even if it is plants someone else has grown 😉
Went round to Kris‘s this afternoon – we were chatting, I was moaning about the garden and how nothing has grown (apart from the weeds, they are doing *really* well) so she said to go over there and help out this aft, and she’ll come over here next week. So we did.
Timing was perfect, as we drove through a village on route, parents of my best friend were just coming out of their house, so we did comedy emergency stop, screeched to a halt and arranged to see them week after as well (that’s where we went for art a few times, although they are unfortunately now moving down to Bedford 🙁 )
Afternoon in the garden was lovely – Kris demonstrated the azada which I’ve borrowed to use this week, she planted out things and gave me some of her excess plants to pop in my garden. So I’ve now got three beans, two tomatos and three sweet chilli plants taking up residence 🙂
More discussions with Tim about where I want to be and what I want to be doing – I’m increasingly feeling pointless and parasitic, even if I had a job doing programming it doesn’t feel like real work, I mean, it doesn’t save lives, it doesn’t feed ppl, it’s mainly just moving money from ppl with little to ppl with much. Been browsing small holding websites, but given my dismal track record in the garden feels like rather a large step to take. And we don’t have the money. But it feels like it would be an honest way to live, if that makes sense.
Oh I don’t know. I’m all out of sorts – I loved the week in a field, and living with such a small amount of stuff, but even that was dishonest, because if I was really short of things, I just go out with a credit card. I’m a fraud! And it’s getting to me.
Comments
14 responses to “Feels good to plant stuff”
not a fraud, just struggling to live an ideal life in a non- ideal world.
i often hanker after a simple life – me, one of the most sucked into the commercial capitalist existance type people I know. I don’t know whether it would work or not but I like the idea of it…
also a smallholder in the closet – but as merry would tell you, our veg patch full of weeds, and house = consumption city.
cant give life advice, as my own is not so well worked out. think perfect lives rare though.
Self-sufficiency would be my idea of hell 😉 But I still have a massive urge to get rid of about 70% of everything in this house. I fancy being a plumber ….
we have the same feelings, so this year we planted carrots , beans , lettuce of many varieties. grew them from seed – very proud to be pricking them out into rows in the garden. Couple of days later slug n snails had eaten the lot.
we dream of selfsufficiency – but realistically not sure we’d ever acheive it.
Surely it depends who you programme for? There are plenty of worthy causes that could benefit from your talents and pay you. I am sure at the place where Alison and I met that the many programmers actually felt they were contributing to the saving of millions of lives all round the world.
(((((Jax)))))) you seem very useful to me :0) But sympathise on the feeling useless front – sometimes I wonder, I’ve not had the most stable job history and did used to be nagged by my father to pull my finger out and get a job.
And that azada is really fantastic isn’t it! Took no time to strip a small patch away for tomatoes.
Not sure I know where you guys met? ime the worthy causes very rarely pay a living wage, especially as it would have to cover some childcare.
Nikki, I’ll let you know in about half an hour!
We met here – http://www.ctsu.ox.ac.uk/ – well, in a slightly more dilapidated building, lol!
Roomful of freaky geeks at the end of the corridor, complete with cardboard box sunshields over their monitors, and a man who always wore wellies (clearly Poppy’s spiritual guide!). That was upstairs, in cancer, they seemed a bit more normal downstairs in heart disease.
Well I honestly believe I work for a worthy cause, in that I think training doctors and medical research are worthy. The research in Oxford has saved millions of lives and I much prefer my energies are devoted to that endpoint than profits. I also think I earn a pretty good salary.
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jgodwin/jg.htm
That’s welly-man…
Chris, a manager working for an industrial company might claim that his was the greater virtue, since it is the wealth generated by business which pays for all the research. What concerns me though is that we seem to have less and less people engaged in activities which genuinely generate wealth, and those who are, we hold in little regard.
Status and wealth seem to attach mostly to jobs which do not contribute in any way to the sum total of national wealth.
Far too many people are engaged in activity which adds little or no real value, and merely results in money being moved from one place to another. I would include in this people working in advertising, marketers, media and new media, many IT workers and public sector managers and all lawyers. The packaging industry seems to me to be pretty pointless for the most part and I harbour a suspicion that much of the physical activity of moving goods from place to place is unnecessary.
We seem to be busily exporting all the jobs in production, and the expertise that goes with them. I can’t help feeling that this is a mistake and we will end up with a kind of empty shell of an economy, wholly reliant on workers in foreign countries doing all the work, while we spend the wealth that they create.
Well I was commenting as to whether I felt *my* job was worthy and that *I* prefer the endpoint not to be profits. I wasn’t providing any comment on anything else.
What types of activity genuinely generate wealth?
How you feel about your job is your own business, and I am sure that you would not wish to imply that you look down on the people whose endpoint is the profit which is taken in tax and given to you and your colleagues. Without them, you wouldn’t be there and my concern is that there are fewer and fewer of them to pay for things like the £36 billion annual public sector borrowing tab.
I suppose I would go for a definition along the lines of a good: “…a good is a physical product capable of being delivered to a purchaser and involves the transfer of ownership from seller to customer.” Or maybe it is simply Agricultural and Manufacturing Output. By and large, I don’t think services count. In terms of types of activity, I mean things covered by concepts like growing, making, building and manufacturing rather than dealing, trading, moving, branding, managing and talking, although some of these latter are necessary contributors to the former. Mind you, writing may add to wealth, as in Shakespeare, or IMHO 🙂 not, as in Jeffrey Archer. In the latter case, he has merely moved money from one place to another and destroyed a number of perfectly good trees.
Producing adverts exhorting people to spend money on more and more stuff which will be converted to landfill in short order certainly adds no real value, while the IP and so forth entailed in the research output from places like medsci.ox.ac.uk certainly does.
Well of course our research leads to billions of pounds worth of goods being sold……so you could argue that we more than fund ourselves.
Of course the majority of this University’s funding is not from tax at all 😉 I really don’t see why you imply (or maybe I infer) that my preference to not work for profit is in anyway an indication of what I think of people who do.