I’m in Wales, helping out at a most unusual short film competition, with boardgames. I can’t do better than my flatmate Mark at explaining it, so if you want to know what we’re doing read his post on the subject.

Also since writing here last, I’ve spent a while in North America. New York ate all my money. I found the Statue of Liberty surprisingly moving – it’s original purpose, representing real freedom, is important to remember. Toronto was fantastic. I stayed with Martin Crawford, who knows the extensive and fun live music scene like the back of his hand. The food in Toronto is amazing, and the layout of streets with busy tram-field, small shop, main roads, and quiet cross streets of wooden houses all different. Canada really is the best bits of Europe and best bits of America mixed together in one country. I was quite surprised.

Then I went to Georgia, the one in the Caucases between Russia and Turkey. This was initially on work, a project to do with Georgian Parliamentary informatioon. It’s a very harsh place to travel in December. I went to Stalin’s birthplace, Gori, and to Borjomi where a mineral water comes from (the one the Russians have recently banned import of). Georgia was (roughly) the second country to become Christian, and it has its own orthodox Church. There were gorgeous, and sometimes very remote, old churches. It’s also a very European seeming country. Despite its poverty, it felt familiar in the way that only European countries do.

Enough for now, I think I have to write a blog post about the board games we had this evening for the Really Restrictive Shorts website…

So, I just bought a return flight from London Heathrow to Boston (Massachusetts, not Lincolnshire, cheap short haul flights haven’t got that crazy yet!), leaving the day after tomorrow. This cost a mere £308, which is very cheap. Today is the day the Stern Review came out, which means it was impossible to do anything other than go directly to Climate Care‘s website and buy some carbon offsetting. Or think of it as a voluntary aviation fuel tax, whatever.

Now, in the past, companies like Future Forests (now the CarbonNeutral Company, and quite corporate) offset CO2 emissions by planting forests. This doesn’t work, as you have to plant new forest which is guaranteed to be kept as forest forever. Every tree that dies and rots one hundred years hence has to be guaranteed to be replaced by a new tree, and so on into the infinite future. Otherwise all the CO2 the tree took out of the atmosphere to make itself just gets released again when it burns or decays.

It’s much much more efficient, by which I mean easier, to stop people burning fossil fuels which they definitely would have otherwise burnt. Of course, that’s a fuzzy thing to define, and open to abuse. Climate Care have an “approach” to this which involves selecting projects in countries which aren’t in the Kyoto treaty (to avoid double counting of other CO2 reduction commitments), which are verified by a third party, and which perform intervention that they can be confident wouldn’t otherwise have happened. This seems to mainly involve replacing ovens with more efficient ones in developing countries. But see for your self, there are quite a few projects.

Climate Care it is then. Nobody has any better suggestions. I guess you could give the money to Rising Tide, but you may as well just give it to David Cameron, who has done more in the last year than anyone else in the UK to make it politically acceptable, important and normal to be concerned about Climate Chaos.

So I enter in my flight details. It will, apparently, extract the energy from ancient sunlight stored in sufficient oil to spit out a huge 1.445 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide. That’s including the return journey. Total cost to offset it? Just £10.85. I was shocked, it’s hardly anything. OK, 3.5% of the cost of the flight, so substantially more than the 1% in the Stern Review. But even so! All this whinging from Climate Change sceptics about the cost of mitigating Climate Change is just that. So much whinging. And not only does my money, at least in theory, compensate for CO2 emissions of my flight, it’s also a donation to 3rd world economies in capital, and thence in long term savings for them in the cost of energy.

Of course, part of me knows this must be nonsense. £10.85 is really not much, and can I trust Climate Care at all, or their criteria? Already feeling guilty before buying the flight, I was going to doubly offset it anyway. But seeing how cheap it is, instead I went for quadruple, or £43.40. Still very reasonable, especially given the insanely cheap price of the ticket. Well, compared to getting a train to Manchester (about 70 quid return) anyway.

Meanwhile, if you know anybody in Boston I should meet or can invite me to a cool party or something, then do mail me! I’ll be in the US for the next three weeks.

