How Different Life Must Have Been

[dinosaw]

Bit of a ramble on my part this one. Was sitting on the balcony last night looking at the lights of the city and I had one of those odd thoughts that can pop into your head randomly. I thought what I am looking at now contains more people than the whole of England did back in Tudor times. The population of Izmir is 3.6m and apparently during the reign of Henry VIII there were 2.7m people in England. Imagine that, for every 20 people you see on the street 19 would have to disappear to get back to those numbers. Even taking aside the fact they had no cars, trains, aeroplanes, electricity or street lights which would have made life unrecognisable to us today, just the lack of overcrowding must have made life so different, well outside of London anyway. No point at all to this post by the way just thinking out loud as it were.

 

[chrismahon]

We are in the Gers department Dinosaw. It is the same size as Essex which has a population of 2,000,000 (I was told by a chap from there). But there are only 181,000 living here and 90% of them are in the city and large towns. So I guess we are close. No street lights and many train lines are now unused -like the Beeching cuts. Most roads aren't salted because that would cost a fortune, just the main Autoroutes. Our nearest neighbours are 600 metres away, so in a square kilometre there is about 20 people here.

I read years ago that the world is sustainable with only 2% of its current population. So we are destroying it at a truly massive rate. I have an atlas from school which shows the Amazon rain forest. Not much left of it now. Here half the woodland here has been felled and not replaced in the last 15 years -mainly for fuel. We worry how we will heat whatever house we buy in 10 years time.

 

[dinosaw]

Sounds right up my street Chris, the more remote the better is my view. The funny thing is that where you are the population is probably not so very different to what it was in the 16thC as the French population at that time was 20 million. That means that while the English population has increased 20 fold in 500 years the French population has little more than trebled, I assume that because of their more fertile land they could sustain a larger number of people prior to the improvements brought by the agricultural revolution.I looked up your local town Condom and there are only 151 more people living there now than in 1800!. It certainly seems like one day the world will reach an unsustainable level of population, plenty of people out there who subscribe to the theory of the Malthusian catastrophe, others say that humans always improvise their way out of such problems, hopefully I won't be around to find out which is true. We are probably 18 months away from buying a smallholding in Scotland now so I have started to browse and it is very rare that you get a farmhouse with an acreage plus some woodland which I would really like to make us self sufficient in heating, if we want it we will have to buy it separately, currently costs around 7-9k per acre in the North and 5k per acre in the South of Scotland. Though if it is too far and you have to spend money on petrol to get there then it completely defeats the object.

 

[chrismahon]

Felling timber is a dangerous exercise Dinosaw. I did plenty in the Dordogne to know and had several near misses. Seasoning and drying the stuff is the real problem. So you need at least 3 years worth standing around at any time, unless you are felling dead wood of course. Woodland here is about €5K per Hectare. Problem is getting the stuff out, because all woodland here is on slopes. Nowhere near as bad as the Dordogne though. A cubic metre delivered is €50 and we burned 6 ½ last Winter, so cheap enough at the moment. The main problem is warming the house enough to stop water pipes freezing. We originally wanted woodland for the same reason, but having lived with one I have no intention of becoming a 'slave to wood' -harvesting all Summer and burning all Winter.

Amazingly about 15% of the houses are empty as well. All the kids want an easy city job and a warm house. A lot of the houses are really uninhabitable. Anything built with a slope behind will be very damp. Originally trees would have soaked and diverted water but they have all gone. If you dry a place out with drainage it invariably subsides I am told. The farmhouses and buildings here are without land generally. The land is sold off first, completely missing the market for the remaining buildings. You can get houses with huge stone barns fairly cheaply, but then you chance not being able to buy surrounding land back -there is some racism here.

Humans are doing a great job of getting themselves into terminal problems. Fusion reactors were talked about as a never ending energy source. But the by-product is collapsed matter and a teaspoon weighs many thousand tones. Where does it go?

