Who Asked Them?

So apparently

"The leaders of 35 of the UK's biggest companies have expressed their support for the government's plans for spending cuts running into billions of pounds.

The bosses of Marks and Spencer, BT and GlaxoSmithKline are among those to have signed a letter to the Daily Telegraph." (BBC)

My question is, why on earth is this considered news?

These people have salaries in the millions, they're less reliant on public services than anyone. Why would anyone care what cuts they think are appropriate?

It'd be more pertinent to pick a random bunch of people off a geriatric ward or picking their kids up from nursery. Or how about asking some of the kids trying to escape war and slavery by seeking asylum in the UK?

Of course "business leaders" are going to support public spending cuts - lower tax for them, high unemployment meaning a nice cheap pool of labour, and opportunities to cash in on outsourced contracts and low property prices. Their opinion on cuts is as predictable as it is irrelevant. It's not news and should have been filed in the bin.

"GlaxoSmithKline Uses £7.8 Billion Profit to Distribute Free AIDS Drugs to Poor Countries" - now there's a headline we're all waiting for.

Designed for Landfill

The Sony Walkman turned 30 years old this year, at almost the same time as I did.


Back in the old days a cassette walkman had big chunky buttons, with “Fwd” on one side, “Rev” on the other side, “Stop” in the middle and a bigger “Play” button somewhere equally obvious. They didn’t have a “hold” switch because those massive buttons were never going to be pressed down by accident unless you dropped it on all four of them at once. Doing that would jam them for a minute until you thumped each button one at a time which would generally un-jam them again, sometimes leaving them a little looser but almost always still working.

One happy day “Auto-reverse” came along and removed the need to take the cassette out to play the other side, and at about the same time they got a bit smaller and only needed one AA battery instead of two. As rechargeable batteries slowly came down in price I’m sure I was quite contentedly musically mobile for a while there.

Unfortunately this got me hooked early, and for about twenty years now I’ve combined the activities of walking and listening to music, taking my mind off the massive heavy rucksack I’m often carrying usually via something trashy with the bass boost on. CDs are too flimsy a format to ever really be portable, but they got me used to skipping tracks and I eventually switched to the instantly-obsolete minidisk format. I’m now thinking about getting an MP3 player, but I can’t find anything that isn’t almost completely unusable because of basic design flaws.

This is all I ask…

1) I’d like one that takes a standard sized interchangeable battery, preferably a single AAA, with as long a life as possible. Nothing affects my enjoyment of a music player quite so much as it being silent because the battery has run out, and being able to carry a spare charged battery is the only practical way of making the thing truly portable.

2) I want something reasonably easy to navigate by feel so I can keep it in my pocket out of sight. Not just because I don’t want to get mugged for it, but because I need to pay attention to small matters like crossing roads, looking where I’m going, and generally not ending up like those earphones in a pool of blood from the road safety ads.

3) It’d be handy if it could be reasonably rain proof, or at least come with a rainproof cover it can stay in while I use it. I need this because I live in the UK where it rains quite a lot, and I plan to go out in that rain quite a lot with a portable music player. That’s the whole idea of it being portable. If I wanted to stay at home where it’s dry then I’d use my computer instead. I had a waterproof Sony Sport Walkman in about 1988 so I don’t feel I’m asking for the moon here, but water resistant electronics don’t even seem to exist any more. What happened there? It hasn’t stopped raining.

4) I’ll have it in any colour that won’t show dirt too much. I’ll try not to actually drop the thing in any puddles, but I’m not going to wash my hands before each time I touch the stupid thing. Black works, any other darkish colour would do, white would be bottom of my list.

I’m struggling to find anything that meets even the first two criteria, and I’ve now started just looking for something with as many visible buttons on it as possible.

How does one operate an MP3 player which only has one button anyway? Presumably the sodding thing changes function all the time and you have to keep taking it out of your pocket to find out what the damn button actually plans to do next time you press it. Or each side of the same button does something different so that you have to get it the right way up in your pocket, guess which corner of the circular button you’re stabbing at and then wait a few tantalising seconds to find out whether you’ve skipped to the next track, turned the volume up, turned the volume down or skipped back to the start of the track you were in the middle of. You can be tantalised for even longer if the middle of the same big circular button also happens to be “Pause”.

