IT'S THE kind of story more and more of us are becoming more and more familiar with. You meet your friend and she looks like she has just popped out of Edvard Munch's The Scream: drawn, troubled, low, anxious. Slowly, half-suspecting the answer, you work your way around to asking, what's wrong?
They’ve split up. He’s moved out. He hasn’t been himself since the job tanked, hanging round the house, moping, playing X-box in the afternoon until she screams at him and a fight starts. Then he’s watching telly late into the night and getting up late, doing nothing until he starts playing X-box again and she screams at him again, and on it goes and on it goes . . .
It’s messy and complicated and everyone is hurting and everything feels completely out of control. As a friend, you want to help in any way you can. But what on earth can you do?
Believe it or not, there is an answer to this sort of breakdown, a breakdown currently affecting hundreds of thousands of our friends and fellow citizens, most recently the 575 employees of TalkTalk in Waterford who were told overnight that their jobs were history.
Ironically, it was in Waterford that I glimpsed the solution to the problem. I was there at the Grow It Yourself (GIY) annual gathering, when several hundred GIYers from all over Ireland had assembled to talk, debate, listen, learn and eat some of the best Irish food imaginable.
People such as myself, who were there to provide some provocation, were asked to ponder a simple question: “Can GIY save the world?”
In my contrary fashion, and given the events at TalkTalk during the week, I turned the question round a bit and tried to answer this: “Can GIY save Waterford?”
How do you deal with the consequences of 575 jobs evaporating in an Irish town, and all the mental troubles that it will inevitably cause as people tumble into depression, lethargy and relationship meltdowns? Can there be a simple answer?
Yes. Join GIY. Get yourself motivated by getting your garden rotavated. “Dig for Victory” they called it in England during the war, and they won the war. “Dig to Stay Together” is what I would call it today, as our economy continues to slide, as we haemorrhage jobs and lose whatever sense of security we used to enjoy.
It was my friend’s description of her partner’s day – X-box in the afternoon, telly in the evening, staying in bed late into the morning – that showed just how valuable an activity it is to grow vegetables and fruit for your table, and to do so with the sweat of your own brow.
You can slouch on the couch in a virtual world, and all it will achieve will be a slow slide into lethargy and depression. But if there is garden work to be done, and if that work yields food for the family, you can pass the day in pleasurable, motivating and profitable toil, knowing that there is a tangible benefit at the end of the day: bringing home the dinner, or at least part of it.
And when you embrace productive gardening, it embraces you. Just like children, you can’t neglect it: it needs tending, watering, considering, planning, harvesting, enjoying, treasuring.
A garden won’t let you get sunk down into yourself, because it is always saying, “Hey, over here, this bit next! Drink that cup of tea and get back to work! Come on, make with the seaweed mulch!”
And Waterford gave me another example of how people, by digging, can dig themselves out of the hole they find themselves in through no fault of their own.
The Waterford Harvest Festival street market on the Sunday was packed with brilliant, creative, dynamic food artisans, again from all over Ireland.
Their parade of stalls took up the entire South Quay for the Amazing Grazing day (and the grazing was truly amazing). That is hundreds of food stalls occupying about three-quarters of a mile of the city – surely the biggest market Ireland has ever seen.
Very many of those stallholders were people who have wrung the things they were selling straight from their own ingenuity, desperation, desire and imagination. So, today’s GIYer can be tomorrow’s artisan, a person making a living by making something that matters.
giyireland.com
John McKenna is author of the Bridgestone Guides, bridgestoneguides.com
