Christmas plastic madness

This blog has had its fair share of yuletide rants, not about the event itself but the tide of consumerism that submerges any notion of what this festival is actually about.

Our two great recycling emporiums have been trawled for our re-gifted gifts along with various why-would-anyone-want-to-say-goodbye-to-this shetland jumpers/cashmere scarves etc from Vinted. Lovely foodstuffs such as local honey, handmade chocolates and olive oil from someone who has an olive grove in Portugal and brings up regular supplies will make up the other presents, and although I might buy a few oddities in NOZ (a whole other blog post) I'll avoid the bigger shops.

I had to go into Action (terrifying shop full of 95% non essential goods) to look for a loo brush ( I do draw the line on second hand very occasionally) and was transfixed by the festival of festive tat on offer, the most ridiculous of all: special celebration of the the birth of Jesus dog bed, and - this stuff signals the near ending of the human race if ever there was a sign - a hefty plastic pot containing yuletide white candy floss containing flecks of gold. I've seen many of these pots and each time it's a palm to head slapping duh astonishment moment - a one-use plastic pot containing spun sugar . . . what crazies thought of this, and why, money of course, and especially at this cash-it-in time of the year. Well, time to go and wrap some stuff up in old maps of France I found at Emmaus earlier.

Joyeuse Noël.

Human folly

Follies... odd little buildings without particular usage, playful, harmless. Folly, from the French (folie) meaning foolishness. Nothing wrong with a bit of playfulness in architecture, or your own pimped garden shed, but then there's the bigger and more scary version of the word, folly, which seems to be appearing with rapidity in this world of shrinking natural 'resources' and ever-increasing pollution.

After doing a spot of garden reconstruction yesterday, revelling in the very early signs of spring and feeling how important it is that we embrace all the smaller stuff: birdsong, shapes of trees, simple food made with as-local-as-possible ingredients, examining in detail our local environment, etc etc, I came indoors to start work on the audiobook and happened to see the front page of the online guardian. 

My peaceful thoughts transmogrified into utter incredulity as I stared at the picture of the latest and gargantuanly (if that's a word) huge cruise ship - Icon of the Seas. In a time of human shift towards a probable extinction event - yes it could happen; it's happened before many times - it seems unthinkable that people are still wishing and able to create bigger, grosser, plastic-filled, fuel guzzling atrocities such as this. 

But it's ok... it runs on green energy. Oh . . . yes, right. LNG. Natural gas - natural. It just appears magically without consequences of further climate disruption and vast levels of pollution. 

I personally don't understand the draw of cruises anyway. The few crossings I took on the piddly (in comparison) ferries between Britain and France I found only possible either by lying on the floor - preferably in a cabin - or standing on deck even in horizontal freezing rain. The idea of being trapped on a astronomically huge boat with around eight thousand other people - however manically happy they might be - (or not, if you are a member of the two thousand or so staff) is the stuff of technicolour nightmares, not to mention being swept along within a stream of slightly claustrophobic humans keening for on-land distractions when the mega-boat finally docks somewhere. 

The vessel has an infinity pool, so you can sit and look at a chlorine infested stretch of water hovering above the real ocean infinity, along with seven other pools and spas, a highly naff water park (thrill island), a 55 foot indoor waterfall (?!), and all the usual gyms, cinemas etc, etc. As far as food goes apparently there are forty ways to dine....an odd statement - on one leg? smothered in foam, being lectured by a rabid maths teacher, surrounded by hyenas, suspended above a giant vat of custard; sitting alone at a small corner table while Gordon Ramsey picks your meal apart - what the fuck is this!, naked in front of a gospel choir? and that's just seven . . .

Give me a small rowing boat and a tranquil river in early June - waving river weed, dragonflies, weeping willows, and a picnic, maybe with a bottle of Cava thrown in. Or just a flask of tea. That'll do.

The doings

One's intestinal activities as described by Lord Peter Wimsey . . . although, you will be, dear reader, glad to know that this post is more about the doings of our house.

When you buy a house in France, possibly the same in other countries, one of the main things that crops up, rather like the cam belt in a second hand car, is, has the fosse septique been done? Inevitably if its an older house the answer is, no. Add a boring waste of several thousands of euros to the list of things that will have to be done and sign at the notaires where they will remind you that this has to be dealt with within a year. 

