Routines, Strawberries and the Reinstatement of Yon

I still have nothing even remotely resembling a routine, unless you can call being horrified each morning by the time it takes me to answer e-mails. Yesterday was eaten by a succession of minor but important tasks, such as getting the drains unblocked, drinking a vital pint at an excellent local pub in support of the food co-operative, reorganising my sock drawer and taking lots of photographs in the polytunnel before I plundered it for the ingredients of a rich vegetable soup. With loads of barley in.

Much of the morning, however, was spent talking to a local journalist about the Transition movement. This was too good an opportunity to miss, not least because of the free coffee but mostly because Ruth, bless her heart, is using Transition Town Dorchester as the lead for a colour supplement later in the year. This is a fairly steep learning curve for her, however, as she had no idea what the whole thing was about and had never heard of Peak Oil; so taking things from first principles we were there for... oh, quite a while.

One of Ruth's questions, though, made me pause for a minute. 'Do you ever think you might merge Transition Dorchester with Transition Weymouth?' she asked. 'I mean, they're only a spit down the road from each other.' Well, yes and no, I told her. Dorchester and Weymouth are quite close together - separated only by a few miles of fields and a geographical feature known as the Ridgeway. However the Transition movement is all about planning for a future where we won't have so much fossil fuel to make such trips. In a car, the Ridgeway is a fair-sized hill; on a bike it's more like a cardiovasular workout. On a bike with some heavy shopping in the panniers, it'd practically be a death sentence.

The point is that in the post-carbon economy the world is going to start un-shrinking. What's a spit down the road today is going to be a fair old trek in a decade or two. We may have to reinstate the word yon into our speech. Yon and yonder have fallen out of use over the last couple of hundred years, unless you live in Scotland and some other places about which no doubt you're all about to tell me. I think it's kind of a pity.

For anyone not familiar with it, yon is like an extension of there but a bit further away. The cat who just stole your warm pork chop* may be here (unwisely choosing to eat it right in front of you), there (chewing it up in the hall) or yon (scarfing it down in the relative safety of next door's garden). It's not just there, it's over there, just out of slipper-throwing range. Itinerant cats are nearly always yon, and Weymouth... Weymouth is definitely yon.

But back to today, and the planting of a second row of strawberries in patch B. Sure, I know it's late but that's OK - being as patch A is still in production I can afford to pull the flowers off the plants in patch B this summer, and let them concentrate on forming a good root network. Out goes Sophie the late strawberry, which had an indifferent taste, and in comes a day-neutral variety yet to be chosen. Here we go.



*In memoriam, Magellan the warm pork chop thief. Sorely missed, but not by Colin's next door neighbour whose aim improved considerably over the years.