Back to basics

We arrived in a village called Rasca, with two large rucksacks - a hangover from student days when back packing was the only way to get about. They were full of medicines, underwear, just-in-case dresses, three books perchance I should suddenly increase my reading speed, clothes for all weathers, sun creams, wires and gadgets. The children had two mini rucksacks full of things to do, pens and the like - all ready for our great Romanian donkey trek.

I thought I had packed light but after deciding that two donkeys between eight people was more than adequate, we halved our loads. And then realising that most of the space in the donkeys panniers would be needed for food and water - I halved it again.

Eight people's stuff for 9 days

We took two pairs of pants each, two pairs of walking socks, a couple of tee shirts, one pair of shorts, a long sleeved top and absolutely nothing to play with. We travelled lighter than I ever had before and washed our pants in the shower nightly, we washed our socks and didn't bother with the shorts and tee shirts. It was liberating and I felt completely free.

We survived on very little and managed. The children played in puddles and ponds, ran in grass meadows and made nature art, they went to bed early with stories from our imaginations. Everything felt just a little bit more alive - magical almost.

To come home and see all the unnecessary clutter in the house has caused manic clearance and recycling. Just owning what you need gives the mind so much space - I intend to halve our possessions - and then halve them again. And if I'm feeling really brave, halve them just once more.

Dump

The leaflet was advertising a school jumble sale, asking people to donate items and clear out their unwanted goods - just in time for Christmas. Get rid of stuff to make more room for more stuff. When we were at the dump last weekend taking garden waste and clearing out the rubbish from our shed, I was genuinely shocked at what people were throwing away. Mountains of stuff being dumped. Plastic crap being chucked only to be replaced by more plastic crap at Christmas.

Doesn't make sense. We know it can't be like this forever. I'm going to think about Christmas even harder this year to buy ethically, environmentally, home-made and recycled where possible.

Folly Wildlife Rescue

Pippin turned out to be a boy in the end, a cock from Dalkeith - so he was inevitably re-named as Keith. It seemed fitting. Our rescue pigeon stayed with us for three days and eventually I had a call from his owner. In a distinctive Scottish accent, he told me that the pigeon had been let out in Rippon in Yorkshire, with the aim of flying the 150 or so miles back home to Scotland. Poor little Keith got a bit lost and ended up flying south, almost 350 miles to us in East Sussex. The owner said quite categorically that he didn't want the pigeon back and that it was no good to him, basically that it was crap at its job and that he would just 'dispose' of it.

I mentioned to the owner that it might be nice to take Keith to the vet, or an animal centre or try to get him well enough to be released into the wild. The Scottish voice told me to take him to a pigeon fancier who would dispose of it in a bucket of water.

Well it's a flippin' good job that Keith did fly down South and land in my garden as I managed to find a fabulous place for him to recover. Folly Wildlife Rescue near Tunbridge Wells happily took Keith in, wormed him, put some mite powder on him, weighed him and treated him with such love and care. I was so impressed and relieved that someone else thought of pigeons as precious, sentient beings. They even gave us a reference number so we could check on Keith's progress.

I warned the children that Keith might not have survived, so we all crossed our fingers when we made the call today. Yes Keith was still alive, he's in intensive care but they are worried he might have a nasty virus. The volunteer on the phone said she would just go and see him for us. I heard her tip-toe down the animal hospital and when outside Keith's cage she said:

" Ahhh, your Mummy's on the phone little pigeon, she's called to see how you are, isn't that nice?"

I am so pleased that there are people in this world that are as nuts about animals as I am. Cross your fingers everybody, because if Keith makes it he will be introduced into a flock and they will all be released together - back into the wild.

Goodbye trees

It's not their fault they're ugly, or huge or un-indigenous. They didn't ask to be planted where they did. The poor old Leylandii with it's fearsome reputation, the stuff of neighbourly disputes and unbridled hatred. Oh the poor old Leylandii.

We have about ten of them at the bottom of our tiny garden. They prevent people looking into to our space and provide a woodland-glade feel, our garden is small but perfectly private and contained. The trees also make wonderful hidey-holes and dens, if you squeeze through them to the back of our land you will find rows of mud pies, stews and garden-gourmet delights for the Queen of Nature. The trees protect and hide her dinner, they gently hug and look after my children allowing them space away from me, a space of their own.

And as you can tell by the title of this blog, they are going next Thursday. I haven't told them, I think they would rather not know. It is not my decision, but a new neighbours, who would rather something native in their place. I don't think I will be able to watch.

When I was five, my mum took me on a walk, I remember it well. It was a National Trust sort of place, maybe I was younger than five as I don't remember my sister being around, but I can recall so clearly a tree being felled. I remember the chainsaw killing the tree and I bawled when it fell. The adults probably tittered at my sensitivity, awwww bless her they might have commented. My mum remembers it like yesterday but she doesn't have to remind me, I can see the tree now and I can feel how I felt when it crashed to the ground.

So I'm going out next Thursday, all day. Our privacy will be gone before the natives grow high enough to shelter our garden again.

Goodbye Leylandii, I liked you very much even if no one else did.

Party bags

Party bags are a bit like Christmas crackers. Everyone loathes them but no one can quite leave them out of the celebrations. It's what you do. Children loiter at the end of parties waiting for their bag of gifts, a bunch of plastic toys, some bubbles, packets of sweets and a piece of birthday cake. Parents wonder what can go straight in the bin, the kids want to get the bubbles out in the car on the way home and leave half masticated Haribo's all over the back seat. Well no more party bags in this house.

It is darling A's 8th birthday in a couple of weeks. Eight years, please slow down life it really is going too fast. She would like to go bowling with her friends, have an elephant cake and eat party food. But what about the party bags? An elephant key ring? An elephant notebook? An elephant pencil and rubber combo? An elephant?

