Been away for ages! Spent about 2 months at a lovely community in the Pyrenees, building a giant toilet for them, along with a couple of other people. Very enjoyable just working quietly in the woods, with no power tools other than the drill/driver and chainsaw.
Learnt a lot about using roundwood for structures too, and yielding (or not) to its various wibbles. And a lot about my own patience and tolerance!
Tags:construction·toilet
So, the dust has settled on another Goat Race, and we are happy to announce that about £6300 has been raised for the farm, a huge increase on the £3400 from last year! So thanks to everyone who came, everyone who worked there, especially those who volunteered their time, and to the farm staff.
Exciting new additions this year included the Oxford & Cambridge Stoat Race, food, coffee, beer from Meantime Brewery and cocktails from Abelha Cachaca.
Music from the excellent DJ Pigsnoots, and live freestyle MC’ing from the excellent Voodoo Browne, whose single, Low Budget Raver drops this April.
This year, we had more time to put into making lots more decorations and bits & bobs for the farm which was nice.
Bramble the Golden Guernsey romped home for Cambridge in 57 seconds as Oxford never recovered from stopping at the start of the race to do a poo.
From a personal point of view, I think it’s really important to connect people to city farms – they do an important thing of not letting us forget ultimately what life is about - which is easy to do in cities. So I was happy to see thousands of smiling people walking around the farm, taking it all in. Many will have been to Brick Lane and Shoreditch tens of times and never known about the farm just a street away.
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I made my mum a bird feeder for her birthday from an old tin can and a yogurt pot. You just fill the tin with meal, seed or worms and you’re good to go. The petals came out like a lotus blossom, so perhaps the little birdies that feed from it will acheive spiritual enlightenment.
Instructable: how to make a lotus flower bird feeder from junk
Inspired by this from the RSPB site
Last year I set a bunch of objectives for myself, based on aspects of my life that I wanted to explore. So here are the results. This year’s plans coming soon!
Food
1. Grow and eat 2 kinds of vegetable or fruit in the garden.
This doesn’t sound that hard, but I am a terrible gardener. I only have mint, thyme and chives (almost dead) in my back garden because Dog and I just could not kill them, despite our best efforts using claws, drought, biting, urine and neglect.
Results: Grew potatoes in tyres and a seemingly infinite supply of peppery rocket. Had some difficulties with tomatoes and rhubarb.
Status: ACHIEVED, HAPPY
2. Forage 3 new wild items and utilise them for food (or chutney, soup etc.)
Two high points of 2009 included picking sloes from inside the M25 and the resulting sloe cachaca, and also an amazing wild blackberry crumble. So more of the same this year.
Results: Achieved with a couple of different types of mushrooms and a good day’s foraging in Two Trees Island in Essex, picking Sea Purslaine and Wild Fennel. I think picking and eating wild fungi was my happiest surprise discovery for 2010, I am definitely now a slightly cringey amateur mycologist.
Status: ACHIEVED, VERY HAPPY
3. Kill and eat 3 different species of animal.
There is nothing more satisfying than catching your own dinner. I hope to maybe catch/eat a couple of new types sea fish (bass?), or maybe a rabbit.
Didn’t go fishing at all this year, and not really to any farm-like places either. I seem to be eating less meat these days anyway too. Feel ok about this one.
Status: FAILED, DON’T MIND
4. Build 6 new food/drink items from scratch.
Last year I set the wholly unrealistic goal of only eating scratch built things (e.g. no bought ketchup, no coleslaw, etc). This year I will try a few new things like beer, jam, tonic water, jelly or a gala pie.
I just couldn’t get this going, but on the plus side we now use the breadmaker every day which is amazing. It took a while to get right, and even now we get it wrong sometimes, but I love the smell of yeasty baking flooding the house from 5 in the morning, and we rarely buy bread from a store.
Status: FAILED, PERTURBED
Work
My theme for work is building things with long term value, and generally being freer – getting more control of my time and more control of what kind of work I do.
1. Abelha
has gone well in our first year so me and Hal are mega-excited about the future. We started with the theory that booze makes people happy, and henceforth the more booze we move, the more we get people to spend time happily chatting, chilling, flirting, dancing and who knows what else. So far we are up to something like 17800 of these man-hours of Abelha-fuelled fun. Our resolution is to further increase the peace around the UK and world.