We did consider ignoring this as the current system, just like in the house we left, functioned perfectly well. The fact that the our new abode's fosse is a pipe that runs from the house, under the road and into a field situated in the next department of France was never going to result in a shrug of the shoulders and a beh . . . ça va aller from the scary SPANC people - water authorities or, Small, Pancake-Adoring Newt Catchers.

Within a week of moving in I was already checking the various options knowing any system would take months to sort out. Option One: Huge plastic thing the size of a van buried in the ground which would have to be emptied by one of those poop lorries. Option two: A micro station. As far as I could tell this was similar but cost a bit more. Option three. Phytoépuration. A reed bed system which has only been approved by the small pancake adoring newt catchers relatively recently. It costs a little more, but doesn't have to be emptied and you can at least see at what you were forced to spend money on. That being a very large wood-clad concrete box containing reeds, sand etc.

We possibly could have done it ourselves but I could imagine the endless checking and rechecking, list of things we had done wrong, crashing the hired mini-digger into trees, and so on. With so many other house issues to be dealt with we went for the paying-through-nose option and eventually the rep from Aquataris appeared, measured the ground, did various carrotages (long sections of earth) to check the drain-ability etc and deemed that it was very likely that it would all be approved. It was approved after several weeks and the work planned for mid-may; also timed that the plumbers could link it all up at the appropriate moment and that any doings would move effortlessly - nice! into the new system rather than old pipe into field.

The day arrived, and unlike the plumbers, the firm of landscapers commissioned to do the job turned up! already a great plus. My imaginings of a totally green system fairly quickly evaporated as I noted the arrival of huge amounts of plastic pipe, plastic sheeting, plastic other things but still a lot less plastic than we would have purchased with option one or two. The employee was a blur of movement for three days, digging trenches, sawing concrete plaques, laying sheeting, gravel, sand, planting reeds and much more. He finished before the plumbers turned up, left me with instructions (eek) and was off to the next installation. Apparently these are becoming more and more favoured with the company completing one a week in our area.

So, it's done, all connected up and the baby reeds have already grown several inches in a week. I do recall my mother saying, however, that when she was a child, her father put their doings in a pit in the garden then when it was rotted they used it on the veg plot. Cost of . . . nothing, no meters of plastic tube, no pumps, no concrete, just rather amazing vegetables . . . 

I liked the tube in the field, and we could have bought a harpsichord, or built a big pond or bought a newer car instead. Sob. SPANC are coming to check the installation next week and according to the installer we may have to put up a temporary small plastic fence and then take it away again when they have gone. I can't imagine how anyone would drown in slightly damp sand before which they would have to remove the metal grid system to get at the sand. And I really hope we don't have to pay an extra fifty euros to have the pleasure of seeing the plastic fence for fifteen minutes which I think was on the quote. Madness. All of it. However I still feel it's better than seeing a large piece of disturbed turf under which would be something one spent a vast sum of money on which would never be visible again until it was deemed to be beyond its serviceable life and would have to be dug up and replaced with another van-sized plastic thing. 

                                                       Cheaper option at 12 euros 53 cents.

There is no hope

Well, hopefully there is hope, a bit anyway but at moments like this - when I went in to a hypermarket earlier mainly to use their loo - one does despair. A glass of freezing coke from a frosted bottle on a boiling day is a treat I indulge in maybe three times a year, knowing that my teeth and in fact the rest of me will thank me for not washing down the thirty-nine grams of sugar contained in the mysterious brown liquid more frequently than that.

But that's just part of it. No one needs to drink coke, or any other soda. Look at the sheer enormity of the plastic used to fill just one supermarket's allotted coke aisle. A massive aisle of it! Just this one product. Plastic bottles, plastic packaging, sugar, colouring, caffeine, landfill. Ignore the science. Ignore the warnings. Just keep raking in the money.

Rant over. I'm going to sit down with a book and a lovely glass of tap water.

Serious shit

We are in it.

