Food stuff first – pictured below. I had some of my frozen blackcurrants at my flat in Aberdeen (not enough electricity for a freezer at home), so I threw in some of them in to the meal. In terms of feeding the old microbiome, including herbs and seasoning added, if you like counting, there are 10 different plant types. And with some fennel tea, toast, porridge, and dark chocolate snacks later, that made 14.
Turning 50 on the 26th of January has come with mixed feelings, as I’m sure decade-changing birthdays always do. Someone I met the day after said she’d felt older at 50 than she did at 60, because she felt 50 was the oldest of the younger crowd and that 60 was the baby of the older crowd, therefore, the decade between 50 and 60 felt like getting younger. Obsessed as we are as a culture with staying young, this reasoning makes sense and it definitely feels like a turning point in the battle to stay looking and behaving young which I am reluctantly as caught up in as everyone else.
It had been over 80 days since I’d had anything that resembled a proper period and since my mother’s periods stopped at 50, I was convinced mine were over now too as my cycles have been winding down now for a while, or at least my periods were lighter, my cycle stretching out and becoming more unpredictable . I have been wondering what a future deviod of sexual/creative highs and lows would be like. To celebrate my 50th birthday, I chose to go out dancing with my sister – probably a predictable choice – I’m not old yet! The last time I’d have gone dancing in a club-like situation was I think when I was at art school in Dundee in 2021, and I feel I have definitely aged in the last 5 years, inwardly and outwardly. I spent the day on the run-up to going out, getting more and more anxious, and despite carefully eating and drinking in the right order, the anxiety didn’t ease up much. I enjoyed catching up with my sister, and the dancing was fun until the wall of men around the dance floor began to feel opressive. The anxiety, plus a dry mouthed, crampy, disturbed sleep, still didn’t make me realise I was premenstrual until a very light period began the next day and is still going. Feeling exhausted, achey, introspective, and introverted, I opted out of the open mics I’d planned around my first day back at uni.
Considering the targeted meta ads I am faced with daily for face yoga, hair dyes and 50 plus women influencers trying to tell us how to dress to look younger it’s hard not feel super aware of my fading youth. The current trend in normalising grey hair and ageing is I suppose reassuring, but how stupid and telling that we have to try to ‘normalise’ something which is normal! Having sworn I would never dye my hair when it started greying, I bent my rule slightly a few months back and threw some peroxide at bits of it, with the intention of blending the prolificlrating greys at my crown and temples with the natural darkness of my long, older or should that be younger hair. It seems, even before the peroxide streaks, people assumed I’d dyed it and am now growing the greys out. Who knew grey came in like that? They only seem to grow to about 6 inches, then what? Fall out? But I can’t bring myself to cut the dark length off to try to unify it. And I’m not sure I’ve helped anything with the bleach. I’m now trying to see the wirey greys on the top of my head as sparkling, lively antenna rather than see the overall impression of them as dusty and faded. I suppose the language makes a difference.
So since my hormonal cycles grind on, and I try to keep phrases and decisions like ‘it’s time I started dressing my age’ and ‘right, that’s the last time I need to go clubbing’ out of my head, I await a surge in energising, creative hormones along with the first stirrings of spring which my namesake the goddess Bride or Brigit brings (my middle name is Bride which is the Scottish gaelic for Brigit and is pronounced Breej, though I usually just say Bride for simplicity).
Yesterday, on the First of February, which is Imbolc or St Brides day, when the Calliach starts to loosen her grip (though I’d forgotten that till today), I planted some Jerusalem artichokes in my garden. It was drizzling when I went out and soon it was pouring (since the snow, the rain has barely stopped), but felt quite mild. I was in full waterproofs, but the sun started shining at the same time – a rare sight just now and lovely to be in despite the wet. The soil was predictably sodden.