A big year for us, we have increased our volumes significantly, started working with a great agency, LoveDrinks, and myself and Hal’s roles in the business has changed a lot too. Up to about 111,948 hours of Abelha-fuelled good times now. All systems set for world domination.
Status: ACHIEVED, HAPPY
2. Work freelance less, and more on developing own projects.
(about 1:2 ratio of freelance to own projects)
Status: ACHIEVED, HAPPY
3. Get the wheels going on one new product or service with long term potential.
We started getting paid (tiny amounts) for our art-related activities, which is excellent, and also I realised that don’t even almost have time to set up a new business scheme right now.
Status: FAILED, DON’T MIND
4. Do about 165 days of work in 2010.
Status: ACHIEVED, DON’T MIND
Fun/Art
This is the easy section. I think it’s really important that we try to bring lots of moments of beauty into other people’s lives (as well as our own). For me this means craft, sort-of-art, events, and general silliness.
1. Make the Goat Race bigger and better this year.
Wowee, we had over 1000 people through the door and coverage in nationals and all over the radio. So a resounding success. Even bigger for 2011, watch this space.
Status: ACHIEVED, HAPPY
2. Do another installation piece in a gallery or festival.
2 exhibitions this year, one of which was in the V&A, which was ace.
Status: ACHIEVED, HAPPY
3. Develop our multi-touch screen into new useful object.
Hmmm. We learned the obvious lesson that it’s much more interesting to make new things than muck around with old ones. I am glad to be moving away from screen-based stuff though. However it is taking up room in the shed.
Status: FAILED, OH WELL
4. Build a piece of art that has ongoing development/usage potential.
Status: UNCERTAIN, DON’T MIND
5. Do our jousting party bigger and better this year.
I really haven’t been in a party mood since my epic birthday, and over the spring and summer I spent a lot of time surfing, which has been my other favourite activity this year. Bike jousting is a noble art which will have it’s day though.
Status: FAILED, DON’T MIND
6. Make the DogBox club into a regular self-sustaining thing.
Status: SEMI-ACHIEVED, DON’T MIND
7. Build three hats that I designed ages ago but still haven’t made.
I just didn’t have the bandwidth/energy to pursue this. In fairness the amount of time I spent doing self-directed art-like projects has been much more than I thought this year, so I am not too bothered about this. There is now a studio-traffic list of projects waiting to be built, so it will just have to wait it’s course.
Status: FAILED, PERTURBED
8. Make one sustainability-related project.
Both Mobile Phone Birds and this lamp I built would count. Would like to do more in this field. Watch this space.
Status: ACHIEVED, PERTURBED
Nature
1. Observe and sketch the 12 Zodiacal constellations.
I observed 9 of them, including getting much better grip of all the stars visible from the UK. Capricorn, Sagittarius and Scorpio eluded me though.
Status: FAILED, DON’T MIND
2. Observe and sketch 10 Messier objects (e.g. galaxies, star clusters).
Had some other great moments “discovering” Jupiter’s moons, shooting stars, and so don’t mind this. I haven’t yet found myself that interested in the Messier objects yet, perhaps they’re more of a thing for telescopes.
Status: FAILED, DON’T MIND
3. Pick/sketch/photograph 12 UK wild flowers.
yup
Status: ACHIEVED, HAPPY
4. Catch a falling leaf.
This was a surprise highlight of 2010. Having never done this as a child, I couldn’t believe what a rush it was. Daft but true.
Status: ACHIEVED, SUPER-HAPPY
5. Observe and sketch common cloud types
I in fact got totally obsessed with clouds, collecting about 100 pictures of them. They are a constant source of beauty and amazement to me.
Status: OVER-ACHIEVED, HAPPY
6. Mark the equinoxes with some kind of cool sculpture (this is the goal I am least keen on, and to be frank it sounds a bit druidic, but I like the idea of building a modern stonehenge).
Done, pictures coming soon!
Status: ACHIEVED, HAPPY
Tags:nyres2011
Spent a morning picking sloes in the glorious winter sunshine. The hardest part about making sloe gin is avoiding the temptation to drink it before it’s ready.
The difference between homemade sloe gin and the store bought stuff is phenomenal – store bought stuff tastes like Ribena and Halls Soothers, while the homemade stuff is very mellow and berry-like.
One of the things I am enjoying most this autumn is learning about, and eating, wild mushrooms.
