Blow The Man Down!
Did you bake banana bread at any time last year? Or grow your own vegetables, fruit and flowers? Or even your own sourdough culture (and name it)?
No, Dear Reader, we didn't either, exactly. Though there are some overripe bananas rattling around in the bottom drawer of the freezer. Maybe this time?
I've written about my attempts at gardening over the years (go search my back catalogue under 'gardening' or 'yarden'), culminating in our next move, which will actually get us some land into which I can plant things! This will be a Big Improvement on having to use Very Large pots, which require a Lot of watering first thing in the morning come summer.
Meanwhile H's venture into Livestock husbandry (sourdough is in fact a culture of wild yeasts, plus, hence 'livestock) has successfully kept us in live kefir for several years now. Our guts are thanking us for it, I'm sure. I know the organic milk suppliers are. I hope the Organic dairy farmers are too.
Having had a brother in dairy farming, I know quite how little of the price we pay for milk actually 'trickles down' to dairy farmers. Apparently the current price paid for non-organic milk is about 30p/litre. This barely covers the cost of production; let alone employing a 'relief milker' so that the farmer doesn't have to milk his herd at eg: 5am and 4pm every day, day in day out, forever.
How much do you pay for your milk, Dear Reader? Either doorstep delivered (currently 80p/pint non-organic, 92p/ pint organic) or from the supermarket? Does this sound fair to you?
There are reasons why Dairy Farmers rarely take much needed holidays. There are Reasons why Dairy Farmers give up, sell up the farm that's been in their family for generations and go into something easier, or (too often) commit suicide
So the latest way of keeping up our spirits while we wait for our vaccination appointments is Shanty singing. We've already heard/seen the Socially Distanced Choirs who have gotten round the Restrictions and have managed not only to rehearse, but actually sing 'together'.
The latest iteration of this has been getting together on Social Media/Zoom/Microsoft Teams/TikTok to sing sea shanties - the work songs of sailors down the generations. After all, when you have to haul on ropes to move heavy sails or cargo, having a song does help you pull together. Literally.
re-posted, by kind permission, from Extemporanea, who writes it all so much better than I could :-
Apparently we are in another part of the pandemic where we are singing about the dark times, and I have learned a new random collection of words, which is "TikTok shanty fandom". It is curiously pleasing that the TikTok sea shanty fandom exists, and that it randomly builds multi-part shanty versions which disparately add a voice or instrument line in a fine spirit of emulation and community. The version below of the current viral sensation "Soon may the Wellerman come" loses me a bit when it adds the canned beat and starts remixing, but it's the best quality edit of the first part I can find. (Also, the first bass addition, the cheerful blonde dude in the cap who basically started all this, has a completely phenomenal bass voice).
This is a bloody catchy piece of music, and I love what the communal treatment has done to it, but it's also fascinating and faintly horrible that it's become a viral meme at this point in time. I mean, yes, it's catchy and we're all bored, and it's also communal and we are all relying on each other very heavily through the internet to beguile us through this crisis. It is curiously akin, in its creative/collaborative spirit, to making bread. But it's even more interesting in purely thematic terms.
This is a whaling song. It arises from the nineteenth century whaling industry in New Zealand, major participants in which were the British Weller brothers, who built and lost a small empire in Otago in the 1830s, both running and supplying whaling ships. The Wellerman, with his "sugar and tea and rum", is bringing supplies to the whalers while they pursue their whale, and while they look forward to the day when the whale is caught and "the tonguin' is done" (tearing the blubber off the dead whale in strips, eeuw).
But there's a lot more going on here. The accounts I've been able to find are either "yay NZ industry" or "boo dead whales", and comparatively few mention the fact that the whalers were not salaried, they were paid in supplies, in fact, in the "sugar and tea and rum" carried by the Wellerman. Who was thus both boss and supplier, in a little closed and incestuous loop which gave all the power to the Wellers, who did indeed grow rather rich on whaling and supplying whaling ships, at least before the whale-oil bubble collapsed. The song is about entrapment, the ship hooking and endlessly being dragged by the whale, the whalers endlessly bound into the work/eat cycle of their moneyless employment, which ensured they couldn't actually easily leave it, because they could build up no savings on which to do so. "The Wellerman" is the whaling version of the coal-miner's Sixteen Tons - "another day older and deeper in debt, I owe my soul to the company store". It speaks, under its jaunty tune, to pandemic and lockdown because of that claustrophobic sense that you can't get out.
It also implicitly speaks to our current late-stage capitalism, and its absolute disregard for the wellbeing and prosperity of the workers it exploits. The whalers under the sway of the Wellerman are desperately akin to the Amazon wage-slaves who are slipping into poverty while Jeff Bezos accumulates billions. While I love the song and its communal expression, it has also made me incredibly depressed, because it suggests that there is something fundamentally broken and intrinsically unlearning about humanity: nearly two hundred years ago we were not only slaughtering whales, we were exploiting the workers so a tiny elite could make money, and we're still doing it. Slavery, and indentured service, and exploitative and inhumane companies who care about money and don't care about people and deliberately locked them into service so they couldn't escape, are baked into our cultural DNA. I hate that. I hate that America is still fighting to implement a minimum wage which has been fought over for so long that it's no longer a liveable amount. I hate that the "New South Africa" notwithstanding, there are people digging in our bins every time we put them out, and the divisions between our poverty-ridden rural or township citizens and the wealthy commercial or political classes are huge and growing huger. We've always done this, how can we stop doing it?