Touch screens? Horrible! Fine, I guess, if you’re sitting somewhere warm and dry (because I guess you can’t wear gloves), devoting all your attention to dragging the pretty little animated icons around. Not so much fun if you want to go anywhere where you might have to look away from it for a minute or where anything might bump it unintentionally. So you can’t actually put it in your pocket and walk, drive, do the washing up, exercise, weed an allotment or eat anything to music.

And why the hell are these things all white now? WHITE?? They’re supposed to be portable, and yet if you’d like them to stay shiny at least until the novelty of having something new has worn off you can’t put them in a pocket, can’t touch them if you’ve been reading a newspaper, can’t put them down on any surface that might have any dust on it or in a room that might ever have had any children in it. And it must take the potential resale value down to a small fraction at a stroke, because after just a few weeks use it’s going to be a highly unfashionable shade of yellowy grey.

And is it really too much to ask for corners that won’t rub off? Coloured plastic has been around for quite some time now and is available in a vast range of colours, several hundred of which would make very nice colours for the casing of a small electrical device. It’s really not necessary to coat it with a metallic finish of any description, and it’s going to look much better in a few months time if it doesn’t have a coating that wears off all the corners.

But the battery situation is just unforgiveable. Having agreed - more or less - on things like standard time, which side of the road to drive on, and roughly how many volts are going to come out of a socket in a wall, humankind went on to produce battery cells for mass consumption in some common standard sizes. Both AA and AAA rechargeable batteries are easy to source, durable, easy to charge and easy to replace – they’re the quite blindingly obvious choice of fuel for a small portable electrical device. So why would anyone decide to put a completely non-standard sized rechargeable battery in a portable device and then seal it inside so it can’t be charged outside the unit?

Because, obviously, anyone who wants portable music enough to buy one of these things is going to want to sit next to their computer all the time to recharge it. They take 3 or 4 hours to charge, so when the music suddenly stops half way to the 24 hour garage one evening, all you have to do is turn around, walk back home and sit next to a USB port for three hours and then you’re up and running again.

OK it means they can be ultra slim, but I can fit seven AAA batteries in the tiny fifth pocket of my jeans - it’d be well worth an extra 3mm width to be able to carry a spare battery around with me. For when the battery runs out. Which it is generally going to do while I am in the middle of walking and listening to something, rather than when I am conveniently sitting at home next to my computer.

Especially since some MP3 players have a battery life of an unbelievably low six hours - perhaps that’s so that you can’t actually get too far away from your PC before the battery runs out? I despair.

Don't Buy a "Green" Thing

There are so many “green” products out there – from eco ironing spray to solar powered cherubic water features – that it’s easy to miss the simple fact that avoiding a purchase entirely is usually the greenest choice of all. The truly green alternative to a mains-powered water feature, for instance, is not a solar-powered one with a huge manufacturing, transport and disposal footprint, but an entirely non-electric one (like this made from a bathtub rescued from landfill), or just doing without a water feature altogether.

Making something pretty by re-using what would otherwise be wasted is a nice idea, and there are loads of projects and websites on making funky clothes, jewellery and desk tidies from reclaimed waste. But how often are you likely to wear a newspaper dress, how many pen holders could anyone really need, and how much jewellery would you avoid buying new if you mastered the art of making bottle-top earrings instead?

We’re so hooked on consumption that we’re coming up with ideas to reduce it by essentially consuming more. We’re inventing more “needs” that we can satisfy with ideas borrowed from sustainable solutions, while forgetting that we already have real needs far more deserving of our efforts to meet them more sustainably.<

Along with this, almost all products which are actually useful have just about succumbed by now to the natural state of decay known as the Shoe Event Horizon, which caused global societal collapse on the planet Brontitall in “The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams:*

“The foundation of the Shoe Event Horizon theory is that when depressed, people tend to look down, and when they look down, they see their shoes. To cheer themselves up, they might buy themselves a new pair. Thus, in a generally depressed society, demand for shoes will rise.

In the critical condition, demand for shoes rises faster than the capacity to make good quality footwear. As shoe quality decreases, the demand increases further because shoes wear out faster and need to be replaced more often; as the demand for shoes increases, cheap mass production causes shoe quality to drop even more. What results is a spiral of increasing shoe demand and decreasing shoe quality. Eventually, this destabilises the economy to the point where it is "no longer economically viable to build anything other than shoe shops", and planetary society collapses.”

