My Furry Flat

Things which don't work so well with cat hair on/in them:

Velcro
Selotape
The filter in the washing machine
Hand-rolled cigarettes
The wheelie button on my computer mouse
Margerine

Things which work better with cat hair on them:

The cat

So, should I shave the cat?? Just look at her about to sit on the sellotape here:

Big Green 2009 Cancelled - "A Premeditated Political Decision"?

The Big Green Gathering, which I wrote about a while ago here and which should have been on again this weekend, has been cancelled at the very last minute in what seem to be highly suspicious circumstances.

Police took out an injunction to stop the event going ahead, just days before the festival was due to open and while large numbers of people were already onsite building the massive infrastructure that a festival needs.

They'll have laid water pipes, put up marquees, made compost toilets, put up fences, built stages and bars, and generally spent a huge amount of time, effort and money already, and now won't see any revenue coming back in at all. There's no question that the festival will have done absolutely everything they could have done to satisfy the license conditions so it could all go ahead - the Big Green may well not survive the losses they will now suffer after cancellation.

On Sunday issues about security arrangements and traffic management apparently couldn't be resolved to the satisfaction of the council and the emergency services, and organisers had no choice but to surrender their licence for the event. Police have said "The event was not cancelled by the police or Mendip district council. The organisers voluntarily surrendered their licence yesterday; therefore it was their decision to cancel, not ours."

But it's obvious that such late cancellation was the last thing that festival organisers would have wanted to do, and the festival chairman Brig Oubridge has said that on the part of the police "It was a premeditated political decision made at least a week ago. There were going to be people from the Climate Camp here as well as Plane Stupid. It could be seen by police as a gathering ground of radicals."

The whole thing has started to smell an awful lot like what happened with the Smash EDO film. A campaign against an arms manufacturer in Brighton put out a film called "On The Verge" about their protests and the police harassment they'd suffered. Venues across the country which tried to show the film then suddenly had problems with their licenses from local councils, apparently after prompting from the police. Brig Oubridge's statement suggests that something very similar lies behind the cancellation of the Big Green.

It's highly sinister if local bureaucracy is being used by police, across forces, to disrupt activity that they dislike not for public order reasons but because it involves political opinions they disagree with. There's more at stake here than just this festival - John Vidal says in the Guardian that "Some observers believe the closure of the festival is part of a larger plan to crack down on all environmental protest." It's not just festival goers and stall holders who should be worried about how they spend their summers - political policing is everyone's problem.



As soon as the no doubt extremely stressed and worried festival organisers are able to tell their side of this story, a further statement will probably appear on the Big Green Gathering website. Until then, the one thing they’ll certainly need is as much solidarity in the form of cash as they can possibly get.

They’re asking for anyone who can afford it to consider donating the price of their ticket back to the festival rather than asking for a refund. I've just bought myself a BGG T-shirt from their online shop, which may become a kind of political statement depending on what emerge as the real reasons behind this year's cancellation, and which will bring them some much needed money in. You can also donate from their website if you have a credit or debit card, or cheques can be sent to:

Big Green Gathering Co Ltd
PO Box 3423
Glastonbury
BA6 9ZN

With much more of this story still to emerge, the London Climate Camp only a few weeks away and Ian Tomlinson still fresh in everyone's minds, it sure looks like it's going to be an interesting summer...

EDIT: Much more detail is now up in an article on SchNEWS here. It's absolutely astonishing.

ANOTHER EDIT: Bristol Indymedia is probably a good place to keep an eye on this story too.

Free Acid!

There are hundreds of different products for getting limescale off toilets, sinks and kettles, and they all basically involve acid, which dissolves limescale if you leave it to soak for long enough.

There are also a lot of people, like me, growing hundreds of times more rhubarb than they can really handle because the plants get very very big and there's a limit to the amount of rhubarb crumble one can eat in a year.

Rhubarb is incredibly acidic.