Today’s breakfast, omelette with freshly picked field mushrooms form around the Hackney / Tower Hamlets area. Field mushrooms (agaricus campestris) are just about the most common edible mushroom. Delicious, deeply satisfying and a bit scary.
Another New Years Resolution done, foraging new kinds of food. Yesterday I found some little wild puffballs. Peeled skins off, cut into slices, fried with butter and garlic and added to salad. Tasted delicious with a kind of neutral, mushroomy flavour. When you cut into the flesh, it smells exactly like a can of Heinz/Campbells mushroom soup, but fresher.
I am still not dead. Luckily, puffballs are mostly safe to eat and hard to mix up with poisonous mushroom. As long as the flesh is white (not yellow or any other colour), and they are definitely a ball, with uniform flesh throughout (as opposed to another kind of mushroom that just hasn’t opened yet, in which case you will see the formation of gills and a cap when you slice it open), then you should be ok. Please check many books and websites before eating any mushrooms!
DO NOT EAT THESE
These look pretty good to eat right? I found them growing wild around woodlands in Hackney. Anyway I identified them as Wood Mushrooms from a book. Let them sit in the kitchen for a couple of days. Looked at the book again carefully, then went for a walk, came back and was just about to turn them into omelette for breakfast when I did one final check, for no reason, and it turns out they are the poisonous “Yellow Stainer”.
DO NOT EAT THESE
Wood mushrooms also bruise yellow, but these produce bright yellow stains even down in the stem when you cut it with a knife.
There is a old carpenter saying, “measure thrice, cut once”. No idea why it was only the 3rd time I looked at the book that I got it right.
Article from someone who knows more about mushrooms than me:
http://www.mushroomdiary.co.uk/2010/08/horse-mushroom-imposter-the-yellow-stainer/
This is a lamp made from scavenged parts which uses heat from one candle to generate electricity to power 6 ultra-bright LED butterflies. It’s a designed for someone who lives off-grid, so it can provide a bright white light source off just one tea-light. It uses the heatsink from an old Dell computer, and a thing called a peltier chip (converts heat into electricity) taken from a 12V fridge.
I was inspired by the amazing instructable from reukpower, and have made a few refinements to the way it all fits together. Pretty happy with it. The most cool thing about it is that the light from the LEDs is really really bright – much brighter than the light of the candle. Spooky huh?
close up of the butterfly – cut from a plastic bottle and painted
One thing that particularly pleased me is that it’s made from hardly any new parts. I only had to buy a transistor and some heat conducting paste.
you can see the circuitry underneath – it’s a circuit known as a joule thief, which sort of transforms the voltage from the peltier chip into something that can run the high-brightness LEDs
inside the tin cans – loft insulation surrounds the peltier chip (the white square)
the finished lamp/mobile
Tags:butterflies·eco·electricity·lamp·LED
The cat, called Catter or Cat for short, is now 6 months old and has started killing mice (our house is an old house and is infested with mice). Two down in the last ten days.
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I have been looking at clouds loads recently. An exciting(!) day today – as we had sun dogs a.k.a. parhelia over Victoria Park. Sun dogs – little suns that appear 22° to the left and right of the Sun, often displaying the colours of the rainbow.
Also a faint upside down rainbow in the clouds above the sun – if you zoom in you can see the colours start from red at the bottom.
At first I thought it was a circumhorizontal arc, but no such luck.
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Image from Michelle Bower
Just an early warning to say hold the date, The Goat Race is back, at Spitalfields City Farm, just near Brick Lane, on Saturday 3rd April 2010 (Easter weekend). Same day as a similar sounding sporting event.
Image from WowtheWorld
If you’d like to get involved with either the Goat Race, doing a stall or activity, promoting something, or the afterparty, get in touch.
I finally built a site for it at www.thegoatrace.org , and you can join us on Facebook at bit.ly/goatrace .
We are taking on board feedback from last year – more activites and fun surrounding the race, and a better organised afterparty. So stay tuned.
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We have loads of mice in our house. I don’t want to poison them and I have shot a few with an airgun, but I thought getting a cat might be a better way which would also generally benefit the house. I don’t really like cats (I love dogs), and didn’t really feel anything when I went to get this kitten. But now after a few days, it is making funny noises, running/leaping around the house, generally getting on with Dog, and I quite like it now. Even at 6 months old, it is pretty coordinated and driven to destroy fast-moving mouse-like objects, so I have high hopes for it to rack up a good body count this year. I am going to call it ‘Cat’.