It seems to me that it is no longer economically viable to manufacture anything much other than cheap, shoddy products that don’t properly withstand normal wear and tear, that are deliberately designed not to be repairable by the average user and that are inherently disposable, thereby ensuring the future purchase of replacements as often as manufacturers think they can get away with. The result is that we’ve stopped expecting anything to last, we don’t expect to have to form the habit of maintaining anything, it rarely occurs to most of us to even attempt to fix anything that breaks and we’ve largely lost the skills we need to do so even if we wanted to.

How come so many people who grow their own vegetables don’t know how to sharpen the tools they use? Why, when everyone knows they should only boil the water they need, do they not also know to regularly de-scale their electric kettle to prolong its useful life? How many people use an energy efficient light bulb in a lamp, but throw the lamp away when it stops working because they don’t know to check and change the fuse? How many of those designing exciting “eco” clothing ranges throw away good versatile T-shirts from their own wardrobes when they don’t know how to get rid of a stubborn stain?

Instead of making very beautiful bottle-top earrings and pen holders, perhaps we should concentrate on things we couldn’t just entirely do without – basic clothing, tools, lamps, kettles, bikes, taps, everything that serves a useful purpose and is a solution to a real need rather than an invented one. We then need to teach each other about how these things are made, which designs are most durable, how to fix them when they break and how to maintain them so they break less often.

Why has learning simple repair and maintenance techniques yet to become fashionable the way "eco chic" apparently has, and where are all the reduce-reuse-recycle-but-see-if-you-can-REPAIR-it-first sites?

I’ve made myself a new “repair and maintenance” tag for this kind of thing and I hope you all have nice sharp garden shears now. I'll try to find something else to fix while you're busy descaling your kettle.




* Sorry to stereotype but I imagine I’ll now get Douglas Adams fans commenting that they’ve memorised the entire text of HHG and the planet Brontitall isn’t in it, so thought I’d better just mention that it’s only in the original BBC radio show and that memorising the entire text of HHG isn’t likely to get you a girlfriend.

Ian Tomlinson - It Happens All The Time

I went to protest against the meeting of the G20 in London last week. I listened to a samba band, chatted to lots of lovely random people, ate slightly squashed sandwiches in the sunshine and was nowhere near where Ian Tomlinson died.

To briefly fill you in if you’ve been on another planet for the last week or so; someone who had nothing to do with the protests was walking home through it all, and was hit and pushed over by a police officer in riot gear. Video of this happening was recorded on at least two different cameras by other people nearby - which you can see here and here - and we’ll probably eventually see footage from CCTV cameras in the area too. It is pretty clear that it’s assault. He died in the street soon afterwards of a heart attack, and it seems that police officers actively hindered the efforts of a medical student to give him first aid, and then delayed an ambulance attending the scene to resuscitate him.

Plenty has already been written about the G20, the protests against it, the police tactics used and the press coverage of it all.

The one thing I don't think is being said enough at the moment is that the tactics and behaviour of the police last week were entirely routine. Just about every major protest I've ever been on, as well as many smaller ones, has been policed in more or less this way – in fact you can always spot a first-time attendee at any protest because they are the only people still expressing astonishment at what they see police officers do.

Kettling, crap (i.e. obviously arbitrary) arrests, police provoking violence, hitting people on the ground with batons, shoving very hard with shields and intimidating people who aren’t even involved happens at almost every protest. Lots of us simply expect it now. Most people who are attacked by police officers never bring a complaint - it’s not usually possible to identify individual officers after the event, and onlookers are often busy being attacked themselves rather than filming what is happening. But it happens all the time.

I’ve seen countless protesters with head injuries, because lines of police often raise their batons above their own heads to beat indiscriminately down on crowds of people, after pushing them back so they’re packed too close together to be able to avoid the blows.

Every time there is any liaison between protesters and police, we ask them to ensure that all officers’ identification numbers are kept clearly visible precisely so that we can hold them accountable for this behaviour. Every time they fail to do this.

They actively prevent people from recording their actions by filming or taking photos. Even people who realise that media coverage is biased often have little idea how profound and widespread the bias is. Unprovoked and disproportionate police violence is massively under-recorded and under-reported, preventing any individual case from being seen in its wider context of routine police brutality.

