New Year's Eve meal: Allotment sushi -- Tesco sushi gear plus the following fillings in various combinations: tuna-mayo, smoked salmon, cooked and pureed broccoli, carrot sticks with liberal sprinklings of roasted sesame seeds. The dip was soy sauce with mirin and wasabi. Inside the maki sushi (the rolls) I used grated Bavarian purple radish, also fresh from the allotment, which is much milder than wasabi and worked very well. Salad was chopped red cabbage, also fresh from the plot.
Oh yes, and beer! Frueh Koelsch, which we get from a specialist beer importer.
Spent the rest of the evening mostly curled up on the sofa with the cats and practised cartooning and painting on my new graphics tablet whilst watching Jools' Hootenanny and, later on, some 1970s Top of the Pops.
Intriguing how those hair styles are coming back again after 40 years... I'm sensing that as a society we are on the cusp of something big and, hopefully, ultimately, quite wonderful. Some very profound change is coming. And, and this is the theory, not terribly scientific, the more hair the men permit themselves to grow on their bodies, the kinder, more thoughtful, less warlike, happier and balanced this new society will be. Society as it is now is organised such that it requires men and women to discipline their bodies constantly. In the late 60s and early 70s, that iron grip loosened -- another period in world economic history when capitalism suddenly revealed just how little it had to show for itself and how little return there was for all that sacrifice, that anxiety and self-denial. The backlash followed promptly, and it expressed itself in a rebellion against the disciplined, ascetic, clean-shaven body that submits itself to 48-hour-weeks spent in quiet desperation. Instead, all these bearded, long-haired men and women emerged, singing of free love and revolution. But they were side-tracked by conveniently scheduled distraction-wars and a huge consumerist bubble that was utterly unsustainable but that lasted until 2008. Then it popped. And now we're on the slide down and accelerating.
I look around me these days and see more and more of these sunny, bearded creatures, and I hope, fervently, that when the time comes and the Powers That Be are finally wedged into a corner from which there is no escape and when they pull again the only remaining play they've got left and call up those gentle young people they thought they'd pre-trained via these appalling FPS wargames and ask them to shave their heads again and enlist, for real, and they try to put a real gun in their hands and say to them, go, shoot at those brown people for us, will ya? It's for your own safety and security, honest, and if you don't believe us, then take it from us that it's to protect your own country from these scary brown people thousands of miles away... That at that point the sunny creatures will shake their hairy heads and tell the old men to go away and play with their own damn guns. Because it's Peak Oil and Peak Phosporus and Peak Water and there are no more "countries", but there are seeds to plant and several billion people to feed, clothe and house. That the old men had a decent shot at solving these problems and that they blew it and now had to move over. That Tahrir Square and Syntagma Square and Zucchotti Park and Oakland and Berkeley and Brooklyn Bridge and Madison and Barcelona and Valencia and Tottenham and Moscow were only just the beginning.
As Tank, the freeborn, says to Neo in The Matrix: "It's a VERY exciting time."
Happy New 2012!
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