Julia’s “Fishing For Footage” project has attracted some funding that took us over to Ullapool for a couple of days to meet up with the young folk at Ullapool Youth Space and chat to them about what we’ve been doing, let them have a look at the kit we’ve developed, check out the footage, and most importantly have a go with it themselves.
Now, when it comes to deep water and young people and funded projects you have to be careful, taking them anywhere near the sea requires a lot of expertise and risk management that we frankly don’t have. But we’d scoped out the local river, which is mostly too shallow to drown in unless you make a real effort.
Not only that, but the kids knew of a spot just upstream from where they normally swim (yeah, they can swim there for fun, but not for our project without paperwork!) where we could drop The Fish in from a bridge and just let it play with the current, the results were lovely. The river is quite peaty, meaning there’s a red tinge to the water, it really makes the green of the plant life pop on video.
The following is raw footage filmed by the young folk who took charge.
This is all based around an excellent video by Fandabi Dosi, aka Tom Langhorne, who specialises in actually living the survival techniques and equipment of Scotland in the 16th Century or so. Multiple uses of the plaid (“the great kilt”), starting fires in a notoriously wet country, that sort of thing.
This particular video is about his take on a Highland survival food. He comes up with his own recipe, which as far as I’m aware doesn’t actually exist historically, but it could well have done, or at least a close variant.
So I tried it…and yeah, it pretty much works as advertised. It isn’t, as he points out, going to win any baking awards, but it’s calorifically dense (my sums say about 1,000 calories a biscuit, so three biscuits a day is a reasonable claim), and they’re definitely edible. More than that, they are one of these foods that feel calorie dense when you’re eating them, if I was massively hungry in the hills this would be a very welcome snack. Not as good as firing the stove up and cooking something substantial, but easily enough to fill me up a bit.
But about that shelf life claim – how long will these things stay edible without refrigeration? Given the ingredients I’m willing to bet on months, and wouldn’t be surprised if it was into the years. Not necessarily “best before”, I can imagine they’ll continue to dry out and may get a little more challenging to eat, maybe needing a soak in water first, as with hard tack / ship’s biscuit, but I’m looking more at the bacterial side: will they be safe to eat, rather than pleasant.
So I cooked some up, have them stored in a cool (not refrigerated) dry place, wrapped in greaseproof paper tied with string (the modern equivalent of Tom’s beeswax impregnated cloth), and I’m going to take a bacterial swab every six months, both from the surface and from the inside of a broken open biscuit, and I’ll see what I can get to grow on an agar plate.
Note for the microbiologists: this isn’t entirely rigorous. I’ll be using standard nutrient agar in aerobic conditions, because that’s the limit of my training and the kit I have access to.
Note for the non-microbiologists: the stuff I’ll be using to grow any bacteria I find is not set up to favour stuff that is particularly harmful to humans, specifically anaerobic food poisoning stuff like botulism. This is entirely on purpose, I’m not trained to mess with stuff like that.
What I’ll be looking at is whether bacteria grow on them more generally. I’ll also be able to pick up moulds and fungi etc, which may or may not be harmful if eaten. See, for example, the blue mould found in many cheeses, and is entirely harmless. Or ergot, a fungus that grows in rye and has similar effects to LSD, but in a far more unpleasant way.
So first bit of advice as you all go out into the big, bad, good, boring, fascinating world: if you have a blog, assume your 6th years will find it.
Not only that, assume everything you do online will be found by your friends, family, employers, prospective employers, that cute person from last Friday….the internet is as public as it gets, even things that claim to be private. (Hey, if you were a hacker, would you concentrate on the public stuff or the stuff that claims to be private?)
Other bits of advice: Learn to cook, it makes life cheaper and more fun. Always have an order-of-magnitude estimate in your head before doing the sums, it catches the easy mistakes. Google “Wheaton’s Law”, “Godwin’s Law” and “The Ballmer Peak”. Be generous with minstrels – yes, both the chocolates and the buskers. Anything is fixable, some things are not worth fixing, telling the difference is a major skill. If the folk on the spaceship had listened to Ripley and followed the quarantine protocol, Alien would have been a much shorter film. Do not stare into the laser with your remaining eye. Never leave your wing man (/woman/person….the original quote is “man”). RTFM.
My images of the year (the abstract blocks-of-colour one is MM’s photosynthesis project, shot through the various coloured filters being used, the prism is from WH’s spectroscopy project, when it was just sat out on a bench catching a few more wavelengths than just Neon’s:
