In gardens where we feel secure

You'd think that growing stuff in Florida would be easy. We're blessed with year-round sunshine and warmth; no need to worry about chills, frost, and the rest. Even on the Winter Solstice, we get over 10 hours of daylight. There's far fewer pests than you might expect, including a glorious absence of slugs. All you should need to do is plant your seeds, and watch them shoot up.

In reality, though, the conditions in Florida can be baffling for anyone used to gardening in more temperate climates. The heavy rains and heat of the summer batter seedlings senseless and scorch better-developed plants. The winter's main problem is that daylight figure. Though, of course, 10 hours is a lot for December, it's not enough. The sorts of plants that are suitable for the winter weather are generally those which also need long, summer-like days before they're persuaded to fruit or flower. One ends up with plants that grow quite steadily, but refuse to produce, and eventually settle at some stage of development, awaiting a longer day that never comes (the Summer Solstice enjoys about 12.5 hours of daylight; there's not much variation in day length this close to the Equator).

To get round that last problem, you need careful selection of short-day varieties. The problem, it seems, is that there are very few edible plants native to Florida. The whole state's ecosystem, in fact, is curious, in that the enormous biodiversity of plant and animal one would expect is simply absent. The few native plants that there are do very well; the thick creeping vines in my garden have put on at least eight feet of growth in the past month. But most things grown by people are transplants, imports, exotics, which may or may not be well-adapted to the climate. In large part, it's a guessing game and a gamble.

All of the above might have been enough to stymie my efforts at growing vegetables last year. The main factor, however, was the gang of feral-ish cats who, with my housemates' imprimatur, hang around our back garden. I was growing in containers (why are landlords always so prissy about having lawns replaced with potatoes?) and the cats took great pleasure in sitting and sleeping in them, smothering all the poor seedlings. The net results of my efforts were a few wildflowers, a broccoli plant in one of those states of arrested development, and enough lettuce leaves for a supermodel's salad.

I am not yet discouraged, and have just bought some new seeds to plant, along with some cat deterrent stuff. Wish me luck. In the meantime, the garden comes with enough cat-proof produce to keep me mildly happy. The mango tree is, so I hear, hugely productive. Unfortunately, fruiting season is June and July, so when I left for the summer in May, it was heaving with unripe fruit, and when I returned in August, the tree was bare. My housemate who stayed over the break attests to a month in which he ate two mangoes a day and gave plenty away too. More happily, the avocado tree has in the last month given us several fruit. This might not sound like much, but these are Florida avocados. They're distinguished from more common cultiavars by their smooth, light green skin, their slightly less oily flesh, and most of all, their outrageous size (see picture -- that's my hand). One of these, suitably prepared and accompanied, is a meal for two.

The other thing that grows in the garden is a minor cause for consternation. Growing above the decking outside the back door are two 25-30 ft coconut palms. In the winter, when the coconuts are ready, the landlord sends round a guy skilled in climbing palms to harvest them. That's some months off; at the moment, there's just nascent fruit. The young coconuts are green, hard, and woody, about the size of a squash ball. And they have an alarming tendency to decide that they can't be bothered with this growing business, and instead hurl themselves off the tree to crash loudly on the decking far below. It surely can't be long before one of us is hit hard. Or maybe until one of the cats is hit. Now that wouldn't be so bad at all.

The last time England regained the Ashes, four years ago, I watched the final day's play in the living room of the house in Sheffield I'd moved into the day before. New to the city, I knew nobody with whom I could share the occasion, jubilant texts to friends elsewhere substituting for in-person celebration. This time, I listened to the last two sessions in the house in Miami I've inhabited for the last year (less three months of summer), again devoid of company, again with digital communication compensating. Four years ago, the particular was new, but the general familiar; a new house and an unfamiliar city, but a city whose character was of the same stock as every other English town, pace that mythical South Yorkshire exceptionalism. This year, it's somehow the opposite. The particular - the house, the city - are familiar, but the general seems as strange as ever.

