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We had a big sort-out of the garden this weekend, trying to tidy things up a bit before winter strikes. We’re also making a concerted effort to save seed. A lot of the crops we grew this year were grown from seed supplied by The Real Seed Company. These are all true breeding seeds, so you know exactly what you’ll be getting if you save your seed, unlike the F1 hybrid seed provided by a lot of other companies (although it’s always worth saving seed and trying it, because it’s free). The Real Seed Company specifically promotes seed saving, which — when you think about it — is pretty altruistic of them because theoretically it reduces their own income as seed providers. They even publish a seed-saving guide, under a non-commercial Creative Commons license, no less.

They make the very good point that by saving seed from your strongest, healthiest plants, you are selectively breeding plants adapted to your own growing conditions, unlike seed that you buy from big commercial growers, which often requires a lot of inputs to make it do well in anything other than ‘ideal’ conditions. Quite apart from that, it’s fun to save your own seed, and with crops like tomatoes, peppers, beans and peas, it’s very easy to do. We’ll still be ordering more from The Real Seed Company for next year, because we want to try some new things as well. [I don’t have anything to do with The Real Seed Company, by the way, other than being a very happy customer.]

We also dug over our beds and added some more organic matter to get them into good condition for next year. While I was away, Mr. Bsag bought an azada to try to cope with our very heavy clay soil. It is a great tool, and slightly easier on your back than a traditional spade, as well as being very effective for opening up heavy soil. Even so, you really know that you’ve been getting a good workout after a few hours. It certainly beats going to the gym in my opinion, because it has useful side-effects, as well as getting you fit, but I know that I’m going to be stiff tomorrow.

Despite the stiffness, gardening and allotmenting (if that is a genuine verb) is a great way to relax at the weekend. I think that the gentle and diverse pleasures to be had from running a food-producing garden or allotment was probably best summed up by our new allotment neighbour, and older gent who has worked wonders on his plot over the past few months. We were chatting to him about the torrential rain the previous weekend. “Ah yes”, he said. “I was up here then. I just sat it out in my shed, sorting my nails and screws into jam jars.” He gave a happy sigh, and the Zen-like smile on his face as he remembered made it clear that sorting nails in his shed, in the rain, on his allotment was pretty much the best possible way to spend a Saturday.

Well, the bot larva removal isn’t going quite as smoothly as planned.

I had an appointment at the hospital this week, where the good people in the Department of Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine got a gander at my little resident. It’s becoming something of a theme for this particular medical incident, but I got two medical students observing again. I don’t really mind, but I do see quite enough of students in my work life, without them appearing in my personal life too. Still, they have to learn somehow.

The experts agreed that it was almost certainly a bot larva — ‘almost certainly’ because it has obviously died, and is now a squishy mess that even the keenest entomologist wouldn’t be able to identify. They suggested that they make an incision into the lump to see if they could extract it, which would save me from an appointment with an orthopaedic surgeon.

There followed quite a few painful minutes (why are local anaesthetic injections so painful?) of scalpel action, which I was quite glad not to be able to see, but the bot wasn’t budging easily. Rather than follow my example when I’m doing DIY — half-do a job, then whack a load of filler in to cover the bodges — they decided to leave it for an orthopaedic surgeon after all. Since the resulting cuts wouldn’t stop bleeding they also had a put a couple of stitches in, which means that I’ve got to go to my GP to get them removed (if I don’t sneakily whip them out myself with the kitchen scissors, and claim that they ‘just fell out’).

To sum up, I went in with an ugly looking but currently painless lump on my foot, and came out with stitches, pain and an upcoming appointment for day surgery. Sometimes you just wish you’d never started on something.

Our working day, while we were in Brazil, was dawn to dusk — about 5.30 am to 6 pm. We were up and out by 5.15 am, watching the light rush over the landscape, as it tends to do in the tropics (no languid, leisurely dawns there), then we headed to breakfast at about 6.30 am, feeling like we’d already accomplished something. Then there was the relatively cool, productive period until about 11 am, an agonising hour when our stomachs rumbled incessantly for lunch, followed by the flattening, oppressive heat of the early afternoon until about 3 pm. The final stretch from 3-6 pm was pleasant, gradually cooling, and with a lovely golden light cast on everything.

I mention this because I found it quite a pleasant way to work. There’s something just right about timing your working day to match the available light. You get a feeling of continuity as you watch the bats (which you saw leaving their roosts at the end of the previous day) returning from their night time foraging, and the cormorants and herons (which you saw coming back to their roosting trees the previous evening) leaving to start their day. Their activity synchronises with your activity, and after a bit of adjustment to the early start, you find that it sits very comfortably with the natural changes in your energy levels.

Of course, if you get up at 5 am, you have to go to bed at about 9 pm at the latest (though we rarely lasted past 8.30 pm), so it somewhat curtails your social life. And in temperate latitudes, your working day would oscillate wildly between unworkably short in winter, to exhaustingly long in mid-summer. Of course, this is how people used to work when their calendar was driven by the agricultural year, and artificial light was expensive and hard to come by. Explaining to your boss that you are late to work because it isn’t yet light is going to sound like the lamest of excuses now. But if I had more freedom to schedule my own day, I’d like to follow the periodicity of the natural day length more closely — I think that I’d have a lot more energy to spare.

It seems that I may have brought a little stowaway back with me from Brazil. A couple of weeks into the trip, I noticed that I had a small lump on the bottom of my left foot, between my big toe and second toe. That wasn’t very surprising, because I am — as I have said before — a mosquito magnet, and had gathered a impressive collection of bites by that time. However, this one seemed a bit different.

[Squeamish readers, please look away now.]

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I’m back. At least, I think I am. Brazil is such a huge country, and so far away from the UK that travelling from the centre of Brazil feels like an expedition in itself. I started back on Saturday, at 3pm local time, and didn’t get back to Birmingham until 1pm on Monday. There was the 20 hour bus ride, the hours of waiting at Sao Paulo airport, the 11 hour flight followed by another 1 hour 40 minute flight, and finally the taxi ride home.

Perhaps it was mostly tiredness and jet-lag, but I found that my senses got disconnected from one another. Like a group of tired children, they straggled along, getting out of synchronisation with one another. When I woke on the bus, sound roared in suddenly like a window opened on raging surf before sight and touch worked out where I was. On the flight, I realised that I had been staring at the back of the seat in front of me for several minutes after waking, seeing it, but not being aware of sound, touch or smell, or of thinking consciously about anything.

Bits of me kept getting left behind. I felt wide awake on the last part of my flight, then an intense, irresistible sleepiness ambushed me suddenly as we landed. Part of the problem, I think, is that long distance travel is done using stolen time, and there’s eventually a price to pay for that petty crime. On the plane, it’s night, but if you lift the window blinds slightly, you see fierce, shocking sunlight piling up against the glass, trying to burst the little bubble of time created by inter-continental flight. It finds you in the end.

I enjoy taking off. I like the burning roar of the engines, feeling the hand of acceleration pushing you firmly in the chest, pinning you to your seat. I like the sudden, gentle lurch as the wheels leave the ground, when you are falling and being lifted at the same time.

But it’s all disconnection, and I’m glad to be back with familiarity, slowly synchronising my senses again and re-setting my clock. I seem to be more or less all here.