Going Wild

I am trying, little by little, to reduce the amount of plastic, especially single use plastic, I use. I have a long way to go, but try to take small positive steps in the right direction. My latest switch is to a refillable deodorant. I ordered a starter pack of Wild Natural Deodorant, which arrived earlier this week. So far, so good. It is a deodorant, not an anti-perspirant, so feels a bit different but seems to be working OK. You get a reusable case, made of metal and recycled plastic in a choice of colours, and a refill in recyclable/compostable packaging. I picked a rose fragrance for the first refill, and have set up a subscription order for three other scents to try over the next few months. I like that it is all natural, vegan ingredients, as well as being more sustainable and plastic free. The downside is that it is going to work out more expensive, but I'm in the fortunate position that I can afford to pay a bit more for a "greener" option, and I know it is helping to support a small company rather than putting extra profits into the coffers of a giant conglomerate.  

I have also been decluttering and sorting out clothes this week. M had a last box of stuff from the garage to take to a charity shop this morning, and I managed to fill a bag of clothes for him to take with it. Unfortunately in a rush to add a few last bits I managed to scrape my arm on the edge of a metal basket and give myself an impressive scratch on my arm. Oops! Fortunately it looks worse than it is and there wasn't much blood! I am aiming to do something approximating to Project 333 and sort out a capsule wardrobe of 33 items for 3 months. I still have some more wardrobe sorting and decluttering to do, but it is starting to look much tidier - partly because out of season clothes are in over-full boxes under the bed.

H is back from her trip to Italy. It was an easy run to the airport, taking just over 90 minutes each way for a 90 mile run. It is always a bit unpredictable as it includes a large, unavoidable and busy chunk of the M25 London orbital motorway, which on a bad day can lead to big delays. Today was good, with only one five minute delay on the way there and none on the way back. She had a good time and found it fairly similar to the UK in terms of Covid precautions, though with more people wearing masks outdoors and masks compulsory when moving around in restaurants. She was staying in Umbria, which escaped the worst of the outbreak and has had only 30 Covid deaths. 

Busy Week!

Whew! Last week zoomed past at speed. Most of it was taken up with work. Unusually, I had tight deadlines for both jobs - the archives deadline partly self-imposed, as I wanted to get something finished as I have another two weeks' leave to take this week and next week. I should have been in Florida with H and TG for our long planned and much anticipated trip to DisneyWorld, but 2020 happened, so we are not. H is at least enjoying her trip to Italy. Yesterday she sent me pictures from Rome, which looks even more deserted than Central London when I visited three weeks ago. She has also been to Siena, San Gimignano and Montepulciano, spent time relaxing by the lake, and eaten lots of pasta and ice cream. She will be back tomorrow, so I will be driving to Gatwick Airport to collect her and and her BF. 

On Saturday M, TG and I went to Cambridge for the day. It is about an hour and a quarter drive from here, so an easy day trip. Unlike London and Rome, Cambridge was busy. We bought buns for elevenses from Fitzbillies bakery, famous for its chelsea buns, and then spent a bit of time in the shopping centre as TG is at an age when shopping is an appealing past time, and she had a couple of things she wanted to look for. Then M got lunch (falafel wrap) from a stall near the market, and TG and I bought sushi (me) and teriyaki chicken and rice salad (her) from Itsu. We walked past some of the colleges and across the river to find some grass where we could sit and eat. Usually we would have explored the "Backs" (college grounds backing onto the river) but the college grounds were all shut due to coronavirus. After lunch we we went for a walk, ending up at a park where a lot of small groups were socialising. We were amused by a birthday party where a nearby tree had been dressed up with decorations. 

