Sleep Interrupted

Louise is away at the moment, visiting her aunt, uncle and cousin down in Devon. This makes me solely responsible for the children for a whole two days, which is a rare experience. So far so good, though.

This morning I took the children to do the weekly grocery shopping. We left fairly early to beat the rush, which wasn’t hard seeing that they’d been awake since 6.30 with me following (inevitably) shortly after.

We rocked out to some Kings Of Leon on the way. Later, Ben asked if he could buy the same “music stick” as me when he grew up. I asked him why and he said it was so that it could have cool music like mine on it. Go the Kings!

We drove through the now-characteristic British summer weather — grey skies and light rain — and easily found a spot in the car park. This was when I realised that I’d forgotten the carefully prepared shopping list. Oh well, I thought, I’ll wing it and probably won’t forget too much.

My… god! I hate shopping. Louise normally coordinates our shopping activities. If I’m in attendance, it’s more as mobile child minder and high shelf reacher than as an active shopper.

This time I had to make all the choices myself. Now, if I didn’t care about Issues then this would have been easy. But Fair Trade and Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fernley Bloody Eats-It-All have done too good a job at educating me to the plight of farmers and chickens and the environment in general, so now I have to think about everything I purchase.

Is that chicken from the UK? Is it farm assured? Where have those apples come from? What?! I can’t get apples from the UK? Oh, maybe that’s right: seasonal. So how far have these ones come from? Brazil?! New Zealand?! So, which of those is further? Can you get Fair Trade apples? Argh!

And don’t even get me started on China. Here’s a little challenge: Go into any homeware section of a supermarket and find something made somewhere other than China.

Now that last paragraph might sound a little xenophobic and I would be lying if I said that wasn’t a component of the sentiment — I don’t like the thought of our country being beholden to another entirely alien culture on the other side of the planet. But… is it really right that a large proportion of the goods purchased in this country are shipped from halfway around the world from a country that has such differing standards to us when it comes to environmental concerns and civil liberties? People often ask “how can they make these so cheap?”– there is an explanation but I don’t expect they want to hear it.

So, I’ve managed to spiral this post from something cheery and life-affirming into a bitter rant on the injustices of the world. Perhaps I shouldn’t write at this time of night but it is kind of how I feel right now… I learnt about stagflation today. Yeah, the future’s looking bloody marvelou right now.

Tim, I agree that recycling plastic is frustrating. When I looked into this last year the council’s rather uninspiring response was:

Thanks for your web response regarding what plastics we recycle. However, the plastics listed are the only plastics recycled in our’s and around 90% of other Councils. Basically we only accept plastic bottles.

As the recycle-more site you pointed to says, it would seem the reason for many plastics not being recyclable is that there’s not the market for the recycled material. So I guess the answer is to try and reduce instead of recycle.

I was interested to learn that Tetra Pak can be recycled… although not round here yet. Amazingly, you can post them back if you want — at your own expense. I wonder what the eco-nomics of this are?

Tim, the inconvenient truth is that the film has some factual errors. That does not mean it has been robbed of its purpose.

If its core arguments are sound then the message will survive. The arguments’ scientific basis is sound. The High Court ruling only requires nine errors to be highlighted and for teachers to explain the political context — hardly a bad thing in itself.

Do we have to accept messages entirely without question because someone influential says they are important? I’m glad that important ideas such as climate change are held up to scrutiny because it makes it that much harder for self interested, short sighted politicians like Bush to deny.

I worry about the environment, which explains my goal this year of reducing my carbon footprint. The problem is I feel a sense of paralysis that comes from not knowing what I should do beyond the well known staples of energy saving light bulbs and switching off equipment at night.

This is why I sent off for the BBC and OU’s climate change guide. It actually contains quite a few interesting pointers such as theyworkforyou.com. I may include a few more of these links once I’ve taken a look at them.

The most enlightening thing I happened across was the Energy House. This shows you, very simply, the carbon footprint impact and related cost of certain improvements you can make to your household. What surprised me was that by far the most effective course of action is to switch to a “green power” provider (or green power tariff with many existing suppliers). I’ll certainly be looking into this now.

What prompted this? A post by Wil that should quash any remaining doubts you might over whether climate change is real.