I haven’t updated my blog for a while.

This is partly because I’ve been finishing my novel, putting the final touches to another book on earthships, looking after my new-born baby son and moving house.

But the main reason is that I’ve been working on a new website.

It’ll be here soon. I promise.

In the meantime, here’s a picture that will bring tears to your eyes.

I had to chuckle at Peter Oborne’s cricket column in the Daily Telegraph today. Although he is the Telegraph’s chief political commentator he also knows a lot about cricket. In fact he even won the prestigious and lucrative William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize in 2004 for his biography on Basil D’Oliveira, the South African-born England all-rounder who died last week. I also have no doubt that he will at least have read another William Hill winner — A Social History of English Cricket by Derek Birley — that is as far as I know the most comprehensive and brilliantly researched book on its subject. Even a passing glance at Birley’s book reveals that Oborne’s column — ‘Cricket is being destroyed by this indecent obsession with money’ — is disingenuous, sentimental, pompous nonsense designed to appeal to believers in the myth dear to Telegraph readers’ hearts — that things were better in the old days.

His contention that money is now ruining the sport betrays a profound ignorance, or perhaps, more likely, a deliberate disregard, for cricket’s history. Cricket has never purely been a game idyllic patoral delight, as Birley reports. Money has always been at the heart of the sport. In the mid- eighteenth century, Birley notes that:

‘for the most part the involvement of the gentry in the cricket games of their inferiors was a by-product of their penchant for gambling.’

He quotes the Morning Chronicle in 1774:

‘The Game of Cricket…has too long been perverted from diversion and innocent pastime to excessive gaming and public dissipation.’

The following year there was a full-scale riot at a match hosted by the Duke of Dorset.

In the middle of what is called the golden age of cricket (1890 - 1914), E. V. Lucas wrote that ‘Any step that can bring sentiment again into first-class cricket is to be welcomed: for a hard utilitarianism and commercialisation have far too long controlled it.’

Birley notes that ‘Cricket…had been plagued by nostalgia since people first began to think it worth writing about.’

Cricket has always been close to gambling and other ways to make money. And there have always been been people saying that the sport has been corrupted. In this sense, Oborne fits into a long tradition, going back at least as far as John Nyren. But Oborne’s nostalgia is not just for cricket, but for society in general:

‘A major cause of the chaos confronting us today is that we have, as a society, chosen image rather than substance, and the short term over the long term. We have destroyed our long-term capital in search of easy money. We face financial catastrophe and social degradation because we have turned our back on solid values.’

If he looked a bit more closely at the subject he might realise that those ’solid values’ he claims to find in British history are just as illusory as his implied history of cricket. The commercialisation of cricket is nothing new; neither are the problems at the heart of British society — one look at the frivolous gambling nobility of the eighteenth century in search of ‘easy money’ suggests that Oborne needs to dig a bit deeper to find the real rot in cricket and society in general.

My good friend — director of everything Peter Pan at Great Ormond Street Hospital, Christine De Poortere — spotted this piece in the Independent on Sunday and sent me the link. The literary agent Charlie Campbell is apparently threatening a revival of the Allahakbarries cricket team. This of course was the subject of my book Peter Pan’s First XI.

According to Matthew Bell he has has ‘assembled 11 literary types to take part, including novelists William Fiennes and Tom Holland. Campbell has lined up fixtures next season in Corfu and Croatia, and has his eye on Lord’s.’

Dear Charlie, I would love to go to on a cricket tour to Croatia and Corfu. Do you have space for a twelfth man?

I got a reply from Charlie while I was still writing this little blog. He writes:

‘The Independent piece was not accurate - we’re not reviving the Allahakbarries, but the Authors team instead. (Though obviously there was quite a bit of overlap in terms of personnel - as you know much better than me.) Do give me a ring if you’d like to know more. And we’re looking for players if you’d like a game.’

I shall report back.

Pigeon-shooting, gardening and foraging for fungi have all become hobbies of mine since I moved to the New Forest in March this year. So when my uncle-in-law called me to ask whether I could help him make some cider last month, I immediately said yes, sensing an opportunity to further improve my ever-expanding self-sufficiency skills (and also because, as a keen cider drinker, I thought there might be some free cider on tap at some point).

