The Soil Association’s tagline follows: healthy soil, healthy people, healthy planet. Sounds thoroughly wholesome. It is.

The Soil Association are committed to ensuring that food we eat is nutritionally good. Based in Edinburgh and our fair city of Bristol, they work in schools, set standards and are consistently campaigning for organic farming and security, opposing genetically modification, antibiotics and pesticides. They have Monty Don as their President. You know him, very recognisable face, a garden and travel presenter with bestselling books such as Fork To Fork and The Jewel Garden. He was the Observer’s gardening editor too, don’t you know? Don speaks indisputably well and (whole)heartedly about the SA, organic food and growing:
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Spring 2009 saw Phil Haughton sow his first seeds at Wood Barn Farm, a certified organic farm overlooking the picturesque Chew Valley Lake in north Somerset. Since then it has grown from 11 acres to 22 and provided some of the produce for a box scheme which reaches 300 customers in the Bristol area, trading as part of Haughton’s Better Food Company.

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I’ve never met Margaret, my landlady, but she has one of those direct, no-nonsense voices. I assume she is afraid of nothing. I’m told she drives a Volvo Estate (probably one of the old ones that sound like industrial fans, their interior including backwards facing seats in the boot and those horrendously disconcerting seat warming devices) and she most likely wears Hunter wellies and a Barbour for purely practical reasons too. Anyway, she said to me when we moved into our flat in Redland that we should; “Watch out for the foxes. You know, for the cat.”

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10 ways Bristol has changed over the last 10 years

Riots, job-cuts, awful fashion and a royal wedding! We’re quantum leaping like it’s 1999 again. Why? What’s the fascination with retro-reminiscence? 10 years ago I was scooping sick out of my pockets and I remember thinking at the time ‘I really don’t want to be back here again. Thank god for the relentless future when all this will be lost to alcoholic blackouts’ and yet here we are again, reliving the past - like that’s somewhere good to go. Were the days before these days really so good that we all want to go back for a day out or is Bristol at its best now?

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“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end,” said Seneca, the stoic Roman philosopher, in the mid-1st century. In this new year of a new decade, can we begin the green society and bring to an end an age we can’t in any case maintain for much longer? This would mean putting the concept of sustainable development into action instead of just signing up to the concept, speaking warm words about it but carrying on essentially with business as usual!
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Stokes Croft is changing. The arrival of Cabot Circus nearly three years ago had everyone fearing the worst and we grimly expected Bristol’s cultural quarter to become whitewashed with highstreet garbage while yuppy flats were squeezed into every square inch going but in actual fact, the biggest change we’ve seen in the area has been the creation and renovation of more independent cafés and pubs than you can shake an organic, Fair Trade carrot at! New venues have popped up like The Canteen and The Arts House, old venues have been transformed like Leftbank, The Social and The Bank, and now, alongside old favourites like The Pipe And Slippers, The Bristolian Café and The Croft, the community café to end all community cafés, Café Kino, has been given a facelift and a new home too.
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Bookshops are special places that exist in a dimension other then that which you and I exist within most of the time. I’m not talking about Waterstones, WHSmith or any other high street chain, no, I mean the sort of shop that upon entering time slows down as you are hit by the heady smell of ageing tomes and texts, and the cloistered rows of books impose themselves upon you. Such bookshops are dotted around Bristol but by their nature are usually tucked out of the way. If you don’t know about them, they can be hard to find although stumbling upon such a shop by accident is like finding a tenner on the street. The atmosphere is unlike anything you would find in a chain store; you invariably warm to the ambience and can lose hours poring through the volumes on offer. There’s no rush, you can dip into texts and spend ages aimlessly browsing. If your love affair with books is anything like mine, you’ll find an endless supply of delights.

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The Bristol Drugs Project is an organisation offering support to anyone affected by addiction. Starting from a team of probation officers which now also includes ex-drug users, BDP uses its years of experience to battle physical, social and psychological harm related to substance abuse. We spoke to Maggie Telfer about her experiences working with the organisation.

What is your role in the organisation and how did you come across the job?
I’m the Chief Exec at Bristol Drugs Project and have been involved since the beginning – almost 25 years ago. In that time we’ve grown from a small organisation of 4 employees to that of around 100 staff with 70 volunteers today. We lived through the massive expansion of heroin use from 1992 and crack cocaine from 1999 and of course (par for any voluntary sector organisation) lots of funding crises over the years. However it has always been a fantastic, if challenging, place to work.
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Presents are a way to say to people that we care, that we want them to be happy and that we value our relationship with them; that is quite a lot for a small parcel covering in paper. Eloquence is therefore a top quality for Christmas gifts, starting from their very basic parts: wrapping paper. So here you go, a guide to translating what you want to say to anyone and everyone into that oh-so-important scrap of paper:

Family:
This needs to wrap up (apart from your present) everything from ‘I do deeply inside me know that no-one loves me like you do and I will forever value you above everything for that’ to ‘please stop interfering with my life’. Go for a complex collage with many colours and patterns, something you obviously devoted a lot of time and energy to. If ‘complex collage’ sounds terrifying, don’t worry, the awkwardness of the result will make you even more adorable to them.
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Be Nicer To Turkeys:
Over ten million turkeys are eaten during the festive season in the UK. Millions of these birds are reared intensively in huge windowless buildings containing crowds of thousands. Selectively bred and anti-biotic treated for maximum growth, these birds cannot express natural behaviours and cannot mate without human intervention. I’m just not hungry for this kind of food at all and its ecological footprint is very high. If you don’t want to avoid turkey at Christmas altogether though, its well worth paying more for a bird reared to much higher animal welfare standards.

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