It's giving me a micro-version of the grief and despair I felt when America elected Trump: that there is a segment of humanity - capitalists or Trump supporters - whose thought processes are so alienatingly inhumane to me that I can't feel any sense of connection to or kinship with them. And their inhumanity is dominating the directions our culture takes, precisely because it is exploitative and uncaring, and tramples the people who feel otherwise. And it's a lot of work for a sea shanty to be doing, but we're all trapped in this, working endlessly at awful, destructive jobs for which we are paid insultingly and from which we cannot escape, because the system has put us there and keeps us there deliberately. All we can do, apparently, is sing about it.
And you know what, the garment workers out in the Far East who work insane hours in unsafe conditions for very little pay so that we can have 'disposable' fashion are in a very similar position to the whalers, or the Amazon workers. Or even, maybe, workers here in the UK.
Now that Brexit has been Done, the UK Government is considering repudiating the EU directive on working hours, which incidentally, pre-Brexit, they said they would not do. Currently, on legislation 'forced upon us' by Brussels, businesses are not allowed to make their employees work 48 hours per week. Max.
With higher than ever levels of unemployment, poor wages, and the 'gig economy', the UK Government is considering allowing employers of those who have jobs make them work for longer, rather than getting the firms who benefit from this (usually basic wage) labouring to employ more people. Preferably at an hourly rate on which they can afford to live, which, I suspect, might have been another piece of legislation 'forced upon us' by Brussels. That and Having to clean up our waste water before dumping it into the nearest river, or sea.
As someone who has lived on the South Coast for most of the past forty years, I really appreciated that Directive. Pre-Directive it all used to be stored and pumped out (from a Very Long pipeline) on the falling tide. Even then swimming off certain beaches locally could be more of a case of 'going through the motions'.
'K, dismounting (for now). The washing machine has just landed (told you I'd learn it. Won't be taking the 'L' plates off this month though. H is producing a spreadsheet of 'Programs and Time taken' which we'll stick, or maybe write, on the kitchen wall til we have Learned.) Today it is sunny, gotta dry washing when the sun shines.
Y'all have a good day now, whether you're washing/ drying/ baking/ shanty singing/ fighting for Justice/ binge-watching Netflix/ whatever!
No, Dear Reader, we didn't either, exactly. Though there are some overripe bananas rattling around in the bottom drawer of the freezer. Maybe this time?
I've written about my attempts at gardening over the years (go search my back catalogue under 'gardening' or 'yarden'), culminating in our next move, which will actually get us some land into which I can plant things! This will be a Big Improvement on having to use Very Large pots, which require a Lot of watering first thing in the morning come summer.
Meanwhile H's venture into Livestock husbandry (sourdough is in fact a culture of wild yeasts, plus, hence 'livestock) has successfully kept us in live kefir for several years now. Our guts are thanking us for it, I'm sure. I know the organic milk suppliers are. I hope the Organic dairy farmers are too.
Having had a brother in dairy farming, I know quite how little of the price we pay for milk actually 'trickles down' to dairy farmers. Apparently the current price paid for non-organic milk is about 30p/litre. This barely covers the cost of production; let alone employing a 'relief milker' so that the farmer doesn't have to milk his herd at eg: 5am and 4pm every day, day in day out, forever.
How much do you pay for your milk, Dear Reader? Either doorstep delivered (currently 80p/pint non-organic, 92p/ pint organic) or from the supermarket? Does this sound fair to you?
There are reasons why Dairy Farmers rarely take much needed holidays. There are Reasons why Dairy Farmers give up, sell up the farm that's been in their family for generations and go into something easier, or (too often) commit suicide
So the latest way of keeping up our spirits while we wait for our vaccination appointments is Shanty singing. We've already heard/seen the Socially Distanced Choirs who have gotten round the Restrictions and have managed not only to rehearse, but actually sing 'together'.
The latest iteration of this has been getting together on Social Media/Zoom/Microsoft Teams/TikTok to sing sea shanties - the work songs of sailors down the generations. After all, when you have to haul on ropes to move heavy sails or cargo, having a song does help you pull together. Literally.
re-posted, by kind permission, from Extemporanea, who writes it all so much better than I could :-
Apparently we are in another part of the pandemic where we are singing about the dark times, and I have learned a new random collection of words, which is "TikTok shanty fandom". It is curiously pleasing that the TikTok sea shanty fandom exists, and that it randomly builds multi-part shanty versions which disparately add a voice or instrument line in a fine spirit of emulation and community. The version below of the current viral sensation "Soon may the Wellerman come" loses me a bit when it adds the canned beat and starts remixing, but it's the best quality edit of the first part I can find. (Also, the first bass addition, the cheerful blonde dude in the cap who basically started all this, has a completely phenomenal bass voice).