(Photo by A@lbi and licensed for reuse)

For three years now I’ve subscribed irregularly to a box of fruit and vegetables from Cambridge Organic Food Co. On Sunday or Monday, If I’m going to be at home enough later in the week, I leave them an answer phone message. Then on Wednesday afternoon there’s a knock on the door, and a friendly man gives me a crate of freshly selected seasonal goodness. (Photo right is illustrative and actually in New Zealand, it is licensed for free reuse by darren131)

A few weeks ago, on a Saturday, Mark and I went on their organic farm tour. We had Duncan from COFCO as our guide, and there were two stops. I didn’t take notes, so any truth below is damaged by the forgetfulness of the mind, or the dangers of fact checking with Google.

LEAFs and Clover

Russell Smith Farms is 2000 acres nestled around the Imperial War Museum at Duxford. His posh country clothes, accent and manner, along with the fighter jets passing overhead, led me to stereotype Robert Smith as a Tory farmer gentleman, in the nicest possible way.

Until the late 90s they were a conventional, that is to say industrial, farm. Amazingly, it is Waitrose who persuaded them to start converting to organic. There was me thinking they were a posh, expensive supermarket, when actually they’re leading a national food revolution. OK, same thing. Waitrose also promote the, new to me, LEAF marque, which indicates that a farm is nice to skylarks, and counts how much pesticide it uses. This is quite separate from being organic, and something to watch for.

When the current set of field conversions are finished two fifths of Russell Smith Farms will be organic. I think Robert said it takes 5 years to convert a field, during 2 of which it produces no produce at all. Instead you grow grass and clover, and plough them back into the soil. To my surprise clover is nitrogen fixing, a legume. That is, bacteria in its roots magically turn the most common gas in the air into what an industrial farmer would get from fertilizer.

Robert Smith was fascinatingly excited about his farm. He talked about modern hoeing machines used to clear weeds from between rows of organic crops. He constantly gave costs in thousands of pounds per acre, of how much was lost one year when a crop was blighted, or how much is spent on Polish labourers. He talked about bore holes and building reservoirs. Of badger banks and field margins. He was glad they had converted parts of their farm to organic as it made his job much more interesting, dealing with living breathing, rather than sterile fields.

Loam and bumblebees

Most of us think of organic farming in the negative, by what it doesn’t do compared to the industrial farming that we’re used to. So, organic farms use no pesticide or fertilizer. Put like that it can sound foolish, mad, inefficient. Actually, organic farmers think of it in the positive, as a totally different way of farming. Organic farming is about soil, growing crops in sustainably maintained, high quality soil. It’s not about exact control of nature, but about manipulating nature to our advantage, while working with the grain of her needs.

Our next stop was at Adrian Izzard (who we didn’t meet, but photo of him right, taken from COFCO’s website), a small organic farm in an area where every house has a huge plot of land. Most of them now are used as paddocks for horses, but Adrian’s is a thriving business. Greenhouses full of the most delicious cherry tomatoes, forests of cucumbers surrounding us. We walked through them snacking, and looking at the curious insect pods. You can buy, in packets in the post, little pods of insect eggs. These hatch, and eat the pests which you would otherwise have used pesticides on. There were also tiny hives of bumblebees, it was most curious.

One last thing that Duncan showed us at Adrian Izzard’s farm. Soil, put simply, is a balance between sand and clay. A quick way to test quality of soil is to grab a lump of it and then pretend you are a small child. Roll it into a sausage-shaped lozenge, and then try and bend it. If you can’t even roll it in your hands, then it is too sandy. If when you bend it, it breaks up, then it is just the right mix, known as loam. If you can bend it round, and mould it into whatever shape you like, then there is too much clay.

In conclusion

The nicest thing about getting an organic box delivery? I can’t remember exactly why I originally started ordering one a few years ago. Perhaps it was for ethical reasons – to treat the countryside better, to reduce food miles and hence carbon emissions by buying local food. But actually, the best thing is this. It is good being given seasonal fruit and vegetables, without having to select them yourself. An antidote to option paralysis. It is good being forced to work out how to cook things whose name you don’t even know. Tasty, fresh and fun.

I have a rule, implied in the text at the top of this page, not just to post links to other stories and websites in this blog. But these crazy American artists are too much fun not to.