We found a cafe with some free outdoor seating, so stopped for various permutations of tea / coffee / iced coffee and cake / brownie / scones according to individual taste. Before heading back we also paid a visit to Fudge Kitchen, which does probably the best fudge ever, both with and without dairy. TG bought a slice of chocolate-caramel fudge, and my slice was vegan chocolate-coconut. M finds fudge too rich so didn't want any. We then headed back to the car stopping off at John Lewis to buy a new duvet cover and pillow case set to replace our rather worn one - we spotted  white one with a monochrome elephant pattern earlier and decided to go back for it. We also bought an avocado tool that TG, who has just discovered she likes avocados, had been hankering for. It halves the avocado, removes the stone and then neatly slices the flesh. She road-tested it today and it is a source of much joy! So much for my minimalist ambitions. 

Today was our 28th wedding anniversary (go, us!) so M and I went out for a meal this evening. We went to a pub we hadn't been to before, which H had recommended to us, along with another pub in the same chain (Oakman Inns). TG has just reached the point of feeling comfortable left home alone in the evenings, so we have finally reached the point of not needing to find company for her if we are both out - just as well given the constraints of social distancing. We really enjoyed the meal - M had duck, I had pasta followed by a vegan sticky toffee pudding - and will definitely go back. We also got £20 off the bill as this is the last week of the Eat Out to Help Out scheme with discounts of £10 per person for meals eaten out on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. 

The Green Machine

Since I last wrote on Thursday I have spent quite a bit of time pondering green energy and electric cars. After we ordered the electric car we also put in an order to have a charging point fitted to the side of the garage. The government provide a £350 grant towards the cost, which Pod Point (the company we chose) claim on our behalf, but everything has to be done in the right sequence (car order followed by charger order) and with some delay while the grant application is processed. We had anticipated that we would get the car before the charger, and would have to rely on a slow domestic plug point connection and public charging points for a while, but were pleasantly surprised to get an email from Pod Point on Friday to arrange an installation date - not firmed up yet, but it is looking as the charger will arrive before the car. 

The imminent car and charger arrival reminded me that I needed to check our household energy tariffs, as our current fixed rate deal was due for renewal. The UK system allows different suppliers to tap into both the electric grid and gas supply at wholesale prices and sell gas and electricity on to consumers (at least, I think that is how it works!). The market is quite competitive and switching suppliers is very simple, so it pays to shop around every year (usually contracts have a 12 month lock in period). We have actually been with the same supplier for the last three or four years, but when I checked this time I found a better deal elsewhere so have switched to that. When getting quotes I added in the extra electricity I estimate running the car will use, and the new cheaper tariff means we will pay exactly the same monthly amount for gas and electricity as we were paying before. Obviously the car won't really be free to run, but it is going to feel that way! As a fully electric car it is also exempt from road tax and servicing is cheaper than for petrol engined cars, so it should work out very economical. Our current car guzzles diesel, so has been costing us a lot in fuel - or at least, it did pre-Covid when we were both going to work - and is environmentally very unfriendly. As we will be using a green energy supplier and the new car will have zero emissions hopefully our carbon footprint will now be quite a bit smaller. 

Still pondering cars and chargers, I then did quite a bit of research on using public chargers and taking electric cars on long journeys. Several YouTube videos later, I think I am now getting to grips with charging etiquette and the complexities of a system with multiple brands of chargers, all with different apps and payment methods. Long journeys will mean relying on rapid chargers, which are more widely available in some areas than others, although all service stations on major routes now have them. The couple of long journeys we have coming up over the next few months at least look manageable though we will need to allow a bit of extra time for charging stops. Locally we are well provided with chargers, as Milton Keynes is incredibly well set up for electric cars, but with a home charger that isn't particularly useful for us! I did discover we can register with Milton Keynes council for a green parking permit, which will allow us to park free in many places. We will also be able to park free in the premium (expensive!) parking slots nearest to the shopping centre if we use one of the electric chargers there - the cost of the charging will be a lot less than the cost of parking would be! 

