Naomi grew up in rural Wales and taught art in Lewisham for years before bringing her family to live in a commune in Suffolk. She now shares one colossal house, Old Hall, and seventy acres of farmland with 45 others. Old Hall sits like a spaceship full of hippies in the middle of a posh commuter village. Naomi’s environmental concerns drive her quest to work and live a more sustainable life. She is an activist that doesn’t enjoy police cells so tends to do the outreach or artwork instead.

_____

 

HEX 

 

Give it 10 years from now and we’ll jackhammer the car parks up for allotments, tear up the pavements for brassicas and plant alliums in BMW’s. We’ll line the buses up as greenhouses; seedlings on the bottom deck, corn on the top deck and saplings up the stairs.  The bus windows south facing for solar gain carefully employed to utilize the free heat. White vans can store the fruit, dry the beans and support the tomatoes. Some Lewisham soil will be enriched by those gardeners that compost, it’ll be ready to bloat the sap up, out and into a swelling fruit. Some gardeners’ soil will need regenerating and we will need to feed it.

We’ll cut into the rooves of SUV’s for compost loos with that great drop past the chassis on to the brown riches of humanure below. Humanure will nourish our new food. Lumpy food with black bits, pest holes, fresh and ugly food packed with energy that we will relish.

We’ll rip up swathes of London tarmac and dump it somewhere out of sight; somewhere that’s not looking; somewhere like Surrey.  Huge chunks of debris will be piled up to make manmade mountains in Dorking. Reinforcing rods will strike up into still air, bare like trees, rusted silvery like beech bark before the disease and the chainsaws. Entangled wires of electric wizardry will be pulled out and pushed into twisted piles of sparkless shrubbery for any birds to nest in.

Shiny tower blocks will give us our whetstones and all that glass, all those edges for knives, billhooks, scythes. Sharpening our tools will be a priority. 5-year-olds will be tooled up with the rest of us, working to pull a future out of pesticide-soaked lawns, the wormless parodies of fertility for a new city wealth.

We’ll be chitting potatoes, sweet ones and farming the reclaimed streets. We’ll be collecting eggs from smart cars, cooking in trucks and serving chutney from the back of land rovers. There is no beach beneath the Lewisham pavement, but we’ll smash up the slabs regardless and blindly reach through to get at the heart of the matter. There is no sand or salty water, but there is green gold down there, enough for all of us and it’s oh so green. The future is medieval and that is ok but how do we handle the collapse? We will have to go through something first but then maybe we’re already doing just that?

 

The living room has more plants than furniture, I think, sitting on the comfy sofa watching my daughter being alive and safe at home with me.

I’m shop-stopping Iris, I say, unsure of how a nine-year-old feels about shopping. It’s difficult to tell.

I’m not buying any more unnecessary new stuff, I explain.

Why not? She says. Absorbed in stroking the cat on the living room rug.

I lean back into the sofa and say . Well…we don’t know what to do with the stuff we already have, do we? And there are better ways of doing things, I think.

Ok, she says looking up at me. So, what about my wolf necklace for Christmas?

Oh. Do you really need a wolf necklace, Iris?  Seven-year-olds have to dig that stuff out of the ground with their ickle little fingers. It’s not magicked up out of nothing, you know.

But you pinkie promised me.

Did I? I’ll get you a more humane necklace, second hand.

It won’t have a wolf on it though will it.

We might get lucky…

Daddy will get it. I’ll ask him.

 

The organic fruit and veg box, if you forget about the fossil fuel delivery, is guiltfree. I get a large one, weekly, for the three of us and top it up with rice and things from local shops with a conscience. Going around an actual supermarket has practically vanished from my to-do list. Oats: they are still an issue. I took a pillowcase to the No Packaging Shop in Forest Hill, but I stopped them from filling it up when I saw that their oats were tiny.

I can get small oats; oats that have been milled into a type of oat dust, that’s easy. Yes, the difference between small oat porridge and big oat porridge is minimal, but my little family, when faced with the wrong sized oat down their spoons in protest.

Down.

We like big oat porridge don’t we, Iris? Says Joss, careful not to look at me sat next to him and smiling paternally at Iris across the table.

Iris inspects the breakfast in her bowl, looks up excitedly at Joss and across at me with narrowed eyes – Mummy. Are these proper oats?

Yes, I say, not looking at Joss.