It takes me perhaps a day of being back in the UK to feel comfortable. Here, I reckon on a fortnight, particularly after the long summer holiday, before I feel settled. Just like when I return to Durham, I can note the changes in my immediate environment: the creepers that have grown 10 feet over the summer to swaddle the hammock, the avocado tree now laden heavy with coconut-sized fruit, the spiny-backed orb weavers (below) whose summer webs crisscross the garden. But the sense of secure belonging in the wider context that I enjoy back home is unsurprisingly absent here.


Having been here before, though, some things are easier than they used to be. A couple of emails, and I was set up for a game of football three days after I arrived. A typical Miami experience, this. I cycled for 10 miles through a heavy thunderstorm, eschewing the road for the pavement owing to the four inches of standing water flooding the inside lane. The storm cleared as I got to the pitches, leaving a clear and sunny day, but somehow not assuaging the humidity. The moisture that beads on your palm if you clench your fist might have been wrung from the air rather than formed from your sweat, so thick is the air. 90 minutes later, and another 1o miles cycling home, my teammates expressing bewilderment at my readiness to go such a distance under my own steam. Night fell fast as I went; no drawn-out dusks this close to the equator, and no let-up in the heat either, the nights barely four degrees cooler and still cloying.

Term starts again on Wednesday, my final semester of coursework. The days before it does have been and will be filled with administration and preparation. Renewing my ID card, servicing my bike, writing my syllabus, catching up with friends, readjusting to a life both mine and not mine. The summer, fun as it was, has gone, and isn't a fair comparison to life here anyway; I can only enjoy those three months as I do because I come back here to do this. Give me a week or so, and I'll be enjoying this too again. For now, though, it's mostly feeling like duty.

WMC

I know that I said that the next post was going to be about economics, and that one's still in the works, but I'm sure you'd rather hear about some fun things instead. Last year, I entirely ignored the Winter Music Conference. Three good reasons. Firstly, the music at the huge majority of the events is boring house and its cousins. Secondly, this being Miami, and this conference drawing a crowd of people either a) on expenses or b) too rich to afford common sense, the huge majority of events take place at the kind of venue that charge you $30 to get in, $100 if you want to get in fast and not queue, and $10 for anything liquid.

Now, both these obstacles to having WMC fun are surmountable. With some careful scanning of the official event list (check how long it is!), and some blog trawling for off-list events, you can string together a whole week's worth of free fun. The third obstacle was the killer last year: nobody to go with. My friends here are a lovely bunch, but unfortunately, absolutely uninterested in any (modern) music that doesn't involve guitars. And going clubbing on your own is not just lonely, but very awkward in a city where the events take place miles apart, and the public transport system mostly turns into pumpkins past midnight.

This year, though, things were looking up. I'd recruited a dancing-buddy, best described as rave-curious rather than fully out of the clubbing closet, and made some judicious selections from the various events. Quality, not quantity. I could have been out every night of the week, but Spring Break was the week before (shame), and the demands of school preclude seven nights of parties. This was also slated as my last weekend of two-day guilt-free enjoyment before the end of the semester as the deadlines pile up. What a way to do it.

First up, Thursday night, a Bersa Discos/Tormenta Tropicale showcase. It was in the bar of a super-posh SoBe hotel spa, and it was really, really badly attended. There were perhaps four people there specifically for the thing, and a few others drifting through. Plenty of reasons for why, but gutting for the guys putting it on all the same. Still, great tunes, nice warm-up for the weekend. I had a good chat with one of the Bersa boys (Disco Shawn), and in the end, we (I say we, I made the offer but I was just another passenger) gave him and his GF a ride back to their hotel. Saved them a load of cab fare, secured a guest list at TT if I ever make it to SF/LA at the right time. Seriously nice, straightforward guy, and they were doing a proper WMC-style party the next night, so hopefully they got the crowd and the pay they deserved. (By the way, if you don't know much about the cumbia stuff that Bersa do, this mix is as good a place to start as any).

