Saturday 7th January 12

A good day, despite seeing my favourite veg shop being emptied and closed.

I'd agreed to collect Sally's compost this morning.  For a couple of years, she's been bringing her waste veg and fruit peelings once a week to Country Fresh, where they've been added to a box or bag which I've then taken home.  She is really keen on keeping as much as possible out of landfill and only throws away a tiny amount every few months.  So with the shop closing, she was in a bit of a difficult position, and rang me up to ask if I'd be prepared to collect the stuff from her, once a week or once a fortnight.  I agreed to do a weekly pick up from her back yard.  I then went to the shop and Rich wasn't there, but said (over the phone) that he'd be there in 20 minutes, so I collected two Christmas trees and cycled home... and back again to the shop.

I took a large quantity of the last of the fruit and veg from Richard, who was going to the skip site with boxes for recycling, and black sacks of mixed stuff for landfill.  I just did one journey back home, and asked Rich to let me know if there was more to help with later in the week.

I spent a bit of the afternoon sorting out some good fruit and veg from the genuinely compostable stuff, and loaded quite a few heaps high with sacks of materials.

In the evening our youngest went to spend time with a friend, and was invited to have a sleepover, and that gave space for our eldest to have a game of Scrabble with us, he joined forces with Gill and soundly thrashed me 359 versus 289.  I had a very unlucky game letters-wise.  No excuse really, between them they had some excellent words and I'm quite glad it ended up like that as our son will be more likely to play if he thinks he can beat me.

Friday 6th January 12

More paper shuffling in the morning, then went to town after lunch to have my teeth cleaned and polished, and went to my Building Society to shuffle yet more paper, to Dixons to ask what might be wrong with the phone, and then on to Alligator to pick up their compostables and buy some peanut butter.

When I got home, the phone was mysteriously working again.  Very odd.

I did a little bit of log splitting and stacking.

I had an early tea... soup with vegetables in, and then headed for David's where we went for a coffee at City Screen.  Thee was no-one there that David knew to talk to, so we read papers and came away in less than an hour, and I left his place at 7.30, and came home via a logpile.

Thursday 5th January 12

I spent a good part of the day dealing with assorted paperwork and admin stuff.  I really don't like doing this, but now and again it has to be done!

I found, much to my annoyance and dismay, that our home phone is not working properly... well, at all!  The buttons when pressed don't register the number on the screen with a bleep immediately, making me think that press hadn't made contact... so I pressed it again and thus got the wrong number on the screen... and then when I pressed 'call' it just wouldn't, and finally when I tried to ring it from my mobile the base station rang but the handset didn't.  Very annoying.  I do hope we don't have to buy another phone.

Gill went to the hospital to see why her right elbow was hurting so much, after her tumble.  She came back late lunchtime having had an X-ray, which revealed she has chipped her ulna and burst a synovial bursa.

I needed to make some phone calls and did a couple with my mobile but not those which I had to wait for a long time in a queue... and the lovely Maria round the corner came to my rescue, saying I could come and use hers, mainly for the call I had to make to Yell to deal with a problem with a recent invoice.  I'd already called with my mobile and the 0800 number, which is free from a landline, is not free on a mobile, so I wasn't happy to just wait for 10 minutes and pay I don't know what... so thank you to Maria for letting me do that call from her house.  I also got through to the chap at the Council who the compensation form went to, and he asked us to put Gill's new medical diagnosis in writing and send it to him.

Late in the afternoon I had a bath... washed hair as I was due to perform in Leeds, an event hosted by Leeds Green Drinks, called Yorkshire Green Laughs. 

This was a successful event, doing my balloon show plus banter.  I got some positive feedback. 

Wednesday 4th January 12

Woke fairly late, and had a good chat with a friend who's in a pretty desperate situation.  There's nothing I can do to help, really, apart from listening and being sympathetic.  Lots of this person's friends are offering advice and ideas and these don't help as the person is unable to make any decisions or change their situation.  It all makes me very sad as I'm very fond of them. I hope to go and visit sometime soon.

I didn't get a lot done today really... the only 'things' on were to go to Country Fresh towards 4pm to take some of the last fruit and veg, as today is the last trading day before it closes, and then to take our eldest to Cafe Scientifique in the evening.  I did do mountains of washing up, finished making the soup I started last night, and nearly finished making the passata - stewed, whizzed, sieved tomatoes.

However, I made the trip to Country Fresh into a circular journey, by going via Hazel Court recycling centre to put a load of drinks cartons into the carton bank, some low energy lightbulbs in the CFL barrel, some iron nails etc out of the stove grates into the metal skip, and a load of small plastic bottles in the plastic bottle bank.

Seeing Country Fresh was sad... I've enjoyed my relationship with them for nearly 10 years, helping to reduce the amount they've had to send to landfill.