Can anyone think of any reason I shouldn't boil up a load of rhubarb and use it as an organic, eco-friendly and incredibly cheap kettle, sink and toilet cleaner?

The Fabulous Wrecked Tent Project

On the last night of Glastonbury I fell asleep in Merrick's tent, with a trickle of rainwater falling on me right in the middle and a small pond growing at my feet. I was warm and tired enough to fall asleep/pass out quite quickly, but instead of counting sheep I drifted off dreaming about groundsheet patches and reinforced seams.

It's a lovely tent - a modern dome design which is easy to put up, flexes in the wind and is strong and sturdy, but made almost entirely of cotton rather than nylon so it breathes and shades like cotton bed sheets. It was bought for Glastonbury 1995 and has been well used since then, but it needs some serious repair work to keep it in service much longer.

As I recently ranted, I hate the way so many people throw things away and buy new replacements rather than repairing and maintaining what they already have, and this tent is such a nice object in itself that I just couldn't resist making a project of it. I thought I'd post my progress here in case it helps anyone else not have to buy a new tent, and in case anyone has any tips as I go along.

I took the tent home with me, but instead of drying it out the whole thing was so grubby that I threw it straight in the bath to wash it first. I started off by handwashing the fly sheet, which is about the thickness of good quality bedsheets and tough enough to scrub with a scrubbing brush. The water coming out of it was only a very pale shade of brown after about the sixth rinse, so I wrapped it in a sheet to keep the fittings safe and put it in the washing machine to spin it halfway dry before I hung it up.

The previously clean white sheet came out so dirty that I changed my mind and put it back in for a proper 40 degree wash with soap.

With the fly sheet drying outside on the line I started cautiously prodding the inner to see if I could get away with not washing that. The inner is awkward because it's stitched onto the groundsheet, but 14 years of mud, sweat, mildew, squashed insects and ...whatever that is... really did need to come out of it before I could do anything else.

Although it will look great (and breathe better) after a wash, cleaning it isn't just for aesthetic reasons. Tiny particles of grit stuck between fibres will eventually wear and break them - some of the smaller holes in the inner look as though they might have been caused this way - and patches of dirt will affect the tension and flexibility of the fabric, making it impossible to sew it straight or with a consistent tension. Wonky or badly tensioned sewing pulls in some places more than others which causes further rips, and the inner fabric is so fine that a little will make a lot of difference.

So into the bathtub it all went, the groundsheet bundled up out of the way making it look like I had a dead body in there, and out came blackish water and 14 years worth of Glastonbury mud. The fabric was too thin to withstand the scrubbing brush so there ensued much energetic squishing, and the rips meant I didn't dare lift any of it out of the water as the weight of it wet was likely to tear it even more.


After 11 or 12 changes of water I concluded that the really black bits were a permanent feature, they'd probably look better when it dried and they add character anyway, so I left it to drip in the bath for a while and then spread the groundsheet out in my bedroom, with a chair inside it to lift the inner up to dry as best I could.

I just love how doing things like this doesn't seem to strike cats as particularly unusual - Mizzy walked right past this enormous thing she'd never seen before which was taking up almost the entire room, and paused only for about half a second to determine that it was wet and therefore not interesting.

By morning it was dry enough to get it outside, and when I put the poles in to spread it out properly it dried out in ten minutes flat in the baking hot sun. The next job will involve either waterproofing it or taking revenge on it for soaking me at Glastonbury. I'll keep you posted.

Mizzy Has Adventures

A neighbour was looking after Mizzy for me while I was away at Glastonbury, and he said that the first time he came round, when he opened the door and she realised it wasn't me, she "did the cat equivalent of bursting into tears." I'm sure she settled down after that, but since I've been back she's been super-cuddly, wanting to sit on me and lick me all the time which is very sweet and makes me feel we're nicely bonded now.

The weather is really hot and I've got a few days of wellie washing and drying out the tent to do at home, so today I put a collar on her with a bell and a tag for my phone number, and let her out of the flat.