Are they Daddy? she says to Joss.

I answer with, they aren’t proper or improper, just cooked. What’s the actual difference guys?  I carry on eating my breakfast.

They both look into their bowls.

It’s not oat dust Mum is it? Says Iris.

It’s porridge, I say.

They lean across the table to look into each other’s bowls and confer. Then they sit back to their own bowls in mock outrage. Yes, it is oat dust.

I fire a look along the table to Joss with DON’T attached.

Can you find one whole oat-shaped oat? Joss asks Iris, still not looking at me.

He reaches across the table to Iris’s bowl with his spoon in hand and I stand up so that I don’t have to witness breakfast being dissected. I turn away with my empty bowl and go to the sink behind Iris. I turn on the shiny taps and water flows into the washing up bowl with the porridge pan in it. I set about the daily task of agitating the stuck lumps off the sides of the pan and watch the sticky white shapes diminish.

Here’s one, says Iris.

Let’s see, says Joss. That’s not even oval Iris. Come on!

I scrub the steel pan and ignore what they are doing behind me. I look out over our tiny green garden. It’s too small a square for much but maybe I could grow big oats.

I remember as a student looking at a book about land art. Beautiful photographs of heroic man-made shapes in remote places I’d never get to. Not authorised fly tipping no. Seminal art works; lightning fields, sun tunnels and spiral jetties -, an interaction between landscape, art and nature. A small photo amid the grandiose text stopped me. Artist Agnes Denes in a spellbinding field of mature wheat which she had grown in downtown Manhattan.

Do they have to be oval, says Iris behind me.

Agnes created 1.8 acres of golden wheat on land worth billions facing the Statue of Liberty. Imagine, a brilliant wheatfield on a landfill site next to the gleaming towers of the World Trade centre. She called the artwork ‘Wheatfield – A Confrontation’.  Two metal erections looked down from technocratic heights onto a scene of rural work. The wealth of the towers and the wealth in the wheat field, a confrontation and an attack about how blindly people embrace progress. Agnes harvested over 1000 pounds of good wheat from that site. She called on the elbow grease of rich and poor locals to help clear the landfill site, tend the earth, regenerate it and vicariously each other. Local relationships were forged in its making and the shared labour of clearing and preparing left everything more alive than before.

Are you checking for square ones!? says Joss.

Agnes made it she says, to draw attention to our misplaced priorities. She harvested and then distributed the artwork to struggling local communities and it nourished them.

Agnes’s wheat field wasn’t off in some remote place, like the Great Salt Lake or the Painted Desert. She hadn’t bulldozed, welded, concreted or erected anything to create permanent structures or destroy anything. She took trashed land and put the earth back into good heart.

The site is now Battery City Park with luxury condos and shiny skyscrapers- but no twin towers and no wheat.

Mummy, mummy, LOOK! Iris shrieks.

I turn around to face them. Iris is standing on her chair pointing at Joss. Joss is holding his spoon high and balancing on the spoon is all of his breakfast in one bowl shaped lump, released from its bowl mould.

Are you going to eat it Daddy? Eat it, eat it!

Joss looks at me proudly.

Yes, he is, I say. It’s food.

The congealed glob slips off Joss’s spoon and hits the table wetly.

Joss is scraping porridge from the table with his spoon and dropping splats back into his bowl. Iris is delighted. She kneels on her chair and sets to releasing her own porridge portion. Her spoon shaking as she laughs.

Playing with food.

I watch this harmless fun and try to smile. It’s only mess and waste.

Harmless fun. Fun harm. Less harm. No harm. No fun. That’s not ok.

Waste not mattering is our privilege, right?

I look up to the cupboard where the oats are. The door is open weirdly, showing my neatly stocked shelves full of grains and pulses in lovely clean jars. One shelf has a line of paper oat packets declaring wholesomeness through matt printed packaging. A recent bulk buy of the wrong bloody oats. I count the packets and do the maths, money plus time, plus the headache of choice, up and down two high streets, well out of my way so that I can buy ethically, so that they can fling it about in disgust?

I watch the paper packaging tightening. The little bags swelling up as I look at them. They are bulging, straining their neat glue seams, fat with frustration they burst softly into clouds of oat powder that billow smoothly into the room. The chitchat around me recedes and I watch the dust haze glide towards the ceiling, a white out. I did that, I think. I’m sure that I did that, and I close my eyes for just a moment.

