Tuesday 28th April 09

A rainy day, and we were expecting a Suma order so we stayed in... the delivery was much later than usual and arrived after 1pm. Despite the rain, I did a good wood stack outside the front door.

I also did some weeding as some weeds come out more easily if the soil is wet, and did some compost heap management, piling several sack's worth of assorted veg on the current pile, with a good layer of woodchips from a stumpgrinding operation at Woodlands last year.

We had leek and potato soup with some garlic bread... Gill's home-made bread... and the last slices of yesterday's nutloaf.

At 7pm I cycled down to the Museum Gardens to attend the meeting of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society in the Tempest Anderson Hall, a lecture by Dr John Barrett from the Stockholm Environment Institute at the University of York. I've been to quite a few of John's lectures and they're always good, this one was called 'The Carbon Footprint Of Everything We Consume' and although I knew quite a bit of it already, I learned new things about 'consumption based emissions' and 'greenhouse development rights', and things which will hopefully come to pass at the Copenhagen Climate Talks in December. I have quite a bit of research to do...

I asked a question at the end about carbon calculators and John suggested two I could try, the WWF calculator and he B&Q One Planet Living calculator, both of which were developed by SEI, with the B&Q one in association with Bioregional.

I have been meaning to join YPS for some time, so tonight I did. I was then able to go to the small gathering in the Gatehouse for a few chats and glass of wine.

Zipped home in order to see Newsnight which I had hoped would have the Ethical Man meets Joe Jenkins, author of The Humanure Handbook, 'the book which changed my life', but unfortunately he wasn't featured, he was left on the cutting room floor as it were. Relegated to a mention on the blog. How sad! How disappointing! Missed opportunity BBC!

But, on searching the blog for the mention, I find that there is a vid of the piece they didn't broadcast. Seeing this made me happy. Another 13 seconds of (nameless!) fame... just over 2 minutes in, and how nice to see my hero Joe. Cool. (not Joe Cool, Joe Jenkins...)

Gill and I watched a film 'Wimbledon' which was quite good.