Susi’s Great Unleashing

Have you ever heard of a ‘sod off shed’?  No, I hadn’t either until two kindergarten friends from the UK turned up, one from the days of hand-knitted mohair cardigans and patent leather party shoes and the other from clandestine visits to the rocks on the Italian Riviera to hang out with the sons of Nervi fishermen.

“Your mother did not approve of Claudio” she said, as we studied the black and white photos of our Summer holiday all those years’ ago.  In his skimpy togs, that left nothing to the imagination, and abs to die for, I could see why.   “What a fab time we had.  It was brill!”.

I smiled at the words ‘fab’ and ‘brill’, words I haven’t heard since I went to see the Beatles at Finsbury Park, they too in black and white, when I screamed solidly for 2 hours, in my faux leather skirt and my knee high socks on which I had embroidered “Paul” in green silk thread.

A photo of my other friend, from London in the 1970′s, cracked us up. Sitting in a tent at a Grateful Dead concert, her cheeks puffed out like a hamster and her eyes gazing into the beyond,  an old Afghan coat keeping her warm and a joint the size of a pork sausage in her right hand, she looked more dead than alive.  ”Cor blimey, you could roll half a dozen joints with one that size!” someone said.

I haven’t been to England since 1985 and then it was just to pick up a jar of Marmite and quickly get on a plane back to the US.  I had forgotten how posh people from there sound, the precision in the pronounciation, the understatedness of the language, the inbuilt sang froid of the  - “oh bother boots!” rather than the Kiwi ”fa-ah-ah-kung hell!”.

When my car fell into a ditch, on loan to friends who had celebrated Easter by drinking a bottle of whiskey and not paying attention, I told my friends that I was going to banish them to the garden shed to sober up.  ”You’re sending them to the ‘sod off shed’” my friend said, in a Somerset accent.  ”That there is the ‘sod off shed’” and she pointed to the garden shed.

We watched the antics of the drunken sods, in their shed, from a tiny window in a bathroom in the top floor of my house.  If someone had taken a photo, it would show 3 older women, all wearing spectacles, creening their necks for a better look.  ”Look!” one said “they’re stroking each others’ arms in some kind of martial art dance”.  ”Yes, whiskey makes you do funny things” I said, remembering the first and last time I drank whiskey, finding myself sitting naked on my parent’s sofa between two other naked bods, and I still can’t remember what happened.

In ”The Hurt Locker” – the biggest ‘sod off shed’ of them all – the men drink whiskey and punch each other, so my friends and I became extra vigilant when the martial art stroking turned into wrestling and there were thuds emanating from the shed.   One sod disappeared rather suddenly from view,  felled to the ground not by speed and force of muscle, but by  inibriation and the all-consuming desire to lie down no matter where.

I tiptoed to the ‘sod off shed’, and peeked around the door.  I half expected a gruff voice – “sod off” – as I braced myself.  I was quite used to the garden shed, but a ‘sod off shed’  has a meta identity, a bit like the ‘naughty step’ or the ‘time out room’.

“Is he alive?” one of my friends asked, when I returned to the house. A nice pot of tea had been made as is customary in alarming situations. “Well, I think so”, I replied “he seems to be breathing and someone has covered him with a quilt and put his head on a pillow, and there’s a bowl of oysters by his head and a mug of black coffee.”

There was a ‘sod off shed’ in the wonderful film “BOY”, where the man of the house hangs up his gang patch and  is immune to the magic powers of his youngest son, Rocky.  It is not only a place one gets sent to, it is also a place from where one can tell others to “sod off”, when they call you for dinner or to ask you to bring in the washing.

Some bloke made a fortune by writing a book about blokes and their sheds, with stunning colour photographs of men in shorts in front of garages or tumbledown wooden shacks they call their own.   I am not sure if mention was made of the ‘sod off shed’, but just in case, I offer this photo for inclusion in any future edition.



It is exactly three hundred and forty-one days since I posted anything on this blog.  341 days during which I have been totally absorbed in climate change, 341 days of drowning in acronyms – UNFCCC – LULUCF – REDD – NAMAS – NAPAS – BASIC – AOSIS – CDM – MRV – MVCS – these, and many more,  now bounce around in my brain and roll of my tongue as I navigate my way through the inconprehensible policy documents and advocacy statements that clog my Inbox on an hourly basis.

341 days’ later, I am now on a holiday from my Inbox.  I must resist the temptation to click on the terminal server from home and await the day I return to work where thousands of e-mails will greet me.  A curt message is displayed to all who try to contact me – I am not available for 2 weeks, if it’s urgent, breathe deep and find someone else. Sorry.

