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Back in April, full of the joys of spring, I decided to grow tomatoes in our back garden. I read up on the subject, bought five cherry tomato seedlings and popped them in just the right amount of manure and soil with little trellises to climb when the time came. I watered them diligently, carefully measured out the right concentration of tomato food to give them and plucked off the stray shoots the books tell you will inhibit growth. In short, I gave those plants my best shot. And, when the flowers started to turn into promising little fruits as the plants climbed the trellises, my mouth fair watered in anticipation. Anyway, they all got blight and died.
But the allotments around our village are groaning with produce. And research suggests that growing your own is not only good for the environment: no packaging or shipping costs, but people who cultivate fruit and veg for domestic consumption tend to waste 95% less than the UK average and are healthier to boot. So next year I might try something less ambitious – my ex-farmer father-in-law has suggested I might be able to manage potatoes.
In any case, there won’t be any chi-chi little jars of homemade tomato chutney in the family Christmas stockings this year. I bring this up because, while it may only be mid-September, many of our shops appear to want us to believe the festive season is already upon us. You might be groaning at the very thought when many of us were basking in a heatwave last week. But this author argues you can actually play the retail overzealousness to your advantage.
I’m professionally obsessed with stories about Ukraine, so I really enjoyed editing this fascinating article about Russia’s invasion of Poland in 1919-20 this week. Intriguingly, Vladimir Lenin used a very similar excuse for sending the Red Army into his neighbour as Vladimir Putin would more than a century later: namely that Russia was being threatened by the capitalist west (in Lenin’s case this was Britain and France). In the event, Russia was humiliated on the battlefield, which I’m hoping is a good omen.
This week we also looked at eating insects and why the UK is less keen on the idea than the EU. We marked 30 years since the X-Files hit our screens and wondered why it is still so popular. And we speculated about the faint chance there might be life on an exoplanet with the prosaic name K2-18b while marvelling at the amazing images produced by the James Webb Space Telescope.
Courtesy of our friends and colleagues in the global network, we assessed Joe Biden’s prisoner swap deal with Iran, we wondered why it has been so hard to overcome inequality in South Africa, and we learned all about why the sound of running water makes us want to pee.
From our podcast team this week and for the next fortnight, a real treat. September 13 marked 30 years since Yasser Arafat and Yitshak Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn having signed the Oslo accords that the world hoped would lead to peace in the Middle East. In the first of a three-part series, BBC correspondent-turned-academic James Rodgers and international relations expert Amnon Aran interview Jan Egeland, the Norwegian diplomat who helped make the accords happen. Unmissable.
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