I headed approximately six miles south-west, as the woodpecker flies, to Godshill, where Chris, my uncle-in-law, lives with his wife Kate.

He runs a pottery and has a large garden and an orchard on land that his family have lived on since 1914. He is an energetic and robust seventy-eight year-old who produces pottery, tends a large vegetable garden, cycles vast distances, and makes forty gallons of cider every season.  There has been a glut of apples this year and down my road there have been wheelbarrows and plastic trays full of fruit left at the end of driveways with signs for people to help themselves. Chris had plenty of them already – a mixture of proper cider apples and general ‘eaters’ of a few different varieties. He and Kate had already picked them in their orchard – a combination of windfall and tree-picked – and put them in sacks that were resting up against the shed where he keeps his barrels.

The cider is legendary amongst family and friends. Chris’s son described it as ‘tight-hat cider’ because, he says, after about a pint of it ‘it feels as though you’re wearing a very tight hat’. Chris dilutes it with a little ginger ale (sounds strange but tastes great) to reduce the alcohol content (that he reckons is somewhere around 13 per cent in the barrel) and puts the whole thing through a soda stream to give it some gentle fizz. He serves it from one of his own pitchers. I’ve enjoyed quite a few deep delicious gulps of it on warm summer evenings in their beautiful garden.

But cider-making is not quite the mysterious art I thought it might be. In fact, all you really have to do to make cider is make some apple juice, wait for a month to allow some natiral fermentation to take place, then add some sugar and wait for a while longer. Chris lets his juice ferment and mature into proper cider for three years before he starts to drink it.

Last year’s batch had turned to vinegar and Chris is concerned that the barrel is not clean. It is the first time it has happened to him in more than twenty years of cider making and he is determined not to let it happen again. We discuss possible uses of cider vinegar – for wart removal and general health – but agree that it would be difficult to use 40 gallons of the stuff and that proper cider is definitely preferable.

Chris squinted at me when we head out into the yard, with his eyes twinkling a little.
‘So you’ve come to learn our country ways, have ye?’ he said, putting on his finest Wiltshire farmer’s accent.

We started washing the barrel by filling it with sterilising solution and rocking it back and forth so that it created a wave that ‘scours’ the inner surface. Then we washed it out with fresh water a number of times.

Chris cleaned the wooden slats of the cage that will hold the apples once they’re being pressed.

Chris is deliberate, methodical and careful in everything he does. We washed the apples, a sack at a time in metal tubs filled with fresh water.

Then we started loading the cleaned apples into the ‘apple mill’ — a Heath Robinson type contraption if ever there was one:

This has a metal hopper or chute that takes the fruit down onto a crushing mechanism formed of two sets of counter-rotating gears with hard nylon teeth.

The machine was originally hand powered but has been converted to run on mains electricity. We crushed the apples once or twice — depending on how mushy they were — before loading them into the press. The crushing process means that the apples give up their juice far more easily.

This is the press without the cage:

And this is it with it:

We were able to fit about four buckets’ full of apples into the spindle press and then stacked the wooden blocks on top and started to turn the handle and press the apples.

The juice comes flooding out through the sides of the wooden slats and into the circular metal channel that runs around the base of the press. This has a pouring lip at one point and the apple juice gushed out of it, into a two gallon bucket waiting underneath. We placed a sieve on top of the bucket to catch any solid lumps of apple that may have otherwise found their way into the liquid.

At first, the juice was cloudy but it later became clear and golden as the press squashed down harder on the apples. At one point in the day we stopped and had a glass of it. It had quite a subtle flavour – sweet but not cloying.

Turning the handle gets harder and harder until it’s impossible to turn it any more. At that point, Chris attached a gear to make it easier to turn and we managed to exert a little more pressure. Once the juice had stopped flowing – and it may take twenty or thirty minutes for it to run completely dry (’you can’t rush it’ says Chris with a grin) – we began to break the press apart. What is left is quite spectacular – Chris described it as a ‘cheese’ of dessicated apple.

We broke it up and put it in a wheelbarrow, ready to wheel down to the bottom of the garden.

Then we decanted the juice – perhaps around five gallons a pressing – into the barrel.
We cleaned out the press and repeated the process: - clean the apples, break them up, press them, decant the juice – over and over again.

