Can you spare a moment to be surveyed?

Doing a survey quickly makes you aware of one thing. The vast majority of people have a lot of trouble answering a question clearly and simply.

It would be reassuring to think that the survey designers were considering their difficulties when they drew up their questions. You know, gentle opening, introduction of subject in plain English, logical sequence from question to question, taking previous answers into account of course.

It's not always the case. In fact they’re more likely to be thinking of their client’s marketing requirements.

A range of ethnic groups, age diversity from 18 to 80, socio-economic status from A to E, all culled straight from the phone book. And all struggling at this unearthly hour, as good, true and honest citizens of these dominions will, to second guess your intentions and deliver the answers you want to hear.

But what DO you want to know, I wonder, as I dial the seventieth number of the day and start my spiel. ‘COULD you spare a moment …?’

In this case my charm works. The lady respondent neither ‘has visitors’, nor is ‘just on my way out’ or ‘right in the middle of cooking scrambled eggs’. She can spare two or three minutes and there is not a lot better that being told your opinion matters.

‘So,’ I venture, ‘how many pieces of fruit and veg do you eat in a day?’ It’s a challenging opener, unique in its ability to befuddle, confuse and polarise.

Are we talking about pieces as in parts of a whole? If you have an apple, say, with your breakfast and cut it into quarters, does that amount to four pieces? It’s difficult to say. And if you have five types of veg with your pork loin and fruit salad to follow does that satisfy your quota for a week?

The media, health professionals, doctors, nurses, dieticians, all remind us repeatedly that we should eat fruit and veg at five different times during the day. But it’s hard to quantify, not to mention hard to achieve.

Meanwhile I strive to keep on message. A supremely effective tactic of the lost and confused is to go off at a tangent. Despairing of understanding your questioning thrust, they meander off and tell you all about their very own personal dietary approach.

It’s not that I’m not interested. Just that I only have three minutes to get the answers I’m paid for.

Several questions later we veer round the bend into the final lap. This is the heart of the survey. Does my respondent seriously think that free cooking courses might be a good idea, even though she has fifty years’ experience, has raised six children and 18 grandchildren and knows more about nutrition that any of us raised in the junk food era. It’s patronising. It’s also showing clearly that the question-mongers have not thought this through. In their single-pronged assault on the nutritionally ignorant, they just haven’t allowed for the range of knowledge and experience that actually resides in the population.

Many of my mature lady respondents brush off such disrespect with contempt. ‘Would you like information to be available about preparing low-cost healthy meals?’ I murmur in an even tone, hoping my words will be lost somewhere down the line and she will say ‘yes’ just to save time.

‘My dear, I brought up six children on war-time rations. I think I know as much about this as I’m ever going to learn’.

I’ve even been called ‘young lady’. Music to my ears now I am decidedly not.

They’re understanding though. Everyone knows that surveys are the new national service. No matter how trite, irritating and irrelevant the questions, you just smile inwardly, think of the nation and offer your response. It’s all for the highest social good and practically everyone now accepts that surveys are integral to how society works. We just have to keep on believing that they garner some vacuous, twilight truths about what people actually think.

I’m heading into the final straight now. The ubiquitous demographic details. Postcode so we can place you, age (so we can get a spread), ethnic group (and the glaring truth that a very large number of people deeply resent the moniker of White–British and insist on their Englishness). ‘Would be you be willing to participate in future surveys?’ Some do, ‘if you can catch me in’.

It’s all over, the boxes are checked, contact details recorded. They walk free (perhaps with a smug, virtuous feeling to help them through the day).

I’m on to the next Watt in the BT Phonebook. ‘Er, I’m calling on behalf of …’

The Food Revolution Arrives On My Doorstep

It was a bad moment. The organic fruit and veg section in Canley Sainsbury’s had completely disappeared. So once I got my jaw back in place, I went to ask why.

I only use organic fresh produce you see. And I didn’t want to wade through the chemicalised veg to locate the cunningly concealed pesticide-free items. Life's too short. It was clearly over with Canley Sainsbury’s and time to get online.

Some rapid research revealed two options. River Nene, based near Peterborough, are more local but Wimbledon-based Abel & Cole held the trump card. You don’t need to order a standard veg box and risk getting veg you don’t want. Instead, you just pick out your chosen individual items from their well-stocked online shop. So long as the total reaches a minimum of £10 per delivery, you’re sorted.

