Tuesday 22nd February 11

A really lovely day... doing one of my favourite activities, working in a 'special school'.

So I had a small lie-in but got up before 10 and packed up all my gear, my backpack with costume, balloons, feathers, 4 wheel and 2 wheel unicycles, my kit bag with sticks, juggling balls and diabolos, my small unicycle and big unicycle, plus my 'handbag' with reading matter, diary, and sandwiches.  Gill plaited my hair, which I washed last night so it was lovely and shiny.

Packed the bike and headed to the station at about 11, as I needed to get my tickets for my trip to London at the end of March.  I am travelling down on the Friday morning and back on Saturday evening; my talk is Saturday afternoon.  I got my ticket to Brough too, and headed to platform 7 for the 11.53 train.  I'd ordered a taxi last night to pick me up from Brough and take me to St Anne's School, and it was waiting for me.

I was ready to do my show by 1.10, and I had about 20 children come along, with a good number of adults with them, as many of them needed support and help; some needed preventing from coming out of the audience area and interfering with the equipment behind me.  However, a core group were happy to watch and interact, I got 4 children up to do devilsticks, maybe 10 to balance feathers, they loved 'Derek the Diabolo' especially when I had to tell him off for misbehaviour, and several volunteers had a go on the 4 wheel unicycle.  The balloon show and workshop was fun too.  We finished sometime after 3pm, I got changed again and Kay sorted out my paperwork, and I got a lift with Carol who was going back into Brough.  I had to wait for the 4.22 but I read my NewScientist. On the train, though, I dozed.

I had been invited to go and see Caroline Lucas on her flying visit to York, scheduled to be at 4.45 at the library.  I knew my train wasn't supposed to get in til 5.15, so I thought I'd miss half of her talk.  We got in early at 5.08, i loaded my trailer and cycled like the wind along to the library, locked up, gathered all my clobber, and as I walked in, Caroline was just walking through the library into the side room where the Green Party meeting was.  She'd just finished giving an interview with Radio York (interview here, 2 hours 6 minutes in).  She spoke very eloquently to the group who had come to hear her speak, about the Green alternative to the ConDem cuts.  The Greens would invest in green jobs, such as the 100 jobs created in Kirklees, insulating peoples' houses and fitting energy efficiency measures, which help people keep warmer for less money.  These workers pay tax and their income means they are able to buy goods, which also raises revenue... the work they are doing cuts carbon emissions and improves quality of life.  This scheme was brought in by Green Councillors.  There are countless other green jobs.... for instance, we have one of the World's best wind and wave resources, and we could be heading towards energy security if we invested heavily.  The Greens would not renew the nuclear submarine Trident scheme, saving £100 billion over 30 years, and would introduce the 'Robin Hood Tax' which wouldn't take away from ordinary people at all, but big financial transactions between banks and traders would have a very very tiny tax slapped on.... raising £20 billion a year, just in this country! 

In the questions at the end, I asked about whether she thought that in the referendum about electoral reform, whether the Alternative Vote system would help the Greens.  Her answer was that it might, to a limited extent, but that if we get AV this time, we are far more likely to get proper fair Proportional Representation in the future.  So I'll be voting for change, for AV, despite not liking AV that much, as it is not nearly as good as PR... but we haven't been given the choice of voting for that.

Caroline left to go and visit Leeds and Wakefield, and after a bit of chatting, loaded up my bike again and cycled over to Bishophill to meet a Freecycler, Tracy, who'd offered a packet of dried kidney beans.  I'd been chosen as the lucky recipient... her reason for giving it away was that whenever she thought to have them, they needed soaking first, and she never got around to doing this the previous day!  Well Gill and I often plan meals a day or two in advance, so this won't be a problem for us.  Thank you Tracy!

Then I came home, via 2 sacks of recycling from Freshways, getting in at 7pm.  For tea I had some rissoles Gill had made from the remains of yesterday's rice, some new potatoes, and the unusual mushrooms found thrown away on Friday night.  They were quite nice.... the texture was rather soft, and I wouldn't buy them, although rescuing them from a bin is a completely different matter!

A happy evening; my New Zealand relative Wendy hasn't been squashed in an earthquake, and I'm deeply saddened for those who have, or rather their families and friends.  So I watched YouTube vids of that quake and the devastation (for instance, this), and other online things, and then caught a programme about David Nash, a sculptor who works in wood, and I think he probably becomes my 3rd favourite sculptor, after Peter Randall-Page and Andy Goldsworthy.

Friday 7th May 10 Election Count

A very memorable day!!!