At lunchtime Chris fried up some of the last of the season’s tomatoes from the polytunnel, melted some grated cheese over the top and put the mixture over some toast from a homemade loaf. We drank ice-cold lager with it and my cheeks glowed. It’s fairly hard, repetitive work, grinding down 21 sacks of apples into 40 gallons of juice and it took us a full day plus a couple of hours the following morning for Chris on his own. But for a year’s delicious cider drinking I’d say it’s ultimately good value labour.

1940 Chronicle, the social media campaign I wrote for the RAF Benevolent Fund (RAFBF), won a prestigious award last week — PR Week’s best digital and social media campaign.

I wrote the content for five characters blogging in real time through the Battle of Britain, updated daily as though it was happening in the summer of 2010, exactly seventy years after the real Battle of Britain. In addition, I also wrote newspaper articles for the Daily Chronicle newspaper, giving readers a wider sense of what was going on at the time. This also helped to achieve a greater sense of verisimilitude — of being immersed in 1940 rather than 2010.

I worked closely with digital marketing agency Reading Room — who originally came up with the idea — and the RAFBF.

RAFBF have written some more about the prize and the project here. The previous week the campaign had also picked up a special commendation at the 2011 Charity Times Awards for outstanding use of social media.

I was reading Hell’s Angels by good ole’ Hunter S. Thompson over the weekend and I was struck by a number of passages about lawlessness that seemed peculiarly (given the fact that Hell’s Angels was first published in 1966) apposite  following the rioting in the England two weeks ago.

Take this paragraph, for instance:

‘More and more often the police are finding themselves in conflict with whole blocs of the citizenry, none of them criminals in the traditional sense of the word, but many as potentially dangerous - to the police - as an armed felon. This is particularly true in situations involving groups of Negroes and teenagers. The Watts riot in Los Angeles in 1965 was a classic example of this new alignment. A whole community turned on the police with such a vengeance that the National Guard had to be called in. Yet few of the rioters were criminals - at least not until the riot began. It may be that America is developing a whole new category of essentially social criminals … persons who threaten the police and the traditional social structure even when they are breaking no law … because they view The Law with contempt abd the police with distrust, and this abiding resentment can explode without warning at the slightest provocation.’

And this:

‘Far from being freaks, the Hell’s Angels are a logical product of the culture that now claims to be shocked by their existence.’

Similarly, there seemed to be widespread shock at the looting rioters, but were they not also a ‘logical product’ of a wider culture? This is something that many people want to dispute — lots of ‘hard working poor people’ who would not dream of looting, for example. But if the broadest definition of culture is ‘the total range of activities and ideas of a people’ (Collins), then when thousands of people participate in rioting and looting then by definition this is a cultural phenomenon.

Thompson is ambivalent about the Hell’s Angels for most of his book. He is attracted by their uncompromising attitude towards ’square society.’ But when he is ’stomped’ by a handful of Angels at the end of the book, his underlying feelings about their thuggishness come to the surface.

‘On my way back to San Francisco, I tried to compose a fitting epitaph. I wanted something original, but there was no escaping the echo of Mistah Kurtz’s comment from the heart of darkness: ‘The horror! The horror! … Exterminate all the brutes!’ It seemed appropriate, if not entirely just … but after getting such a concentrated jolt of reality I was not much concerned about justice.’

Before I moved to the New Forest in March this year I had lived in east London (Tower Hamlets and Hackney) for ten years. So I was glued to the television last week when I saw riots taking place on what just a few months ago had been my doorstep. And then, on Wednesday August 10, I stayed the night with friends in Hackney, armed with a thick branch of holly — this particular countrysider’s self-defence weapon of choice for trips to an embattled city.

Here are ten reflections on some of the events and the coverage of them:

1. In many ways the political/business establishment will not be too dismayed by the riots as they illustrated a surfeit of material aspiration rather than a defecit. The evidence from many of the riots (though not all) was that people were after fetishized material posessions - brand name trainers, clothes, electronics and mobile phones, for example. They seemed to be echoing the mantra that is a standard part of the daily educational curriculum in the western world: ‘greed is good’. Major businesses (as opposed to small local traders) that were looted can reassure themselves that at least their products are greatly coveted.

2. What rioters were NOT doing was attacking the political system or saying they wanted political or economic change. The people rioting were not political demonstrators and seemed to have no interest in politics. But just because they didn’t have a political agenda does not mean that the riots are not political. Of course they are!

