I came across this Mahatma Gandhi quote for the first time in the last ever printed edition of The Ecologist magazine yesterday. I like it a lot as it helps to quell the sense of  helplessness and ‘this problem is too big and too complex for little old me to do anything about’.

Even the smallest things get noticed and have an impact in their own way so by my buying eggs from the local lady with hens and our drastically reducing consumption of meat (and never eating cheap meat produced in hellish animal factories) and our decision to not fly and to drive only when necessary and to spend our money on food which has not had petrochemical fertilisers and pesticides used on them and by turning away from all household chemicals which are not derived from natural plant sources ARE actually all having an impact.

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I finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy last week – an amazing novel for the ‘globally warmed generation’ – very dark and bleak tale of a man and his young son walking though a world destroyed by humans (I presumed a nasty combination of resource depletion + climatic change resulting in a global nuclear war scenario). The book was spellbindingly well written in very poetic prose but now I am left with terrible images and even more fear about the future of our species doing everything it can to ensure we destroy the environment which supports us.

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I’ve decided to learn to ride a horse as I suspect it will be a good means of transport in the future when petrol is too expensive for Ms Average to afford to run a car.

I thought it would be good to accompany our young daughter but at six, she has decided she is too scared of being on a (tiny) pony and will try again next year. It’s not a nasty skill to learn – as soon as I’d clambered up onto poor 20 year old Verdi’s back we set off on a woodland hack through masses of wild garlic and alongside a pretty little babbling brook. It was a strange sensation having to trust that the animal would not slip into the stream and topple me off but we made it back to the riding school in one piece and then began to learn how to trot. A very way to spend a Saturday lunchtime in the spring sunshine.

Dear old Bealers sourced and bought a beautiful spinning wheel for my christmas present, hid it in his office for weeks and even managed to somehow stop our chatty office cleaner from spilling the beans to me whenever I bumped into her in the village or when she helped us move house. On Christmas day I was presented with an enormous box which contained not only the wheel itself but a huge bag of Jacob sheep fleece and the necessary additional equipment needed to get spinning fleece into yarn (combs, extra bobbins and a ‘niddy noddy’).

For a few months it has been a pretty ornament in the porch until I recently attended a wonderful one-day ‘learn how to spin’ course at the very cool ‘Spinning Weal‘ shop in Clevedon, Somerset (the website has a very good online store for wool, yarns, dyes and quilting things it also has a calendar of forthcoming courses and events).

It was a fascinating day. I discovered that spinning is a rewarding, meditative passtime which seems to bring one back in touch with an activity which must have been essential to  many of our ancestors. For the duration of the course I was learning to spin with some really interesting women and our course tutor Sarah had loads of insight into the history of spinning.

By the end of the day I had been taught not only how to spin yarn but also how to ply it with another yarn and then to make a ball of something which could actually be knitted into fabric. We were also shown how to blend dyed yarns with one another and how to make different textures of yarns.

Since coming back from the course I have been keen to do more spinning but I have not been able to make the time as we don’t sit down to eat until 8.30ish. Perhaps it is the sort of activity I will have more time for when the nights are long and the fire is lit.