Transition Town Tooting

Tag: Uncategorised

  • Next Sunday Swap

    The Selkirk on 60 Selkirk Road, SW17 0ES, has kindly let use use one of their upstairs room for our next Sunday Swap, so put Sunday the 1st of March, 1-4pm in your diary now!

    The swaps are a great opportunity to arrive with something you don’t want, and leave with something you do. The previous ones has seen anything from books to fragranced candles and doorstops being swapped, and the sky is the limit.

    As spring is upon us (really!) and it’s time to get those seeds in the ground I thought it might be a nice idea to bring along unwanted seeds, gardening tools, swap ideas and advice on what to put in the ground this year. Anything else unwanted from that spring clean is of course also welcome.

    So come along, grab a drink or a bite to eat with us, chat away and swap some stuff on 1st of March!

    For any further info please email transitiontowntooting@gmail.com

    Sara

  • Hats off to the Hens

    I have been feeling very sorry for them. Everytime I go out in the morning to let them out and fill up their food, the ice on their water bowl has thickened. As they rush out to peck at the unforgiving stone hard ground I worry about them. To make things more lively for them I have taken to boiling up our vegetable peelings for a few minutes to put out – a kind of bird broth which is much appreciated. After evolving for 1000s of years, they have clearly got resilience down to a fine art and are the hardiest of creatures. The next day the youngest produces her first very small egg. It’s 1.5 inches long, a lovely brown and we serve it up for breakfast to pack a little goodness into our daughter returning to university that day.

    A really excellent first TTT meeting of 2009 on Jan 5th. As someone said, 2008 was all about coming to terms with the enormity of the world’s challenges, reading loads, feeling somewhat overwhelmed by it all. 2009 can be a year of doing and actions.
    More soon on all this.
    LN

  • Sunshine on a yellowed oak tree

    Has anyone noticed what a remarkable autumn we have experienced in London this year? It compensates for the slightly disappointing summer tenfold; we have had wonderful glowing mornings filled with scents, colour and sounds. Yes, there have been more than a couple of rainy days. But they have rarely lasted more than a day, and once the rain has passed the sun has cast its’ admiring glances at us yet again, filling the world with unusual warmth.

    I like to think of this autumn as the autumn of a way of living we have all taken for granted for so long. There’s been remarkable destruction, as there always is in autumn. And winter will bring even harsher times still. But we all know that at the end of winter sprouts will penetrate the solid ground yet again.

    I think this wonderful autumn we’ve seen has encouraged us to enjoy the small things: sunshine on a yellowed oak tree, the wading though wilted leaves and the array of mushrooms in all sorts of spaces we think we’ll never know if we can eat or not. The late meals we share with our friends that turn out not being so late as it’s dark outside at 4pm. The log fire we all thought we’d have this year.

    I think the small things we’ve come to enjoy this autumn have showed us what we’ll need to appreciate for the next few years. Until the spring.

    Sara H

  • Feels like the 1950s …

    Player's wall Mitcham Road, Tooting Broadway by ramson.

    Our heating doesn’t work. Feels like the 1950s. Great for saving on energy bills, and for bowls of warm porridge in the morning, but look forward to a smidgeon more heat.

    Off on Thursday to the Transition City Conference in Nottingham which is being held specially for communities working to set up Transition Initiatives in Cities. That’s us. The progamme looks really interesting and includes sessions on: The Sustainable Communities Act, Energy Descent Plans, Diversity in Cities, Transforming Cities into Hubs of Sustainable Food and Working with Conflict. Will report how Hilary Jennings and I get on there. Anyone else feel like coming, there are still spaces. This excellent article in the Times speaks in detail about transition initiatives sprouting up all over the globe – a growing army of ‘local heroes’ determined to turn challenges of climate change and oil depletion into ‘our finest hour’.

    In the last week Transition Town Tooting’s heroes have been in contact with Capital Growth; London Sustainability Exchange, London 21, Sustain. There’s interest in linking up with any TTT initiatives we can get off the ground around carbon reductions, food growing, health programmes and so on.

    We have begun a conversation at Tooting Bec Lido around renewable energy for the site. The Cold Water Swimming Championships will be held again there on January 24th. Registration by Dec 24th if you want to enter!!! An excercise in resilience if ever there was one.

    Just found some very fine photos of Tooting on flickr. If anyone recognises the one above as theirs give a shout to transitiontowntooting@gmail.com

    LN

  • Roller Coaster Days

    In the last few days, clocks turned back an hour. Darker days on their way. Will have to wait ’til St Lucy’s day in December for the turning of the solar year, the winter equinox and a little more light. Have spent the weekend gathering jumbo crop of apples from my father’s garden. They are now cooked up and coming to a ‘rolling boil’ in a huge pan in the kitchen. A tang of apples pervades the house. Winter may be on its way but there will be apple jelly.

    It has been a roller coaster couple of weeks: stock markets tumbling, house prices falling, banks in crisis, a ‘full blown recession’.
    Over the past months as Transition Town Tooting has been finding its feet, I’ve been struck by the perspicacity of this movement to forsee the urgent need to plan ahead, build resilience and collectively invent how our low energy future will sound, look and feel like. The realities of the Triple Crunch (credit crunch, peak oil, climate change) are playing themselves out at top speed in full technicolour all around….All the reasons for creating positive community responses to these global challenges are surely here!
    And here is some VERY GOOD NEWS: On October 28th -tomorrow- the government is to announce that the new Climate Change Bill – which will be made law next month, with a commitment to curb the UK’s carbon footprint by 80% by 2050 – will now include aviation and shipping emissions. This is the world’s first climate change law and is what Friends of The Earth director Andy Atkins has called “a world-class climate change law”. This appears to be a direct result of everyone lobbying their MPs who in turn have lobbied the government. Change IS possible.
    Now we have to work out how we will actually reduce our carbon footprint by 80% by 2050. Transition Town Tooting (TTT) will continue its events, awareness raising over weeks and months ahead. 2 meetings planned immediately on Nov 2nd (11am-1pm) and Nov 4th (7-9pm). Both at Mushkil Aasaan, 220-212 Upper Tooting Road, SW17 (side entrance, first floor).
    The first, a practical workshop with visioning excercise and how we imagine TTT’s Energy Descent Action Plan coming into being. A future preferable to the present and built on some of the amazing ideas that have been coming forward and will continue to be dreamt up by all Tooting residents. The meeting on Nov 4th is a planning meeting to build on the momentum gathered over the Autumn for organising events and next steps.
    Sunday Nov 2nd will also see first ever Transition Town Tooting Sunday Swap. Bring anything you would like to swap: food, ideas, clothes. Apple Jelly anyone?? See you there. Lucy Neal.

  • View From A Tooting Window

    This Tooting resident seems to be surviving the credit crunch without too much bother. What can you see from your Tooting window?

  • The Petroleum Interval

    History may well regard our lives as being lived in the “Fossil Fuel Age”, filed away for posterity or museum visits just like the Bronze or Iron Ages. Rob Hopkins suggests in his Transition Handbook it might be called “The Petroleum Interval”, a relatively short “blip” in history when large quantities of oil were extracted from the Earth to fuel human activities.
    This graph makes me think Man might just need to use his massively inventive brain to work out how to change how the world is powered asap! What do you think?