Equinox, Eostre, Eggs - it's Spring!

It’s Equinox time, blog fans!

That means that up here in the Northern Hemisphere, spring has officially sprung, and from today – where the night and day are of equal length - the days get longer and the Eostre festival begins. It’s time to start celebrating the green shoots of new growth and renewal and life after a winter that’s overstayed like a food-stealing houseguest. You know what that means!

Yes, up here it’s all eggs and rabbits and chocolate and blossoms and everything says new life! Fertility! There's romance in the air… and on the platform at Camden Town tube station, where I saw two particularly pretty young people having a big old smooch last night.

Christians, of course, are celebrating the Easter festival, and the miracle of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. Iranians are celebrating the beginning of their new year, as are the Baha’i. The Chinese (and their admirers) are balancing eggs on their ends; the symbolic idea being to prove that harmony exists in the world, if the traditional symbol of fertility (the egg) can find balance on the most balanced day of the year.

And in my personally favourite ritual, in America, the employees of the Annapolis boatyards are burning their socks to mark the end of the cold weather and the warmth to come.

Down South, of course, it’s a bit more complicated. When the Christians came to the lands at the South of the world, they brought their festivals with them with no date adjustment. While Australians are certainly stocking up on chocolate for the Easter festival, the symbols of regrowth and new life are slightly out place for the greying weather and the onset of autumnal chill. Nevermind – we shall deal with that in a moment.

Pagans celebrate the change in the weather and the transformation of the natural world with a festival. The deity of the season is Eostre, a lunar goddess and one of fertility, sexuality and, sometimes, war. If the word sounds familiar, it’s because, as a fertility goddess, she's provides the basis of the word "oestrogen" as well as gives her name to the Easter festival. She’s usually depicted naked, and often in the company of the lion, horse, sphinx or dove, and with a star in a circle that represents the planet Venus.

She also goes by the names Ostara, Ostera, Estara, Eostar, Eostra, Inanna, Ishtar, Anat, Astarte or Asherah, depending which bit of the world you're in (or how good your spelling is). Some equate her with Aphrodite the Greek goddess, Venus the Roman goddess and the Syrian Atargatis. Others equate her with Nut, the Egyptian goddess of the night, and Guan Yin, the Chinese goddess of mercy.

Interestingly, the ancient Israelites worshipped the goddess as the consort of El, and the Hebrews in Judah worshipped her as the consort of Yahweh himself. Archaeological evidence for this relationship abounds, as do arguments that the Bible writers, who no one could argue were great flag-flyers for the celebration of female sexuality, sidelined her divinity. In the Old Testament, for example, the prophet Jeremiah freaks out when he discovers Jews who worship her as the Queen of Heaven. As Jeremiah rebukes them, her followers resist conversion. In Jeremiah 44:15-18 they make their case:

We will burn incense to the Queen of Heaven and will pour out drink offerings to her just as we and our fathers, our kings and our officials did in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. At that time we had plenty of food and were well off and suffered no harm. But ever since we stopped burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have had nothing and have been perishing by sword and famine.

There’s a book on this subject, for those of you who find this stuff interesting. One suspects, on a purely sociological level, that a society that worships around aromatherapy, healthy sexuality and feasting probably has both more appeal and more time to devote to agriculture than one where religious wars and forced religious conversation take up people’s time.

But I digress. Whatever name she goes by, Eostre is about fertility and the delights of nature at springtime. To worship her, or just celebrate the season she represents, is to wander in the greening woods and vales and delight in their new shoots. It is to fill your home with fresh flowers - jonquils, lilacs, crocuses, daffoldils, irises, tulips and lilies - throw a pastel-coloured tablecloth over the dining-room table and flavour food with marjoram and thyme. Buy new plants for the home and garden. And, perhaps the best bit of all, bake cakes and drink fruit juice or wine to celebrate the return of life to the earth.

Research into the best cake with which to honour the season’s goddess throw up both unsurprising and very surprising results:

• hot cross buns, naturally 
• carrot and walnut cake, as carrots are in season 
• Maltese figolla – an almond-pastry dish used to serve up chocolate Easter eggs 
• Cornish pasties. No, I am not joking. The crescent shape of the Cornish pastry was brought to Cornwall by the Astarte-worshipping Phoenicians, who came there to trade tin. 

