In this post I cover an oft-requested topic. How my allotment centred life has helped me manage Adult Onset Still’s Disease (AOSD) and Fibromyalgia. AOSD is a very rare auto-inflamatory disease, as a result the information on the web is drawn from a small sample of patients and isn’t very...
Quite a few people have asked me how we cope with three allotments. This video gives a good impression of what a typical day looks like, there’s not as much weeding as some would suspect!
It’s taken me a while, but I’m now in a suitable mood for setting new years resolutions. December saw me laid up with man flu and January had me mostly confined to the house with food poisoning and a torn stomach muscle, but all these problems are now fading and...
This post isn’t for me, I’ve already committed to retirement, it’s an answer to the regular stream of friends and colleagues who ask me this question, it’s my attempt at a well thought through answer, rather than a quick email reply. To get started it might be worth taking a...
I’ve come to the end of my first calendar year as an allotmenteer and it’s been life changing, I expected to enjoy growing my own food, but it turned out that there were lots of benefits that I really didn’t expect to get from the allotment: the wonderful sense of...
I was at the peak of my physical fitness and at my most optimal weight back when I was 25. Now I’m 52 and retired I decided that I would try and return myself to that same position, when I was able to commute 25 miles to work on my...
I spent my first afternoon at the allotment yesterday and it surprised me, in ways that I didn’t expect. I expected a patch of bare earth, in the midst of lots of other patches to be perhaps the definition of unsurprising, but I was wrong. It proved to be really...
I’ve always loved eating animal products, although when I found out about the inhumane conditions in which some of them were raised I immediately switched to free range eggs and more recently organic diary. For meat though for many years the best I could afford was the RSPCA’s Freedom Food,...
In a recent blog post where I started to talk about my beliefs I mentioned that living a ‘good life’ is about balancing ‘living well’ and ‘living right’, this post explores what I mean by ‘living well’. It’s not prescriptive, there are many different approaches to living well that work...
I’ve suffered from Adult Onset Still’s disease and secondary Fibromyalgia for close to 15 years, that means daily pain and fatigue and lots of pain killers to help me through the day. When I retired 6 months ago I decided that one of my first challenges would be to find...