If Ian Tomlinson had not died last week there would have been no investigation. If there had been no footage of the assault then it would have been assumed that the police had acted reasonably, and the attack would have become one of thousands of police assaults which go completely ignored every year. It’s a matter of time before someone else dies, and a matter of luck whether anyone will manage to get clear footage of it next time.

I hope the investigation into Tomlinson’s death doesn't allow everyone to narrow the focus of discussion to just this one fatal incident. It's high time that the whole nature of the role of policing at protests is called into question and that some real accountability is forced on the police.

Change of Address

I mentioned recently that I've been having big problems with bluebottle.com, who have provided my e-mail account for a couple of years now and who are crap. I just about managed to dump them before they dumped me this week, but not without spending several sunny days indoors staring at a stupid computer screen. Sorry if I’ve been ignoring you.

When I first set up my account I couldn't get it to talk to Outlook properly/at all so I ended up just leaving everything on the server, and it was oh-so-convenient to be able to access it all from any computer anywhere. This did eventually mean having two years worth of correspondence saved somewhere out in cyberspace and not backed up anywhere, but hey, that’s not a problem when it’s all working fine, and what could possibly go wrong…?

A few days ago, just as I was beginning to get warnings about having reached my capacity and needing to delete some old messages, Bluebottle sent an email to all their users to let us know that they're no longer going to be providing free accounts, we have ten days to download any of our correspondence that we'd like to keep, and then please would we bugger off if we're not going to give them any money.

“Panic” would be too strong a word considering the way I’d probably feel about, say, finding that I’d fallen into a polar bear’s private swimming pool, or being trapped in a lift for 41 hours, but I was pretty quick to send a pathetic message to Techie Friend begging him to come over and make it work please. Techie Friend being good at this kind of thing, it now does work in that all 3000+ messages that were on the server are now on my machine and won’t be deleted by Bluebottle. Unfortunately, the downloading process and the fact that I haven’t bothered to organise anything into folders for two years means that I now just have a very very long list of messages in no particular order. In fact it looks quite a lot like my paper filing system.

I've spent nearly four hours today putting thousands of messages into 38 sub-folders in Thunderbird. This is in addition to time spent persuading five Yahoo groups to use my new address, trying to somehow capture all the e-mail addresses I've ever used which Bluebottle holds onto forever in a massive, badly-punctuated list rather than permit me to keep a proper address book, changing 38 subscriptions to various accounts and websites many of which I'd forgotten I had, and writing to everyone I’ve ever met to let actual real people know my new address.

So, apologies to anyone reading this who has written to me recently and who I haven’t yet replied to.

If you still only have either of my old addresses then my new one is the same username @riseup.net – I will get anything sent to the riseup address, but the process of moving has left me with three different inboxes and a large folder called “dump” which is going to take me a while to sort through. I will reply to you all, but for the moment you are probably marked blue for “To Do” in a funky new Thunderbird folder somewhere.

I honestly don't remember it being this hard to change my physical address, although it has been a while since I've moved house and I'm probably forgetting.

On the plus side, I've got my new address talking to Thunderbird to avoid ever having all this hassle again. I can now do italics and different colours and all kinds of exciting things, and other people's text gets wrapped rather than keeping going for six feet or so off my screen to the right. Unwrapped text quite unfairly makes people seem very longwinded. I haven't even started on creating my own mailing lists yet, but look out world…

Time warp

At this time of year I feel as though anything I turn my back on for five minutes goes through some kind of time distortion effect where weeks of neglect happen to it in my short absence.

I spent two whole weekends recently doing nothing but weeding the allotment, and it now has dandelions in it that I couldn't possibly have missed only a couple of weeks ago - great big mature bloody trees have sprung up, with masses of seed heads crumbling gently into cracks in the soil all over the entire plot.

Slugs of course are well known for having the ability to warp time - this is why, for instance, courgette plants sometimes seem to disappear completely without leaving any remains at all. They apparently find it necessary to shred corn, so I'm growing a second batch of corn plants for them to eat when they've reduced the first ones to ribbons. At least the fox deli bar should prove cheaper this year, since a new plot-holder on my site works part time in a pub and can get us all beer dregs to use in the slug traps.

I have loads more seeds to sow, a strawberry patch full of buttercup, kit to repair before the festival season, a zillion things I'm supposed to have read by now and a flat that I can't even find the dirty laundry in any more. Socks, in particular, have been doing the time-distortion thing a lot recently. I've always found them to be prone to it.

