we'll have much luck given that our only strategy, so far, is to a) Aggressively threaten Russia and b) Put all our faith that America's fracking industry will ride to our rescue.
DeleteDoesn't sound very clever, does it?
We've another cold snap coming this weekend, so we'll see if there is anything to add next week ...
If I was a conspiracy theorist I'd think that the UK is pretending to pick a fight with Russia in order to soften up opposition to fracking and Trident, but there's too many conspiracy theories out there already...
DeleteWith extreme weather events, and so on, it's a very good opportunity to see how different regions of one's country function, or fail to; and take appropriate and prudent action.
ReplyDeleteAnd to pay proper attention both to ones woodshed and cellar.....
All the best
Xabier