Everything was methodically sniffed, the back doorstep was peed on, she tried out some paving stones for rolling around on and she let me catch her again at the bottom of the garden when I started getting nervous.

Having a little sleep now after all that excitement.

Glastonbury 2009

I'm going to Glastonbury Festival on Tuesday, and I'm so excited I can't think about anything else any more. If you're going then don't forget to use the property lock-ups (which is where I'm working). If you're not then the weather forecast below will hopefully make you jealous.....

Easier Than Making a Decent Paper Plane

Daniel Harris of Freewheelers did a little impromptu survey of people on the Climate March last year to see how many had switched to renewable energy. Out of a random 53 of those people who had bothered to get out of bed, travel into Central London and march for the climate that day;

"7 people didn't know where their electricity came from; 24 knew they were using a non-renewable supply; 3 said they were moving to renewable electricity; and 19 said they were already on renewable thank you"

That's a bit rubbish, really. Only 36% of people marching for action on climate change had switched their own supply? It may be less exciting than dressing up as a parrot and a gorilla, but switching is a much more "direct" action and it's very much easier. I suspect that most people are just put off by misconceptions about how difficult it is to switch, given that almost no one understands much of the information given on their energy bills let alone which companies are "green" or which is the best tariff they offer.

But if you live in the UK and you want a green supplier then it's easy.

You really don't need to know what a kilowatt hour or a standard energy unit is. You don't need to shop around, because there's only one company, Good Energy, offering 100% renewable electricity in the UK. You don't need to compare different tariffs because they only have one, and not only is it not rocket science, it's easier than making a decent paper plane.

The most difficult part is the very first step – you’ll need to find a previous electricity bill. This is tricky if your filing system is anything like mine, but do it for the planet…

That will give you both your meter number, which will be obvious because it looks like this; and a rough idea of how much you spend per month on electricity. Go to the Good Energy website, click on "Join Good Energy" and fill in the form. It also asks things like your name and address, and they'll ask you to send them a meter reading as soon as you can, and that's it.

Uniquely among UK utility companies they actually answer the phone if you need to call them, so if you have any problems or if you'd rather do the whole thing by phone then you can speak to real human beings on 0845 456 1640.

However pretty the leaflets your current supplier sends you - even if it claims to be endorsed by the RSPB or Greenpeace - if you haven't done this yet then the very screen you're reading this from is unnecessarily damaging the environment, and it will continue to do so until you switch. Detail on whatever might have confused you about the "green" credentials of other suppliers is in Merrick's article "How Green is Green Electricity?"

But if all you need is motivation to just do it right now, imagine the embarassment of unexpectedly being asked to explain why you hadn't got around to it yet while wearing that parrot costume on a large climate change demo in the middle of London on a cold December day.

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.

Introducing Mizzy

My good friend The Neighbour’s Cat suddenly and unexpectedly got sent to live with someone else just before Christmas last year. I had no idea she was going, didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, and for months afterwards kept thinking I’d glimpsed her out of the corner of my eye sitting on the windowsill or hiding behind the curtains.

I’d been thinking for ages about getting my own cat, and last week I finally took the plunge and answered a classified ad on Gumtree. Someone nearby needed a new home for a ten year old, overweight, black-and-white cat with dandruff, so I’m now sharing my flat with a fat old lady cat called Mizzy.

By pure coincidence she has very similar markings to Neighbour’s Cat, but measures at least twice as much around the middle and currently weighs about five kilos or 11lbs, which is a lot of cat. Apparently an “average” cat weighs about four kilos, which I worked out is roughly the equivalent of me weighing well over 11 stone instead of 9. She’s going on a diet.

She’s very chatty and friendly and lets me rub her belly, and her string chasing technique involves lots of amusing rolling over to use all four paws, so we’re getting along fine.

