Billy King shares his monthly thoughts –

We are back into the darker half of the year, past the autumn equinox, and we need the odd extra layer of clothing and a bit of heat. But as I always say, every season has its advantages and cosying up at home as it gets colder and darker outside is one advantage. And of course autumn colours in the trees, leaves flying about, and the swirl and sound of dry leaves, is another wonderful aspect of life in this season.

Chickpot

It is a while since I have given you a recipe to chew on. So here goes. As regular readers and perusers of the INNATE website may know, I have a whole pamphlet on veggie and vegan food in the appropriate section of the website https://innatenonviolence.org/wp/pamphlets/

As with most of the recipes I have shared I don’t give exact measurements as they are open to very considerable variation in ingredients and adjustment to taste. The following vegan ‘Chickpot’, so named because of chick peas and potatoes, is my take on what was given as a breakfast hangover cure (!) but I wouldn’t recommend alcoholic hangovers – or quite the amount of chilli that was in the original recipe unless you like things hot spicy. The recipe was in a small, free magazine that I received with another magazine that I subscribe to; strange. The original title was ‘Potato and chickpea breakfast bomb’.

This is now a regular, adapted, dish in our household and freezes well. It also travels well so it is often transported in a container, placed in a sealed bag in case of any leakage, but the semi-mashed potato absorbs most of the tomato juices. You can then safely carry it in a bag or backpack.

For cooking the main ingredients you can use a wok or a heavy saucepan. Place a few tablespoons of sunflower or whatever cooking oil you wish to use in your pot and use a medium high heat. Place a teaspoon or two of cumin seeds in the heating oil until they are pungent – don’t let them burn (if you don’t have cumin seeds, use ground cumin later). Then sauté 300 – 400g of onions (white, red or both) along with a well chopped, deseeded chilli, and a couple of well chopped garlic cloves. Let that cook, stirring frequently, until the onions are going a golden brown.

We cook the spuds, about 700g cut into 2 – 3 cm pieces, in a pressure cooker but you can also steam them at room pressure or cook in water. You want them cooked and hot when the rest is done and that requires guesswork or calculation. When the onions are cooked as above, add your tomatoes. If you have fresh tomatoes you could use half a dozen, chopped; you can alternatively use a tin of tomatoes…and add a couple of fresh chopped ones if you like. You want the tomatoes to be cooked and reduce a bit so whether you use fresh or tinned this might take 15 – 20 minutes with a lower heat. I also add 50 – 60g of tomato puree. Add salt or soya sauce to taste and possibly a teaspoon of turmeric.

When you have your onion and tomato mixture at about the desired consistency, add your cooked chickpeas to heat them. Of course other beans are possible but chickpeas are the best at keeping firm rather than mushy. You could even use defrosted frozen peas. If using a tin of beans I would use one tin or equivalent but you can use more – as I say this is a very adaptable dish.

When the potatoes are done, drain them and half mash them, i.e. you want both some mash to absorb some of the tomato mixture and some potato pieces to remain. Mix this potato in with the onions and tomato and serve. You can use chopped coriander, parsley, dried fried onion or nooch (look it up) or its constituent ingredient nutritional yeast (e.g. Engevita) as a garnish. Serve with your favourite chutneys or pickles. The above should serve four as a meal in itself but you can serve a veg, nuts or toasted sunflower seeds with it. However experiment with all of this until you get it the way you want, it is a very flexible recipe. Bon appetit.

The growing season

The times they are a changin’ and global heating is making its mark. We have a smaller garden than we used to so what I can grow is very limited. Intending to get a small greenhouse for the growing season this year, I decided it would ‘take over’ the available space and instead we bought a ‘glass cabinet’ kit to go against a wall; it is under 2 x 2 x 0.5 metres in terms of dimensions and you don’t walk into it, it has sliding glass panels at the front. It wasn’t cheap but is actually very flexible with removable or foldable shelves which can be used for little seedlings in the spring and then these shelves are folded or removed for when whatever you are growing as a summer crop, tomatoes in my case, need the space.

As instanced before, I grow most herbs in tubs or window boxes, and the availability of home grown herbs is Priority No.1 in a small garden because of their instant availability when you decide or discover you need such and such for a dish you are preparing in the kitchen. And buying herbs isn’t cheap while having most of your own is easy and cheap – most are perennials with a plant lasting for years. Parsley (the favourite herb of grammarians…) and scallions are exceptions and I don’t bother with the latter as we have a variety of chives (some early, some later, and garlic chives which stand longer in the winter) and Welsh onions which we use like chives (leaving the bulb and cutting the stem).

Outdoor cucumbers grow very well in tubs, training them up a few bamboo stakes and they feel like a different vegetable to shop bought ones with (organic ones having) a rather higher solid matter ratio. The biggest contrast in taste between shop bought veg and home grown is probably tomatoes; you can buy slightly more tasty tomatoes in the shops, at a price, but home grown ones are a real treat.

Some of our tomatoes, not a lot, ended up with a dark mark or part on the bottom from the plants drying out in this summer’s heat. I had space for a couple of courgettes in a ground bed and put another couple in tubs……they and the cucumbers got powdery mildew later on in the season which I treated with potassium permanganate spray which certainly helped (potassium permanganate is also used in processing cocaine….).