As it is the season of rebirth, Titania suggests a lovely ritual for beginning the “new” seasonal year. She sets out candles around her shower and showers with rose-scented products, bringing an actual rose into the shower with her and anointing her body with it in deference to the beauty of spring, stepping out clean and fresh into a new year and a new identity for it.

Celebrating the season with the fragrance of the spring a wonderful way to greet the return of warm weather. For those of you who resist the inflated prices of perfumed moisture-potions and soap-elixirs, remember that it is much more cost-effective to buy unscented home-brand products and scent them yourself. Whether it is rose or orange blossom, limes, jasmine or anything else floral that does it for your nose, try these:

• Add a couple of drops of your favourite essential oil in some frangrance-free hair conditioner to perfume your hair.
• Add some drops of oil to a tub of generic Vitamin E cream to use as moisturiser
• Put drops of essential oil on makeup-remover pads, which are then strewn throughout your drawers to perfume your clothes
• Put an oil-impregnated makeup-remover pad into a seal-tight sandwich bag with a scentless soap, and keep in a dark place for a couple of weeks to perfume the soap.
• Scent your own candles; light a candle, and when its wax is soft, blow it out. Smear the softer wax with oil, and then let it harden again. When it is relit, it will disperse the smell around you.

Alternatively, there’s another fantastic way to psychologically click into the season... 

... A springtime egg ritual!

1. Go out and buy the freshest dozen eggs you can find. 
2. Sit for a moment, staring at the eggs and consider 12 things that you want to achieve in the year ahead. 
3. Get a piece of paper and a pen, and let your mind doodle 12 symbols that represent your wishes.
4. Now, hard-boil the 12 eggs. 
5. When they have cooled, use a paintbrush and some food colouring to paint each egg with one symbol. 
6. Display the eggs on your dining table in a decorated basket, and for the next 12 days, crack open one egg and meditate on your wish as you discard the broken shell and eat the egg. Not only a very pretty way to decorate a table, but a convenient snack that’s high in protein, too. 

PS For those of you in the Southern Hemisphere, the Autumnal Equinox is a time to heal and strengthen in order to survive the coming bleaker seasons. All the books recommend NOW as the time to mend broken friendships and make amends for past mistakes. So get on the phone before the weather gets old; you never know who you’ll need to survive the chilly days ahead. 

10 Things I Didn't Know About Writing a Book Before I Wrote a Book

Again, I apologise for my absence before my last post. I don't know if you missed me... but my dad did - a couple of days before my last blog, a cute email arrived reading: "Your mother and I have noticed you have not been posting your blog, but you are on Twitter. Yo, lady, what gives?" (he is so down with the street-talk, Dad).

What gave was that I had to retreat to the Organic Vegetable Cave to complete the first re-edit of my book. My book! Burnt Snow! First re-edit! Done! A little Twitter I can justify, but a blog takes - ahem - significantly more focus.

The "Michelle Ozolins" Page in my Burnt Snow Character Scrapbook

Not to mention, I've also started co-presenting a radio book club for Australia's ABC network. It's all getting a bit exciting: you can read about the radio show, and even make recommendations about what we read here.

But to give readers of this blog a thorough understanding of just what's been occupying my time, I present to you a special Book of the Witch literary feature:

10 Things I Didn't Know About Writing a Book

Before I Wrote a Book

1. Getting a Book Deal Doesn’t Write the Book For You
Burnt Snow was sent off by my agent to publishers when it was at 50,000 words; it’s true that publishers don’t need more than that to make a decision and my agent didn’t want me wasting my time. The deal process is agonizing, even if it is handled by an agent. There’s waiting for the thing to be read, reports at their end, meetings at their end, further enquiries, offers, meetings about offers, meetings about your book that you have to go to (that their marketing person also goes to), people come in, drop out, come back again. Money gets offered. Rights get negotiated. Choices have to be made – what they can afford, which publisher you want to go with. And after it all, after the meetings and the contracts and the money and the rights, they hand you a deadline, which comes as a bit of a shock. After all this effort, it’s overwhelming to think you have to finish the bloody book.