While travelling from France to the UK recently, I was struck more strongly than before - possibly as I my trip concerned absolutely nothing of frivolity (refer to next post when it eventually appears) - of how current human life seems to revolve around shopping and acquiring stuff. And most of it being plastic-centred.
Stansted's airport's shopping maze just said it all really with an unintended pre-apocalyptic message. I bought a banana encased in its own wrapping and travelled on, noting the Central Line had been entirely taken over by Apple's latest marketing strategy, and eventually arrived at my destination.

                                  



I stood in Boots yesterday after going in search of toothpaste (nothing at all available in a metal tube, of course) and felt very frightened by the shelves, aisles and displays of mostly totally unnecessary products. I've felt this sort of creeping worry for years but yesterday it was more of a looming awareness of some unpleasant end of the way we choose to exist, and not as far off as most of us might think.

Below, an extract from, The Mad Dog Café, part three of a trilogy I wrote back in 2013, in part concerning the state of play regarding overconsumption. Cameron has gone to stay with his hoarder parents and sister in Scotland.

"You'll live here?"

    Andrea nodded. "Yes. It's fine, a room will do - somewhere I can shut myself off from everything and the parents. They're happy about it, someone in the house to help as they get older, and no overheads for me."

    "It sounds a good arrangement," said Cameron, shuddering at the thought. "What are you going to study?"

    "Philosophy and economics. I’d already done an Open University degree a couple of years back when I was beginning to question my blind faith. What happened rather clarified my thoughts."

    "Will you look for a job?"

    "Maybe something part time, but there's really no point."

    "No point?"

   "Cameron. Go back to your life and live it to the full, while you can."

   "Meaning what exactly?"

    Andrea looked at him with her large grey eyes, brow furrowed. "Don't you ever wonder where we are, us, the human race? Don't you feel everything has accelerated far too quickly?"

     "Well, yes I do, but we are rather cut off from what most people would think of as normal life. I suppose I don't dwell on it too much, we're so busy with the restaurant and everything, the kids . . . "

    "You should perhaps dwell on it. Just think about Kirkaldy for example – six supermarkets, six! in this relatively small town. Each supermarket is stuffed to the hilt with food, but not just food – choice. Choice. It's an evil word. We've come to expect choice of everything and the manufacturers use that, more and more, and more choice of things we don't need. Do you remember that first Sainsbury's?"

    "Not really, no."

    "Well, I'm older than you . . . Mother used to take me there when it first opened. I can just recall the yogurt section, there was one, or perhaps two brands, and they offered plain, strawberry and toffee, that was it!" How much choice do we need?" 

    "None really, we just make our own yogurt and add things to it."

    "Exactly. That's what people used to do. But it's most worrying when you start thinking about it on a large scale. Kirkcaldy. Six supermarkets, each with a yogurt aisle five yards long – Fife with a population of around three hundred and sixty thousand, shopping in probably thirty supermarkets each with five yard long yogurt aisles. Scotland, how many supermarkets, how many shoppers, how much yogurt?"

    "And that's just yogurt," reflected Cameron.

    "Yes," Andrea continued, "think of everything else apart from food. Cheap jewellery, televisions, toys, toiletries; mountains of plastic in each supermarket or electronics store in each town. The way the goods are produced, the water used, the pollution, the conditions people live in who make most of this stuff. The planet can't support this. Children need to be taught about real life, earth, plants, skills that have been forgotten, while there's still a chance."

    "You think it's too late."

    "We got lost somewhere. We reached the point and moved beyond it."

    "You mean it's all downhill from now?"

    "I think so."

    "So, when was the point we should have slowed down."

    "I often wonder about that. Probably before computers really took hold, perhaps in the mid-seventies."

    "We'd still be stuck with shag-pile carpets and terrible fashion."

    "It's not a joke, Cameron, our governments can't even unite to stop the production of plastic bags let alone nuclear warheads. Something is coming . . . look at the weather, how long ago did we see the sun here? Cameron, go back, grow your garden, teach your children, make something for a different future."

    "What are you going to do?"

    "Learn, write, teach perhaps, make a small difference if I can. I'll look after the parents, I don't have other responsibilities like you do." 

    "I said I'd help them clear things out, do some alterations."

    "It's not that easy, it would take months and they don't really want change. I'm fine in that room and they have money to do repairs, I'll deal with it. Go home."