Click to viewThis is a bloody catchy piece of music, and I love what the communal treatment has done to it, but it's also fascinating and faintly horrible that it's become a viral meme at this point in time. I mean, yes, it's catchy and we're all bored, and it's also communal and we are all relying on each other very heavily through the internet to beguile us through this crisis. It is curiously akin, in its creative/collaborative spirit, to making bread. But it's even more interesting in purely thematic terms.
This is a whaling song. It arises from the nineteenth century whaling industry in New Zealand, major participants in which were the British Weller brothers, who built and lost a small empire in Otago in the 1830s, both running and supplying whaling ships. The Wellerman, with his "sugar and tea and rum", is bringing supplies to the whalers while they pursue their whale, and while they look forward to the day when the whale is caught and "the tonguin' is done" (tearing the blubber off the dead whale in strips, eeuw).
But there's a lot more going on here. The accounts I've been able to find are either "yay NZ industry" or "boo dead whales", and comparatively few mention the fact that the whalers were not salaried, they were paid in supplies, in fact, in the "sugar and tea and rum" carried by the Wellerman. Who was thus both boss and supplier, in a little closed and incestuous loop which gave all the power to the Wellers, who did indeed grow rather rich on whaling and supplying whaling ships, at least before the whale-oil bubble collapsed. The song is about entrapment, the ship hooking and endlessly being dragged by the whale, the whalers endlessly bound into the work/eat cycle of their moneyless employment, which ensured they couldn't actually easily leave it, because they could build up no savings on which to do so. "The Wellerman" is the whaling version of the coal-miner's Sixteen Tons - "another day older and deeper in debt, I owe my soul to the company store". It speaks, under its jaunty tune, to pandemic and lockdown because of that claustrophobic sense that you can't get out.
It also implicitly speaks to our current late-stage capitalism, and its absolute disregard for the wellbeing and prosperity of the workers it exploits. The whalers under the sway of the Wellerman are desperately akin to the Amazon wage-slaves who are slipping into poverty while Jeff Bezos accumulates billions. While I love the song and its communal expression, it has also made me incredibly depressed, because it suggests that there is something fundamentally broken and intrinsically unlearning about humanity: nearly two hundred years ago we were not only slaughtering whales, we were exploiting the workers so a tiny elite could make money, and we're still doing it. Slavery, and indentured service, and exploitative and inhumane companies who care about money and don't care about people and deliberately locked them into service so they couldn't escape, are baked into our cultural DNA. I hate that. I hate that America is still fighting to implement a minimum wage which has been fought over for so long that it's no longer a liveable amount. I hate that the "New South Africa" notwithstanding, there are people digging in our bins every time we put them out, and the divisions between our poverty-ridden rural or township citizens and the wealthy commercial or political classes are huge and growing huger. We've always done this, how can we stop doing it?
It's giving me a micro-version of the grief and despair I felt when America elected Trump: that there is a segment of humanity - capitalists or Trump supporters - whose thought processes are so alienatingly inhumane to me that I can't feel any sense of connection to or kinship with them. And their inhumanity is dominating the directions our culture takes, precisely because it is exploitative and uncaring, and tramples the people who feel otherwise. And it's a lot of work for a sea shanty to be doing, but we're all trapped in this, working endlessly at awful, destructive jobs for which we are paid insultingly and from which we cannot escape, because the system has put us there and keeps us there deliberately. All we can do, apparently, is sing about it.
And you know what, the garment workers out in the Far East who work insane hours in unsafe conditions for very little pay so that we can have 'disposable' fashion are in a very similar position to the whalers, or the Amazon workers. Or even, maybe, workers here in the UK.
Now that Brexit has been Done, the UK Government is considering repudiating the EU directive on working hours, which incidentally, pre-Brexit, they said they would not do. Currently, on legislation 'forced upon us' by Brussels, businesses are not allowed to make their employees work 48 hours per week. Max.
With higher than ever levels of unemployment, poor wages, and the 'gig economy', the UK Government is considering allowing employers of those who have jobs make them work for longer, rather than getting the firms who benefit from this (usually basic wage) labouring to employ more people. Preferably at an hourly rate on which they can afford to live, which, I suspect, might have been another piece of legislation 'forced upon us' by Brussels. That and Having to clean up our waste water before dumping it into the nearest river, or sea.
As someone who has lived on the South Coast for most of the past forty years, I really appreciated that Directive. Pre-Directive it all used to be stored and pumped out (from a Very Long pipeline) on the falling tide. Even then swimming off certain beaches locally could be more of a case of 'going through the motions'.
'K, dismounting (for now). The washing machine has just landed (told you I'd learn it. Won't be taking the 'L' plates off this month though. H is producing a spreadsheet of 'Programs and Time taken' which we'll stick, or maybe write, on the kitchen wall til we have Learned.) Today it is sunny, gotta dry washing when the sun shines.
Y'all have a good day now, whether you're washing/ drying/ baking/ shanty singing/ fighting for Justice/ binge-watching Netflix/ whatever!