2. The Way You Work is the Way You Work: Stop Fighting It
It took Joseph Heller 8 years to write Catch-22 while he worked his day-job in an advertising agency. It took David Guterson 10 years, around the peripheries of his job as a teacher, to write Snow Falling on Cedars. Writing around your need for an income is admirable - and takes enormous discipline. I can’t do it, so while writing Burnt Snow I had to forgo an income and live on my credit card in disgusting poverty because I can’t – I just can’t – get any writing done without warming up for two hours. Sure, once I get through two hours of excruciating, staring-at-the-computer despair, something clicks and I can churn out 1000 words an hour until I pass out at my desk, but it makes working around anything difficult. Knowing how you write and reorganizing your life around it is how you ACTUALLY get the thing done.

3. Commercial Publishing Companies are NOT Charitable Organisations
Your book may indeed be a brave and brilliant reinvestigation of everything we know about the English language. You may have done several creative writing degrees, sailed through your PhD with structural flair and have difficult and uncomfortable truths about existence to share with the world. That’s awesome, but commercial publishers are still under NO obligation to publish your book, even if you’re really, really clever and really, really talented. If their books do not sell, their company fails and they lose their jobs. So when you present them with your book, their interest is in how they can sell it, and how many they can sell. From my experience, they ask:

• Who is the target market for this book? (tip: if YOU are lucky enough to get asked this question in person, the answer is not “people like me”, because that equates precisely to 1. You are a unique and beautiful individual, remember?)
• Are you familiar with other books in this genre? (tip: the answer to this question is YES, you CERTAINLY should be, because otherwise how do you articulate what the Unique Selling Point of your book is?)
• What IS the Unique Selling Point of this book? (they don’t ask this directly, but answering it anyway is VERY important)
• What do you understand of the commercial publishing industry? (the answer here is to know that it’s super-competitive, high-risk and with extremely tight margins, meaning that you will pledge to work like a lunatic within the meager resources of the company to make your book successful).

4. Knowing How To Answer a Marketing Question Does Not Undermine Your Credibility as a Writer
Do not, for one minute, think that there is a separation between literary excellence and marketing; literary excellence is marketing. The reason why a lot of talented fiction writers fail to sell a book is because:

• They have not thought about their market and can't actually articulate who would read the book except themselves. Not exactly a flag-flyer for a publishing option, this.
• They think that their book is so awesome, everyone will just flock to it. This is not borne out by reality. I think White Noise by Don Dellilo is one of the greatest books ever written - and even though it's sold well, and for 25 years, not everyone has either heard about it or read it, get me?
• They think they are smarter than the people who are reading the genre they are writing for, and believe they can cynically exploit an established market. The reverse usually proves to be true, as a patronising attitude is rewarded with staggering indifference, from publishers, readers and everyone else.

When you sit in the room with the people who are about to dedicate literally years of their professional life to your project, who are risking vast amounts of money and resources on getting your story out to the world, the heavy, heavy reality of what is involved here lands like a punch to the head. The obligation is to make something fantastic that your market will want to read, and it's the most demanding challenge to your literary skill in the world.


5. You Should Pencil in Some Thinking Time
When I was an undergraduate, I studied English Literature with a man called Richard Harland, who is now a full-time author. Richard came back to the university a couple of times after he left to give masterclasses on writing. One of the things he spoke about was how in his writing practise, he scheduled in thinking time; he would sit in a comfy chair for a couple of hours each afternoon, thinking about what he would write the next morning. Research shows that sleeping on a problem is one of the best ways to solve it, and doing some quality thinking for a defined period in the day will certainly help this. Narrative is HARD. Characterisation is TRICKY. Working your brain properly is the only way to survive.