I haven't posted here in over a month, and I have a huge backlog of things I wanted to ramble on about, some of which I'll try to get around to posting soon. In the meantime, you may like to amuse yourself with pie charts and Venn diagrams...






Back soon, perhaps with some more short and sweet ones until I've got RL a bit more under control.

Remembrance Day

I'll be wearing a white poppy tomorrow, in remembrance of the bravery of war-resisters and conscientious objectors as well as civilians, children and soldiers killed in the name of war. Such a small word to stand for so much murder.

A prize for the first person shown on TV wearing one, and although I'll be keeping the two minutes silence I'll be doing it without uniforms, flags, marching or royalty. Glorifying militarism seems an inappropriate thing to do on such a day.

Bastards

We’ve been vandalised again.

All my neighbour’s apples were taken, from two three-year-old trees that had their first good crop this year which was almost ready to harvest. Her pumpkins were all taken, her peppers and chillis were thrown around the place, my pond was trampled and a couple of apples and a pumpkin thrown in it.

But what’s really weird and disturbing this time is that our bathroom sink has been un-plumbed and removed, as has the toilet cistern and one of the taps a couple of plots away. We hear there are gangs going around nicking stuff like that for the value of the copper in the pipes, which is apparently worth more than all the tools which were left in the shed and the bolt cutter that they left at the scene. Bizzare.

Recycling a Fish Tank

I’ve had a four foot fish tank lurking in my kitchen for a couple of years now. There must be a lot of energy involved in making a fish tank, from the manufacture of the glass and the glue to the transport involved in getting it all from source to manufacturer to retailer to my flat, so I didn’t want to just throw it away without first applying “The Four Rs” as best I could.

The Four Rs are principles to put into practice as often as possible to avoid creating unnecessary waste, and they stand (depending on who you ask) for Reduce, Repair, Reuse and Recycle. Applying these principles to a large fish tank is proving pretty difficult, especially as I try to organise its final transport to fish tank heaven in a responsible way.

The tank was first given to me when I moved house a few years ago, and had been hanging around in the garden of someone else with an obsessive reluctance to throw away this kind of junk. It was already leaky when it came into my possession, but such a great new home for my goldfish was well worth the price of some tank glue and a couple of hours work learning to seal it. Its first year or so spent with me involved three of the “Rs”; reducing the need for a new one, repairing it and re-using it, and it was just the job both for housing the fish and for impressing friends and visitors with the “fixed it myself” factor.

And then…

At 3am one day my downstairs neighbour woke me up to alert me to several gallons of water coming through his ceiling from my flat above. My sealing job had lasted about a year and a half, but one corner had eventually given out and created a huge lake where my living room had been. Not about to either fix it at 3am or risk it flooding my very-nice-about-it neighbours a second time, I gave up and bought a brand new replacement as soon as the pet shop opened in the morning.

Once empty the old tank looked remarkably unbroken, so I promptly filled it with chives, basil, coriander and a few tender garden casualties to make a nice warm greenhouse in my kitchen, ingeniously re-using it to pamper tender plants for years to come. The plants hated it.

I spoke to someone at a hydroponics shop who concluded that a lack of light – despite the aquarium bulb I’d fitted – was probably causing the problems. Running more lighting would have been a complete waste of energy given the huge amount of natural light elsewhere in my flat, and the tank also grew mould all over the place because of the lack of airflow. The use I had found for my redundant tank appeared to be far better served by something I had already, i.e. a windowsill which came free of charge with the flat.

After a few more ideas failed to make it off the drawing board (Outdoor greenhouse – would crack with frost. Storage potential limited by shape and fragility. Model of Orac from Blake’s 7 – too long, etc.) I advertised it on Freecycle, a website where people give away unwanted things to other people who do want them. The first time no-one wanted it at all, and the second time although someone did reply, they then changed their mind about making it into a mini-greenhouse, possibly having foreseen some of the problems I’d had and probably also already in possession of their own windowsill.

Stockpiling onions, potatoes, jam and dried herbs this autumn I’m clearing space to put up shelves in the kitchen and have at last decided to try applying the final “R”. I dragged the tank down the stairs into the front garden by means impossible to describe without the aid of a cartoon sketch or two, and although by some miracle it didn’t slide down the staircase and shatter, it did get a very nasty crack through one side and now looks all dejected and out of place on the lawn.

