Thursday 8th January 09

Well, an interesting day as both our boys were unwell enough to be at home.

So, a quiet morning as they were mostly in bed, but some interaction with them and I had lunch with them, as Gill had gone into town for some tests before having her gall bladder operation in a couple of weeks.

Gilly came back after lunch and I cycled into town to get a big tin of Oxfam coffee (it's not made by them, it's fairtrade Cafe Direct bought from the Oxfam shop in Monk Bar, then onto the Council offices to meet the contact person for the Hull Road Ward Planning Panel, re room bookings, then back through Monk Bar to InSainsburys to get Mayonnaise, pasta, vegan ice cream and a few other bits. Called into the metal merchants just off Foss Islands Road to find the price of copper at the moment... it's very low at £1.80 per kilo. Domestic wiring with the plastic on is currently (geddit?) worth just 50p a kilo, so the wire stripping I'm doing is worth it. But it might be a good idea to hang onto the stripped wire until the prices rise again.

Home quickly so the ice cream didn't melt... mind you the ambient temperature can't have been much more than freezing.

I filled the log baskets and had tea... cauliflower with veg pastie and squash. Not bad!

I was due to facilitate the York in Transition meeting at the Stables so I arrived fairly early, and met up with a lass from Leeds called Elvina, who's looking for some visual way of representing local environmentally friendly actions for an art project. So she took some photos and participated in the meeting. We reviewed the different sub-groups and what they've been doing, reviewed the aims of the awareness-raising talks some of us are doing, had a real-life demo of updating the wiki website (http://transitiontowns.org/York/York), and a run-through of the fairly new Sustainable Communities Act (http://www.localworks.org/) and a number of other item. Right at the end of the meeting, one of the bulbs in the room blew... tripping the fuse switch... so we were plunged into darkness, which caused some interesting comments.

Went to The Slip Inn afterwards. Good chats, but only stayed for the one pint and came home... spent a couple of hours on the computer, as usual, whilst half watching the television and keeping the stoves going.