6. Your Thinking Time is NOT Your Down Time 
It says in the Bible that the Sabbath should be a day of rest and it’s advice for healthy living. You can’t and shouldn’t work 7 days a week. Your brain needs rest. If you don’t spend a whole day NOT writing your book, you will enjoy it more when you get back to it. If you live breathe and eat your book 24/7 you will start to hate it and it will hate you back; your writing will become internal if you have no external stimuli, and internal writing is inaccessible to any reader who isn’t you. Whether you take your Sabbath in church, at the pool, or dressing up as a poodle, it is very, very necessary for your mental health and writing clarity.


7. The Printing Budget of a Fiction Book is Actually only 1% of its Total Budget 
This is one of the reasons the publishers are so worried about the impact of the iPad, the Kindle and digital downloading on the book market. If the digital books were only going to be priced 1% less than the print version, there’s be no problem – but the digital booksellers (like Amazon and soon Apple) have been trying to drive down the price of new books as downloads as being up to 33% cheaper than the print version. Which may be great for consumers price-wise, but which will lead to a staggering drop in either variety or quality as publishers struggle to make money on books by reducing their main cost-centre: labour. Editing labour and marketing labour.
A good book is as easy to read as it is emotionally engaging and intellectually challenging. This is such a difficult trick to pull off that it relies on an army of readers, senior editors, junior editors, copy editors and proof-readers to get right. Everything is scrutinised; are the characters consistent? Is the door of this room in the same place on page 43 as page 3? You have used the world “sentimental” eight times on one page. This comma doesn’t belong here. We are confused about the motivations of the central character…
This is also why vanity publishing is a risky proposition; people train and work through the ranks for years to become senior editors; do you really have comparable experience? Will your book be as good as it can be without it?

8. Your Editorial Report is Not Going to Fit In An Email
I was offered three deals from three different companies, and went with the team that I felt I had the best “click” with. They loved my book, they were enthusiastic about me. I knew there were fun times ahead.
Then I got the editorial report. 10,000 words of it. I almost fell off my chair. Pages and pages of criticism – everything from the fundamental story structure to questions about characterization, feedback on my writing style and some flat out rejections of plot points.
It’s about making the book better, but, like any recovery, it takes time. I sat on the couch with a printout of the manuscript and a biro and went through it page-by-page. It took me a month.


9. You Finishing the First Draft is Not the End. It is the Beginning.
I’m learning there are lots of beginnings in this business. I thought that everything was over when we got the deal – then I remembered I had to write the book. I thought everything was over when I finished the draft – then I got the editorial report. I thought everything was over when I incorporated all the changes… but, of course, there’ll be another report. And another draft. And then an uncorrected proof. And then a corrected proof. And even when Burnt Snow goes off to the printers, it will not be over… The marketing cycle will just be beginning. And then there’s TWO MORE BOOKS in the series to go. “You know, you and I are embarking on a three-year relationship?” said my publisher. I’ve had boyfriends that didn’t last that long. Oh, my!


10. Did I Mention That It’s Really Hard Work?
I had a burst of inspiration for Burnt Snow – an idea that crystallized into magic, literally. The words poured onto the keyboard in the first two weeks. At the beginning of the story, everything is possible.
But this process is demanding. The story goes places you don’t expect it to, and you have to keep up. Characters develop complex personalities and all of a sudden the thing you wanted them to do at a certain point in the novel they aren’t likely to do anymore. Outside of the actual story and plotting and characterization, there’s all the technical stuff. Is it okay to repeatedly use the word ‘said’? Are there other words for ‘face’? Which is the best preposition for the verb? Is the tense consistent? Is there a tonal shift in this metaphor?
It takes months, years - even with help - to get this right. It costs money in lost work, it costs time in dedication. You have to think in at least 10 directions… and your communication skills aren’t just for the page; they’re for the meetings, the questions, the conversations, the blogs (!), the tweets, the festivals, talks and workshops. It is a commitment of life, for life.
But, of course, this is what I’ve trained for. And I love. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.


Is that a good enough explanation, Dad?!

The Great Organic Veg Delivery Comparison Shop Adventure!

Hello, blog-fans!

Apologies for my absence - I've been working on my book (!) - a subject, I promise, will be milked to death in my next post.

