Friday 4th December 09

Our solar panels and water tank arrived today! They came by separate couriers, the panels (which the delivery person thought was a snooker table top!) and a mystery parcel came in the morning, then the tank, which is smaller than I expected, came just after lunch.

Hopefully, this will all be in place by Monday evening. Exciting!

We had a nondescript day apart from this... I did some washing up (yawn) and some composting work in the garden, and got 5 jars of mixed dried fruit ready for the LETS Christmas Fayre. I did do some internetty stuff and found out about a very interesting looking event on 16th December in London, called Feeding the 5000. This is to highlight food waste, something I feel very strongly about. All the food served on the day will be stuff which would ordinarily have been binned... wonky carrots, unsold bananas, imperfect baking potatoes... Their main partner, Fareshare, does a great job getting supermarket surplus, which would otherwise be wasted, out to needy people, such as hostels and day centres. Through Feeding5k I've discovered This Is Rubbish, another brilliant group.. I'll have to have a read through their website soon! They are my kinda people, methinks...

I set off to the LETS event soon after 3pm with the raffle prizes I'd blagged, sorry, politely asked for from local businesses on Bishopthorpe Road. Lynn was already setting up and there were several trading tables from LETS members' businesses. I put up our new banner outside and some little posters, and at 4pm when we opened, went to give out flyers on Bishy Road to invite people to the event.

Hugh Bayley the MP for York arrived... he'd been invited by Lynn and as he was interested in local trading, he accepted her invite and it was good to chat to him in a more relaxed environment. Most times I meet him, it's a bit confrontational. This was friendly though. And he bought some of my dried fruit! I wonder if he is aware it's stuff which has been thrown away and rescued by me and dried on the woodstove?

Lynn had organised a visit from Santa, who is occasionally Brian, a colleague of Jill Weaver's in Leeds. I had a good chat to him, and then asked his wife Kim what she did. We soon moved on to what she used to do... which was to work for Leeds City Credit Union, where she worked alongside Sue Davenport, and was the person who realised that there was something not quite right. She's writing a book about the experience. I was really shocked to hear about the fraud that Sue had committed, as she'd appeared to be so committed to the Credit Union. I met her on several occasions when I was setting up York Credit Union (now North Yorkshire CU). Sue Davenport has recently been declared bankrupt and is being investigated by the police. So that was an interesting conversation!

There was also a good magician, a four piece choir doing acapella stuff, Stephen doing some puppetry, the raffle and then David arrived to play his guitar just as we were packing up, so I STILL haven't heard him play and sing!

We didn't have many visitors, it was mostly LETS members, but it was really nice and relaxed, and I got to meet some new members and old ones too!

I cycled swiftly home as it was very cold. The family were at the School Xmas Fair. I stoked up the stove with several good logs to warm the place up and got the thing almost glowing red hot! Nice for them to come home to. More home-made soup (out of the reject bins again!) which I followed with a soft avocado (same provenance) and some macaroni (bought, shock-horror!).

So a toastie evening with another glass of the home-made blackberry and elderberry 1994, which is indistinguishable from Port. Delicious!