Super Market

There follows a short bit of middle class annoyance. I feel a certain amount of shame but I have an engineers approach to a solution so bear with me.

Every two weeks I carry a large plastic box full of bottles and jars to the kerb (okay, it’s a grass verge) outside my house and I get depressed. A classic bit of late middle aged, middle class mithering.

Then a big diesel truck comes along and a nice bloke sorts the cans and glass into containers on the truck and off they go.

Of course it’s better than landfill, but those glass jars and bottles are perfectly useable. I keep some to pickle my beetroot and the occasional load of jam and marmalade I might bother to make, but the vast majority end up in the recycle box.

What a stupid waste. Why can’t I go back to a shop, re-fill the jars in some clever, hygienic, fiscally prudent, profitable for the company technological way and save a whole load of hassle.

And that’s just the glass. We have recently been issued with massive sacks to put all the plastic bottles in. We fill it in 2 weeks, hundreds of plastic bottles for milk, fruit juice, shampoo, yoghurt etc etc.

Yesterday I accompanied the Mrs to new supermarket has recently opened in Cheltenham, our nearest large town. I normally try to avoid buying stuff in the big chains, true, you can live perfectly well without stepping foot in a newly built out of town supermarket with ample parking, but it takes a bit of effort.

But yesterday I shrugged and entered a recently opened branch of an American chain called ‘Whole Foods Markets.’ This company started life in Austin, Texas in 1980, it’s expanded over the USA and now there’s a very posh branch in Kensington and now Cheltenham. Quelle surprise!

 I’ve shopped in one of their stores in Los Angeles, it’s not cheap but when you’re faced with another pack of sliced soft foam type product with the word ‘bread’ on the packaging, you start to appreciate some actual bread even if it does cost a little more.

Now, I just want to state that I’m not sponsored by this outfit, I’ve only been to this new store once but I was impressed. Not so much by the fact that the array of food on display was spectacular, or by the fact that they source as much as they possibly can from local producers.  It was the fact that they are already starting to do what all supermarkets should be doing.

Okay, they are only doing it with wine at the moment, but as always I’m full of optimism.

You can buy wine in bottles like in any store, but at Whole Food Markets you can also fill your own bottle, when you’ve finished the wine you rinse the bottle, take it back and re-fill it. Revolutionary.

Well, not that revolutionary, it’s only a few years back that milk came in bottles that were returned and used again. When I was a kid we got milk from a farm in a little milk churn, butter came in paper and nothing came in plastic. People were still alive, yes, the whole world was black and white and 90% of what we did was dumb, stupid and bigoted, but we didn’t re-cycle because there wasn’t anything to recycle. The family bin when I was a kid was tiny, mainly full of dust from my mums ultra inefficient hoover. Dustbin yeah.

Wine in a re-usable bottle, crazy, you could probably use the same bottle for ten years before you needed to replace the rubber washer on the cap. Madness.

Imagine if you could do the same with milk, jam, mayonnaise, baked beans, in fact all the stuff we currently buy in plastic bottles, cans and throw away jars.

Imagine turning up at your supermarket with a bag full of recently cleaned, re-usable and sealable standardized bottles and jars and re-filling them.

What a hassle! It’s a massive imposition on our freedom, it’s a huge curtailment of our consumer liberty, it must be banned!

We must continue to waste all the resources we have, we must waste as much money as possible recycling materials that have been used for 5 minutes or the way of life we know and love will collapse into a heap of middle class, holier than thou posturing.

Or, it’s quite a sensible and simple to introduce idea with no class connotations.

Beyonce and Kebab

I mentioned the brutal murder of two of our chickens on the Twitters this morning, okay, let's re-phrase that. Yesterday a fox, we've seen him, big fella, took the second one so we are currently in a lock down state. 

I've been getting a lot of advice as to how to avoid further losses and I'm grateful for all of it, however I just want to explain our situation so I don't try and respond directly on the Twitters.

Our chickens sleep in a secure, moveable hen house. In 12 years no fox has ever managed to get in, they have a nexting box and access to grass within the bounds of this Gitmo Bay of the chicken world. However as a general rule we let the chickens out during the day, they could wander off to Cheltenham if they wanted, but they stay within our garden, indeed, they will come into my office during the summer if the doors are open.

On one particular day, I was on the phone to a highly urban television executive when Kebab wandered in, took one look at me, gave a little shudder, dropped a massive chicken poo on the floor and wandered out without a second thought. Charming.

So our free range chickens really are free range. The risk is low, foxes generally hunt at night, we've had more chickens run over by cars than taken by foxes. But in the last two days both Beyonce and Kebab have gone. We now only have Madge, Taylor and Joni left. 

Kebab was old, she'd been delivered to us almost entirely without feathers, a battery hen saved at the last moment from some remote slaughter factory. Within 4 weeks she turned from a totally bizarre looking walking plucked chicken to a rather aggressive and very large feathery chook who laid an egg every day for about 4 years. Never went broody.