3. The Conservatives in particular seemed to like using the phrase ’sheer criminality’ to describe the riots (and to discredit the notion that there might be a justifiable cause (alleged police murder of Mark Duggan) or a socio-economic explanation for them taking place). Boris Johnson said that he did not want to hear any ‘economic and sociological justifications’ for the rioting. Interestingly, Johnson also wrote a piece in the Telegraph, with a similar theme, about Anders Brevik’s Norwegian killing spree. The Johnson viewpoint is that bad things happen because free individuals make poor choices. That might seem a reasonable position to take with an individual killer, but when it comes to thousands of people going out on the streets and committing criminal acts then it seems less plausible. To understand why it happened, though, is not to say that it’s alright. As Marie Curie said:

‘Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.’

4. Even those seeking answers for why the rioting took place have little or no sympathy with the rioters themselves. And the easiest way for the government to look as though it is doing something useful (and popular) is to urge the harshest possible punishments for the offenders (even though they have little direct influence on this process; indeed, the government has looked fairly irrelevant at every stage of the riots: police chief Sir Hugh Orde said that key government figures made little meaningful contribution to their management ). But this authoritarian impulse has found expression both in courts seeking the maximum possible sentences and in councils threatening to evict tenants - and their families -  that were involved. The trouble is that if the analysis of many of the rioters as being people ‘with nothing to lose’ is right, giving them even less to lose surely seems like an idea based on atavistic notions of retribution rather than part of a plan of action to make things better. The cliche I’m looking for here is ‘kneejerk’.

5. The best single piece I have read on the riots is Peter Oborne’s analysis in the Daily Telegraph in which he wrote that there was ’something very phony and hypocritical about all the shock and outrage expressed in parliament.’ His major point was that the criminality seen on the streets of London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol and Nottingham ‘cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society.’ Cameron has talked about the ‘slow motion moral collapse‘ with respect to the riots, but he failed to make the same connection in any of a number of lapses amongst the political-business elite: the meltdown of the banks, the MPs expenses scandal, the News-of-the-World hacking scandal. As Oborne says, ‘[Cameron] awarded a senior Downing Street job to the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, even though he knew at the time that Coulson had resigned after criminal acts were committed under his editorship. The Prime Minister excused his wretched judgment by proclaiming that “everybody deserves a second chance”. It was very telling yesterday that he did not talk of second chances as he pledged exemplary punishment for the rioters and looters.’

6. Brendan O’Neill’s article about the ubiquity of the welfare state being the problem rather than the cuts to it has been widely ridiculed. But I certainly felt during the riots that people felt powerless in their own communities. In certain areas with strong ethnic communities like the Sikhs in Southall, Turks in Dalston and Stoke Newington and Muslims in Birmingham, people quickly got together and went out on the streets themselves to effectively protect their own businesses and in so doing demonstrating some degree of non-reliance on the state. There were also groups formed in Enfield and Eltham, though it was interesting to note that these were reported on in liberal newspapers like the Independent as being racist vigilante groups with links to right-wing political groups like the EDL.

7. The BBC News 24 interview of Darcus Howe was problematic for the BBC not just because the interviewer got his name wrong (Marcus Dowe!) but because he refused to follow the script — i.e. an orthodox narrative consisting of cliche soundbites — that had built up around the story.

When he challenged those pre-conceived notions it seemed to create a kind of moral panic in the interviewer and revealed that the BBC does not truly welcome plurality of opinion — it’s there to toe the political establishment line.

8. 24 hour news presenting on a breaking story is no doubt a tough gig with many potential pitfalls, but the most wearing aspect of 24 hour news to the viewer is sheer repetition as well as disingenuous use (on the BBC at least) of replay footage in a kind of ’shock and awe’ montage that exaggerates the drama of the story.

9. The social media red herring. There has been an enormous amount of nonsense talked and written about the role of social media in relation to the riots. This time it was mainly about the Blackberry messaging service. But there have also been calls for Twitter and Facebook to be taken down during periods of social unrest (see point about kneejerk reactions above). This is largely irrevelvant. Riots by their very nature are crude and largely un-co-ordinated.  And rioters have been able to communicate with one another for centuries using messenger boys, megaphones and telephones, long before ’social media’ came on the scene. There was no-one tweeting about the Gordon Riots in London in 1780.

