Will Dig Life

Back in 2020, I briefly mentioned in another blog post that we were no longer vegan. I said that shift deserved its own blog post, but here we are at the end of 2024 and I never wrote that. Not that I intended to leave it this long, but it really did take me this long to truly digest the change (pardon the pun) and get enough distance from my previous world view that I could write about it. Paradigm shifts like that don't come quickly, or easily. I've had a few major paradigm shifts in my life - from atheist to Christian , and later to Catholicism - and it's a disorienting thing every time. It starts with the proverbial 'pebble in the shoe' (something niggling that gets harder and harder to ignore) and takes time to even go from subconscious to conscious mind, to a time of discovery and 'why didn't I see this before??', and finally a bewildering sense how I could possibly have thought the old way because I'm now wearing all-new lenses on life. The ...

37 degrees. In public transport without air conditioning, even I am reaching my limits of comfort in the heat! We are staying at the very outskirts of the city. Regional services are easy to reach, making it simple to get far away (like to see my cousin, although we haven't managed it yet because she's got Covid) but quite hard to get around locally. There's one tramway and a few buses, that's it - to get to the other means of transport, we need to go 7 stops on the non-air-conditioned tramway. Frankly, that's put me off going to many places! Luckily we do have a family pool in walking distance, and we've become quite familiar with it. There's also an initiative by the city where there's free, supervised multi sports on offer locally where I could leave the kids, 9am-2pm. This is great because I can stay or go (although there's really nowhere to go from there, it's all residential and it's too far to go home) and thus far I've always stay...

I think Covid has caused many people to pause and think, and change things - and not just people, but organisations too! Mr's work for example, previously insisting that all employees work at the office, has now changed permanently to allow them to choose only two days in the week to be physically there. That was always technologically possible, but only after Covid has there been the willingness to allow it. So too for us as a family, a lot of things have shifted during the Covid months... many of them had nothing to do with Covid and it's just been how things fell in time, but others were definitely prompted by the extended time we've had to be together and to think. Some things stay the same, but momentous changes are happening too! I think many of these are worth a blog post of their own, but here are the main changes that have happened with us during/after the Covid months.... We have become Catholic as a family. The kids were baptised in October 2020, and Mr. is curr...

It comes naturally to me to question the norms of culture. Looking back, I think it's my mother's influence - she was described by many as " weltfremd ": a stranger to the world. She lived for her passions (music), never much concerned with the realities of life like money, practicalities, logistics. As a teenager, of course, my default response to this was to be as practical as could be: I chose to do a business degree, not because I'm passionate about business but because practically that would allow me to do a variety of things, to make an income. But something of her attitude certainly stuck. Even as a child, I took a certain pleasure in going against the flow, of doing the opposite of what peer pressure would have dictated (aged 12-13 for example I wore pretty much the same clothes, a drab grey/black baggy style, every day no matter what, when all the girls around me had nothing but fashion on their minds)... and to this day, if something is a popular fad...

It's a regular discussion point amongst vegan parents: should we support local community farms? Knowing that the animals we're looking at will be slaughtered and sold as sausages at the farm shop... and yet, yes I take my children there. I want them to meet the animals, appreciate their lives and what they're like - smell them, touch them, interact with these living beings. Because they are not abstract. They are not concepts. They are alive, breathing, sentient, and I want my childen to experience them alive: and not as packs of meat in the supermarket that we just happen not to pick up at our weekly shop. My kids haven't asked yet about where meat comes from. But when they're ready to ask, they'll be ready to learn.

I don't know quite how we packed so much into this one day! As every Saturday, N had her swimming class first thing. With a new teacher, who is an absolute natural at teaching - engaging, fun, he got her to do things like submerge her entire head! She had an absolute blast. After that, Mr needed some space to prepare the lesson for Sunday School so I took the kids to Aerospace. They know it quite well by now but there's always something to see... After lunch, Mr joined us for a trip into the town centre where we had learned about a flock of woolly seagulls to find. They were hiding in the MShed (there are more in other locations but we didn't have time before closing)... lots and lots of them! Oh Bristol, so lovely and wacky and random. Can you spot the seagull in each of the pics below? ...and a real seagull too! Having found enough seagulls we headed into town for a coffee at Dom's, our favourite cafe. Why favourite? Well, to s...

The questions have started. They've always been there occasionally, but now she's 7 months old and we're just beginning to introduce her to food (not that she's particularly interested just yet), this question has become a regular one. My answer can't be given in just a word, though. Firstly, being vegan is a life choice, not just a food choice. It means to abstain from willfully and unnecessarily causing harm to other sentient beings - and that includes not just eating them, but also wearing their skins or furs, using products that were tested on them, or exploiting them in the many ways humans have invented. But, let's keep things simple here and stick to the food, since that is what most people are thinking of when they ask the question. A few thoughts on this. I want her to be healthy. I will do the  best  by her that I know how. This includes, but is not limited to, giving her the best nutrition to thrive. Why would I deliberately give her food t...

Source: BBC It was the burning cows. It was the pictures on TV that stopped me in my tracks. Burning cows and the explanations, together with the images, of how a virus had made its way through Europe on live cattle transports throughout the continent - transports on which the cows suffered unspeakable misery, for the simple reason that by being slaughtered in a different country their meat could be labelled as produce of that country. Another picture is forever etched in my mind, thought I can't find it online - footage of those live cattle transports, a cow was being transferred from train to lorry I think, via crane. The crane just attaches where it can, it had the cow dangling in the air by a front leg, which was being broken and dislocated. Didn't matter. The cow, leg broken but alive, was dropped into the new container for further transport. As long as it was breathing on arrival, that's all that mattered. I cried for them. I'm crying right now as I thin...