Mummy! Why aren’t you looking?

I open my eyes to see Iris standing triumphant with a glob of porridge held out on her spoon. Behind her the dust is pouring rapidly into the tall chrome bin in the corner. Its lid sticks straight up in acceptance.

Iris! says Joss suddenly.

The lid goes down.

What a mess we’ve made.

 

I push my trolley through the doors of a supermarket to buy big oats. I smile at the miserable security guard as I pass him, but he doesn’t smile back, and I twinge with shame. I walk into the fresh fruit and vegetable aisle. More of a hall than an aisle. The air is different in here. Fresh food from around the world and there’s no smell but vegetables do have a smell. What have they done with the vegetable smell? Don’t they like the smell? I trolley on until I see the avocadoes.

Avocadoes are never in our veg box.

Each nut is snuggled into a specially moulded seat for its in-flight protection. Duo packs secured with cellophane. Ripe and ready orbs with a carbon footprint so massive that the microeconomics of recycling the packaging is laughable. I put two packs in the trolley.

Life is short.

Especially for those of us still living. Those of us still eating creamy super food.

Push on through.

I stop at the sight of peeled oranges. Perfectly peeled oranges. Not odd, no. Perfect.

I photograph the wrapped fruit and text Joss with ‘Did you know?’

I roll into the home baking isle and the cakes on the packet mixes look good. Just add eggs. I wonder if the cakes smell. I think they should. Maybe they add the smell like they do in coffee jars. A bit of coffee smell gas adds to the experience.

My phone rings.

Hello. Oh, hi Joss….did you get the orange picture?……

I grab a bag of gourmet jellybeans and put them in my trolley.  With one hand I push the trolley, and the other holds the phone to my ear.

..I’m not angry Joss…not yet anyway.

I pass by a wall of sugar in foiled slabs, snack packets, family sized or for your own personal fun and destruction with ingredient lists like a chemistry labs stock take.

Oh Ok… When?… Are you working the night shift on that?

Palm oil is a step too far for me. I saw the video of the orangutan that ran along a felled tree in a slashed forest to bang on the metal teeth of a felling machine with its hairy orange fist in hopelessly brave resistance. The machine operator doesn’t knock off the orange protester, he just  carries on regardless. Perhaps he sees this and worse every single day and perhaps it haunts him. I put the sugar bar back on a shelf full of bars and pay Joss some attention.

You’re doing a new window display ….Is there a skip big enough for the last job you installed for that shop?

I’m facing a range of disposable wipes.

…. a security firm? Really they employ a security firm for the skips?  No way.

Joss tells me about the skip security guy, and I tell him that no one is choosing eco soaps and he asks me if the other shoppers look cleaner than I do, and I think they do.

Bye then.

I push my trolley past the cleanliness-is–godliness advocates and aim for cereals. Chilled meat section, brrr. I’m going around in circles.

I’m aiming for oats.

 

I stop at strawberries splendidly presented in small wooden crates. I pick a crate up and read the brown paper label, but I can join the dots.

We’re not children la-la-la-ing, with fingers in our ears stepping into the abyss.

I put two crates of strawberries in my trolley. Iris loves them.

The sixth mass extinction. 200 species a day.

I wheel over to the checkout.

Rolls of pretty wrapping paper stand in boxes at the checkout. 99p’s worth of unnecessary.

I’m receiving a terminal diagnosis. Anger, denial, bargaining and fear. My whole idea of the future has to change. This diagnosis is not just mine, it’s for every living thing on earth.

The science is bleak, the science is not an opinion and it can’t be undone.

I open my sweet packet from the trolley and eat jellybeans and don’t read the ingredients. Lalalala, fingers and ears.

Coming towards me is a two-foot-high soft toy penguin. The couple holding it between them are opening and closing the calendar flaps it has across its belly. I stop and stare. What bright spark dreamed that thing into existence?  The couple look pleased with each other and with the penguin. It’s a novelty advent calendar and the two ladies make it do odd penguin walking.

Hilarious.

Who is responsible for that?  Which corporate spark made penguin graphics to pitch the brilliant bird idea? Who ran the costings? Who stitched it? Who stuffed it? Who settled the invoice?

Put it back! I would demand of the happy couple if I had the guts. Don’t buy that but I’d look crazy and they wouldn’t hear me. There are ways of raising the alarm.