Apart from thinking about cars and electricity, we went to R's yesterday for lunch. It should have been a BBQ but the weather didn't cooperate. The whole weekend has been wet, miserable and very humid. Much cooler than last week, but as a cool bodied person whose chest doesn't like damp, I preferred the heat. Lunch was great and it is always good to have all the family together.  H and her BF left today for 10 days in Italy, lucky things! On Thursday the UK added France to the list of countries from which returning travellers have to quarantine. As France is one of the most popular holiday destinations for the British, that is a big deal and will cause a lot of disruption. Fortunately the level of Covid cases in Italy looks both low and stable at the moment, so there doesn't seem any real risk that H will have to worry about quarantining when she gets back. M is working the late shift this weekend, and we managed to get out for a walk this morning when the rain stopped for a while. We did a similar route to one we walked last weekend, but in reverse. Lots of heather out now, and we also took a small detour to what the girls when they were young always used to call The Stones. "The Stones" are actually a giant sundial, but they were a favourite place for small people because they loved playing games on and around them. 

Cooling Down and a Birthday

The weather in the early part of this week was almost unbearably hot, into the mid-30s centigrade (90s Fahrenheit). In a country where houses are built to retain heat and don't have air conditioning, that isn't easy to deal with. A hammock in the shade with a gin and tonic helped. 

Then two hours later on Monday evening it was like this! Thunder, lightening and torrential rain. It didn't relieve the heat though, and Tuesday was just as warm - but more humid, so felt even worse. I feel the cold and usually enjoy hot weather, but even for me it was too much. The fan in our bedroom was on full speed during the night but didn't manage to do more than shift the hot air around. 

We went for an early morning walk on Tuesday and decided to do laps round the lake, thinking it would feel a bit cooler near to the water. It worked up to a point, but by the time we finished at 9am it was already getting hot. There was another big storm on Tuesday evening, but the weather didn't finally break properly until yesterday afternoon, when there was a series of smaller storms followed by overnight rain. I had been doing lots of exercise over the previous couple of weeks, and am now beginning to really feel the benefits with more energy, less stiffness and generally feeling stronger, but the last few days it has been a struggle to do anything much because of the heat. I am determined not to lose momentum! 

Today is H's 22nd birthday. She celebrated by taking TG on a shopping expedition to Milton Keynes, the first time they have been to the large shopping centre there since lockdown in March. She said she felt safe and comfortable, with people wearing masks, plenty of hand sanitiser and not too busy. She had an online introductory session for her new job yesterday and has now "met" some of the other new starters and found out more about how things will be working over the next few months, how her training scheme will be organised and so on. Most of her shopping today was for work clothes - necessary after living in trackies (sweatpants) and trainers much of the time as a student and during lockdown! She will start off working from home, so that initial induction and training can be done for the whole group of starters together online, but they are also keen to give them time in the office as soon as possible - probably a couple of days a week from late September / early October by the sound of it. This evening her BF came over and we had a birthday meal - she wanted a finger food buffet which mostly involved things in packets which just needed heating up, so nice and easy. She had been out for a meal with her BF on Tuesday, and we are going to R's for a birthday BBQ on Saturday, so she decided against having a takeaway tonight. Hopefully this will be a good year for her, as she transitions from being a student into her new career. 

Morning Walks

We are having a heatwave this weekend so have gone out for our daily walk in the mornings before it got too hot, which also fit in nicely with M's work shifts - this has been his first weekend back, working 1pm to 7pm both Saturday and Sunday. We have a country park nearby which, oddly, we haven't been to since lockdown. Initially because it is just a bit too far to walk, and then because once the carparks opened up again it got busy. Yesterday we parked in a village near to one of the paths into the woodland and did a three mile route round the eastern section - there are two centres with visitor facilities, Stockgrove to the east and Rushmere to the west. We walked past, but not through, the ancient woodland which makes up part of the site and is now designated an area of special scientific interest.

The lake is an artificial one and not very deep. It was originally part of a country house estate owned by the lord of the manor and used for rowing and fishing - the base of an old boat house is still there. The house and estate was used for military purposes during the Second World War and later as a school. The estate was bought jointly by both Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire County Councils (the county boundary runs through the park) and turned into a country park for public use. The house itself was eventually subdivided and turned into private housing. The lake looked beautiful in the morning sun.

