Last night London was thoroughly glum. As I sat in an hour-long traffic jam just 5 minutes from home, I surveyed the block-long queue of commuters huddling against the rain, one man crouched down holding his head in despair as yet another already-full bus passed them by. Home and warmth still several unhappy hours away.

Is there anything that could make Londoners more miserable than a tube strike during the February freeze? Well actually, I think there is: if the unions really wanted to achieve maximum impact, personally I’d have held off another week. Why not punt for Valentine’s Day? There’d be no faster way of resolving negotiations than grinding the city to a halt on one of the most popular commercial events of the year.

The roguish cynic in me indulged in this thought: picture thousands of lovebirds with romance on their minds – separated, wretchedly stranded in different corners of the city, hindered from delivering their £50 bouquets of imported roses, stuffing their faces over a mediocre set menu, or reaching that all-important rendez-vous under ‘The Kiss’ at Kings Cross on time.

I may be newly single for the first time in several years, but I am adamant I will not be joining the mass of uninspired internet daters searching for their 97% match at the top of The Shard. Newly liberated = newly empowered. So this year I will not be hoping for freshly cut flowers or a smattering of gaudy greeting cards. Instead I’m taking matters into my own hands and have opted for an ‘experience’. My new playmate – 14 years my junior – and I will be heading to Somerset. Unbeknownst to the rest of my friends this will not be a weekend of country walks, pub dinners, open fires and big breakfasts. Oh no. There will be masks, lingerie, and plenty of sex (and yes, hopefully still a big breakfast) as we join a throng of bacchanalian revellers all seeking the same Valentine experience: not love, simply pleasure.

But putting my inner cynic aside for just a moment, there are ways for even the most loved-up Londoners to avoid buying into the consumerist crap that ends up littering our bins a week on. Return that lingerie (it’s a myth, girls don’t like red underwear) and try one of these simple pleasures instead:

• Morning glory: get up and watch the dawn – when was the last time you saw the sun rise?
• Write each other a poem: when the creative juices start flowing, so will everything else!
• Go on a bargain hunt: head to your nearest market with a budget and a time limit – half an hour to find the perfect love token for a fiver. Guaranteed to get the heart racing.
• Make it last longer: Camellias are widely referred to as the ‘rose of winter’ because they only blossom at this time of year, they are also a symbol of promise and love. Walk to the garden centre, then go home and get your hands dirty.

Have fun getting it on Hustlers!

The post The Authentic Valentine Experience – not love, only pleasure appeared first on EcoHustler.

Misty Oldland is a pop star, artist, writer and white witch. She had global success in the 90s with her laid back funk including top ten hits in Europe and Japan and a number 1 in Iceland. In 2006 she released Forest Soul an amazing eco album. She is currently developing a children’s story, The Golden Seed in which  a secret league of endangered animals save the planet. EcoHustler is massively proud she is in the EcoHustler Advisory Posse!

For more info, check out:

www.mistyoldland.com

www.thegoldenseed.co.uk

Bonus Videos – Misty back in the day

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Tuesday 5 November marks twenty years since John Major’s government passed the opportunistic and short-sighted Railways Act, which permitted the breaking-up and selling-off of our beloved railways.

Since 2009, Bring Back British Rail has been working hard to ensure that the history of our once proudly publicly owned railway is not forgotten. On our website, on Facebook and on Twitter, we are a growing movement of more that 60,000 people demanding a re-unified national rail network run for people not profit. Please join us today!

To mark the twentieth anniversary of privatisation, we are working with our friends at Action For Rail to co-ordinate a national ‘day of action’ for the Public Ownership of our railways. Please join us for the rally at Euston Station or see the Action For Rail website for details of protests taking place at more than 30 stations across the country on Tuesday 5 November, which is a national day of civil disobedience.

Protest Against Privatisation
Tuesday 5 November 2013

7:30 – 8:30 (8:00 AM photocall)
Euston Station
London
NW1 2RT

This autumn we are very excited to be launching our ‘sister campaign’ Power For The People - “the Bring Back British Rail for the Energy Industry”.

