Aren’t these beans beauties? They are (in case you’ve not guessed) beans from my veggie patch, which I’m going to have to call “our” veggie patch if things carry on the way they are because again it’s been DM out there picking them for me.
It may seem like a strange thing to do but I’ve treated my runner beans (which I HATE in the way we Brits usually eat them – that is in their pods) like you’d treat a French bean or a field bean. That is, I’ve let the pods mature on the plants and harvested the beans only. The pods have gone into the compost. So here are some beans, at different stages of maturity – the ones at the bottom are more immature than the ones at the top, even though they’re bigger. They go from big, fat beans with a black pattern, shrink a bit and the colour of the pattern changes to brown as they mature. Now they’re going to be treated to the Jamie Oliver method of cooking beans and then frozen in batches waiting to be added to recipes as we go through the winter.
BTW – they’re from angiosperms and are dehiscent fruiting dicots, in case you were wondering.
Anyway, the point of today’s posting is more about bean counting than the beans themselves. I had a conversation with a good friend of mine on the phone the other week and something she said has been bothering me. We were talking about mad people like me who’ve jumped ship and left the corporate world for a different kind of life. She said something along the lines of “it’s clear from your pbase that the grass isn’t greener on the other side”.
I’ve been mulling it over and decided that if that’s the impression that I give when I write about my new world then I’m clearly doing it wrong. The truth is that in every sense imaginable (other than one) my world is indescribably better than it was a couple of years ago. I’m in it. My own world that is. I have choice and influence over my own destiny now, whereas before I felt as though my world was something that I had no control over at all. Like being inside a big snowball rolling down a hill and gathering momentum and size all of the time. Not to mention being as cold as ice.
I see my home, sometimes even in daylight. I have a relatively short commute – I only spend two hours a day commuting instead of 3-4. I cook us meals every evening in my own kitchen. I even manage to eat food I’ve cooked myself for lunch most days. David and I sit down to our meal at a sensible time of the evening and I get to stay on the sofa until bedtime. Rosie and Archie remember who I am. I manage to feed our hens myself a few times a week. I go into my own garden regularly. I can walk into the pub whenever I feel like it and be sure of a warm and friendly welcome from people who know my name. Our circle of friends here is tight-knit and warm…..and if I choose I can see them on a Wednesday night without needing to feel guilty about not working all evening. Most of all, I get to sleep in my own bed at night.
The thing is, I wouldn’t go back to what I did for all the tea in China – there is no salary and no “package” that would be worth giving up the things I cherish again. I wouldn’t change anything other than one thing that in the balance of good and bad barely even nudges my balance scale down – it is, of course, money. If only the finances of this were not so hard. If only I didn’t find myself “counting beans” - every last one of them, often several times over when I realise how few of them I’ve got. I hate the feeling of wondering whether I can afford a cup of coffee in a café at college. BUT I do know there are many, many people who’d be very grateful for enough money to even be able to ponder that.
You see, I really do now believe that money can’t buy happiness – look at how miserable I was when I was a corporate whore. I also know that at the end of the day, we’ll survive with what we’ve got. I’ll have to carry on counting those beans for a good few years yet but every day I’m just grateful that I don’t have to be a corporate whore any more.