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This year, instead of making vague statements, or trying to *not* do things (which is really difficult), I made bunches of little objectives across a number of categories which are important to me: Food, Work, Fun, Nature and Personal. The idea is that all these little tasks added up will hopefully shape life more in the direction I am trying to go.
Food
This year focusses on going back to basics: growing, foraging, killing, cooking and eating.
1. Grow and eat 2 kinds of vegetable or fruit in the garden.
This doesn’t sound that hard, but I am a terrible gardener. I only have mint, thyme and chives (almost dead) in my back garden because Dog and I just could not kill them, despite our best efforts using claws, drought, biting, urine and neglect.
2. Forage 3 new wild items and utilise them for food (or chutney, soup etc.)
Two high points of 2009 included picking sloes from inside the M25 and the resulting sloe cachaca, and also an amazing wild blackberry crumble. So more of the same this year.
3. Kill and eat 3 different species of animal.
There is nothing more satisfying than catching your own dinner. I hope to maybe catch/eat a couple of new types sea fish (bass?), or maybe a rabbit.
4. Build 6 new food/drink items from scratch.
Last year I set the wholly unrealistic goal of only eating scratch built things (e.g. no bought ketchup, no coleslaw, etc). This year I will try a few new things like beer, jam, tonic water, jelly or a gala pie.
Work
My theme for work is building things with long term value, and generally being freer – getting more control of my time and more control of what kind of work I do.
1. Abelha
has gone well in our first year so me and Hal are mega-excited about the future. We started with the theory that booze makes people happy, and henceforth the more booze we move, the more we get people to spend time happily chatting, chilling, flirting, dancing and who knows what else. So far we are up to something like 17800 of these man-hours of Abelha-fuelled fun. Our resolution is to further increase the peace around the UK and world.
2. Work freelance less, and more on developing own projects.
(about 1:2 ratio of freelance to own projects)
3. Get the wheels going on one new product or service with long term potential.
4. Do about 165 days of work in 2010.
Fun/Art
This is the easy section. I think it’s really important that we try to bring lots of moments of beauty into other people’s lives (as well as our own). For me this means craft, sort-of-art, events, and general silliness.
1. Make the Goat Race bigger and better this year.
2. Do another installation piece in a gallery or festival.
3. Develop our multi-touch screen into new useful object.
4. Build a piece of art that has ongoing development/usage potential.
5. Do our jousting party bigger and better this year.
6. Make the DogBox club into a regular self-sustaining thing.
7. Build three hats that I designed ages ago but still haven’t made.
8. Make one sustainability-related project.
Nature
I sometimes get an awesome sensation of peace and awe in beautiful natural surroundings – mountains, sunsets, lunar eclipses, etc. I knew when I got Dog that I wanted to spend more time outside, exploring; also, being a bit of a nerd I’ve always had a keen interest in nature too. I want to spend less time on the Internet too, and just to slow down a little.
1. Observe and sketch the 12 Zodiacal constellations.
2. Observe and sketch 10 Messier objects (e.g. galaxies, star clusters).
3. Pick/sketch/photograph 12 UK wild flowers.
4. Catch a falling leaf.
5. Observe and sketch common cloud types (if I ever have a kid, at some point they will ask about clouds, and I will feel like a bit of a cunt if all I know is that the wispy ones are good and the big grey ones are bad).
6. Mark the equinoxes with some kind of cool sculpture (this is the goal I am least keen on, and to be frank it sounds a bit druidic, but I like the idea of building a modern stonehenge).
Here’s to 2010!
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This year I have been thinking a lot about waste. Today I built a compost bin, which felt good as it not only didn’t cost anything, but it used up all these mangy palettes that have been cluttering the front yard.
Tower Hamlets give us these brown waste food bins, but my main thinking around waste is that it’s really important to dispose of as much of your own stuff as possible, rather than relying on council services. This is so that we’re aware of how much stuff we are using – if we had to personally dispose of every single bit of non-degradeable rubbish we bought, we would definitely use less of these things.
Another aspect I find interesting, that’s pretty unfamiliar to me, is that I’ve built something, but have no idea if it will ‘work’ until about a year. Will the palettes rot away? Will I get bored of it? Will I screw up and kill all the composting organisms? Who knows. In this day of fast response, throwaway stuff, it’s really refreshing to have projects like this.