Saturday night: the big one. Three top-notch labels/crews — Mad Decent, Turntablelab, Iheartcomix/Trouble and Bass — come together to put on a party in a downtown gallery. The event's off the main list, strictly for the cognoscenti, and the flyer (see below) promises free entry and drinks all night. The RSVP thing turned out to be a kinda joke: I'm guessing it was a legal dodge. "But officer, this is a private party, all these guests have RSVPed, and we're not selling any booze, so kindly go and arrest some criminals or something". The venue was a gallery, all right, but a gallery with a massive warehouse-like space attached, and a large outdoor patch of concrete as a chill-out area. The free drinks were for real, and there was a constant long queue for them, meaning the grinning guy across the road in the convenience store made a killing by staying open all night and selling beer and water to the impatient.

And yeah, it was a proper good party. Wild, bouncing, unpretentious crowd, killer tunes, sweat dripping off the walls (party in Spring in Miami in non-AC'd building = outrageous perspiration). Slightly dodgy soundsystem, occasional power outages, all a bit reminiscent of good old Matilda. We got there a bit before 12 and I don't know who was on, but it didn't sound too promising; the first thing I heard them drop was, err, Faithless' 'Insomnia' — straight up, no remix. Gulp. But anyway, whoever got off, and then Trouble and Bass came on. Oh me. If you don't know their stuff, check out some of the mixes on their blog. Big bassy tunes and drops and constant ear-banging breaks. Naturally, like every other hetero-bass-boy, I now have a medium-size crush on Star Eyes.

After that: Sega: OK, but not really feeling the whole metal mashup thing. I sort of see it, but you know, don't. Next up: Rusko: dubstep. Great for a bit, went on too long. It's 3am and I want to jump, not skank. But good all the same. Boy looks like a pikey.

Then the main event: Diplo. Oh, the man knows how to rock a party. Tunes and mashups and Baltimore and bass and baile, new stuff, old stuff, that horn riff recurring... and guess who he brought along as his MC and hype man? Lil' John. Yeah, I guess, why not? They're apparently working on tunes in the studio, so it makes sense. And whatever you think of the man's own records, he complemented the sound perfectly, hitting you with all those lines that only make sense in a club with a crowd who want them to make sense.

We left towards the end of Diplo's set -- it was 4:30am, getting to be more about endurance than enjoyment, and a half-hour walk across town was between us and transport to our beds. And apparently the guy on after him got his set cut short because things were shut down early by some of those law enforcement officials who think their job description includes the strict regulation of fun. So a well-timed exit. But all in all, ahhhh, so much fun. The kind of party where, if you happen to see someone you saw there somewhere else a while later — the supermarket, the street — and they clock you too, you exchange a sly smile and go on your way, because nothing more need be said.

Worst Form Ever

This post is something between a rant and a whine, and as self-indulgent as that sounds. Do excuse me, but I've been driven to this by the Student Loans Company. Reproduced below is the most confusing, ambiguous, ill-thought-out form I have ever had the misfortune to be asked to fill in. Don't worry if you can't make out the details (if you wanted to); I'm going to reproduce the salient points in the text.

There are bad signs from the start. The request in the first block of text to enter any "amends" of name and address on the next page doesn't speak well of the English of whoever wrote this. Nor does it say much for the SLC's efficiency that it requires three separate unique identifying codes to know who I am.

But let's pass over these minor quibbles and get to the real problems. The form, as it says at the top, is one that I should fill in if I'm overseas. The second block of text says that the purpose of the form is to establish my "employment status and potential earnings over the next 12 months". With these two things in mind, consider these requests for information:

"Please give the date you left (or will leave) the UK".
"Please give the date you will resume (or resumed) UK residency".

