I've got some work as a sessional tutor by our local college to teach gardening to community groups, and this week I'm starting three courses on growing veg from seed. So I've been getting my head around lesson plans, teaching schedules, enrolment forms... until my head hurts. But it's great to be able to plan learning around something I love and feel I know enough about. I realised the other day that the best thing about this sort of teaching is that I can be me. When I was doing secondary teaching I always felt I was pretending to be someone else.
I'm also doing lots of gardening as well as talking about it, and a couple of years after swearing I'd never do events again, I'm getting mixed up in organising events connected with Nottingham's Transition Town movement. The Great Spring Sowing has so far involved meetings which manage to be unstructured, well-organised and enjoyable all at the same time. Chair? Shmair!
I've also - unusually for me - been watching quite a few telly programmes. For some reason the period after Christmas always seems to be good for telly. I've been enjoying the 'Round the World in 80 Faiths' programme. I thought that the presenter, Peter Owen Jones, was going to be pretty irritating, but warmed to him as he gave most things a go, getting into some rather harrowing situations and some very moving ones too. I'm amazed how many different faiths there are, and I imagine the programme could have wound up some people either by leaving out their particular faith , or by showing a too-quick snapshot of it. I was a smidgin annoyed at the example of atheism - but then I realised that this was just the sort of response that all the other 79 were creating in someone, somewhere. I'm also enjoying the series 'Christianity - a history', each episode of which is presented by different people so each one is very different from the others. I feel that the programmes presented by atheists are more acute and bolder in their approach, while the others tend to be descriptive - but still interesting. Cherie Blair next week on the future of Christianity... So television is rubbish these days? Not in my opinion. Let's hope that the BBC and Channel 4 do manage to carry on producing such good stuff.
Similar but different: the current bevy of Darwin programmes are looking promising. The recent Attenborough one - 'Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life' - was terrific. No longer on i-player but the tree of life animation (a bit devoid of plant life! But still stunning) is here. The first of Attenborough's Natures Great Events series was heart-wrenching. Not looking good for polar bears... The Natural World programme 'A Farm for the Future' was cracking. Even though I know a bit about the subject matter there were plenty of shocks. There was a more upbeat message too: it included the best short descriptions of permaculture and forest gardening I've seen, and demonstable links between older farmers and the younger ones trying to cut their energy use.
Which kind of brings me back to where I started - growing food. Quite important really.
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