I found instuctions on how to build a compost bin from palettes from the Gardeners World website, good grief, never thought I’d end up there.
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I had a spare lightbulb that I had hollowed out left over from another project so I made it into a terrarium for my mum for Christmas.
It’s very easy to make, you hollow out a lightbulb, then add regular soil, then stone or bark (I used bark) that has a load of moss on it. A dramatic rock adds good zen effect too – I used a chip of slate stolen from the garden centre.
No special tools required, though I used a few cotton buds to clean up the inside after all the soil had gone in.
Inpsiration from Instructables, one of the fewer and fewer remaining websites that bring me some form of joy.
The other good thing about this is that I still don’t really know what it is. I guess the nearest analogy is a pot plant, but it’s much cooler than a pot plant.
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I hereby declare the First Annual Varsity Oxford and Cambridge Goat Race to be a total success. An edited thank you note from Anne Hopkins, Goat Race co-founder:
Thanks to the 300+ of you who chose Goats over Boats on Sunday – it was awesome and ridiculous in equal measures and most importantly raised over £700 for the farm. Thank You.
Our favourite squat-legged friend, Cambridge, barreled in first on the day in front of the rather more willowy Oxford with a time of 52.6 sec. Go the under-goat!
We can’t get enough of giggling at shots of the goats muscling their way along the course, so please do send us your pics (simeonrose@gmail.com) or add them to the Facebook event page or put them up on the net and tag them goatrace2009.
Huge thanks to go to Cookie for his brilliant design work, Ben for winning tunes, Hal for race-calling and general fine-sportsmanship, Paul for playing Bookie, our nimble-needled knitters, La Fromagerie for the cheese (which Sam Williams won…eventually!) AND of course to the Spitalfields City Farm for letting us run with this random idea in the first place.
(Sorry about the drinks bungle, we were there with free booze but the pub wouldn’t let us serve it to you due to a miscommunication — we will make it up to you next time, promise!)
Anne, Simeon & Anthony
See the pics here on Flickr.
Anthony Goh http://www.deadinsect.co.uk
Abelha Cachaca http://www.abelha.co.uk
Anne Hopkins http://www.snap-shot-city.com/
Simon Cook http://www.made-in-england.org/
Pigsnoots http://www.myspace.com/dothedirt
Magic-ish http://www.magic-ish.com/
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On the same day as a similar sounding event, Sunday the 29th March 2009, we will race two actual goats along a difficult, meandering course lined with cheering spectators.
It’s a charity event from Anne, Simeon, me (and Cookie and Nicky) to help raise money for Spitalfields City Farm, situated just behind Brick Lane.
So come down, browse Brick Lane market, cheer on the goats, and then we’ll all go to a nearby pub or bar for a free (or at least very cheap – I am negotiating with some places now) drink.
=====Programme=====
2:00pm doors open
Donation £3 to enter. (100% of all money taken goes straight to the farm).
Amusements:
** The Official Goat Race Bookie and Sweepstake
** Goatee competition
** Goats in Coats on Boats which Float in Moats Game
** Goat Hoopla
3:30pm The Race Starts
4:00pm Prize giving ceremony
4:30pm Afterparty
We retire to a nearby pub or bar, with DJ and a good drinks offer (likely a free cocktail) for those who attended the race.
=====Dress Code=====
Strictly: Black Tie, Rowing lycra, boat club jackets and ties, or goat.
=====Date and Location=====
Sunday March 29th
Spitalfields City Farm, Buxton Street, London, E1 5AR
Click here for map
Nearest tubes: Whitechapel 5 mins, Bethnal Green 5 mins, Aldgate East 5 mins
So that’s it.
It’s going to be loads of fun – if you want to come, why not get involved with the pre-race banter on the Facebook event page here.
If you’d like to be involved, running a stall, or helping out in any way, let me know too – my email address is on the top right of this blog.
See you there!!
Tags:goat race
I’ve started a new blog/repository for clips of people doing backflips with an almost unbelievable array of techniques and equipment.
This isn’t totally frivolous as it sounds, as to me, a backflip represents everything good and great about being human, like:
* dedication
* play
* athleticism
* now-ism
* bravery
* freedom
here’s a couple of clips to show you what I mean:
wheelchair backflip
the double moonsault
by they way this is a cute example for Herd readers out there – listen to the spontaneous crowd chanting
You can find the WhyBackflip blog here
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