“This summer we are building rafts and floating down the Mississippi River. Here’s the plan: We meet in Minneapolis in late July with sections of our raft in tow. We piece together our pontoons and fill them with salvaged blocks of foam. We make it beautiful and tie on anything that floats, adding it to our junk armada, our anarchist county fair, our fools ark. Our precious cargo is everything we hold dear: pieces and parts of the culture we are already creating. Our zines and puppets, sewing projects and poster campaigns. Mutant bicycles and punk rock marching bands. Plus our thoughts and dreams and irrepressible energy. Together we float down the Mississippi river, as far as we can — anchoring here and there to perform, give workshops, and create the big huge spectacle we wished would have stopped in our hometowns. And at each place we invite anyone to contribute performances or workshops of their own.” – Miss Rockaway Armada

I’m reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and this reminds me of the start of that. A quiet distant place, no contact with the world. Until the gypsies returned.

China has a new great wall, which blocks parts of the Internet from its citizens. This is partly done by absolute blocks, for example banning the BBC because it has a Chinese language news site. But it is also done by more subtle means – letting the companies who run forums know that they might be shut down if they don’t remove unacceptable posts, but never quite defining what unacceptable is. That way the companies have to err on the side of caution, and require less direct supervision and enforcement.

Sites I couldn’t access from within China: BBC News Online, Google News UK, Chinese Google News on google.com, Wikipedia, any WordPress.com blog. An expat told me in seconds how to get round some of these. For example, by searching Wikipedia at A9.

In contrast, I was surpised I could access: CIA World Factbook and EastSouthNorthWest (a Hong Kong run blog about China). The restriction really does seem to be only on Chinese language content.

For all that, the most physical censorship I found was of English, in the Economist I bought at Xi’an airport. There was an article about the Cultural Revolution. Curiously, I could read the leader which said “this editorial will probably not be read in China”. Then I turned to the main article – suddenly in shock. Pages 29 and 30 excised with a neat tear. As well as the Cultural Revolution article, one on the back about Japan.

Visions of factories full of censors, desperate to ship the Economist to educate businessmen into booming the economy, eager not to see China insulted by revision of Mao. Carefully turning the pages of the foreign magazine, one by one removing the offending page.

(For background, read my posts Chinese family history and Child of the atom bomb first)

In Shanghai, Rosemary and I went to a few more places related to our family history. Shanghai has undergone massive development, knocking down of whole areas, building of new skyscrapers. Amazingly, everywhere we went was still there. A hundred year old colonial buildings, with quite different architectures to those surrounding them. And still used in modern China. It was also great that the guards and porters would let us in. When Rosemary went 20 years ago, all she managed to do was peer from a distance. China is opening up, and relaxing.

The red building on the right of the left photo is the school that my grandmother used to teach in. She was a Physical Education teacher, and it was a school for Eurasians, people with one Western parent and one Chinese parent. The date above the entrance says 1893/1894, and it is now the Shanghai Installation Engineering Co, Ltd. The men on the left were arc welding some metal railings together.

The photo on the right is of the back of the hospital where my mother was born. It’s still a hospital. At first they wouldn’t let us in, I think because I’d been taking photos too obviously. Rosemary insisted she wanted to go round the back, I wasn’t sure why. Eventually a kind Doctor who spoke English was summoned, and escorted us round. The gardens were beautifully kept, and the rear of the hospital (photo) better architected. You can see the tall tower of the new wing rising up on the right behind the old building.

The bottom left photo is of the former Jubilee Court, where my grandparents, mother and aunt lived before they were interned by the Japanese. There was a sign on it saying “Monument under the Protection of Shanghai Municipality”. It’s still residential, we chatted to a woman whose mother lived in one of the other flats.

The right hand picture is of Yuyuen Rd camp. It’s where they were first interned before being taken to the Yangtzepoo camp at the end of the war. The camp used to be a school, and now is again. It’s called the Shi Xi High School, and had very well kept grounds. There were some kids playing basketball, even though it was the weekend.

(Just to explain, I’ve been back from China for a couple of weeks now, but still have blog posts to make about it, which I’m gradually catching up on)

When we were in Chengdu we went on a trip a couple of hours south to Emei Shan. This is where the religious thread of the holiday met the family history one.

My grandmother went on a journey up the Yangtze river to Emei Shan in 1936, with her friend Gracie. She’d been in Shanghai for six years, and in her summer holidays had already visited Peking, the Philippines, Saigon, Angkor, Bangkok, Korea and Japan. So by 1936 there wasn’t much left – they had to go to inland China. At the time, this was a very adventurous thing for two unaccompanied English ladies to do.

