Thursday 6th August 09

Up at a reasonable time as had to go to a York Rotters meeting at 10am and got there on time, to meet the two Waste Minimisation Officers, Rachel and Sara, plus management group members Pat and John, and our employee Catherine.

It was a good meeting. I found out what is going to happen at Lord Deramore's re sustainability and of course, composting, and we talked over the forthcoming fifth birthday party on the 4th September. Gill is going to do a cake in the shape of a compost bin or heap. The WRAP subsidised compost bins finish at the end of September and we discussed what to do after that, to keep affordable compost bins available to members of the public. We had a discussion about a social with information about the micro-organisms which do the work in the compost heap, inspired by a talk Catherine went to at the recent Master Composter event, at Ryton I think. She wasn't that impressed with how that was presented (not enough microscopes for the large number of people who attended) and I think we can do better. Finally, St Nicks has had a bit of contact with the Mosque which is next to it on Bull Lane, and we had a chat about how we could engage the community which uses that. I agreed to do some research. The meeting finished but we kept on chatting for quite a while.

I collected a couple of stray logs (tree surgeons dump them on St Nicks quite often) and called in on Raj at Freshways to ask him about how Islam approaches environmentalism, and if he thinks he knows how York Rotters could work with Muslims to get them enthusiastic about composting. I spent half an hour in there, as he was busy with customers, but I did learn quite a bit. One of the tenets is cleanliness, so keeping the atmosphere clean, the garden tidy etc would be one angle, another is appreciating beauty, so a garden with plenty of compost added would be more beautiful than one without. I'll find out more from various translations of the Quran and associated discussion... I found this quite easily but haven't yet explored it much.

Home for a late lunch and a frustrating afternoon as my normal email is completely unavailable, both on Thunderbird and on Webmail. Fortunately I have an emergency email with Google, which I was able to use to receive a document from the council and then forward that to my colleagues at York Green Festival.

I didn't spend all afternoon being frustrated with the computer... I did a lot of chainsawing and splitting which was very satisfying and also dug out a compost heap, turning it into a builders bag, and admired my growing pumpkins which are doing really well.

I had a late tea as I was out in the garden til after 7pm. I had a beard trim and a bath as I'm working tomorrow and Saturday.