So that's what I have done, bought them all a foster elephant for the year. 12 little girls are now the foster family of Tundani, a rescue elephant in Kenya.

They will receive updates on his well being and how he is being re-introduced to the wild. They will feel ownership and hopefully pride that they are responsible for helping him as well as becoming aware of the plight of eles in East Africa. All round win situation I reckon.

On a cold and frosty morning

Christmas food

I've just opened the fridge door to be greeted with jugs of jellied gravy, a bowl of congealed bread sauce, four day old goose-fatted roast potatoes and a bowl of cooked sprouts. Against all my better intentions, it was time to bin the Christmas leftovers, which goes against everything I have ever written about wasting food. The fridge was jammed with sliced ham and turkey - enough for another twelve roast dinners, I kid you not. We asked the butcher for a boned, rolled and stuffed turkey for 9 adults and 2 kids and this is what we got; 1 stone  and 2 oz of meat. A third of this would have sufficed and even that would've produced Boxing day sarnies. We have learnt our lesson, not being very proficient in hosting large roast dinners and all.

We have one gluteus maximus of stilton left to eat, two boxes of Sainsbury's deep filled mince pies, cold meats, packets of olives, 5 large bags of 2-for-1 revoltingly flavoured crisps and chutneys and pickles galore.  

The festive season is very good at putting me off food altogether, if I could just take a pill-full of all the nutrients I need from now until the allotment starts to flourish, then I would be happy.

Christmas crackers

Christmas is crackers, so are Christmas crackers.

The Christmas crackers were a real stumbling block this year. We prepared and shopped and cooked and shopped, braving the supermarket twice by myself while the children threw up the norovirus at home. We shopped some more, and then a little bit more and then went out at the last minute to buy ginger ale just-in-case someone fancied a whiskey and ginger - they didn't. But the crackers were impossible to buy.

We had 11 for Christmas day - so do you go for the dirt cheap ones? (which look like, errr dirt cheap) - or do you buy a slightly more luxury version which have 'better quality' gifts. To be honest I wanted to skip the whole Christmas cracker thing altogether, it is 20 seconds of fun with a bunch of tat which litters the table afterwards, it goes against my thrifty nature. But there is something about Christmas which forces you to conform, you HAVE to have crackers at the dinner table.

I crumbled and bought some mini pink ones which were laughed out the house, so I had to go and buy some more - a red and gold variety in much better keeping with the Christmas theme. And of course they were all left strewn over the table afterwards.

Golf tees anyone? Mini screw diver set? Come on .....somebody must want the tiny plastic photo frame?

Nature

I need the outdoors, a lot. I have been inside for two days now, nursing a poorly child and I feel claustrophobic, dry from the indoor heat, a bit foetid and unclean. The sun has come up today, bright neon and as round as a lollipop, promising to thaw the light ground frost and provide a day to be happy about. I'm itching to get out there, to ride a horse and feel the sharp wind across my face, or plant the tulips which are still un-bought at the garden centre or go for a stroll to the garlic woods looking out for animal tracks and holly berries.

Sometimes just getting the logs in from the shed is enough to satisfy the outdoors urge. Walking up our tiny garden when its dimpsey, or even dark, the dusk is alive with noises and the air chilled, which feels pure, making me want to take great lung-fulls.

I am going to get close to big nature next week, I can hardly believe it. I almost don't want the experience to arrive as the anticipation is so thrilling. Off to Kenya to see a great friend, to ride with the giraffes, to feel small against the rawness of Africa and her wildness, and her majestic mountains.

I like Lord Byron's words a lot:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.

What a waste

There is nothing more disheartening than finding a bag of slimy salad at the back of the fridge, or half a pot of humus with a furry green layer. I try damn hard for this never to happen and depending on the sliminess of the salad, there is always soup? Take that bag of salad. It has been grown in poly tunnels in Spain, tended and picked by underpaid workers, sprayed within an inch of its life, washed in chlorine or spring water if you buy the organic kind, bagged up in plastic, shipped or air freighted to the UK, delivered to the supermarket where you buy it, take it home, forget about it and bin it when its slimy. Disgusting isn't it?

I hate food waste and was brought up to eat everything on my plate. They say that if you have a compulsion to eat all that is on your plate then you will end up obese or a compulsive eater - utter tosh - put less on your plate or leave what you can't eat and eat it for lunch the next day. Really what are we coming to? When I have other children come for tea the waste pains me, I'm not quite as upset as my mother-in -law would be and happily finish off a toddlers meal or fish waste out of the bin to eat later, I wish I was though - she has a point, we should NEVER waste food.


There are nearly one billion malnourished people in the world, but the approximately 40 million tonnes of food wasted by US households, retailers and food services each year would be enough to satisfy the hunger of every one of them.

UK Households waste 25% of all the food they buy.


All the world's nearly one billion hungry people could be lifted out of malnourishment on less than a quarter of the food that is wasted in the US, UK and Europe.

An estimated 20 to 40% of UK fruit and vegetables rejected even before they reach the shops – mostly because they do not match the supermarkets' excessively strict cosmetic standards.

The bread and other cereal products thrown away in UK households alone would have been enough to lift 30 million of the world's hungry people out of malnourishment


4600 kilocalories per day of food are harvested for every person on the planet; of these, only around 2000 on average are eaten – more than half of it is lost on the way.


24 to 35% of school lunches end up in the bin.

All Food Waste Facts are from Tristram Stuart's Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal (Penguin, 2009) For full facts look here.

There are plenty of websites out there listing ways that we can reduce our food waste, I would have thought it was quite simple - BUY LESS.