    "We'll keep in touch, Andrea. It's so stupid that we never have done."

    "I've changed and I don't blame you for not wanting to know the old me. Yes, keep in touch, if you like."

    Cameron stood up, cold from sitting too long in the chilled room.

    "Come and visit."

    "No, I don't think so." She smiled a little, stood up and went towards the door with a pile of plates, an odd figure; a school teacher from the nineteen-twenties in her long dress and bobbed grey hair. 

    "Goodbye, Cameron."  

    Cameron went upstairs to the bathroom pausing on the way to look in the box room.  It could have been a monastery chamber with its white walls and single bed; the upside-down metal cross on the wall made it less likely however. On another wall hung a print of an apocalyptic John Martin painting, the menacing clouds and crashing sea, strident against the plain paintwork. 

    Under the window lurked a small desk covered with papers and books. Cameron glanced at the titles: World Economics. What is Faith? Panglossery versus Pessimism, Back to the Land, The Road. 

    A large semi-dismembered bible lay on the left of the desk, its pages scattered, some Sellotaped to the wall, paragraphs circled in red. 

    He left the room, suddenly aware of trespassing into a life, a life that should have been known to him, but was not. 

    He closed the door quietly, and went down the corridor to the bathroom. The light bulb had gone; Cameron peed in the semi-darkness, the room's cluttered contents lit up intermittently by a guttering street lamp. 

    He moved through the wreckage and looked out of the window. The rain still hammered down, the black silhouettes of the trees waving wildly.

    Andrea was right. He would go back, tomorrow, early; the parents probably wouldn't even notice. 

                      

                    

Two ferrets and a Soda Stream

Nope - not a new Curtis film, the result of going early to a Vide Grenier (car-boot/yard-sale) this morning - not that perhaps anyone else would have bought ancient taxidermy specimens. (Except Andy, if you read this). Five euros a piece - s'got be a bargain! The soda stream has yet to be tried but I can't see there's much to go wrong there.

                                 

So, what else has this season's scavenging unearthed? It's been a good few Sundays - last week procuring several shirts for Mark at a euro each. Actually, this is odd - how we always seem to find him shirts as he's not exactly a standard Southern France man shape, more Nordic, Viking, even.
Last weekend also resulted in clothes for me, a huge salad platter, an exceptionally nice etching for 5 euros, teapots to replace broken ones, a 1970s wall-hanging to funk-up Mark's music room and various other (mostly) useful items. Why anyone bothers to shop for new stuff is a mystery to me - OK I draw the line at certain things like . . . underwear, and . . . that's about it. Maybe not a second-hand pressure cooker - bit scary.
 A bit scary, is also how much stuff we, the human race - or at least the members of it who have manufactured all these non-vital things - have managed to accumulate over a relatively short period of time. This was just one small amassing of a few folk's spare room rubbish, in one small French village. Imagine all the millions of boot sales and variants of, all over the world. Eek. We are indeed heading towards a possibly not too distant new Earth-Epoch - Plasticusgallusossum era, perhaps. A plastic and chicken bone sedimentary layer. The end of the consumers.
Oo, dear, this is getting a tad dark.
Time for a cup of tea in one of our new 1970s brown teapots.



                 Suitably apocalyptic and lovely etching from a couple of Sundays back.

A thing of beauty

I think William Morris would have liked these.



Yes, its a tiny thing in the face of all the MASSIVE plastic issues our planet and we are facing, but if we all bought wooden dish-brushes rather than the plastic versions . . .
Monoprix make, or at least sell these for just over two euros and they are a small work of art in every way.

Present day conspiracies

Apart from all the stuff about Facebook, certain people in Cambridge rigging election campaigns, etc, etc; this is stuff on a smaller domestic scale but that also has a vast implications for us and our our planet.

Cleaning products.