A lot of the woodland is made up of fir trees, planted relatively recently for commercial use, though I don't know whether felling will fit with the conservation plans for the area, so it may be that the trees will now have a much longer life than originally intended. The land where they were planted was originally open heathland, and there are a couple of areas which have been cleared to allow the heath to regenerate. 

This morning we aimed to take a western route around Rushmere, but took a wrong turning and got back to the lake. We did eventually make it to the Rushmere visitor centre by another route. This section of the park has a wooden sculpture trail which is intended to spark imagination, like this Fallen Inn fairy house. Today's walk turned out to be a bit tougher, with some unexpected hilly bits! Apart from exercising (I also did some Fiit classes) I have had a very lazy weekend, apart from doing some online grocery shopping and doing some financial stuff. TG was also lazy, which H worked at the cafe today and M worked his normal weekend shifts. M was apprehensive about returning to work, not so much because of Covid, but because of the need to get up to speed with changes over the past few months and generally feeling out of practice. He was given a return to work training plan, which meant this weekend was spent learning what had changed and listening in to other call handlers. I think it went better than he was expecting it to, and he enjoyed catching up with people. 

Thursday: Roman London and Electric Cars

Two completely unconnected things that have been on my mind this week are Roman London and electric cars. I decided - a little late in the day! - that I haven't taken enough advantage of all the many things that have been available online since March, so I signed up for a virtual tour of Roman London and a talk about Roman domestic items found in London. Although run by different organisations, I thought the two events would fit well together. The tour on Sunday evening was with Footprints of London, an organisation which in normal times runs guided walking tours, but has now started offering online "tours" for a small charge. Then today I "attended" a talk run by the Layers of London mapping project in which an expert from the Museum of London Archaeology talked about the the connections between domestic items and location. 

I really don't know a great deal about Roman Britain (or Roman London), so I learned quite a bit from both talks - more from the guided tour, I think, which gave me good ideas of places I would like to visit. For example, part of the old Roman wall can be found in London Wall underground car park in Bay 52! One Roman site I have visited is the Mithraeum, which was mentioned in both talks. The remains of the 3rd centuryMithraeum were discovered in the 1950s but were moved to a different site to allow building work to take place. That building was demolished in the early 21st century and the Mithraeum was moved  back to its original site and incorporated into the basement of Bloomberg's newly built European HQ. The Mithraeum and an exhibition of items found on the site is free to visit, but (even in non-Covid times) has to be booked in advance. The pictures on this post are from my visit two years ago. 

The other theme of this week has been electric cars. We have decided the time has come to replace our main car, which now has pretty high mileage and is getting more expensive to maintain. It also runs on diesel, which when we bought it was supposed to be more environmentally friendly than petrol, but is now considered to be the worst fuel to use. Just before everything locked down we had started looking into electric cars, and had more or less decided - with a bit of trepidation - that we would switch to fully electric. As Covid risks now seem relatively low, we booked test drive for two different cars this week. Yesterday we tried out a Nissan Leaf, and today a Kia e-Niro. After trying them both, we decided the e-Niro was the best in terms of looks, feel, range, warranty, and overall quality, but the Leaf was better to drive, cheaper, has more safety tech, and is more comfortable for M who has scoliosis and needs a car that feels right for his back. After lots of discussion, we have settled on the Leaf in a special edition model which has a larger battery than the model we were initially thinking of, and includes various extras that will make it easier and more comfortable to drive. We are hoping we may be able to order one tomorrow.