These are very odd questions. Firstly, If I'm filling out this form, I'm overseas. So the date I will leave the UK and the date I resumed UK residency aren't relevant bits of information. If either of those are dates I can give, I'm not overseas. Secondly, if the purpose is to determine my potential earnings over the next twelve months, the date I left (and the date I returned) is surely irrelevant. Thirdly, unless I'm going to resume UK residency within the next 12 months, the date I resume it is again irrelevant. So all the information requested is irrelevant to the stated purpose of the form.

Next, I'm asked to "tick the relevant box in section A or B" to indicate my current employment status. Section A contains various sorts of employment; Section B lists things you might be doing other than working. The obvious problem is that I am both employed (A) and pursuing further study (B). So to be accurate, I need to tick a box in both sections. Not a huge issue, maybe, but it suggests that the SLC just doesn't know its clientele. Almost every UK graduate studying in the US will be in a similar position to me.

Finally, and the last straw, is section C. Here, I'm asked to give my "Total Income". Just that. What the hell do they want to know? There are (at least) four plausible options:

i) Annual income over previous year;
ii) Predicted annual income over next year;
iii) Total earnings over stay abroad so far;
iv) Predicted total income over whole stay abroad.

Additionally, for each of those options, there are two sub-options. Is the figure meant to be gross or net of local taxes? So we have eight alternatives. Absolutely no indication is given as to which I'm supposed to provide, and I can hardly work it out from the rest of the form, given how confused that is.

I'm so tempted to send the form back uncompleted, with a letter outlining all these points as an explanation for my failure to fill it in. But, since the SLC is doing its best to get militant with me, I suppose I'll make a guess at what they're after and see what happens. Really, though. What a sorry piece of bureaucratic rubbish.

Rant over. Don't get too excited, though, the next post I have planned is about economics...

Some pictures of some birds

Winter lasted longer than usual in Miami this year, but the weather broke last week, and it's back to sunshine and shorts. So Saturday morning found me in the hammock, in the garden, doing some reading. An odd tapping noise was distracting me slightly. Sounded like a woodpecker. Turns out it was two woodpeckers.Our garden's not much of a bird haven. Too many cats. We get a few blue jays, which are unremarkable; they look sort of like fat blue tits. Flocks of macaws fly overhead now and again. Sometimes, they all settle in a tree and do some screeching. Same in my last house, where this one was taken.
The macaws and the jays are quite common here. The other two species that you see regularly are ibises and turkey vultures. The ibises strut around everywhere. The mascot of the University of Miami is an ibis.
The vultures are normally way up in the thermals. You sometimes see them on the ground squabbling over roadkill, and you realise that they're very big birds indeed. The first football league I played in here was held on some pitches in the middle of a golf course, so there was lots of open space, and the vultures flew lower, circling above the playing area. There's something disconcerting about running yourself into the ground in 30 degree heat, feeling like you might die quite soon, with scavengers floating about above you ready to descend when you drop.

In other wildlife news, manatees have been spotted on campus. I'm on the lookout for them, and also for a good alligator photo; I never have a camera when I see one. Watch this space.

Stuporbowl

I have a Facebook 'friend' who seems, in the eight years or so since I last saw him, to have developed a predilection for American football. I know this because it's one of the three themes of his semi-literate status updates. The other two are stories of his child (who may well be charming), and manifestations of his taste in music (which is apparently execrable).

I imagine he, like me, watched the Superbowl last night. But he probably didn't watch it with about 150 other people in his landlord's back garden. Our landlord lives just down the street from us, and has apparently being putting on an annual Superbowl extravaganza for 20 years or so. He'd hired a massive flatscreen telly, got a load of seating, laid on a quite ample amount of food and beer, and invited over about everyone he could think of, it seemed. At half time, there was some prize-giving ceremony that I could make neither head nor tail of, and a massive firework display in the middle of the street.