She'll be sadly missed, but in a couple of weeks a local farmer will drop off another sack load of chickens and we'll re stock. My daughter and I will have to re-name them too.

I admire young people.

No, wait, not in the way a certain maths teacher currently under arrest in France admires them, I admire their adaptability and the way they seem to cope with emerging technologies without fear. 
Yesterday I had a brief lesson in using Final Cut Pro X from a 21 year old chap called Connor. He was so calm, he showed me how to do things without getting stressed when I faffed around and panicked.  
I know it's not all young people, I know you can never generalise, but being a not-young-person I currently feel a little overwhelmed by the plethora of communication opportunities at my disposal combined with the multitude of demands on my time.
Due to a fluke of circumstances over the last couple of years, a large amount of projects I've been working on have all seemingly come to fruition in a very short period.
News from Gardenia the book I've been writing for the past 3 years, was initially launched earlier this year but is only recently on Amazon and bookshops etc. Doing a mini book tour later this year.
Fully Charged the last 2 episodes of this series are released this week and next, been working on this show for nearly 3 years and hopefully we're doing more.
The Man in the Rubber Mask I've been working on in one way or another since 1992. That is now an audiobook but soon it'll be a paper and e-book too, released at the same time as the Red Dwarf X DVD in November.

But these are all very much overshadowed by

Red Dwarf X which we have known about and been working on for last 18 months, that starts on Dave next Thursday.
All these projects need my attention, all of them absorb time, all of them are very close to my heart. The list doesn't include the many other projects I'm working on, or my family life, my children, the house repairs, the mortgage and pension payments, my business, the dog, the chickens, the laundry. 
A thought has just occurred, maybe young people don't have as much to do as an old bloke. Maybe being my age means you're dragging massive sacks of historical baggage with you which slow you down? Maybe I shouldn’t be so despondent, in fact….

Wey-Hey! How many other 56 year-olds are steering multiple projects on multiple media channels, platforms and formats all at the same time.

Right, back to multi-tasking.

Sentimental Blubbering

This really isn’t an advert for Carbonite but I have never been so grateful for a cloud based back up service. All Carbonite does is constantly back up your entire hard drive, I have 147 Gb of data stashed away somewhere, when my computers were stolen, no matter how much I’d tried to back up locally on hard drives, I would have lost a lot of stuff.

As I restore something like 14,000 pictures that were on my stolen iMac, it’s hard not to spend a moment or two getting a little bit sentimental. My two children are now 16 and 19, they are both on their way into the greater world beyond our family home and our lives are adjusting to the new order.

This picture has rushed me back to the deep joy they brought into my life. I had children relatively late in life, I was 37 when my son was born and 40 when my daughter arrived so I’m a bit behind many of my peers. I have good friends who are already grandparents; I’m hoping to see a few more years before I join them in that role.

This picture was taken in 2000 in Gourde, Southern France when we were staying with friends in their lovely house just outside the town. One morning we walked into the market square, bought some postcards and drew pictures and wrote messages to grandma in Australia and Granny in England. The Mrs took the picture. I think what I love about it is their deep concentration, no doubt the Mrs was saying, ‘hey guys, look over here!’ but they had a job to do. 

Lovely Looking Christians

About once every 5 years some young Christians come to our village in the summer and walk around all the houses asking if we want to let God into our lives. I'm not sure if it is intentional on the part of the Evangelical church which sends them, but they are always female, always quite young and there's always one white girl and one black girl. I'll be honest, they were both strikingly good looking young women, I'm an old bloke but I can still appreciate female beauty from a safe distance.
We saw them walk past the house this morning and I commented to the Mrs 'ahh, lovely, the Christians are here again.'
She asked me to deal with them, she gets a bit moody with the whole religion thing, she was raised Catholic and I think the evangelical sector gets her a bit wound up.
I'm always most polite when they come to the door, I always wait for them to finish their schpeel then explain that I'm a happy atheist and wish them all the best.
This morning however, I was pruning an overgrown Kifsgate Rose (if you know anything about this particularly aggressive, skin tearing but beautiful plant, you'll know there's no other type, they just overgrow) and the two young women walked right past me. They smiled, I smiled back, but then they carried on. They didn't even try to convert me. They went to all the neighbouring houses, but they ignored ours. 
I was a bit miffed to be honest, maybe we've got a mark in their special book saying 'atheist devil worshiper.'
Okay, so I didn't want to go through the tiresome discussion again about whether I had ever considered letting God into my life, but it's not fun being ignored.
So here's my question, in terms of efficiency, what percentage of people actually respond to such Christian cold calling, is it worth them trolling around small Cotswold villages to try and get people to come to their church and give them money, sorry, pray. I meant to say pray. 
Although I am an atheist, I'm a sort of Church of England stye one, not an evangelical one. I couldn't be bothered to try and convert anyone to my way of thinking. I can barely be bothered to think about it at all. The whole debate just doesn't really hold my attention.