Tuesday 3rd January 12

Well a very low key day in lots of ways.  Gill and I filled in her Council form to claim for the cost of her glasses, broken when she tripped up over the wonky pavement on the 27th December.  Her bruised right elbow looks horrendous and she's still got a painful forehead and achy knees.

Later, I cycled down to the EcoDepot to hand the form in, and then on to Country Fresh which is having a closing down sale of sorts.  I came back via Freshways and got 2 sacks from there, and there were enough tomatoes in them to make a huge pan of soup AND a pan of stewed tomatoes, which I'll make into a pizza topping or something.

I did quite a bit of washing up and fruit preparation, took a couple of phone calls (hooray, got a Fiddlesticks booking for the end of the month!) and did the usual round of facebook Scrabble and assorted discussions and arguments.

Just before bed-time I popped out and liberated a few more logs from skip-hell.

Monday 2nd January 12

I was woken by our neighbour drilling a wall at 8.40am. I tried to sleep on but couldn't and got up.

Did a good bit of compost heap loading and stacked a few logs. Tried to keep the children entertained.

Did some apples for drying.

Tin of soup for tea.

LETS meeting in Brigantes Bar in the evening.

Monday 12th November 12

A good day.  Sorted out the Energy Day event paperwork for Edward.  This took about half an hour... why oh why hadn't I done it before!

Then at 2pm I met Edward and we discussed the event in January and at 2.30 I zoomed off to the Treemendous meeting.  However, this had already started as I hadn't had an email telling me it was earlier than first advertised. Katie Rees was telling us about her Forest School project, Kindle Woods.

The rest of the meeting was good, and it finished at 4 when the York Environment Forum meeting started in the Council Chamber upstairs.  This too was an interesting meeting, with presentations from the Council's Low Emissions Strategy officer, and her colleague who is promoting the benefits of electric cars.

This was followed by a presentation by an 'energy industry insider' who gave us a really good background about electricity generation.

These presentations overran, so my short piece was postponed and that left Edward to do the bit about the Towards a Sustainable York 2013 event, right at the end.

I collected compostables from Emre at Fruit and Veg, and got home for a late tea, which I made myself.

Tuesday 6th November 12

Up early and I did the 'bread run', cycling round to Thomas The Baker and getting loaves and rolls from the Yesterbake shelves. Then I sorted out a quite large volume of compostables from the kitchen and conservatory, and did a bit of HotBin management, scraping out the bottom layers and putting them into the dalek next to it. I did a bit of lime-stick stacking and at midday, Shirley arrived with her car full of mixed willow twigs, most of them very small and in fact, probably better for composting rather than fuel.  It will take me AGES to process that lot!

After lunch I got ready to go to Sheffield, and I got the 3.44 train.  I met River in Sheffield station, and we went for a meal together; I had pumpkin ravioli.  At 6 we went to the event we'd both come to attend, Sense about Sex.  This was part of the Economic and Social Research Council Science Festival and they marketed the event as Sex myths and sex research.

However, I think it was wider than this. The facebook event page promoted it with this:

Join us in Sheffield on 6th November for an evening of discussion and debate about sex, sexuality and sexualisation. We will be exploring common myths, assumptions and attitudes about sex and drawing on cutting edge scientific and social research to consider how we might look at things differently.

* What is normal sex? And who is having it?
* Is society becoming too sexualised?
* Are young people becoming sexual too early?

* What impact does pornography have on people?
* How can we find out what we'll enjoy sexually? And how do we tell our partners about it?
* What secrets do sex therapists learn about what people get up to in the bedroom?
* Why was 50 Shades of Grey so popular?
* How common are sexual problems and what can be done about them?
* Where do our sexual desires come from?
* How do orgasms work?
* Can you get addicted to sex? Has the internet made this more of a risk?
* Sexually speaking, are men from mars and women from venus?
* What new rules are there for sexual relationships?
* Is the media sexualising our children?
* When it comes to sex, what are the vital statistics?

The evening will take the format of a question-time discussion where you can put your queries and comments to a panel of experts including Feona Attwood (porn researcher and author of Mainstreaming Sex and porn.com), Clarissa Smith (author of One for the Girls and regular expert witness in sex-related legal cases), Clare Bale (expert on sex in young people), and Meg Barker (sex therapist and author of Rewriting the Rules).

Well, as you can imagine, it was fascinating stuff. 

I'd not really heard of 'society becoming too sexualised' and didn't really know what that was about. However, it's a fascinating subject.  Not all of these questions were discussed, and there was quite a bit of 'debunking'.

Afterwards, there was an hour before the train I wanted to get so a group of us retired to the bar next door, and chatted.  Clarissa was on the same train as me so we chatted all the way back. 

I got in at about 11pm, feeling intellectually refreshed.