I might say, excuse me did you know that your penguin is really a weapon? No really it is and you’re pointing it at all of us. My hands are up. This is it for us, our children and the whole human species. Your penguin is going to backfire and take out our life support system. It’s premeditated you don’t want to be involved. Drop it. Just say no. The jokes on you and me and we deserve more. We can turn things round if we work together and aim at the power. Their business-as-usual model has us in its sights and their aim is lethal. Have you heard of shop stopping? The ladies are kissing the killing machine,  stroking its deadly wings and laughing at me.

I should write to the company and ask why or who or what for exactly but what good would it do, one letter amongst zillions of business-as-usual mail. I’d have to shout to be noticed.

Hey you. Penguin Idiots. Join the fucking dots. We’re taking you with us you know. Might as well stamp on little children’s faces so they only breathe pain. Shout fuck you; just because you can; because no one is telling you not to. Because you don’t ask yourselves those questions.. It’s a free world and shopping is not illegal, and work is work you say, not a moral minefield. All ammunition passed inspection. So, hack away at stripped bodies with your blunt machetes and don’t worry about the high-pitched screams, tell yourself they’re just gusts of wind. Embrace the rapture of your burn out and let’s gorge ourselves on swapping real penguins for stuffed ones.

The plastic bird is getting closer and I grip the trolley tight, poised, and ready. I once explained the effects of slug pellets on hedgehogs to a man in the garden centre as he bought some. There’s 1% of wildlife left I said, it’s all going, going, gone. Lions, tigers, frogs and swifts, your kids will never know them.

I had it coming. His wrath.

The happy couple walk past with the evil penguin, throwing me an isn’t it bonkers look and I watch them until they turn into the health aisle. I bet they chuck it in a month, the penguin, the end of it all.

I stuff all the remaining jellybeans in at once, there’s not many in the designed to look generous packet but then I did know that.

Strawberries in November.

Yum.

Could it be more complicated?

Iris has no idea that food is seasonal and that because our climate has been reliable, we have been able to eat, spread out across the world and build our vast civilization. As we move out of the Holocene, into we don’t know what, she needs to be prepared. The tipping points have tipped, and I can’t stop them, but I can help Iris. She needs some deep adaptation techniques, so she has a chance at surviving what’s coming.  Teaching her as best as possible, that’s my job. She’s maybe too little for most of it but then I don’t even know what ‘it’ really is. I need to figure ‘it’ out for her and me.  I know I can’t get Iris over to New Zealand which is where rich preppers are building lavish doom steads. I’m not sure I can conjure up a doom stead we are where we are in a city tied herd.

I take another step towards the man at the till who’s waiting for someone to meticulously re-count their huge pile of change.

I don’t know- how do you know where to start, what to teach? There’s no curriculum, no learning objectives to fashion candles out of tuna cans, create earth ovens or fish with chewing gum bait. We could start with growing things. Things other than sunflowers, so she can gather and plant, eat and medicate. In the face of overwhelming loss, a Giain spirit will motivate her effort and offer her the solace and peace she’ll need. Yes. This is a way.  She will fall with a natural magic that grinds stars with earth to light the green fuse of recovery and I need a local witch to teach me the skills. We need to start soon. I think we’ll grow a line of oats by the Jasmine bush.

I step forward in the queue. I get my phone out and search for Tabletop, Oat Milling Machine, to see if such a thing exists and it does. It looks a bit like an old coffee bean grinder but bigger, demanding more exertion, a hardy object.

I empty my trolley onto the conveyor belt at the point of sale.

When I hand the man an empty packet of jellybeans he smiles.

The bar code is intact, I say.

Bleep.

He offers me the empty sweet packet, but I only wanted the sweets I say. I suddenly determine to correct my failure to speak up about the penguin and add – Not the packaging thank you, that lasts 200 years – but it comes out self-righteous.

 

Once I’m home with slippers on and big oats in the cupboard and I’ve got over the packaging, I make tea. Herbal tea. A witch’s brew.  I drink it leaning against the edge of the kitchen surface and survey the modest, ill-equipped room.  The walls display my friends’ artwork, good and not so good but all loved gifts of their energy and time. My kitchen table often spills over with food, life and love; a wealth meanly allowed to so few but it’s no protection. I still need a witch.

Joss comes through the door.

Hi.

Definitely not a witch.

Hi Joss, I was thinking that I need to protest against myself next.