In terms of flowers of the annual variety I like cosmos, though some cosmos plants grew luxuriantly but left it very late to flower. The only explanation I can see is excess nitrogen though as I use a plant-based fertiliser I would have thought this was less likely to happen. The ones that grew less luxuriantly flowered better and earlier but as some with differing responses were planted close to each other I still don’t understand it. I also grew statice, some for drying, and my old helichrysum seeds didn’t germinate – I’ll use fresh seeds next year. I have a small heated propagator which I start off a succession on seedlings in the spring and that is very helpful in getting seeds off to a flying start; I was given it by a kindly neighbour who didn’t use it, many moons ago.

The miracle of plant growing and nature at work is a constant source of amazement to me. A seed a few millimetres long can become a multi-headed sunflower over two metres tall. With a small garden, space is at a premium so as one thing gets taken out, in my case cucumbers that are ‘done’, something else takes their place such as spring-cropping salad leaves like land cress that I sowed in August.

Momviolence

‘Mom’ is the USA-English affectionate diminutive of ‘mother’ but also used as a collective term as in ‘Soccer moms’. I made an interesting typo recently in an email when, with ‘m’ and ‘n’ being beside each other on the qwerty keyboard, I typed ‘momviolence’ instead of ‘nonviolence’. It certainly won’t have been the first time that has happened but I thought to myself, that’s an interesting concept.

’Nunviolence’ was said to have applied in the popular nonviolent movement in the Philippines in 1986 which overthrew the corrupt and brutal regime of Ferdinand Marcos, since many religious sisters were involved. But momviolence is a wider concept; think Mothers of the Disappeared in Chile and Argentina. Think of the women in Liberia nonviolently forcing the civil war leaders to come to an agreement (as portrayed in the film “Pray the Devil back to Hell”). Even the early Peace People upsurge in Northern Ireland in 1976 could be said to be an example of momviolence. Then there are the women of Greenham Common in England from the early 1980s. You can think of many more examples.

The struggle for women’s equality goes on and, even without the manosphere backlash, has no end in sight. When two sides are unequal – think pre-Troubles inequality in Northern Ireland – and one side makes advances, the other side can feel they have lost out and, incorrectly, that they are in an inferior position because the status quo was considered ‘equality’ or ‘fair’ and relative positions have changed. This can go on for a long time, again think Norn Iron and loyalists who feel they are disadvantaged politically. Of course men’s role has changed and is changing but that is a Good Thing and not something that should feel threatening but uncertainty can be unsettling; however what progress women have made towards equality can be under attack when negative masculinist men feel they have lost out.

When women act in the public sphere stemming from their ‘traditional’ role as carers and nurturers it can be particularly powerful and challenging for the powers that be, as in the examples above. That of course is not the only role for women since they are also a slight majority of ‘homo’ sapiens and can and do act simply as human beings.

Tough at the top – for climate criminals

My obscene quote of the month comes from a report in the Irish Times about prep for the golfing Ryder Cup in Adare next autumn. “The general manager of Ashford Castle in Co Mayo has warned that if you don’t have your helicopter already booked for the Ryder Cup at Adare Manor Hotel in Limerick next September “you are not going to get it”.” https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2026/09/25/ashford-castle-manager-warns-over-difficulty-in-booking-helicopters-for-ryder-cup/

Private helicopter travel should be banned on ecological grounds. And in any case no one should have the money to splurge on helicopter travel. Of course search and rescue, ambulance and firefighting helicopters etc should be used but for the filthy rich to be able to travel this way shows their contempt for the rest of humanity. So there.

You just don’t know

You just don’t know what you do or say that will have an effect. There is a great reflective piece in the relaunched, September 2026, issue of the British peace magazine Peace News (see News section this issue) about ‘Remembering Randy Kehler’ who was a prominent US peace activist. Paul Wesley recalled being very disappointed in a talk Randy Kehler gave in 1969 about resisting conscription and the draft; he expected and wanted a tub-thumping speech, which Kehler was capable of giving, but instead “he gave a very personal and gentle description of the values and emotions that had led to his decision to accept jail rather than compromise his commitment to nonviolent activism.”

One of those attending the conference concerned supported the war in Vietnam. But he was so affected by Kehler’s speech that he sat down on the toilet floor and cried. This guy had top secret documents which “showed in forensic detail how successive presidents had lied continuously to the American public about their conduct of the war in Vietnam.” He knew that if he released the documents he would likely end up in prison. He did release the papers but he was acquitted at trial. The papers were the famous Pentagon Papers and the man concerned was Daniel Ellsberg – who later declared “No Randy Kehler, no Pentagon Papers!”

When we speak out and witness to an alternative, peaceful way we usually have no way of knowing the effect, and indeed nine times out of ten, ninety-nine out of a hundred, that effect may be nil or minimal. But we have spoken our truth and sometimes that does hit home and make a difference.

–

I recently read Joseph O’Connor’s excellent book (fiction with some basis in fact) ‘Shadowplay’ about the life and writing endeavours of Dublin man Bram Stoker, particularly his struggle to be a writer. It was only after his death that his ‘Dracula’ came to prominence, partly through film. But reading this recently seemed quite apposite as the blood-sucking issue of Drumcree re-emerged during the month, truly the Un-Dead are gathering. No one managed to get a stake through the heart of the Drumcree issue three decades ago – I don’t favour stakes or even steaks through the heart of any beings, even vampires – and it is again terrifying people and causing an unsettling stir. [What a lurid point to end on – Ed] [I like to get my teeth into topical issues – Billy]

That’s me for now. Alexander Pope’s line that “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” is true, and just as well, because sometimes we need to draw on all the hope we can to continue in a world which seems so hell bent on destroying itself one way or another – ecologically and/or violently. So let us hope, build, sow (a bit of sewing wouldn’t be amiss either), show the way of peace for people and the earthy earth itself – Billy.