The situation was critical so I mentally hurdled my remaining objections. You have to leave your credit card details so payments can be collected on delivery day. This has always made me uneasy but the need for a reliable organic veg supply overrode all doubts. The padlock at the top of my screen looked secure and I’d seen Abel & Cole vans delivering to some of the plushest addresses in Oxford. So I gathered my courage and pressed ‘Submit’.

Overnight, it seems, my life was transformed. No more humming and ha-ing, handling various sad-looking specimens in the highly controlled supermarket environment. No more rooting around to find the one organic bag of apples in a sea of bagged and unbagged varieties stretching into the far distance on the left hand side of aisle 2.

Instead you’ll find me at home, herbal tea to hand, browsing Abel & Cole’s extensive and accessible online shop. They don’t just sell fruit and veg by the way. The range of produce covers bread, dairy products, soya milks and drinks, household cleaning products, loo rolls and oh … 7 different varieties of squash (at the last count). I should also mention (vegetarians please look away now) that they also stock a lot of different sorts of meat.

Shopping online can, if you wish, be a more considered act. There are no people gabbling into their mobiles in the wine section and no trolley bumps sending you hurtling into the man repricing the reduced items. Nothing like. I merely take another sip of tea and turn my attention to researching the provenance of the items on the extensive shopping list hovering in my mind.

There is so much more information available than in your friendly, local retail monopoly. For instance, there’s a product description just in case you don’t know what Cavolo Nero is, and notes on the producer. Plus a small pic so you can see what to expect.

I need to complete my order by midnight on Wednesday for delivery on Friday. And as if by magic first thing every Friday my box appears. The delivery man doesn’t knock - that would be mighty uncivilised at that time in the morning. He just puts my box in a pre-arranged secret hiding place and pushes the receipt through the door. Sorted!

There has been the occasional hitch. Once my delivery didn’t arrive but it turned out it was all my fault. You have to follow the online order procedure right through to the bitter end, I learnt. And to be on the safe side, Abel & Cole send an email to confirm your order’s been received.

The anguish caused by my missed delivery brought out the best in them. Daniel (in Customer Services) was happy to write six paragraphs of email explaining what I’d done wrong and how to ensure my order goes through smoothly next time. In my experience, Abel & Cole always respond rapidly to queries – within 24 hours unless a weekend gets in the way.

Another downside is that organic veg goes off quicker. Did anybody tell you this at school? Don’t worry, it’s natural - it’s the way it’s meant to be. The only reason that six-month-old celery at the back of the fridge is still looking good is because it's preserved in a shield of petrochemical-derived rubbish.

It’s all a question of perspective. When I see the black marks appear on my sprouts it’s a kind of vindication. This is the real deal – the true seal of organic quality. You just have to love it.

Now, when I see my fridge bursting with veg in such a variety of colours, shapes and sizes, my heart gives an involuntary leap. All fresh and green and relatively clean. In fact the soil on the carrots is real enough and helps to keep them fresh.

And on my increasingly rare visits to Canley Sainsbury’s I glance pityingly at the lines of uniform, standard issue veg, waiting to be rescued from their supermarket hell. I wonder how long they’ve been sitting there, how long they spent in transit and if they even remember the soil and air of home.

Then I snap myself out if it and remember my Abel & Cole veg snug in my fridge back home. Vegetables with heart, to nourish instead of poisoning body and soul.

W: www.abelandcole.co.uk
E: organics@abelandcole.co.uk
T: 08452 62 63 64


Last word

Just to prove I can do deadlines although I've been 'off sick' this week and not up to much. I just wrote this and then redrafted and tightened it up but I wouldn't say there's any conscious structure in it. It could do with a quote or two and if I follow it up that could still happen but there hasn't been time and I'm just pleased to have written this relatively quickly.

Running all over the UK

Running was the last thing on Dorota’s mind when she arrived in England in 2008. But, as she tells Kathryn Karakaya, it didn’t take long to become addicted…

‘Run a half marathon? Me?!’
‘13 miles did you say? Without stopping?!’
‘Why? I wouldn’t even run for a bus…’

That’s what I imagine I’d be saying. The motivations for running a half marathon must be many and varied. But if I’m honest, I could never be bothered to think what they might be.

Until I met Dorota. The idea of running horrified her too at first. But her story shows that initial resistance doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy it once you start. And the glint in her eye whenever she talks about her running tells you how she feels about it now.

At the Cardiff Half Marathon in October she easily beat her personal best, finishing in exactly 2 hours, half an hour faster than her previous attempt. She credits this with having to start with runners slightly faster than her. It was a perfect day, a perfect finish and a new medal to cherish. Plus a new time to add to the chart on the kitchen wall.

‘I keep a chart of all my runs,’ says Dorota. ‘I write down how far I’ve run and my time so I can see how I’m improving’.

Her achievement is even more remarkable considering she didn’t start running until she arrived in England a year and a half ago. She had never had the desire to run in Poland but, missing her local gym and aerobics classes, she started to pound the pavements of Earlsdon just to keep fit. And she found it didn’t take long to become addicted.

So the chart went up, a new watch monitor went on and Dorota was running with a target in mind.
‘I read somewhere that you need two years’ training before you do a half marathon,’ she says. ‘But when I started running regularly, I felt it was possible to do it much sooner.’

So after just six months’ training, Dorota completed last year’s Kenilworth Half Marathon in 2 hours 28 minutes. It was time to move on to bigger and better venues and see a bit more of the UK too. She loved Cardiff’s city to docklands route and the thrill of running with 9,000 other people. Now she is looking forward to Edinburgh in the spring.

Like all serious runners, she has her superstitions. She wore her Kenilworth race shirt in Cardiff and is planning to wear her Cardiff shirt in Edinburgh next year. That way there is an incentive to step up each time – to a faster time and the next rung on the ladder of running achievement.

The ramifications of her success are starting to spread far and wide, even to family and friends back in Poland.
‘Nobody ran before, but since I started my friend has started running 6kms regularly and my brother and his girlfriend have also started’.
And, even better, her boss in Coventry is so impressed he’s pledged to sponsor her in Edinburgh.

It seems that so long as there is another running goal ahead, Dorota will be happy.
‘When I set a target I want to achieve it,’ she explains. ‘It was my target to complete a half marathon in 2 hours. Now I want to achieve 1 hour 50 minutes in Edinburgh!’

And with her chart to motivate her, two medals for inspiration and an indomitable spirit, it’s a target that doesn’t seem very far away.

It worked!

The Morning Pages worked! Except it was midnight. But two pages of free flow into my notebook gave me enough inspiration to decide how I might fashion an article from my notes. It's still 'work in progress' but at least it got me out of the writer's block that had come on me as soon as the interview ended!

Article to follow.

The Empty Page

As a personal retort to the very public experience of the web, I ‘blog’ in a handwritten sort of way into a notebook, as recommended by Julia Cameron of ‘The Artist’s Way’ fame.

Does anyone remember this book? First published in the early 1990s, it became a bestseller, the heart of many a radical creative writing class, and a call to creative people of all genres to get in touch with the muse within.

For me, it became a fetishistic symbol. I’d see it looking inspiring on the corner of my bookcase and take heart from its mere presence amongst my personal belongings. But times were unsettled with many vagaries and pulls on my attention, and I never opened it except to savour the odd paragraph or two in the hot and steamy inspiration chamber otherwise known as my bathroom.

This blogging business inspired me to dig it out again and start reading in earnest. Julia’s advice is to unblock the creative channel and encourage the flow by scribbling first thing. We should sit at our technology-free desks in the time-honoured way and scribble three pages of ‘flow’ unhampered by left brain analysis and other self-imposed constraints. These are the fabled ‘Morning Pages’ and they can set you free.

The idea is to ramble, absolutely without restraint. Get it all on the page and free up your mind for all the clear and sequential thoughts that will flood in later. Petty irritations, rabid rants, family arguments, all can land on the Pages. You can write without excuse or apology cause only you will ever read it.

Theory has it that this lifting of the lid on all the rubbish floating around in our subconscious minds will liberate our creative juices, moisten the seed of our intent and enable the issue of something of writerly value in the day ahead.

I love this idea. And I love to write in a free and spontaneous way just letting the streams of (un)consciousness fall onto the page. What I like most is the absence of any apparent link between my brain (aka conscious thought) and the words that unravel onto the page. It’s as if the act of writing is a direct link between my unconscious and the entirely left brain world of sentence structure and subjunctive clauses. It always feels good and sometimes, as an added bonus, it makes sense.

But if flow is not to peter out to an unenterprising trickle there has to be a schedule propping up the creative act. Morning pages are fun for a one-off but it’s only when you commit on a daily basis that changes happen (allegedly). There’s writer’s block for a start. Nothing to say and your mind’s an empty space? No problem … just keep writing.

In my admittedly limited experience the words do flow, so long as you are not thinking too much about them. So you write your way through your block to the clarity that lies beyond.

And when you have finished, you throw it all away and start over.