Today, I'm adding to the blog a series of weekly reviews of my adventures in organic vegetable home delivery. It will contain a bonus recipe that demands the inclusion of this intriguing broccoli:

The Romanesco Broccoli

The Boy Next Door and I are fabulously stereotypical tree-hugging environment lovers... who live very deliberately *right in the centre* of one of the busiest cities on earth. Obviously, I love organic veg for all the environmental and ethical concerns of its production, but it's an unavoidable truth that it also tastes better. If you don't believe me, hold up an organic tomato to your nose and try not to salivate.

The other day I was rambling around London when I noticed a box of juicy vegetables sitting in an ethical-looking cardboard box outside someone's house. This is deranged behaviour in London, given that the easiest way of getting rid of things you don't want is to leave them outside your house, where they'll be stolen in less than five minutes (I time-trialled this with an old bookcase, it is true), but rather than lurk in the shadows to watch out for London's soon-to-be-healthiest local thief, I came home and decided to find my own organic veg supplier.

I found five:
• Riverford Organic Veg: www.riverford.co.uk
• Abel & Cole: www.abelandcole.co.uk
• The Organic Delivery Company: www.organicdeliverycompany.co.uk
• The Food Folk: www.thefoodfolk.com
• Farm-Direct: www.farm-direct.com

The Boy Next Door, who would, left to his own devices, exist entirely on a diet of fruity buns, has, as the result of a recent snotty flu, enfranchised me to set the nutritional agenda for our household. With a mutually agreed combined grocery budget of £40 a week, I set to work on my first order, from Riverford Organic.

The Boy Next Door works weird shifts, and I spend a lot of nights out, too, so for my first veg order, I thought I would err on the side of caution with quantities. The way Riverford work is that they offer you a box, with a choice of size, and base their contents of a number of items of fruit or veg to fill it. What these are, of course, are determined by seasonal availabilities. There are also dairy and meat options, booze, softdrinks and seasonal treats that you can order, as well as things for the larder.

I ordered:
- a "mini" box: This is advertised as containing 7-8 types of vegetable, being a week's supply for 1-2 people, and cost £8.95. It contained: 8 large potatoes, 5 medium carrots, 2 enormous zucchini/courgettes, 3 medium-sized leeks, 4 medium brown onions, 1 medium savoy cabbage and 1 medium head of romanesco broccoli.
- a "fruit bag": This is advertised as containing 3 types of seasonal vegetable, and cost £5.95. It contained: 4 enormous plums, 4 huge oranges and 8 small kiwi-fruit.
- a litre of semi-skinned organic milk (£1.06)
- a half-dozen free range, organic eggs (£1.95)
- a 170g wheel of St Eadburgha soft cheese (a treat for the Boy the Next door, £4.45)
- a 600ml tub of the "Soup of the Month" - tarragon and celeriac - for £2.99

The total for this spread was £25.35. I worked our larder up to £40 through the purchase of boxes of black beans, kidney beans and chickpeas, lots of dry spaghetti, bacon, wild rice, wholemeal pitta bread, hummus, apples, soft cheese, oatcakes, butter and fruit juice and decided to trade off our larder for anything else.

I emailed in my order to Riverford (the website is a little annoying, as you can't revise your choices at checkout - you have to reverse to the main page and manually adjust the quantities), but was DELIGHTED to learn:
- they delivered for *free*
- they would deliver before 9am on a Tuesday.

Now, the first point of comparison in this shop was to challenge whether a free, organic delivery would be cheaper than ordering the same things from the local supermarket. So I comparison-shopped with Sainsbury's online; we do all our regular shopping from the local Sainbury's, which has an organic section.

Withdrawing the cost of the cheese - which you can't get at Sainsbury's, and which, was, after all, a really a naughty treat - the cost of these items was £20.90.