I had an exciting night at the election count at Oaklands Sports Centre, now rebranded as 'Energize'. Firstly there was a wait as the count wasn't going to start until all the ballot boxes were in. There were two counts, York Central and York Outer, with the hall split into two halves. Sometime after midnight the first boxes were tipped out onto the tables, starting with number 1, and then working through to the low 60s with the Central count, as this was the constituency I was interested in, as the Greens didn't stand in York Outer.

The first job was to check whether the number of ballot papers matched the tally on the sheets taken by the officials in the polling stations. So the ballots were sorted into bundles of 50 for easy counting. This allowed us to look at particular polling disrticts to see what the balance was, so as the ballots were unfolded and put on the pile, I noted whether it was UKIP (hardly any) Hugh Bayley the sitting Labour MP (lots) our man Andy Chase, (just a few) the racist BNP (even fewer) Christian Vassie for the Lib Dems (quite a few but not as many as Labour), Eddie Vee the Loony Elvis Impersonator (virtually none) and Susan Wade Weeks the 'Greenest Tory in the land' (similar numbers to the Lib Dems). I used the 'four-bar gate with a fifth cross-bar' method of tallying. This initial tally told us that Hugh Bayley would retain the seat. It also 'worked' as on one table, a counter put 51 in one pile by accident, and the ballots were rejected as it didn't match the numbers on the sheet. The wads of 50 were recounted and the error found.

All the ballot boxes and postal votes were counted before the second stage of the process. This was where the bundles of 50 were sorted into the 7 candidates. Here, the observers' job was to watch very carefully to see that the right ballot papers were going into the correct pile. It is easy to make a mistake, faced with thousands of forms to sort. I pointed out several errors, where a sorter put a ballot paper in the wrong pile, so close and astute observation is really important. At this stage, the spoilt ballot papers are weeded out. There were a few with no mark whatsoever, and a few with a cross against more than one candidate, or all of them! Some ballots had the mark in the area of their candidate, but not in the box where it should be... for instance, one had the number on the left circled rather than a cross or tick in the box on the right. There were waved at the officer who was collecting the piles of ballots, and she decided whether it was a valid vote, or needed to be seen by the candidates for a decision. There were also quite a few ballots I saw with messages to the candidates, including one with the 'CRASS' anarchy logo scrawled across, and another saying 'I cannot vote for any of you'', and another with a lot of pictograms of male genitalia against the 3 main parties and the UKIP and BNP (not the Greens though!!!) and several others. These are put in a 'spoilt ballot' pile and the candidates check them to see they are indeed spoilt. There were a few with 'difficult to decide' marks, where perhaps the voter first put the cross in the wrong place and scrubbed it out and put it in the intended place. These are shown to the candidates and they decide if it is a spoilt ballot or 'belongs' to one candidate. There are usually over 100 spoilt ballots in an election of this size.

After all the ballots for each candidate are put together, they are put back on the table and counted into bundles of 50, for the final count. The counter makes a bundle of 50, and then swaps with their colleague who also counts it, so each bundle is counted twice. During this counting, usually with a rubber thimble, any incorrectly placed ballots might also be spotted, as all the crosses should be in the same place.

Finally, the bundles of 50 are all put together under the candidate's name and it is easy to count them for the final result. All this took about 5 hours, and the announcement was just before 5am.

The results were Bayley 18,573; Wade Weeks 12,122; Vassie 11,694; Chase 1,669; BNP 1,171; UKIP 1,100 and Eddie Vee just 154. There was a 61% turnout.

After the results were announced Bayley did his acceptance speech, with lots of thank yous for the staff, his team, his wife and lots of others, and all the other candidates spoke briefly.

Then we were done. I cycled home and got in just before 6am. I put the telly on and had a bowl of cereal. Within the hour, the result from Brighton Pavillion came in, and the news I'd been waiting to hear for some time... that Caroline Lucas had won the seat... our first Green Member of Parliament!!! A historic day, a joyous day. The interweb lit up with messages of joy and congratulations. I was quite emotional.

I also started getting messages of birthday congratulation, as it's my birthday today. I couldn't have wished for a better present than Caroline's win.

I stayed up til the boys came down before going to school, and then retired to bed. However, there was a phone call at 11 which woke me up (the car hire company, worse luck!), and I then stayed up til about 2.30 when I went to bed for another two and a half hours.

I did a very short stint in the garden but there was another phone call which brought me back in. But it was a booking for the summer Fair for the Madhyamaka Centre, which was nice.

Gill made a pizza and baked a butternut squash. A nice birthday tea. She also made a cake for the St Nicks 10th Anniversary tomorrow and a pile of buns, each with '10' in icing on the top.

A very memorable and enjoyable day.

Thursday 22nd April 10

Another good day. I got up at 8.30 and did assorted things around the house, and Gill went to the GP as she's had a very painful foot for months and months. She has often wondered if she has broken a bone in there.