10. Middle-class people interviewed on TV and radio (especially in Clapham and Ealing) expressed particular surprise that rioting should happen in their part of London. After all, Clapham, for example, is a well-to-do aspirational kind of place, a trendy ghetto with a reputation of being mainly populated by successful white people who went to public schools. But this surprise seemed to me to reek of upper-middle class complacency and a sense of entitlement. As Seamus Milne mentioned in his Guardian article, in London the wealth of the richest 10% has risen to 273 times that of the poorest. Like most places in London the wealthy and poor live side by side in and around Clapham, with neighbouring areas like Brixton and Stockwell renowned for their deprivation and social problems. Was it so surprising then, that riots and looting should take place in Clapham?

This could be a case of ‘try before you buy.’

The earthship in Normandy built by Kevan and Gillian Trott is available for immediate rental and, if you really really enjoyed your weekend away in the Normandy countryside, a much longer term investment at a knockdown price - just €125,000 + fees.

Here is what Gillian has to say:

‘I would just like to let you know our earthship in Normandy has become available for rent during the summer from 13th August if you would like to make a late booking.  See www.earthship-france.com for details.

Also the earthship is for sale and is the only offiicial one outside America which you can buy.  This earthship was designed and built by the legendary architect Mike Reynolds himself and his famous ‘Commando Crew’ in a beautiful part of rural France.  It has recently been reduced for a quick sale and can be purchased for €125,000 + fees or nearest offer.

If you, or anyone you know, is interested in renting or buying the earthship, please let me know.

Meanwhile, my work on the second edition of the earthship book has been taking me — in the virtual world at least — all around Europe. I am hoping to complete the manuscript by mid-October with a publication in spring 2012.

A few years ago I wrote up a quite detailed proposal for a book that planned to analyse how successful George Orwell had been in his prophecies about the future in his novel 1984 (the underlying premiss being that he uncannily nailed it).

At the time, when Osama Bin Laden was still at large, and seeming to represent a fantastic likeness to the bearded underground opposition figure Emanual Goldstein in 1984, this was the icing on a cake consisting of a surveillance society, perpetual war (the enemy changing from Soviet Union to Al-Qaeda), people being locked up without trial in Guantanamo Bay, and blatant Orwellian initiatives such as the government decision to create the ‘Ministry of Justice’ in 2007.

The book proposal never came to anything but occasionally I am reminded of Orwell’s novel and its relevance to the world in which I live. Take this iconic poster for example:

I cannot remember when I first saw this image, but I increasingly realised in 2010 that it seemed to be everywhere - on t-shirts, in offices and for sale in all kinds of shops - even in the British Library! Where did it come from, I wondered? The answer is that the image started life as poster, first designed and printed in 1939 as a piece of government propaganda at the onset of the second world war. In many ways it seems to represent that stiff upper lip mentality that has since been so celebrated in the popular folklore around the war: ‘people just got on with it.’ But the fact that this image is so popular now, when Britain is fighting wars far from its shores is suggestive of more than just a sentimental appreciation of kitsch or a more reserved way of saying ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’ I’d argue that it’s also suggestive of a wartime mentality still - a feeling of being besieged not only by the threat of terrorism but also economic collapse, environmental disaster and, every so often, pandemics like swine flu. A population that finds comfort in wartime slogans during peacetime is evidently a population that believes it is at war. And as Orwell readily appreciated and the Party understood, a fearful population that believes it is living in a state of perpetual war, creating suspicion of outsiders and unconventional thought, is far more pliable than a population that believes there is nothing to be afraid of. The doublethink at the heart of all this, of course, is that Britain is both at war and peace, simultaneously stable and in rapid flux. Orwell was right!

That’s why whenever I see this poster, I think of Orwell. And it’s certain that when he wrote 1984 he was influenced by wartime propaganda in general, possibly including this poster. I like the circular nature of that. And I sometimes ponder whether I should go back to that proposal again and pitch it to a publisher. But then again, Bin Laden/Goldstein is dead now. So perhaps Orwell was wrong after all.

But hold on a second. Perhaps that was the reason that Bin Laden had to be killed — to prove that Orwell was wrong.

Perhaps…but please don’t quote me on that.