Now I have time to read a book, to weed the garden, to brush the cobwebs from the rafters, to bake and sew, maybe even paint.

It has been a long and exhausting year.  I have met some extraordinary people.  I have learned that the world is a complex place and that there is little to celebrate about being human.  The road ahead is paved with a hopelessness I was not aware of 341 days’ ago.

At the Pasifika Festival a couple of weeks’ ago, the dancers from Tuvalu performed in spectacular costumes, wide smiles and skin the colour of toasted honeycomb.  My friend from Kiribati said “Do not be fooled by our smiles, our always smiling, our laughter and our song.  Beneath all that, in our hearts, we carry a despair about losing our land and culture, to the encroaching tides, to the king tides, which turn our drinking water brakish and our skin red and blistered.  Our children line the corridors of our inadequate hospitals;  our fish fills the bellies of people thousands of miles away; when the tsunamis come and the radio tells us to go to higher ground, we pray.  There is no higher ground.  We live in fear because we do not understand why this is happening to us.  Can you tell us why?”

0.06% of global emissions of greenhouse gases come from the Pacific.  Islands like Tuvalu, Kiribati and Tokelau.  Their islands are disappearing before their eyes.  This is not a dramatic statement intended to get you to sit up and take notice, it is a fact.

Yes, my friend, I can tell you why.  Our greed and addiction to stuff - to the display of acquisition representing status to satisfy our addled screwed up brains – means that we need to fill our lives with product, we measure our success by how much  we consume, we shop til we drop because we are basically fucked up.

In 341 days, almost 300,000 people will have died because of climate change related impacts.  Of these 300,000, most will be in the developing world, the people who are least responsible for the problem.

So, that’s the what and the why, but what of the how?  How do we change things?  In 341 days immersed in this fight for survival have I seen much change?  The tragedy of what happened in Copenhagen in December 2009 should be etched on everyone’s soul, and branded on our collective conscience.  The big globe in the Bella Centre where the UN climate change summit was held did not even include the Pacific Islands.  A large expanse of oceanic islands at the frontline of climate change not displayed in a United Nations’ summit on climate change, with 193 world leaders present .

How I cheered on the strong clear voice of the delegate from the tiniest of these ‘forgotten’ islands, who likened what was happening to the low-lying atolls of the Pacific, a crime against humanity. Watching it live on my laptop, from the comfort of my deck on a sunny afternoon, I probably saw more of what happened during those tragic hours than many present in Copenhagen at the time.   The suppressed rage of those present, many who had not slept for days, the blood dripping from the palm of a South American beauty as she smashed her table in disgust, the Prime Minister of Denmark, Chair of the Conference of Parties, becoming inchoherent through exhaustion and having to be removed from the Plenary.

A convergence is about to happen in Cochabamba in the 3rd week in April. The World’s People’s Conference has been convened to talk about the rights of Mother Nature.  Thousands are journeying from all the corners of the globe, to Cochabamba to discuss the how.  It’s purpose is to set the stage for a World Referendum on Climate Change.

This  World Referendum will take place on October 12th this year. On this day we can start to put an end to the madness.  The questions are very simple:-

a. Do you agree to restore harmony with nature, being aware of the rights of Mother Earth?

b. Do you agree to change this over consumption and waste model that represents capitalist system?

c. Do you agree that developed countries should reduce and re-absorb their domestic greenhouse gas emissions for temperature not to rise more than 1 degree Celsius(1°C)?

d. Do you agree with transferring everything spent on wars and allocating a higher budget in defense of Mother Earth?

e. Do you agree to establish a Climate Justice Tribunal to judge those who destroy Mother Earth?

Voting in the World Referendum will be simple – by electronic means,  by popular vote, through customary channels etc.  A Unity of Peoples’ Nations (UPN) will be formed to be the representative organisation and the results of the Referendum will be taken to the Conference of Parties of the UNFCCC when they meet in Mexico at the end of November.

This is the beginning of the how.

It has taken me 341 days to become a radical.  341 days of learning who is to blame for the mess we are in. 341 days of my eyes brimming with tears on a daily basis as I read what kind of planet my children will inherit.  341 days of realising who is to blame and why.

Not sure when I’ll get back to the blog again.  Once this break is over I’ll be back in the maelstrom of climate change campaigning, navigating my way through thousands of e-mails, looking for that small ray of hope to guide us out of the Darkness, towards the future.  Will my heart be singing 341 days from now?  The answer is in all of our hands.