Using the order mechanism for Sainsbury's Online, the same (or equivalent) items as my Riverford stock were:

Sainsbury's Carrot, Chickpea & Coriander Soup, So Organic 600g £0.28/100g £1.69
Sainsbury's Fresh Milk, Semi Skimmed, Organic 1.13L (2pint) £0.91/ltr £1.03
Sainsbury's Free Range Woodland Medium Eggs x6 £0.24/ea £1.46
Sainsbury's Plum Punnet 400g £4.98/kg £1.99
Sainsbury's Navel Oranges , Taste the Difference x4 £0.62/ea £2.49
Sainsbury's Kiwi Fruit, Organic x4 £0.35/ea £1.39
Sainsbury's Onions, Organic 750g £1.33/kg £1.00
Sainsbury's Leeks, Organic 400g £4.45/kg £1.78
Sainsbury's Lady Balfour Potatoes, So Organic 2kg £1.25/kg £2.50
Sainsbury's Courgettes, So Organic £0.66/ea £1.98
Sainsbury's Carrots, So Organic 750g £1.24/kg £0.93
Sainsbury's Broccoli, So Organic 400g £3.92/kg £1.57
Sainsbury's Savoy Cabbage, Organic £1.27/ea £1.27

Which totals to: £21.08 - although quantities are not equivalent (I got more kiwi fruit and leeks, but perhaps less spuds and carrots). Also, I couldn't get organic plums or oranges from Sainsbury's at this time.

Interesting. ALSO: were I to order through Sainsbury's for home delivery I couldn't get a delivery before 9am. Deliveries only start from 10am, and would cost me an additional £3.50.

That's only an 18p difference between Riverford and Sainsbury's on the groceries, but the difference in cost with delivery means a saving of £3.68, or 17% on the total shop.

Of course, there's an argument that I had to go to Sainsbury's anyway to get our other groceries, so there's a carbon issue with the delivery from Riverford. Of course, buying that many groceries would have needed the help of a car or bus to get home, anyway... Not to mention, there's an ENORMOUS save in time between ordering on the internet and hanging at home for an early-morning delivery, rather than the hours spent going to, staying at, and coming from the supermarket (not to mention that the Boy Next Door is not supermarket compliant, and tends to start wanting to buy £10 of jellybeans or stick bananas in his ears if we're in there for more than 5 minutes).

The real issue, for me, of course, was going to be the quality and taste of the food. I'm writing this on a Sunday, following our Tuesday delivery. Of our stock, we have 1 courgette, 3 onions, some eggs, the plums, 3 oranges and all of the kiwi fruit remaining, but we've had some lovely meals:

- leeks and cabbage fried with butter and bacon
- roast potatoes and carrots
- the Soup of the Month was fantastic
- the cheese lasted, oh, about 30 minutes (and that was the last of our oatcakes)
- spaghetti with broccoli and pinenuts
- fresh orange and bay leaf tea
- courgette with wild rice
- kidney beans with bacon and onion

... and tomorrow, obviously, I am going to whip up an omelette with the eggs, an onion, bacon and the remaining courgette, using the last two onions in a french onion soup for dinner.

Of course, it's alarming that the Boy Next Door and I have essentially been staring at a fruitbowl full of food that we haven't touched for a week. The plums I will make into a cordial tomorrow, the oranges will last a couple more days and I may juice them... but kiwi fruit are annoying little critters and any ideas what to do with them would be most welcome.

So, in summary, Riverford:

- good range of in season fresh fruit and vegetables
- also very decent range of meat, dairy and booze
- some interesting luxury products
- flexibility with ordering (instead of the fruit bag, we could have just selected apples and bananas to add on)
- website is clear, even if ordering is a little annoying
- free delivery, and at good hours for people with, you know, jobs
- they delivered on time and were very nice
- delivery came with recyclable packaging, as well as (bonus!) a handy guidebook to their vegetables (which is how i found out what the weird green thing was) with storage and preparation instructions, as well as recipes. Recipes!
- organic, responsibly sourced
- high quality food (one potato was a little dodgy, but a few flicks of the knife and it roasted fine)
- had to scrub the carrots and potatoes
- got freaked out by the weird-looking broccoli (pyramidical cones and bright lime green in colour)... but it turned out to be crunchy and scrumptious
- tasty food that lasted the promised week
- price comparable (slighly less) than Sainsbury's

The week ahead we are going to try Abel & Cole and see how they compare.

In other news, today I bought a peace lily... and already my apartment is more joyous.

To leave you...