 

[dinosaw]

I'll bear that in mind Chris, so many plans at the moment that we will have to be careful not to bite off more than we can chew. In addition to the animals would like to raise a couple of grain crops, barley and oats, I brewed a lot prior to coming out here and think it would be great if I could grow and malt my own barley, not the most cost effective option probably but then again that isn't why I'm doing it.

 

[chrismahon]

We're having to temper things a bit realising that doing up a house, gardening and having animals won't work out. I'm getting a bit older now and beginning to slow down. The heat doesn't help either.

One thing we won't be doing is home brewing, although they do sell the stuff to do it here. Wine in the Co-operative is €1.40 a litre and it's not bad.

 

[dinosaw]

Yes that is cheap, the French are famous for keeping back the decent stuff for themselves and selling on the crap, always found provincial 'house' wines very good. I can churn out beer of excellent quality if I do say so myself-much better than your average commercial ales at around 70p per pint, quite a technical business once you get into it, different mash temperatures, water types, malts and hops can give you pretty much any kind of flavour and consistency your after, providing you like beer of course. Shame that hops don't really grow as far North as Scotland as they are starting to get expensive with an explosion in interest in heavily hopped 'craft beer' in the USA . I think that impatient/incompetent brewers using home-brew kits have given home brewed ale a bad name really, too much of what people have been given to try is 'green' and brewed with sugar rather than malt.

 

[chrismahon]

I hadn't tasted English beer for nearly three years last time I went back Dinosaw. Went to a local pub for Sunday lunch and decided to try a pint of Bass, which was a beer I used to enjoy and which didn't cause the stomach upset of Marstons Pedigree. Unfortunately my tastes have changed a lot and I didn't enjoy it at all. The Lidl cheap lager here is quite good and works out at €1 per litre. I remember a draught beer called Everards Old Original, produced when real ales began to take off -used to give me a bad headache. I spoke to someone who worked at the factory at the time and he told me it wasn't brewed as such, just flavourings and alcohol added to water.

Bad weather heading this way later today. The Meteo has an Orange alert for thunderstorms with very high winds due about 4.00pm, so we will be tying everything down when we get back from a clothes market late morning. The farmers are harvesting Wheat and Barley now, but I can't see them getting it all in before the storms arrive. Strangely I haven't seen any crop damage from the winds. Perhaps the plants have stronger stems than the UK version?

 

[chrismahon]

They have issued an amber storm warning now, due to hot Mediterranean air hitting cold Atlantic air. Predicts rate of rainfall to be 10-30mm per hour with a total of 30-70mm while the storms last. Hailstones likely between 1cm and 3cm diameter. Gusts to 100km/hr, but we know from experience of the way wind swirls through the valleys here that the local gusts could be double that.

So the old stone houses they built 200 years ago, that are still standing, must have been through a lot in their time. In the Dordogne they still build houses with the traditional oak beam structure -saw a team of 'youngsters putting one up. Not sure where the beams were cut though. The local agri-merchant sold oak pegs.

 

[dinosaw]

Hope you make it through the storm unscathed Chris. First day of ramadan here so it is spookily quiet, most people here don't actually fast, maybe only 1 in 3 but it has the same sort of significance as Christmas day I've been told, people stay home with their families. I love all of that old style construction using the wooden pegs, reminds me of the Tales from the Green Valley series where they used traditional construction, wattle and daub and bracken undercoats to thatch their buildings.

 

[chrismahon]

Storm didn't amount to much Dinosaw. Only damage is a wet feeder and two sunflowers blown down. Apparently the hail season is August and is very localised. Whole small vineyard crops can be lost, whereas next door the vineyard has no damage at all. Same with sunflowers -some fields get completely flattened. Lets hope we don't experience that, because the trailer and car are outside (van is in a barn).

It's the opposite here. Rather noisy for once because not far away is a regional scrambling event - qualifier or finals. Must be a bit wet, but at 9€ admission we won't bother looking.

In the West buildings are 'colombage' construction. Thats a timber frame on top of stone. The infill is straw and mud, which here sets like mortar. We are avoiding them because they are cold and need expensive maintenance. The walls leak as well where the infill has contracted. Brits buy them because they look nice.