I used a garden fork a little to prepare a bed which had had some spare tatties planted in it last year. They were the last of the seed potatoes, and I’d left them outside sprouting in a bucket that had filled with rain and started smelling. By the time I remembered about them they were pretty far gone, but I chucked them on the surface of the soil, and covered them with cardboard and comfrey leaves/stalks, then chicken wire to stop the hens digging them up. Then I forgot to go back in October and dig any tatties that might have grown, then suddenly it was Christmas, then snow (‘The Forgetful Gardener’ I should call this). So anyway, I gave the bed a sort of dig over until the fork was so clarted in mud that I could barely lift it. So I switched to bare hands (I’d long since abandoned sodden gloves).
I found a few tatties, though I really wasn’t very thorough, and I found a few clumps of self seeded dandelions. The clusters of crunchy roots and blanched stalks with tiny pale leaves, which were barely poking out the soggy soil, looked so delicious and fresh to me, that I put them in the tattie bucket. Presumably some witchy intuition was making it clear to me that I really needed something they contained. I read a book once that talked about the micronutrients which are present in wild herbs (weeds) that are mostly missing from supermarket plant foods.
I pulled out some of the stringy couch grass roots around the edges, (which, if you’re interested, when boiled, makes stock that tastes like sweetcorn) and I then made small holes to put the artichokes in. I had about 30, which my dad had taken out of one of his beds of artichokes, having an excess this year. I had planted a bed of them over a decade ago, but I didn’t look after them. They say artichokes can survive anything, but I think not nettles and brambles, because they disappeared eventually. I’ll try to look after these ones better. I’ve given them a cultivated bed within my garden rather than a weedy grassy area outside of it, which is where I left them last time. The great thing about artichokes are they just keep growing every year in the same spot if you always leave a few in when you harvest. They are a very low labour vegetable. A starvation for I think they get called, but I think they are a useful staple. According to my brother, cutting the tops back in August before they try and flower increases the crop.
The holes I made in the mud, if I went deeper than an inch or two, filled with water, and I thought about the diminished water tables in the summer now, all replenished. Everything in such extremes. Lack of water was never a problem for us, because, though we do have a borehole now too, we use mostly rain water, stored in various tanks, but predominantly a massive, double skinned stainless steel (former milk) tank. And because we are used to be being very frugal with water anyway, it never emptied until I emptied it for its annual clean out in the autumn I think, when we must have been sure of rain. It only takes a couple of good rain falls to completely fill again from the large corrugated iron collection area of our house roof. The tank is in a shed so very rarely freezes, and if it does, it’s usually only a little surface ice. As you can imagine, in this rain, it’s constantly overflowing just now.
Anyway, it seemed a couple of hours had passed, and by the time I went inside, it was nearly time to go to Aberdeen as I had a class at university the following morning. I washed the tatties and dandelions and as Charlie had a left over pie he’d made for us the night before, I packed it to take with me for my evening meal, along with one of our eggs boiled, some kale and a stored apple. I ate a couple of dandelion roots and tops while I was washing them because I couldn’t wait, and though bitter, it was as crunchy, fresh, and satisfying as I’d imagined. Like bitter lettuce. I persuaded Charlie to try some, but he did not agree! When I crave something like this, it always makes me think of the story of Rapunzel and how when she was pregnant she longed to the point of obsession for a particular herb in the witches garden which led her in desperation to promise her baby to the witch. Pregnancy cravings are believed to be the body telling you what it is deficient in. My granny apparently craved for and ate coal! In my case, it was presumably a mild hangover rather than pregnancy that was casing the craving. Two weakish beers the night before, to toast my 50th with my brother Ben, who arrived late the in the evening, was enough to make me feel majorly depleted, headachey, sicky, and exhausted even though I’d eaten a decent meal first. But 3 hours had passed by the time I opened the first beer. Mistake. Should have stuck to one or eaten more. Such is age, though I’ve mostly been a total lightweight with alcohol at every age!
Rachel Bride Ashton 