Power For The People aims to challenge the monopoly power of the UK’s ‘big six’ energy companies – who continue to hike up prices whilst dodging their tax obligations – by popularising the commonsense idea of re-nationalising our country’s energy production and supply.

Working together with Bring Back British Rail, we aim to draw attention to the disastrous consequences of the privatisations of the ’80s and ’90s which have seen prices soar whilst standards have fallen. Our website went LIVE today, so please follow the link and be one of the first to join us!

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You probably can’t read the article because it is hermetically sealed behind Murdoch’s pay wall but up and down the country, richer readers – in their country piles, will have nodded their agreement as roasts sizzle in the agas. We should keep eating as we always have they might think, as if history was dreamt up to give television some depth.

Tucked up in the conservatory, within the walled garden, any kind of information can be piped in: information blaming immigrants for reducing our opportunity; information denying global environmental change or the possibility of limitless, distributed energy; information celebrating our cultural heritage whilst ignoring what it wrought upon the world. This type of information does not want to be free.

The high meat diets Gill sentimentalises was hearty fodder for the industrialists railing against the northern cold and ambitious for foreign spoils. English genius manifested engines and steel out of those dales, tools to subjugate the rest of the world.

Starving Indian family, British Raj, 1877.

We took railways to india and used them to extract wealth. We also converted local agriculture to giant cash crop plantations for export with devastating impact. British policies combined with a severe drought, caused an estimated 12-29 million Indians to starve to death from 1876-1902. Everywhere our guns germs and steel arrived was changed forever.

We can’t transform the world and then demand it stays the same.

The aspirational, Western, high-meat diet is now marketed in places like India and China as the second wave of industrialisation we started envelops our world. Why? Because global food corporations need a growing market and meat is a multiplier of grain demand.

Domestically this wreaks havoc as thousands of pigs float dead down poisoned Chinese rivers and as these nation’s ecological footprints surge over their national borders to compete with the places we have traditionally called upon to service European appetites the entire global ecosystem shudders with the strain. 

Meantime, the corporate monopoly of the food chain in Europe labels meat to maximise profit rather than to inform the consumer. Carcasses from different species are mixed together to pickup a premium.

But selective ingestion of information can only hold back reality for so long. The cumulative impact of an exponentially growing human population eating and consuming like Europeans (or worst, Americans) is what is driving global environmental change. By definition, this effects everyone.

Diverse, independent, freely available information urges us all to embrace our new planetary identity. To flourish we must limit the global economy so that nature can keep providing. The era of walled gardens, small island mentalities, borders and nationalism is over.  It is no longer sustainable to have very poor people… or very rich people. Converging upon lives of low impact is our shared destiny… or we don’t have one.

Eating less meat is only a burden if you are doing it in an English restaurant. Luckily our foreign adventures brought quality Indian cooking back with it.

Diwana Bhel Poori House on Drummond Street is famous for its cheap and tasty south Indian vegetarian street food notably dosa and thali. Less well known is that on weekends it hosts an astonishing buffet over lunch offering Londoners a vibrant alternative to meat and two veg. The sheer variety of dishes laid out in bright and fantastic colours is itself a clarion call for global empathy, diversity and unity.

Loading one’s plate is a gluttonous delirium – there is no chance of trying every dish. The variety keeps you interested throughout and eradicates any chance of wishing there was a dead animal on the table.

I would suggest that AA Gill sample the delights with “The Blonde” but his career is based on perpetuating the myth of separateness. His diet is, like him, elite and superior. Were he to eat like the rest of humankind his inflated ego would find itself hollow and collapse. The Blonde might grow weary and seek out something more warm blooded. Because if you need to ingest lots of meat to perpetuate your sense of self, then really, you’re a dinosaur.

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I cycled past this protest the other day.

Protestors are making the connection between the mining of coltan which is a crucial raw material in electronic devices and wars currently being fought in Africa.

Do you think the wars in Mali and the Congo are actually proxy resource wars being fought for corporate control of key resources?

More information here

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