This verdant mountain is an ancient place of pilgrimage, both for pious Buddhists, and for seemingly millions of Chinese tourists. But as soon as you take a hard route away from the temples near the road, it becomes quiet and calm, you can watch the dragon flies, and be at peace.

We walked up the long route, but only went half way up. Even so it was very steep, so for some sections Rosemary got herself carried (photo). This was following her mother – who went up the mountain carried by 7 men! “3 to carry me – 2 Gracie and 2 baggage”

We stayed the night on the mountain in a Buddhist temple, in a surprisingly luxurious room. I’d hope for something a bit more down with the monks (I’d accidentally been to a service with some at the monastry in the town at the bottom of the mountain the night before), but Rosemary needed as much luxury as we could find. It was peaceful wondering round the glen in the twilight, with lakes and bridges. I went up onto the roof garden, watched and briefly played cards with a monk and some of the lay workers.

On the way back down (via foot, cable car and bus) in the morning we saw two donkeys struggling their way up the steps from the valley below. They were both loaded with panniers containing fine rocks for building. Panting all the time, they would sometimes stumble. Their two minders had spades, which I saw one beat his donkey with when it had fallen down once too often.

That afternoon we went to see the largest Buddha in the world as Leshan, carved in a rockface by the river. I climbed down the steps to his feet, and looked up in awe (photo). The Chinese tourists hardly looked, as ever busy snapping souvenir photos of themselves in front of him. I put my camera away. I thought about impermanence. He looked down at me and told me that life is change, and that I would never see him again. In the end, that’s the way it is with everything in this fragile world.

And my grandmother? She stayed five days at the top of the mountain, sleeping in a temple on their own camp beds, and eating tinned beans and pork they’d brought with them. The weather completely failed to clear, so she never saw the rarely visible fantastic view, and had to set off on the weeks of journey home.

She never mentioned the Leshan Buddha in her letters, even though her boat must have gone past it. This had puzzled my mother. But now we know. It is actually quite hard to see the Buddha from the river, you’d have to happen to look when the boat was right next to him.

Even though I’m an atheist, it’s fun and moving to seek out pious people and watching them going about their business. A few years ago I used to do this in the UK via Cambridge Interfaith, who organised such things as a visit to the synagogue on a Friday evening, and a day trip to the Hari Krishna temple George Harrison paid for in Hertfordshire. And I saw lots of religious places with Phil in Burma (see parts of this post and all of this one).

China’s religions are in resurgence, as things continue to loosen up following the Cultural Revolution. Numerous temples have been rebuilt recently. Just before leaving Shanghai, Rosemary and I went on a two day trip to Putuoshan. It’s a Buddhist holy island, a few hours journey by bus and boat south east. We spent the first afternoon going up to the top of the mountain and exploring temples. There were pious people there, lighting incense (photo left), and praying to Guanyin, goddess of mercy. Some pilgrims were even climbing the 1200m path of steps up the hill by prostating themselves forwards on the ground. They would stand up, step forward to where their head had been, and bow forwards flat, again and again.

The photo on the right is of a food area in one of the temples. You could pay a few yuan to a monk at a counter on one side of the temple, and get led off down side passages to the food area and dining room at the other side. There a lay assistant would fill a bowl with excellent vegetarian food, tasty aubergines and mushrooms and more strange Chinese vegetables. You help yourself to rice from a big vat of it, eat as much as you need. I think this is the same food the monks and their assistants ate, made available for anyone.

As well as Chinese pilgrims, there were also lots of Chinese tourists, most of whom we found in the morning down by the coast, coming to look at the brand new (well, 1998) shiny statue of Guanyin. She is golden, holding a small ships wheel in one hand to bring luck to fisherman. She towers what must be 30m above you, you climb up steps to her, flanked by guardians. She rests on a tower of two halls, on a promontry with almost 360 degree views of the sea. One hall contains amazing detailed wood carvings, and another 400 statues of her past lives. A stone carving frieze encircles the halls, skillfully carved with scenes of Guanyin helping locals. I’ve seen quite a few spectacular Buddhist statues, and this one was pretty good. Not to be diminished because she was new, she was awesome.