Glass can of course be recycled, and the nearest bottle bank is all of a three minute walk downhill from here. It may take me a little longer than three minutes though, given that the tank is too heavy to lift and I can only drag it along a foot or so at a time. In Holland they probably just phone the council and ask them to take it for recycling from their doorstep, but since Leeds hasn’t quite caught up on this front yet my best plan so far is to take a hammer to it in the garden and break it up into pieces small enough to fit through the opening of the bottle bank.

I assume that the recycling process will remove the blood.

COMMENTS

Tents

I just can’t get enough of muddy fields in Somerset, so I’m off to the Big Green Gathering tomorrow in a partly home-made tent.

What is it with tents? Folding poles and water resistant fabrics were invented quite a while ago now, surely it’s not that difficult to design something that basically works. It seems unlikely that people design tents who have never actually camped, but when I thought about getting a new one and saw the way some of them are made I started imagining them improvising budget versions of the product testing machines on those Ikea adverts. Everyone in the office stands in a row and blows on it at the same time: it’s windproof. Stick it under the water cooler: it’s waterproof.

It’s perfectly obvious, for example, that having to construct the inner first is going to get everything very wet when it’s raining, so why does anyone still design them with poles on the inside? And why oh why does my current tent have an outer door flap that overhangs the bloody inside bit?

After opening the door and watching it direct the rain exactly onto the end of my sleeping bag for about the hundredth time at Glastonbury, I recently bought a whole new tent from Cybercheckout.com, to more or less the same design but with a proper porch over the door.

“This tent is fully waterproof to 2000mm hydro static head (the recommended use for the UK is only 1500)” it said. “Abrasion, mildew and ultraviolet resistant” it said. “Fly sheet – 70 Denier Polyester (190T Threads per square inch)” . Very nice. Cut to me lying in said tent in a muddy field, a very long way from the nearest central heating, curled around the edge with a plastic bag in the middle to catch the steady drips running straight into the tent from the ventilation mesh right in the top.

So I’m back in the old tent again this week and will appreciate anew all the other things about it which are not shit. It doesn’t actually leak. It has loops for the pegs that can indeed be attached to the ground with pegs. The poles go in keepers that they fit in rather than on stupid pins that pull them too tight, and it now has a custom-built, rain-deflecting, transparent U.V. stabilised plastic porch. Oh yes.

No photos yet because I’ve neurotically packed it three times already, but if it works then I think I’ll patent it. If it doesn’t then sod it, I am definitely going to get a yurt and that’s that. With a wood burning stove and a horse to carry it for me.

Bastards bastards bastards...

...bastards bastards bastards bastards.

My allotment has been vandalised. The greenhouse tipi that used to look like this

Now looks like this with several bricks and a saw bench inside it

The bender greenhouse now has ventilation

The shed has been relocated to the middle of a flower bed and repositioned on its side, leaving the green roof in a pile on top of some strawberries

And I will never again be able to safely stick my fingers into my soil because it’s all completely covered with tiny shards of glass. There is also a layer of large and medium sized shards of glass which I spent two hours today picking up without seeming to make much difference. There are at least three whole greenhouses in there in little bits, which at least might set the slugs back a bit.

This is quite pretty though

Slug Blog

It’s not fair! I’m right at the top of the food chain, I’ve got a spine and opposable thumbs and everything, and yet I still have to compete for my food with bloody SLUGS! I’ve just lost a second lot of courgette plants and something has got to be done.

I saw a friend’s lovely new veg patch and beer traps last weekend. I think I’ve tried beer traps before, but I seem to remember going about it a bit half-heartedly because I didn’t really expect it to work. Nothing really seems to work against slugs. Still, I was in the mood to see at least a few of the little bastards die so I thought I’d try it again.

Burying the pots was a bit of a faff, but not quite as difficult as finding a non-Muslim shop that would sell me lager around here - I ended up going all the way to Sainsbury’s and then spent ages persuading them to give me some Carling for 50p because the cans were so badly dented. By this time I was really starting to resent having to get the beer in for the slugs when they’ve already had at least ten marigolds, eight courgette plants, three broad bean plants, a dozen sunflowers and quite a few strawberries. I think my previous attempt at making beer traps might have ended with me just drinking all the beer at about this point, which probably at least made me feel better about all the slug eaten plants for a while.