• 10-Minute Spaghetti with Broccoli and Pinenuts: Heat 2 tbs of olive oil in a pan, adding your own desired quantity of pinenuts. Cook the pinenuts in the oil on a low heat until they are VERY slightly more golden than beige, but remove from heat immediately when they start to turn this colour. Do NOT drain, but set aside. Boil water in a kettle and pour it into a saucepan, adding (preferably wholemeal) spaghetti. Once the spaghetti is is bent into the saucepan, add a slice of bacon to the water, a dash of salt and cover the pan with a bamboo steamer that fits it. The steamer should contain half a head of romanesco broccoli, cut into flowerets. Bring to the boil - once the broccoli is cooked, the spaghetti should be, too. Drain the spaghetti, add the broccoli to the pan, and pour in the oil and pinenuts, seasoning with ground black pepper and salt, to taste. Can be served with shredded pecorino or parmesan cheese.

Peace, Lily! A Reader Suggests Detoxification by Flowers

This post is a sequel to my previous "I can't believe that people actually read this" article form the other day. Yesterday, I was complaining about antennae growing out of my head. Today I am ordering a peace lily. Why? Because they've been proven by NASA to actually detox the air around you. No, I am not joking and yes, this was messaged to me by someone who reads this blog.

They look like this:

Ooh, pretty!

Peace lilies are called spathiphyllum and come in numerous varieties. They detox the air - specifically, they absorb formaldehyde and benzene - and you only need one plant per room to keep its air fresh and chemical free. Apparently, they are NOT recommended for homes with plants or children, as their nifty toxin-inhaling properties make you violently spew everywhere if you eat them.

But if you know someone without pets or children who's got, you know, antennae growing out of their head, you should buy them one. There is a company in London doing a delivery of a potted peace lily for £20. They're good plants for domestically irresponsible, as they like shadows and only need to be watered if their soil feels dry.

And lilies are gifts with impressive symbology. The Archangel Gabriel, no less, presented one to Mary at the Annunciation, and Mary is often represented with lilies in Western art. Although hers was a Madonna lily (and from a different genus), the symbolism of the flower still holds; lilies, interestingly, represent both purity (because of their pure white colour) and sexual energy and fertility. In the latter case this would be because of the, um, impressive pistils and their particular location within the petals. Give the photo a good stare if you don't immediately see what I mean.

The combination of the symbolism of purity and sexual energy OF COURSE results in lilies being associated with motherhood and fertility. Lilith, the "unsuitable" first wife of the Biblical Adam, was actually named after the lily. [If you haven't heard of Lilith, fret not; she'll make an appearance in the this blog at a later point], but the association with the flower is shared by all kinds of mother goddesses, like Astarte, whose European name is Eostre. This makes a lily a particularly good gift for the season, as upcoming Easter, unsurprisingly, gets its name from the Eostre festival.

In flowers-as-a-gift symbolism, a present of lilies implies your intentions are motivated by purity, majesty and honour. This is one of the reasons that they are popular at funerals - to "honour" the dead. There is a memorable scene in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber that features lilies in this context, but I'll leave this to your own delightful discovery.

Interestingly, perhaps because of their power to "honour" a recipient, lilies are recommended for those bothered at home by troublesome ghosts. They do not banish ghosts, but appease their tempers and thus prevent them from causing harm or mischief. 

Those amongst the living, though, who remain intrigued by the detox properties of plants are also recommended to find refuge amongst ivy, gerbera daisies and bamboo palms. 

And by the way...

It's March, meaning that the Great Len Deighton has updated his seasonal eating recommendations in The Len Deighton Action Cookbook. For those of you here in the Northern Hemisphere, take note that you can now consume with impunity:

• FISH: carp (until the 14th), catfish, chub, cod's roe, conger eels, gurnard, John Dory, lemon sole, ling, mackerel, mussels, oysters, perch and pike (until the 14th), salmon, salmon-trout, scallops, smelts, tench (until the 14th), whitebait and witch.
• HOME-GROWN FRUIT: Apples (Cox's Orange Pippin) and rhubarb.
• IMPORTED FRUIT: apples, grapes and pears, granadillas, grapefruit, mangoes and strawberries.
• MEAT: All meat - with a particular recommendation to try British lamb.
• POULTRY: Guinea fowl and duckling.
• HOME-GROWN VEGETABLES: Jerusalem artichokes, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbages (particularly Savoy - perfect in colcannon, yum), celeriac, kale, parsnips, new potatoes, radishes, spring greens, spring onions, sprout tops, swedes and tomatoes.
• IMPORTED VEGETABLES: Broad beans, endives, salsify and white cabbage.