I washed up. I found a way to get the solar hot water through without the boiler kicking in. Firstly I checked the temperature on the tank in the loft... the incoming temperature from the solar panel was 80 degrees Celsius. So this was hot enough to bypass the boiler and be mixed down with cold water to a reasonable temperature for it to come out of the tap. But we don't think the system is working properly, as when we turn the hot tap on, even with the tank so hot, the boiler goes on. I need to contact the installers to get this checked. So what I did was to turn the hot tap on with a low flow, too low a flow to make the boiler kick in. A few litres later (water for the Papyrus plant!) the water ran warm, enough to do the pots, pans, plates and cutlery. I was very pleased. When Gill came in she said she'd been having showers like that for a while! I checked the temperature afterwards, back up in the loft, and despite the sun still shining fully on the panel, it had gone down to 76, proving that some of the hot water in the tank had been replaced by cold. Result!

I went to the bread shop and got two small loaves and six bags of rolls and some Danish pastries and some flapjack offcuts... all for £4. That's the beauty of Yesterbake!

On the way back I couldn't help seeing several builders vans outside a house, which was having a huge log cabin built in the back garden. There were loads of offcuts already available, actually I think it was packing wood.. as the planks were fixed to steel bands, fortunately easy to pull off the planks, so I asked the builders and they were very happy to see the stuff go. I took one trailer load before lunch and at about 2pm, went to pick up a second load. There were also a vast quantity of thin slivers of wood, again, something to do with the packing, so I brought those home too, and I broke each one of those into about 4 pieces and popped them into a sack... I got 5 potato sacks full of kindling. Excellent. They also said I was welcome to have the pallets.

When our youngest came in from school he had a friend with him and we all chatted together about the things they have done, as he's been on a special day up at Manor School and seen a video about electrocution, and not playing on the railways, and various other things. Apparently it was 'pretty random'.

I dug out about half of the metal-sided compost bin into the builders sack. I riddled another sack of mature compost dug out of the builders bag yesterday. I had a lot of interest from some robins, and I put a small yellow centipede on the palm of my hand and held it out... and one of the robins came and pecked it off my hand. Hand-feeding robins! Lovely!

I had fried egg sandwiches for tea. We have more eggs than we need, some out of date ones, so I used those.

Later I finished breaking up the kindling and watched the politicians debate on BBC2 after it had gone out on Sky which we don't have. I think they are all grey parties. None of them inspire me. Caroline Lucas inspires me. I will be voting Green.

Sunday 11th April 10

A good start to the morning as Gill came up and told me that Caroline Lucas was going to be on the Andrew Marr Show, so I came down and woke up with Caroline.

I spent a bit of time writing about how we reduce our water use, spurred on by the Yorkshire Water 'Edna and Mary' campaign,and when I've finished this page, I'll send them the link.

But I couldn't stay in for too long, and there was lots still to do in the garden so I got out and got busy. I chopped yet more blackberries back, pruned a hedge (it was too long and lanky to use shears, needed the secateurs) and shredded all this, did more compost heap turning and started filling the smaller Compostumbler. I dug up some deeply buried yams, cleaned mortar off some bricks for our neighbour to use in the wall he's building, and then at about 2.30, Barry Potter came and delivered the cider press back to me, which he's had since the autumn. We wandered down the garden and I showed him the corroded large Compostumbler, and he thinks that he might be able to fashion a solution for it. He/we need a stainless steel angled bar, which might be able to be retrofitted to strengthen the rather flimsy thin steel Compostumbler side wall.

Then I did more stuff in the garden, including some riddling and I dug out the red apple tree which I got out of the Radio Times for £6 quite a long time ago. Although it is on a dwarfing rootstock, it is crowding the 'family' pear tree and the white apple it came with, and it fell over with the weight of apples and the wet ground a year or so back, so I needed to remove it. I'll try to find a good home for it.

Later in the afternoon I went to Country Fresh to do some shopping and came back with two sacks of resources, so I popped in to St Nicks on the way back.

After tea I had a good bounce on the trampoline with our youngest, and came in at 9pm when it was dark.

A really busy and productive day.

Thursday 6th November 08

Our wedding anniversary... 9 years married, 15 years since our first kiss... aaahhhhh xxx

I took out little 'un to school and came back and spent some time with Gill, but then went into the garden to put some mature compost into sacks for our friend Alison who's making raised beds. Whilst doing this, I was thinking of something which I did yesterday which led me to feel quite upset and angry.