However.

I persevered this time and I can’t believe it - they really do all obligingly drown themselves! Some of the pots were full to the brim with dead slugs the next day, and I actually had to empty them out to make room for any more.

I then started working out how much it would cost me to buy six cans of lager every time I went to the allotment and decided that it would be a good idea to sieve all the slugs out and re-use the beer instead. This bit is disgusting and if you’re eating then you shouldn’t scroll any further down the page…

Yuck. In a satisfying sort of way. I wonder whether they like elderflower champagne?

Technical Problems...

For some reason I can't load Blogger pages at the moment - after about an hour I managed to get as far as "Help", and after another hour I found a way of sending someone a message about it, but this is the first time in ages that I've been able to write a post.

Anyone got any suggestions?

Pictures won't load either. The picture I was going to use is here.

Composting Tea Bags

I’m sure I’ve always composted tea bags, long before I ever composted anything else. In one house I used to just chuck them out in the garden straight from the kitchen window, since they don’t smell as they break down and apparently some plants like a bit of caffeine. I drink a lot of tea and I’ve never thought twice about composting the bags – it seems obvious, and I’ve been doing it so long I can’t remember where I first got the idea.

I’ve just used the last of this year’s compost on my seedlings, and emptying the bin this year I’ve had unpleasant surprises*. Pulling out odd pieces of plastic and woody bits I kept finding fluffy white fibrous stuff stuck in there, like duvet filling in small patches stuck fast to and tangled up with everything else. I pulled one out after another but they kept appearing, so I looked at different parts of the pile and found them spread out through the whole heap. Even the blackest, crumbliest parts had these stupid blobs in them, either solid little black lumps in stringy white** mesh bags, or stringy white mesh bags full of worms.

I’ve had several thousand cups of tea since I last emptied the compost bin and I’ve put every single used tea bag into the damned thing, and now every single one is sitting there waiting for me to take it out before I can use a year’s worth of compost. Since when are teabags not made of PAPER???

It’s dead fashionable to compost these days – even the Guardian is explaining how to do it – so there are millions of sites, books, factsheets and community projects out there to tell anyone who’ll listen how to put things in a pile and leave it alone for a while. After trawling through a few of them and rolling my eyes quite a lot (Q: My compost bin is full of pests! After only two weeks it’s all full of horrible woodlice and millipedes – what did I do wrong?) I finally submitted a question to WRAP.

After a long time, I got this back:

“The answer is that not enough companies specify their tea bag materials, which can be plastic or paper based. So, two batches of tea bags from the same tea company may have used different materials. You will need to contact the tea bag company I am afraid.”

Right. They get together a big organisation for “supporting compost producers and growing markets for compost products”, but encouraging tea bag producers to create something I can put IN my compost is left to me the individual. Thanks a lot.

I did give up at this point, but then another hour pulling all the little white mesh bags full of worms out of my compost spurred me on again to find a contact e-mail for “the tea bag company” and ask them. I got this reply:

“Thank you for your email and your comments. I would like to confirm to you that our Teadirect teabags are made from polyester which is fairly typical for all teabags as far as I am aware. Yes you are right, unfortunately they are non-recyclable and non-biodegradable.. The best method for disposal is to burn for heat recovery. I would be very grateful of any feedback you have with regards to any alternative teabags that you have come across which I would gladly pass onto our marketing department for their consideration as we are continually carry out research to find more environmentally friendly products. I look forward to hearing from you.”

How many tea bags would I have to burn to boil a kettle then?

Strangely enough, when they’re dry they do burn remarkably well, which leaves me with no way of telling which tea bags are still made from paper, since the usual test for man-made fibres is that they melt slightly (or a lot) when you burn them.

So, the question now is this; should I a) try to make WRAP or maybe the Guardian lifestyle and fashion department compile a list of compostable tea bags, b) ask all the tea bag companies myself which would be more hassle but quicker, or c) get a life, stop composting my tea bags and experiment with using loose-leaf tea, which would probably be more hassle in the end over the course of a lifetime.

Answers on a postcard if you wish, so long as it’s a bloody PAPER postcard.



* The first few were surprising anyway. The next 6000 were just unpleasant.

** Fellow gardeners will appreciate the meaning of “white” in the context of a compost bin compared to the meaning of “white” in, say, a Persil ad.