And one cheeky recipe thrown in, for the marvellous colcannon:

• Colcannon: Boil enough quartered potatoes as you'd want for mash, leaving the skin on. While the potatoes are boiling, melt a large knob of butter in a frypan, adding a chopped brown onion and, then, when it's soft, four rashers of chopped bacon and half of a chopped cabbage (preferably Savoy). By the time the cabbage is soft, the potatoes should be done. Strain and mash the potatoes in their pot with buttermilk, adding the vegetable-and-meat mixture. Return briefly to the heat and season with lots of cracked black pepper and salt. Excellent with soda water on the side.

Smoky Quartz and the Antennae Growing Out of My Head

Yes, we do have to talk about the unnatural relationship that I am building with technology. The Boy Next Door and I are now a three computer household; two laptops and a tower, plus a printer... and we cart around four mobile phones between us, plus the landline, and two MP3 players, two digital cameras (one SLR), two televisions and a DVD player, a real stereo and a miniature stereo and an electronic labelmaker. Which would be fine if we didn't live in a studio apartment so small that the bed is built into the ceiling.

Note: Atennae

Compared to my friends, we lead a low-tech existence. I don't, for example, yet own an iPhone or an iPad (and given yesterday's appalling revelations about the Apple corporation's labour practises, I don't think I want them any more), and the top-notch scanner we want is but a savings plan amongst many.

This is not actually an invitation to rob our house (our models are old, and one of the laptops doesn't have a working 's' key - the resale value is not high here). This is a consideration about the antennae that I've got growing out of my head in the above photo, and how someone who is trying to lead a seasonal-eating-type existence can rationalise her save-the-earth, hug-the-whales, kiss-a-tree existence with the amount of electromagnetic radiation that I am generating just through my compulsive use of Twitter.

Hitting the books, I've learned that the Pagan Practitioners before me have a number of solutions to the technology problem. The Crystal Bible recommends that a lump of smoky quartz can draw away the 'negative energies' of buzzing machines. Specifically, it says:

Smoky quartz blocks geopathic stress, absorbs electromagnetic smog, and assists elimination and detoxification on all levels.

I think the idea is that you carry it in the pocket with your mobile phone or drop a lump onto your computer or TV when they're switched on.

Alternatively, if you think the "electromagnetic smog" is getting to you, you might want to rustle up some agrimony tea or cordial.

Agrimony is believed to be a tonic and a blood cleanser, and was popular in monastery herb gardens for its curative properties. It's said to cleanse the aura if burned on charcoal with mugwort, and its advised (in my venerable edition of Herbcraft by Ann Franklin and Susan Lavender) that the use of agrimony as a cleanser should involve visualisations of negative energy being "earthed" into the ground. Mixed with frankincense and burned on charcoal, agrimony becomes an incense for the purification of a home (with the recommendation that once the agrimony is burned, to repeat the process with frankincense alone).

The easy way to give your aura an instant scrub, though, is probably to drink it:

• Agrimony tea: For tea, you need only steep two leaves in a pot with boiling water for 10 minutes, but do add some brown sugar to taste.

• Agrimony cordial: ... is more involved than the tea, but a lot more fun to sip. Simmer a medium-sized bunch of agrimony (all aerial parts) in a pot with 30g of crushed freshed ginger, 2 sliced oranges, 2 sliced lemons and 175g of sugar in 250mls water for about 15 minutes. When the mixture is good and yellow, take it off the heat, whip it through a blender, strain it and mix it in a jug with 10g of citric acid. Store in a jug in the fridge. This is a particularly nice alternative to alcoholic sparkling drinks if you mix it with sparkling mineral water.