I’ll be adding her opinions to mine here if she has any interesting ones, although so far she’s still eating Go-Cat because I didn’t realise it was made by the evil Nestle, who she will be boycotting when we get to the end of the packet. She much prefers home-made toys like the string and a feather to the annoying jingly balls actually sold as cat toys, so that’s a good sign. We haven't discussed vegetarianism yet.

Sort Your Shears Out!

Everyone’s been clipping everything in sight since we’ve had some sunshine here. On Monday the council used a petrol ride-on mower for all the grassy paths, the neighbours had a gardener doing their lawn with an electric push-mower, all the housing associations sent their hedge-clipping-chainsaw-thing man round and almost everyone else I saw was laboriously hacking at hedges and undergrowth with blunt shears while sweating a lot. So it might be a bit late to tell you this.

It’ll all need doing again in about two weeks though, and the simple non-electrified garden shears that most of us use are about a hundred times easier and more effective to use if you maintain them properly, so here’s how to sort out a pair of shears:

First wipe them clean so you’re dealing with handles and blades rather than a layer of plant goo and grit. Little bits of grit will totally mess up the sharp edges and the pivot, so rinse them even if they don’t seem muddy, just in case.

Close the blades together, hold them up to the light, and look between the blades to see how well aligned they are. If the blades are bent away from each other even a tiny bit then at best they’ll only cut part-way through everything. If they meet at the pivot and the tip but there’s a chink of light in the middle then you’re holding a pair of self-blunting shears. Blades bent in towards each other will scrape their sharp edges together every time you close them, so they’ll be blunt in no time even if you just open and close them without cutting anything.

Bend the blades carefully back into shape until they pass each other very closely and lie flat against each other – you shouldn’t see any light between them sideways-on when they’re shut. I tend to do this by wedging one handle between my foot and the ground, putting a brick under the part of the blade I want to bend, another brick under the loose handle to stop the blades closing together, and then pushing with slow steady pressure on the blade until I can just feel it start to move. Don’t hammer blades or apply pressure too fast in case they snap, and check the chink of light between the blades every time you may have bent them even slightly – a little makes a lot of difference!

Once you’re sure they’re aligned properly, sort the pivot joint out. If they’re stiff you might have grit or gunk in the joint, which a scrub with an old toothbrush in warm soapy water will probably sort out. If it’s rusty then take as much rust off as you can with fine sandpaper and wipe clean with something dry. Then work some oil into the joint so it opens and closes easily. If they’re still stiff then it might be worth undoing the bolt to sand the parts you can’t otherwise reach, putting the bolt itself in Coca-Cola overnight before cleaning its screw thread with a toothbrush and soapy water, then drying and oiling the whole thing before putting it back together.

Finally, you need a sharpening stone. If you’ve ever chewed a piece of grass you’ll know that it’s very fibrous, and so are woody things like hedges. Clipping the stuff will blunt blades quite quickly, so they need sharpening up again every ten minutes or so to keep them cutting easily, otherwise you’ll spend lots of effort just bruising grass.

If they haven’t been sharpened for ages then it’ll take a bit longer first time, but once they’re done they’ll only need a few scrapes to get going again when they start to lose their edge. If they’re very blunt or if there are any nicks in the blades, take them to a locksmith-and-cobblers shop first and ask nicely if they’ll grind them on their machines before you use a sharpening stone for a smoother finish.

Get the sharpening stone wet, look at the blade to see where the tiny slope at the edge is, then drag that sloped bit across the stone – you don’t need to press very hard. If you then look again at the blade the part you’ve scraped will be shiny, so you’ll see easily if you’ve got the angle right and with a bit of trial and error you’ll soon work out how to get a decent sharp edge on a blade – ask a good chef to teach you how to sharpen a knife if you're struggling.

Go off and cut things, enjoy the nice clean slicey noise they’ll now be making, remember to sharpen again a little bit every ten minutes or so, and you’ll gradually stop thinking of shearing as really hard and difficult work.

No petrol, no battery, no mains lead, no fuel costs, no sweat.