COMMENTS

Guns

Listening to Radio 4 yesterday I realised that the reason for the huge traffic jam outside my window was that someone had been shot dead in a takeaway a few doors down the road from my house the night before.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/6581435.stm It seems he was killed at about the time I was watching Blake's 7 at a friend's flat next door.

Doesn't seem very long (although having looked it up it's about 18 months) since I last came home to find my house in the middle of a 1/2 mile police cordon, when a man held his former partner hostage in a house on Bayswater Grove and came out to shoot at police cars and put a few bullets through neighbour's windows. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/4344402.stm

I have decided that the next time I see some stupid film ad with guns in it on this street, which I frequently do, I'm going to vandalise it as thoroughly as I can and let them arrest me and listen to my reasons in court. It's just offensive.

“Child Genius”, Channel 4, 9pm Thursday 8th Feb 2007

This programme plans to follow ten unusually “gifted” kids through their childhoods and beyond, in a format derivative of the 7-Up study begun by Michael Apted in 1964. Since Robert Winston’s “Child of Our Time” began in 2000 with a new group of children, another series with such a similar format must have needed some kind of freakshow-factor to justify its existence. And which parents of unusual children would be most eager to get them on telly for being as weird as possible? It seems the pushy parents of “gifted” children think that a TV appearance can do them nothing but good.

To be fair, there are occasional interviews with two or three parents who consistently talk about their kids as though they are kids, rather than competition-winning machines. But they’re few and far between in this hour-and-a-half long installment, which almost entirely focusses on how unlike other children their offspring are.

So, a bunch of kids with posh accents (presumably there are no “gifted” children ever born on council estates) go around passing exams, using precocious language and reacting in various ways to the “genius” label that is the sole reason they’re supposed to be interesting. The programme doesn’t challenge this, but simply puts them all through another I.Q. test to confirm their genius and shows them doing the freaky things that genius kids do. There’s no real attempt to assess their social skills or self-esteem, and many of them are treated as mini adults and made to work every waking moment, lest they dare waste any of the precious gifts that they’re supposed to count themselves lucky to have.

The Distinctly-Odd family have five “gifted” children, and traditionally reward each child when they pass the Eleven Plus with piles of gifts and a party, saying “It’s more important than a birthday for us.” Everything has been prepared in advance before the letter is opened which will tell them the exam result, and the pressure on the youngest child when he comes to take his Eleven Plus will be staggering.

Physically isolated and socially unpopular, all the Distinctly-Odd children come across as stiff, formal and cringe-makingly polite at all times, with no sign at all of the horseplay or arguing that is surely the whole point of having brothers and sisters. Since they’re all far too odd for social workers to know what to do with, serious cracks will probably only show when either the youngest turns out not to be “gifted” after all and resorts to getting parental attention by burning the house down with them all still in it, or when the eldest finally flees the nest and discovers casual sex and class A drugs.

Many of the parents have had trouble finding suitable education for their children – not surprising if they really think it necessary for their six-year-old to learn Avogadro’s Law of gaseous molecules. But of course the official curriculum is probably the least important aspect of school life, especially for those who can already read, write and add up. What kids really learn at school is how to manipulate the system, how to make friends and keep them, the finer points of popular culture and the complex code of playground ethics that begin to form our understanding of ourselves as social beings in a wider context than that of our own family. And these kids need to learn this stuff far more than most.

If Little Miss Distinctly-Odd acheives her apparently burning ambition to become a doctor, she will be bored witless after ten minutes of interaction with her non-genius patients. Along with having to spend hours explaining food groups to fat people and expanding her vocabulary of euphemisms for diarrhoea, she’ll be socialising with collegues from one of the most stressed and alcohol addicted professions in the country. Most jobs, even those requiring the greatest qualifications, so rarely require intelligent thought that only creativity and social skills get most of us through the day. And ten ‘A’ Levels will not make anyone but your pushy parents love you, much less remove the experience of failure from your life, for which these kids are shockingly unprepared.

The fact that they agreed to take part in the programme only shows that, however intelligent, these kids are still kids and lack the ability or judgement to resist their parents’ labelling and advertising of them as freaks. From the first programme in the series my guess is that all concerned have been set up to provide us with car-crash T.V., as the mental health of these unusually articulate children deteriorates over the coming years. How many will be smart enough to opt out of taking part before the end of the project remains to be seen.