So, yeah, people make a real fuss over this (can you imagine a similar event in the UK for the FA cup final?). The actual game seems almost incidental, which is handy, because there's not much actual game to go on. This was the first time I'd watched a full match, and what's crazy is how long the thing lasts relative to the amount of time they actually play. A game lasts for four 15-minute quarters, but because of the amount of stoppages, length of halftime, and so on, that hour stretches to something like three. And all of the breaks in play are filled with advertisements. Not just a quick one, either, but usually a full break's worth of three or four. This means that it can be quite hard to follow the progress of the game, since by the time it restarts, you can hardly remember what was going on before. I can usually watch pretty much any sport on telly and get interested (though not to the extent of an ex-roommate who could get properly involved with absolutely anything; I balk at golf), but the lack of continuity makes it hard.

Luckily, despite barely watching any, I do somehow know at least roughly the rules of the game. I think this is some long-buried memory from the time in the 80s or early 90s when there was a brief attempt to make the game popular in the UK. I remember buying a book on American football at a Blue Peter bring-and-buy sale across the road, so perhaps that's where my familiarity stems from. Incidentally, at that time, the best team in the US were the Miami Dolphins, which I think explains why most people in the UK can still remember their name despite the fact that since then, they've apparently been consistently awful.

So I could follow the game without peppering whoever was standing next to me with annoying questions, and from what I could tell, it was a pretty good one. Back and forth, and a last-minute winner. I don't think I'm going to be making a habit of watching American football - though I really ought to go to a game some time - but it was quite a fun experience, all in all. If only I could find a 150-strong crowd of people with whom I could watch the forthcoming West Indies-England Test series. Unfortunately, I think I'll struggle to find one person who cares. Sigh.

A few connected thoughts.

Following comment and criticism from both my regular readers, I've resolved to be less concerned with writing long-ish, careful pieces here, and more directed towards actually updating the thing regularly, even if it seems a little slapdash See how long that lasts.

Anyway, having spent the holiday in the UK, I'm now back in Miami, having added another couple of transatlantic flights to my list of climate crimes. Airports and aeroplanes have a strange effect on me. Everything seems to become disconnected in my head, more immediate and visceral. I'm not sure why. Something, perhaps, to do with the peculiar stasis of transit; hours (many of them) sat still, uncommunicative and unreachable, headphones jammed in to drown out the other people. So here, in no particular order, are some vaguely connected thoughts that occurred to me on my way back here last Tuesday.

Regarding the men's toilets at the departure gates at Heathrow: how deludedly optimistic would one have to be to buy condoms immediately before flying?

On the subject of the third runway: it's not the fact that they've decided to build the wretched thing that makes me angry. Well, it does, but what really makes me angry is that it's been obvious ever since the idea was first mooted that this was going to be the outcome. How long ago was that? Three years, four? Since when, we've had inquiries, consultations, coy statements from ministers about how no final decision had been reached, all this verbiage and money and time wasted in an attempt to... to what? To convince the population at large that this wasn't a foregone conclusion? It depresses me that they think anyone was convinced by it all. Why not just do it? Same with everything else: privatising the post office, building new nuclear plants, and so on. Give up on the sham 'listening' or whatever, save us all the bother, and just do what's going to be done in the end anyway.

In-flight entertainment: the last Woody Allen film ("Vicky Cristina Barcelona") might be a wonderful piece of cinema, considered as a whole, but the first half hour is so execrable that I had to stop watching it, so I couldn't tell you. Linked to the comments above about the experience of flying, it seems that my reactions to films are sharpened considerably. I'm either utterly engrossed, or totally turned off. Examples: "I'm Not There", on the way back here this time, had me wishing fiercely that I could be any of the pseudo-Dylans featured, in a way that I've not reacted to a film character since I was young and impressionable. "Juno", a couple of flights ago, I couldn't stomach, though I'd digested it quite happily the first time round in the cinema. And so on.

Terminal 5: is wonderful. Seriously, both arriving and departing are smooth, quick, and easy. Compared to the horrible Miami International, where the weary traveller is greeted by an hour-long queue for passport control and then spat out into a chaotic underground mess of moving vehicles, Heathrow is just lovely.

I think that's enough of that. New rambling tone established. As I said, I'll try to be more regular about all this... Until I get bored. Or you do.