This year’s Tweed Run event in London saw 400 immaculately dressed cyclists gallivanting about the city, soaking up the sunshine and stopping for tea at regular intervals.

I’d love to do something like this, though I think argyll sweaters and multiple tweed layers will be more the order of the day than this:

Which projects to try next?

Already we’re brainstorming which projects to tackle after we’ve finished the Kids Bushcraft, Reinvention Sewing Lounge and Bit Better pilot projects, and we’re thinking bicycles.

Malcolm’s keen on doing a bicycle repair workshop while I’d like to combine it with refurbishing and adding personal style so you absolutely love to get on your bike.

I’m particularly interested in sewing my own panniers and testing out alternatives to toxic waterproof chemicals in all those plastic-coated panniers.

It’s gorgeous outside today, so I’m off for a leisurely cycle down the road to take in the blue sky, cows grazing alongside their calves and the sweet scent of wildflowers on the breeze…

The Power Off weekend is 48 hours, from 11pm on the Friday night to 11pm on the Sunday (19-21 March 2010), without electricity.

Playing board games by candle light, surprisingly wonderful fun!

Power Off is all about having time to have fun, play games, talk to people, have friends and neighbours round, spend time with your children – and all the other things that suffer as a result of 24/7 computers, emails, TV, games, chores, noise, 24 hour bright light and one endless season inside your artificial world, called home.

It is also a wake up call to how much we now use electrical items, how much we rely upon electricity generated far away by carbon guzzling technologies, how heavy our footprint and how little time we have left.

Keeping warm and reading by daylight, mid December Power Off

Power Off weekends are like mini-holidays at home. There are so many things you cannot do (and you might initially twitch at the prospect) but once released from their continual demand you are free, on holiday. It is fun, different, memorable, challenging, good for you and good for the planet.

Everybody’s situation is different – where you live will determine weather, alternatives (wood burning stove, summer in the southern hemisphere), support (neighbours) and limitations (like living in a block of flats in a city). However, this makes everyone aware of their relationship with electricity (especially those things hardest / impossible to give up). That is no bad thing.

Best of all, everyone who has done these before has been glad they did it, for some of us it is now a regular thing.

Our temporary kitchen and heating during the Power Off

So please, why not join us? It feels great to do this with like minded people, all over the world. Together in spirit on an adventure in our own homes.

We are aiming for at least 200 people to sign up.

Even if you cannot do it yourself, please forward this to everyone you know, sing its praises and maybe join us the next time, or just think of us on the weekend – March 20-21.

To sign up either email us at malcolm@touchwoodproject.com or go to our Facebook event and group for the Power Off Weekend and sign up there! Tell your friends, local media, and help this grow.

To find out more about previous Power Off weekends, discover hundreds of suggested things you can do, FAQs and lots of pictures, go to our earlier Power Off posts - and don’t miss the Radio interview!

Power Off Weekend - March 20-21, starts 11pm on the 19th

Malcolm and I are sitting in the conservatory waiting for the sun to dip below the clouds and treat us to a rare sunset over the water. For the past several months, the sun had hidden behind the peaks of our neighbouring island, Hoy, and only for the next few weeks would it set right on the horizon before wending its way north to hide again, this time behind the slope of Stromness.

Dispelling a fuddy duddy image

I took the moment to explain to Malcolm my conundrum: how do I write about how fantastically fun spinning can be, how surprising and imaginative and even countercultural, when most people find it boring?

Hence Malcolm’s comment about little old ladies. Commiserating.

I cast about for a way to describe the kind of spinning I’m doing and what I’ve encountered in the research I’ve been doing on the subject and voila! Punk spinning was born.

I couldn’t find a photo to illustrate this idea, so played around in Photoshop to design this little logo. I should screen print a bag with this on it to hold my spinning stuff (feel free to grab the logo and use as you wish).

Punk spinning is about sheer joy

Punk spinning is about spinning for the sheer joy of it.

Punk spinning breaks the rules, grabs crazy things like nettles, or fabric scraps or copper wire and gleefully spins that. Pluckyfluff creates all kinds of madcap, sublime yarns and is excellent inspiration.

Pluckyfluff's "Posie" yarn

Punk spinning tosses in ornaments and dolls:

Little dolls are actually handspun into this yarn.

It’s about being messy, deliberately imperfect, and generally playing around.

One of my favourites. I'm learning this technique next!

Getting in touch with what makes you feel free

It’s yet another way to tap into what makes you feel free, excited and in flow and I hope you’ll consider giving it a try if you haven’t already. Chances are, someone has a spinning wheel they’d be happy to lend you to try out. Or you can find a class.

Once you’ve got your hands on a wheel, here’s a great beginner’s tutorial. She’s got several more video tutorials to help you learn all about spinning.

Get the right soundtrack

Oh one last thing: a soundtrack is all important.

To keep me from getting too caught up in spinning the right way, or feeling it has to be perfect, I enjoy the not-so-dulcet tones of Rage Against the Machine, or The Rapture, a band I found thanks to the TV show “Misfits”.

Misfits, about a group of screw-ups doing community service who unexpectedly develop superpowers, is also excellent spinning background. Here’s a clip: (Thanks to Channel 4′s shortsightedness, I can’t show a clip so never mind. Grrr, greedy copyright sticklers drive me nuts.)

But find what works for you. And let me know if you go for it.

I’m thinking about the often delightful responsibility of being a dreamer, a storyteller, and how you tell a story that’s both honest and worth telling.

A good story starts with the improbable or downright impossible

I think you start with attempting the impossible, which is why the quote above, which I discovered courtesy of Willy Wonka, keeps going through my mind. Here, take a look:

Isn’t it glorious?

