Monday 19th March 07

Another chilly day but I got up early to help my friend Pauline stay warm.... she's the only person I regularly supply with logs for her Clearview Stove. She has a 4kw smokefree and sometimes runs out of fuel, and during this cold snap she has had to resort to coal, which burns clean on these stoves but is a fossil fuel, and as a Green she doesn't enjoy using this.

So I took the kiddies to school and cycled on to Pauline's to deliver two sacks full. Then onto Out Of This World to pick up quite a lot of compostables and bombed home, as I've a gig at lunchtime. However I got back before 10 so I utilised a load of organic but unloved/unsold bananas and ditto limes to make an experimental fruit-leather. I halved and squeezed about 10 limes and peeled and popped into the blender about 15 bananas with the lime juice and some of the pulp. When it was well liquidised I poured it into my finest seive and pushed it through with the back of a 'last lick' rubber spoon, and poured the liquid into a non-stick swiss-roll tin, and placed this onto a wok stand on top of the stove. To prevent it burning I use a fan which uses the hot stove surface to make electricity and this makes the fan blades spin round, blowing air over the drying fruit. This 'Caframo ecofan' is sold as a method of helping to circulate air round the room but the hot stove creates it's own powerful convection currents, so it's really just a gimmick.... unless you use it to speed-dry fruit!

At 11.30 I set off for Manor School to do my Professor Fiddlesticks circus training, today diabolo and unicycle. The session went very well and the children enjoyed themselves, as did the teacher! After this I visited my old friend Jean who is always pleased to see me, as life in an old people's nursing home isn't good. I'd only been there 5 minutes when some staff came in and told her that her room was going to be cleaned so she was moved into the common room and we sat together there. It's not a pleasant place as one of the incumbents shouts and another, sitting next to Jean, repeated everything I said, well the last few words of it, as if in a trance. One lady looked like 'The Scream' and another rocked and shook continuously, mouth open and eyes shut. Not a good advert for old age. Jean gets one other regular visitor, a brilliant old lady called Joyce, who cycles around with an anti-war notice on her bike. So Joyce turned up, as promised in Jean's appointment diary, and I left them to chat.

I cycled home with the wind mainly behind me blowing snowflakes, and got in just as Gill was setting off to pick up the boys. I did some emails and blog and ate tea which Gilly had created, a lovely and filling bulgar wheat and veg mix.

Then some more work outside, despite the cold wind and snow flurries, and back in to get ready for the talk I had agreed to give to York Co-operative Members Group about YorkLETS. I picked up some LETS info and membership forms on the way into York from Stephen our Membership person, and got to CVS in good time. i think the 10 or so people enjoyed the talk and two took membership application forms.

Back home in time to watch an interesting programme on farming, selective breeding, genetic modification and cloning. Interesting.

Whilst Gill watched ER, which is too graphic for me, I went on the computer again and was pleased to find an email from a ?cousin Jenny Cossham who I found during a Google search, and I was able to leave her a short message which she replied to. She's into various aspects of sustainability too, which is great!