Photo from: familiesagainsttoxicproducts.org

We, who like to think we are environmentally aware, have been happily (well, not happily - uninterestedly, perhaps) buying various cleaning products over the years thinking they are invaluable and necessary to the household chores. I have always, or certainly in the last few years, bought items said to be non-harming to land, water, flora and fauna - and that are also housed in 'recyclable' plastic bottles.
But why do we feel we need all this stuff? Adverts presumably, and that our parents used such things - actually, I don't recall my mother using anything at all other than a bit of washing up liquid, but then she was rather Quentin Crisp about cleaning - after five years the dust doesn't get any worse, I think he was quoted on saying.
Some years back a group of friends in our region got together and started growing, collecting and drying herbs to make into a general house-hold cleaning product; mixed with vinegar - a easily found by-product of the wine industry here - culminating in an excellent product called VAM. At the local bio store you can buy an initial bottle, then keep going back for the re-fills. It's brilliant for floors, surfaces, everything, especially used in conjunction with bicarb of soda - and you get an exciting little fizzing chemical reaction for added excitement.
Maybe it's not 'spring meadow' (chemical)-perfumed or not quite as mega-grime removing as some of the more caustic products, but how deep-cleaned do we all really need to be? Yes, maybe in a hospital, but probably not at home.
I once saw a program about anti-bacterial sprays where the crew went around an average house and checked out what was lurking in places that people usually get scared about - sinks, loos, et al, and nothing harmful was discovered. The program's maker also suggested we invite a lot of our own modern-day allergies through being over zealous with spays, air-fresheners and wipes.

Plastic

                               

Do we really need (thick) plastic cat-head crunchies containers - small cardboard box? 

                                

Violently-coloured, huge plastic drums containing body-building . . . stuff including calf's whey

Where to start? We all know from the zillions of films circulating about seas full of discarded plastic, and rubbish dumps as high as office blocks that we and our planet have a massive problem, but if we could all make small changes, the message to manufacturers would gradually, or possibly, rapidly, seep through.
Here's a picture of Mark's home-made ketchup (mainly tinned tomatoes, onions and tom paste) housed in the LAST ketchup bottle we will buy. And my attempt at home-made deodorant (lemon juice, bicarb and err, can't remember now) - perfectly effective on a day-to-day basis, although I might occasionally resort to something stronger for scary bureaucratic, bank loan situations, etc.

                                       

We will never time travel

Husband trying to re-connect the small, boingy overflow pipe that was blocked with a happy bacteria colony

Some days you just realise how unlikely it is that we as a race will develop more than we have when sinks still have to be unblocked by unscrewing a filthy plastic bit of plumbing that is impossible to get at and superbly easy to get cross-threaded - and that's the French system. I seem to remember the UK version being even more challenging.
I doubt that every home will have a robot that will cook, stack the dishwasher, answer the phone and unblock your sink, or that we will live on packs of space food and be able to tune into what everyone is thinking - or at least I hope not.
I sometimes wonder if we should have stopped and taken stock in the 1970s; about the time that cassette recorders were wildly exciting and plastic hadn't completely taken over the planet - but then I would be writing this in a notebook and no one except me and perhaps a few bored friends would ever see my musings . . . I wonder if there's any wine in the fridge. Yes, wine, cheddar and an episode of something comforting.

Further, further, further proof

that the world is a mad and dangerous place.

On a trip to our local DIY shed a few days ago to buy a plank, I stopped in amazement at a display topped by a gabbling televisual advert for an incrementally-descending loo lid.
Yes, folks, it is true! There is an end to all that terrible worry and domestic noise pollution caused by the clack of plastic against plastic, or wood against wood if you have a posh lav. . .
For years I have felt troubled by this, disturbed you might say, even avoiding the toilet altogether and peeing in the garden so not to be plagued by this awful, house-vibrating sound . . . finally a solution! Praise the Lord of all invention!
But really. Who would buy such a thing for nearly forty euros? Quite a few people apparently if the diminished pile was anything to go by.
What could you buy with forty euros? Let me see . . . toilet paper to last for a year (if you are a little puritan with it - which one should be), lunch out for two, a good donation to Oxfam; the entire box set of Spiral (fantastic) a mahogany loo seat with gold hinges, a night in a sordid motel with your lover, a new shirt, a hairdo, a massage/reflexology/shrink session, a tree, or even two trees depending on the age of it/them, a budgie, a vast chocolate cake and a bottle of fizz and invite a load of people round for tea . . . or you could buy a plastic widget that will make your loo lid become silent.
I don't think anyone in our house ever puts the lid down anyway. Are we bad people?