I had recieved an email from The Carbon Account reminding me to input my gas and electricity meter readings, so my graph of carbon emissions could be updated. I do this at the beginning of every month, and the website software calculates/estimates my annual carbon footprint. I really like this way of presenting the information, as I can see the different levels of carbon emissions from different activities over time. For instance, in August, as we were away for a week, our household emissions visibly dipped very slightly. So, yesterday, I read the meters and put in the new figures, and I decided to do something I had vowed to do back in September when I was expecting a visitor from America. I do not fly, for reasons of high carbon emissions being incompatible with my low carbon lifestyle. When my friend flew over last year to see me and other friends in the UK, I was a bit upset about it as I was contributing to the problem by agreeing to see this friend, and if I hadn't of agreed to spend some time with her, she might not have travelled. So when she indicated she'd like to come and see me again this autumn, I was not that happy and tried to put her off. However, she was intent on visiting and quite pushy and forceful, and I'm not the sort of person who tries to prevent people doing what they want to do. So she flew over and I agreed to spend some time with her. I also said that I would take moral responsibility for one of her flights, carbon-wise. So yesterday, I inputted a single journey from Manchester to Atlanta into my Carbon Account figures and was ASTONISHED to see how much carbon was emitted! My annual electricity emissions are about 250kg and annual gas emissions are just over 60kg... but the one way flight emitted a whopping 1947kg, making 86% of my yearly emissions. I was angry and upset. Not only has this wrecked my lovely graph (which you can see by going onto the site, clicking on 'people' and forwarding to the 'J' section and clicking on the pic of me and Caroline Lucas... you can see how much the spike of aircraft emissions dwarfs my household footprint by clicking on the small-print which says, 'Your emissions (including flights- click here to exclude them)'.

Interestingly, perhaps fortuitously, the visit dd not go well and I won't be seeing the American lady again. This is not due primarily to the fact that to see each other she has to fly, it's because we didn't get on. But the flights thing is an issue and I look forward to next November when that emissions spike disappears from my graph..... It will take longer for those carbon dioxide molecules to go from the atmosphere though, and I apologise to anyone who cares about this planet for re-igniting that friendship (we met as teenagers) and being part cause of those emissions (actually 1947 kg times four, nearly 8 tonnes). Dreadful! I won't even begin to think about my parents who have decided to visit New Zealand. Flying completely wrecks any good we do by recycling or using the bus rather than the car. If you fly, you cannot call yourself 'green', as if you do you are a complete hypocrite, and this is how I feel about myself for agreeing to see this friend. I'll try to put the whole sorry episode behind me.

Barry came to deliver the press and crusher, looked down the garden and drove away with the compost for Alison.

I continued to work in the garden in the drizzle... lovely!

Gill went to town on the bus to get shoes and came back with boots.

I went to school at 3 to help with Green Thumbs. I took a small group and we prepared a mushroom kit in a box.. a layer of straw with mycelium running through it, and a casing layer on top. We then had a good chat about decomposition, and all the types of organism which help... fungi, bacteria, slugs, worms, woodlice... my fave subject!

Home to a happy household, children voluntarily doing homework (a first for everything!) and all peaceful! Totally wow!

I made tea on the woodstove... slices of crook-neck squash, grown in the conservatory, and sweet potato from Country Fresh, and chestnuts from Poppleton Road.. all this along with my son's salad created at school today, yum!

A happy evening too, spent quite a bit of time on the phone with a helpful caller from Tiscali, trying to help me sort out a problem I'm having with emails bouncing back from certain email addresses, many thanks to Anup from Maharashtra who was very good to talk to, professional, and he got the problem more or less sorted (ie the problem is not with Tiscali, it's with, probably, The Phone Co-op... so will contact them next!)

But also had a good game of Scrabble with Gill. I won, just.

Sunday 7th September 08

Gill woke me up as the wonderful Caroline Lucas was on an early-morning politics show being interviewed. I am a fan of hers, and am glad that she has been elected to the position of 'Leader' of the Green Party. Now I didn't really want the Green Party to change and have a leader, although I think that the reasons to have a symbolic leader are pretty convincing. So, despite my reservations about my party having a leader, I think we've got exactly the right person. She is extremely articulate and seemingly an accomplished politician, being able to slag off the 'grey' parties extremely well (ie firmly but politely!) and remind the interviewer that being green is fun, gives a better quality of life than the materialistic capitalist nightmare which is ruining this planet. So I say 'Good Luck Caroline' and I hope you become the first of many Green Party MPs.
The rest of the day was marred by homework... well, not homework in itself, but the children's attitude to it, and their behaviour towards Gill and myself. They are incredibly resistant to actually getting on with it. They need constant cajoling, encouragement and help. And even then, there are many bouts of CENSORED...

I went to the allotment for over 3 hours, dug up loads of potatoes and onions.