I am now back to working-at-home on my archives job, and M will be going back to 111 at the weekend - another step back towards a new normal. TG is mainly being very teenage and getting up in time for lunch and binging on Glee. H decided we needed to plant flowers, so we went on a trip to a local garden centre on Tuesday and bought some bedding plants to put in pots round the patio. We had coffee and cake in the cafe while we were there, which again, was a nice bit of normal. Yesterday while M and I were out test-driving the two girls got them all planted and we have sorted out a system which should mean someone remembers to water them. I have black thumbs and the sum total of our gardening knowledge is very, very small, so I am not hopeful that they will survive, but at least we are trying! 

Sunday: London Calling

I missed London - so yesterday I went on a day trip. Covid infection rates are still quite low (although they may be starting to creep up again) and Saturday trains are not usually too busy, so I decided to risk taking the train and spending a day pottering in London. It was quiet. In a normal year, London would now be heaving with tourists. I walked down from Euston Station through Bloomsbury and Covent Garden. The road leading to the British Museum, which hasn't yet reopened, was eerily empty. Covent Garden was not as quiet as it looks in the photo below, but was far from its normal bustle and missing the usual street entertainment.  

I had planned to get myself some sushi for lunch, but most cafes and takeaways were closed. I imagine without the tourists there just isn't enough business to be worth opening. I ended up going into Boots to pick up a drink and a sandwich to make sure I had something to eat. I did find a Pret open in the Strand, but most branches seemed to be shut. I sat on a bench in Trafalgar Square to eat and enjoyed the relative tranquillity - it is just a shame it comes at such and economic cost. 

Most of the museums have not yet reopened, though will be opening over the next week or so, but I had booked myself a slot to visit the National Gallery. Everything was very well arranged. Visits are free (except to their Titian exhibition), but need to be booked in advance online so that they can limit numbers. I had a 12.45pm time slot and spent a couple of hours there. Three one way routes had been set up for different sections of the main galleries, and there was also a free exhibition of paintings by the Dutch painter Nicholaes Maes. I saw quite a few old favourites and discovered some new ones, like this self-portrait by 18th century French portrait painter Elisabeth Louise Vigée le Brun. I have the Smartify app on my phone which allows you to scan a painting with a phone camera, identifies the picture and the artist and gives information on them - easier than peering at captions on the wall, and very helpful for social distancing! The National Gallery offered free Wifi which was very helpful as the 4G signal wasn't great.  

After lunch I bought a slice of vegan salted caramel and chocolate cheesecake and a coffee with soya milk from Cafe Nero and took it down to St James Park - although I am not currently eating a plant based diet, I do still try to avoid dairy, both on ethical grounds and because I don't think my body likes it much these days. After my coffee and cheesecake I walked down The Mall to Buckingham Palace - literally down The Mall, which was only open to pedestrians and bikes. 

I walked through Green Park and Hyde Park, past Kensington Palace and then up to Notting Hill tube station, about three miles altogether. I noticed that as I walked it got gradually busier. The tables outside the large Serpentine Cafe in Hyde Park looked pretty full, there were a lot of pedals on the lake, and at the western end of the park quite a few groups of people picnicking or (in at least one case) partying. I also saw a couple of family groups who I think were celebrating Eid a day late. Although they weren't sticking to social distancing, at least the groups were outdoors and not indoors. My favourite discover in Hyde Park was this statue, called Serenity.   

I was a bit unsure about taking the tube, but couldn't face an hour's walk back to Euston so settled on taking the Circle Line which is a high level line - no escalators, and more open platforms. It wasn't too bad, though I had to change at Edgware Road and waited a while there for a train so the platform got busier than I liked. Most people were wearing masks, though there were a few chin-maskers (why do they do that? Answer, I guess, is so that if they spot anyone in authority they can pull it up and pretend they were wearing it all the time!). My train carriage back home also had chin-maskers and no-maskers. Fortunately it was quite empty and I was able to put plenty of space between myself and the idiots. I'm glad I went, as I suspect that once we get into the autumn things things will get worse again and I will be much less likely to want to travel on public transport. With that in mind, I'm trying to make the most of the summer while the risks are low enough to feel safe going out and about.