What I really want to know is how she was funded. The Chinese government have, I remember being told a few years ago, paid for lots of temples to be rebuilt, if only to attract tourists. But are there also rich Buddhist benefactors, paying millions for new statues? I haven’t found the answer, but here is a description of the Guanyin statue and some photos of her.

Tibetan sky burials sound very odd, exotic, macabre. After being shown a sky burial ground by a native who takes part in them, my mind began to twist round and see them as normal. Just as many Tibetans do – I don’t know figures, but it is widespread. A sky burial goes like this.

The funeral party meets at the house of the deceased and his or her family. They have some sort of a gathering (I’m imagining, similar to an Irish wake). Then the friends and other villagers take the body of the deceased to the sky burial ground. This is a gentle grassy place, a little way up on the edge of a hill just outside the town or village. Close relatives of the dead person stay at home.

Vultures approach from rocks across the valley. See photo – for obvious reasons I couldn’t photograph the burial ground itself, but those are the rocks where the vultures live in Langmusi. The burial ground is behind the camera.

The body is lain down, the head placed on a special stone. Monks from the nearby monastry look on from further up the hill. The body is chopped up by the friends, using knives and similar. Bones are smashed up. The flesh gouged out of the face. Hundreds of vultures flock round, getting in the way and pecking at those who are cutting up the corpse. Other villagers watch from nearby.

The vultures eat all the flesh. Burying it in the sky. Afterwards, the funeral party returns to the relatives in the house, for a further gathering – again, I’m assuming much like after a cremation in Britain.

You’re taught to do this when young, 10 or 12 years old. Older men give you a severed arm to chop up. It’s hard at first, but a few years later you do it easily, and do a clean job. Later again, you teach the young how to do it.

It was a very messy place. Fragments of bones. Clothes – everything of the deceased is left there. Burning these things isn’t allowed, as the smoke could go anywhere and is thought to spread bad luck. A sock. A knife. One blackened, part torso, picked clean. Left by a funeral party who did a particularly lazy job. Prayer flags nearby, tied up haphazardly in large numbers. But also a calm place, green, airy, sheep nearby, nature.

The vulture is perceived differently to how our folklore sees them. They’re perceived as both a good and an evil creature. Evil, as they are sometimes horrific – taking live babies from nomads in the grasslands. Good, as a creature of cleanliness, purity, renewing the physical body into nature.

I’d read about sky burials before, although probably just in a sidebox in Lonely Planet a few years ago. Environmentally friendly, yes, but I have concerns about disease. My guide pointed out a dead vulture on the ground, he said made ill by its food.

Actually seeing the grounds, and talking to someone about it, made me realise how normal it is to Tibetans. It’s an everyday thing (well, once a week in Langmusi, population 3000), ancient and ordinary. It’s only macabre if you have an excessive attachment to the human body after death. And for a Buddhist, or an Atheist, that makes no sense.

On the bus from Zoige to Langmusi, I met a girl who for all the world looked Han Chinese, but turned out to be Tibetan. She had reasonable English, and was well turned out in the fashionable way that city Chinese are. She was an accountant in a government-run Tibetan medicine hospital in Zoige, on the way to visit a friend for the day, it being a Sunday.

Two interesting things. Her first language was the Amdo dialect of Tibetan, but she was only taught to read and write in Chinese at school. Now, in her mid 20s, she was finally starting to learn the Tibetan alphabet.

Secondly, she got a text message (seemingly, the worst bus routes have the best mobile phone masts, it makes coverage on English railways look pathetic) from the Tibetan friend she was visiting. He asked “Where are you?”, in English. This because you can’t write in Tibetan letters on a mobile phone, and she couldn’t have read it anyway. He didn’t know any Chinese characters, so they had to communicate in English.

He was another Tibetan educated in India. I haven’t got a number on this, but lots of them leave as teenagers over the mountains. There the Tibetan government in exile give them free education, and they return in their early 20s, embued with Tibetan culture. For this reason – more contact with English speaking foreigners – Tibetans seem to have much better English than Chinese.

The other foreigners who had been on the broken down bus the day before also got off at Langmusi (photo). It’s a town of just 3000 people, I think half of whom are monks in the two monastries there. The monastries were run down, disappointing places. Perhaps underfunded, but also just unclean. I wondered round hopelessly in the morning, at lunch was approached in the cafe by an English speaking Tibetan guide, who I hired in the afternoon.