Five Meet Up in Finsbury Park

Last Tuesday five writers from the Social Reporters crew converged at Edible Landscapes London in Finsbury Park to discuss the schedule for winter/spring and all things editorial. Here Charlotte Du Cann, Mark Watson (Bungay, Norwich), Jo Homan (Finsbury Park), Adrienne Campbell (Lewes), Caroline Jackson (Lancaster) reflect on the day.

Charlotte: Set and setting are everything in a meeting and what better place to discuss the future with prickly pear and cactus behind and geraniums in front of you? There is nothing like a face to face meeting either. Especially with people you know are committed to the project and immersed in Transition. You can pay full attention and then diverge, have a laugh and come back to business. Or rather bring everyone back to business, as we were determined to get through an IMMENSE list of topics in store for the year ahead.

The social reporters are flung far and wide in all directions in the UK and most of our communications are by email, with telephone conversations, comments on our posts and the occasional Skype as well. The beauty of meeting means you can play and work with a subject amongst you, so it moves and changes and becomes a clear and dynamic springboard. Because five of you are paying attention it comes to life quickly and two or three words become a whole range of possibilities. We're starting our topic weeks in February (see panel on the left) and henceforth all the weeks will be led by different editors amongst the crew. We'll be discussing a wide variety of issues, incluing deep nature, funding, supermarkets, flying, teenagers, transition on the move, Transition training, living without money, interviews, reviews and more. Hope you will join us!

Many thanks to Jo for organising the space. If you are ever in London do go and visit this ace perennial nursery and forest garden. It is an oasis in a challenging city in a difficult time.

Jo: It was really lovely meeting some of the other social reporters last week. I hadn't met Mark or Caroline before so it was a special treat to put a face to the name and the virtual correspondence. It felt like we could go into our conversation from a much deeper starting point and there was a kind of live frisson that can't happen so well down the wires.

Adrienne: What's the point of the Social Reporters? To me it's about reflecting on being human in this transition time. Since we're deliberately rooting ourselves in and writing about our own terrain, it's good to reflect on each other and also to occasionally meet in person to add all the dimensions that go beyond words. So it was a real treat to meet up in Jo's heated greenhouse. I discovered, for example, that Mark has an irresistable laugh and that Caroline has a rich life and a quick wit that I remembered from her writing. Charlotte, of course, I've known since our twenties when she was a scarily clever fashion editor; it's so great to see that intelligence applied to the cutting edge of a more necessary cause. And Jo - your work at Edible Landscapes is inspiring. I'm going to make some of those pallet tables for our own allotment sharing table.

Here's to the Purple Beautyberry that Mark and I stumbled across on our way to the cafe. Here's to the next time!

Mark: Was it the travelling to London by train as the sun rose through frosted Suffolk oaks on the coldest morning so far this winter? Or meeting all the London plane trees, alders and a bay tree coming out in flower on the way through Finsbury Park? Or the excitement of converging at midday the five of us at Edible Landscapes London, where Jo welcomed us among beds with rainbow chard, sweet violet and artichoke? We ate winter salad leaves straight from the beds and sat down on a circle of tree stumps, to talk about everything from not feeling like strangers because we all shared the experience of transition and the social reporting project, to keeping in mind the writers who couldn't be there that day, to the best way of using our own wee for composting (plants don’t like being wee’d on directly).

It was all these things. As well as sitting together in that warm greenhouse full of plants, and producing a full-on life-in-transition rota for the coming months over home-dried rosemary and orange peel tea.

Caroline: Just 12 hours since I set off for Lancaster station at a run through the shrouded landscape of an early northern morning. The frost persisted – earth and water hard bound and beautiful all the way to the London suburbs. Then that special metropolitan form of global warming set in and all was water threaded tarmac. But London was warm in other ways too – a warm welcome at Edible Lanscapes where Jo was laden with beautifully made educational signs for the beds of perennial plants. And then come Mark and Charlotte and Adrienne, warm hugs all round. As we pick our way through the saplings to try eating violet leaves at Jo’s insistence, “They’re good. They’re so good”

We are suddenly aware in our slightly awkward physical proximity of how we know each other, how closely, in spirit we are bound through the writing and the reading of our blogs. Adrienne voices what we are all feeling, “So strange to know each other so well, so intimately …like we’ve been naked together.” The feeling persists all day, as we speak, smile, react, thinking oh yes, I remember what she said in this blog, that blog, flicking through the pages of each other’s existence, touching in an extra episode here a colour, a movement there – the generous folds of a coat, the fabric of a London childhood, the force of an habitual gesture.

At the end of the day Mark, Adrienne and I detour to Occupy LX. It’s dark now and the cold is setting in. At the Info tent the welcome is genuine, palpable – we are making a kind of pilgrimage because London is the place where it all happens - but they want, they really want, to know about Occupy Norwich and Preston and Lancaster. Finally we must wrench at the knot, tear ourselves away to timetables and to trains. But as we journey home each our separate way, we pick from our coat cuffs these gorgeous strands of purple and gold and wind our fingers in the threads of a precious day.