The line is actually taken from a poem called “Ode” in a collection called Music and Moonlight — two of my favourite things and apropos since two nights ago we took advantage of a dusting of snow and bright full moon to go outside and waltz.

Impossible thing #1: Malcolm dancing

Dancing of any kind, much less the waltz, would probably have been on Malcolm’s list of impossible things to do up until recently. Even at our wedding, he refused to dance. But he’s always felt bad about that, so last Christmas my present was his promise to learn how.

We went to a few lessons of Scottish country dancing because that’s the closest thing we could find, but it still wasn’t quite what we were wanting.

Then the other night we were talking about it again and I finally thought to check YouTube, where I found a “Learn How to Waltz” video to teach us the basics. We then spent a goofy few minutes box-stepping our way around our kitchen.

We both felt so dizzy from turning around that we didn’t quite see how we’d be able to continue until I did some more Google searching (god I love research) and found you can avoid dizziness by looking at a fixed point in the distance.

So the other night we seized our chance and stepped out onto our gravel drive coated in a lovely couple of inches of snow.

The moon was full, the sky clear, and the light shone so brightly. I hummed off tuned-ly “Buffalo gals won’t you come out tonight…and dance by the light of the moon.”

I didn’t think to take a picture, and in searching around for a photo to best capture what it looked like and felt like, I found this one:

We too could hear the waves lapping on the beach, and while we aren’t actually Victorians, we felt like ones. Our house is the only one for maybe 1/2 mile around, and since we’re perched by the sea, half the view is ocean. That meant that once we stepped outside, the only illumination was moonlight.

But it was so bright you could almost pretend it was daytime, and I saw why there have been so many songs, poems, stories set to moonlight. With the snow reflecting the light, we could easily see our way through the steps and I felt a sense of timelessness and adventure.

Now before this gets too sappy, let me also say we looked a bit like those awkward teens at a school dance, less-than-gracefully shuffling our way through the “one, two, three, one, two three”s. Plus we couldn’t look at each other or else we’d get dizzy.

The point is, Malcolm put aside his self-consciousness about dancing and I put aside my lazy inclination to stay inside by the fire and we ventured forth into the improbable.

Result: a good story worth telling ourselves over the years.

The humble impossible

Doing the impossible or even improbable doesn’t have to be epic. It can be small, humble, silly. It’s a path to creating your own magical story, one you’ll enjoy telling yourself years down the line.

Now how to end this post? I asked Malcolm, and his answer was “by eating some soup.” OK then.

Since we’re such butter junkies — I’d guess we go through something like a pack a week — we thought finding this out would be be both fun and illuminating. In our case, is it worth dishing out the extra money for Lurpak and President over the cheaper ones? A blind taste test is the only way to find out.

Handily, it’s also a good excuse to eat lots of butter.

Butter taste test ready to go

Ode to butter

One of the great joys of Britain for me is their butter. Oh how I love it so. Having grown up on margarine (because we all thought it was healthy didn’t we?), I was a latecomer to the Way of Butter, but when I moved here I stumbled across all the different European butters right in the grocery store aisle. The love affair began, and to this day our guests at our table marvel at the thick slices of butter we cut as if it’s cheese.

I say, you’re missing out if you carefully cut only the stingiest bit of butter for your bread or porridge or crumpet or scone. And God help you if you’re still using margarine. Get thee to a creamery!

In any case, I highly recommend holding your own Butter Blowout. Here’s what you need to do:

Holding your own Butter Blowout

Stock up on your usual favourites and add the most high-end and cheapest butters.

The six brands

In our case, I usually beg to have Lurpak, which is Danish or President, which is French. We actually have a local butter, Walliwall, which I initially loved but had recently and didn’t like the flavour of. It’s unpasteurised, so perhaps I left it out too long. So we bought all those, plus Kerrygold (Irish), which I remember liking and Malcolm scoffed at, and Tesco’s generic. We threw in goat’s butter, which I’ve never had before, at the last minute for fun.

Malcolm did the preparing and lucky me, I did the tasting.

Yikes, too much salt

What amazed me straightaway was how salty most of the butters were. Three of them I pretty much dismissed because all I could taste was salt. My top 3 were noticeable in taste and my very favourite really stood out as by far the best.

My guesses

Malcolm had me try to guess which one was which brand. Here were my guesses of which brand alongside my rankings:

#6 (last place): Tesco Salted

#5: Kerrygold

#4: Lurpak

#3: Goats butter

#2: President

#1: Walliwall

Walliwall has a different texture — more like crumbly cheese — so it’s hard to disguise. It has a marvelous creamy, slightly sweet flavour with a richness I associate with Orkney Ice Cream. Yum. As I mentioned before, it’s unpasteurised and I think that might be partly why it tastes so delicious — you aren’t killing off the flavour through overheating.

But I got the butter brands wrong otherwise.

The actual butter rankings

Here’s what they actually were:

#6: Lurpak. Doh! All this time I thought it was my favourite, but it was just SO salty. Next time we’ll try unsalted.

#5 Tesco’s. Yep, it’s crap, as suspected.

#4 Kerrygold. OK, but still too salty.

#3 President. Yummy, but with a smell I didn’t like and not as good as…

#2 Goat’s butter. Delish.

#1 Walliwall. Superstar. Anyone with access to it simply must try it.

So that was fun. Walliwall is the hands-down winner and it’s local!

Next time…

We’re going to do it again but with less salty underpinnings, like water crackers instead of oatcakes. We’re also going to be a bit more aware of how much salt we’re eating since at the end of the session, I had a sore throat and 30 minutes on, I’m still feeling it. So we’re going to get the unsalted butters next time.

Let the buttery times roll…