Author: Dave Haygarth

I love this nation’s obsession with sustainability. It’s a great aspiration – the newest of the status symbols – one for the clever people.

I jump on the bandwagon too from time to time. I can’t help a nagging smugness about reducing my carbon footprint by cycling into work, owning ‘only’ one family car, etc., but I know, in my heart of hearts, that I’m just as bad as anyone else.

However, I didn’t really want to talk about me (let’s just assume that I’m a fairly responsible person who could do better, could do worse). I was really enamoured by the story of MP Hilary Benn, who (honourably) challenged the product-miles mantra and suggested that we (in the UK) should buy our loved ones’ Valentine’s Day roses from Africa. The minister told a sustainable food conference that emissions produced by growing flowers in Kenya and flying them to the UK can be less than a fifth of those grown in heated and lighted greenhouses in Holland.

This is ground breaking stuff. Sort of. The nice middle class sustainable people (no offence, I’m including me) were all getting settled into the routine that local is good. Then this type of thinking comes along…. Grrrrrrr….

So – we’ve adjusted our thinking – and come round to the notion that we should woo our loved ones with the lower carbon roses from Africa. That’s the right thing to do.

BUT – hang on – as this article in the BBC site illustrates, sustainability is about three (usually conflicting) areas – economic, social and environmental. We’re so often drawn into the environmental (particularly by the mainstream media), that we tend to give a lot less thought to the other two.
I. this case, this means thinking about the implications (by European Federation of Professional Florist Associations general secretary Toine Zwitserlood) that child labour is a big thing in the African floral industry (we’re on to the social bit of the Venn diagram now). This thought sends us liberal do-gooders scurrying into our holes. Where the hell do we get our flowers from now???

Luckily, I just gave Katie a card this year. Probably not even recycled. Am I good or bad?

Any parent could list loads of funny things their little ones say.  Here’s some of ours.

Feb 2013

Gem from Elsie this morning. Chatting about how milk gets to the bottle. “They put these things on the cow’s udders, them they ud them…”

Feb 2007:

Lily made me giggle this morning with this bit of simple dialogue. D: “Would you like some toast” L: “Yes please” D: “With some jam on?” L: “Yes please. And butter in the middle ”

 

Something very worrying about this. Something that makes you think that there’s an accident waiting to happen.

Loads of people will no doubt have had significantly worse days than mine in yesterday’s severe gales as they ravaged across the country.  My day was a bit of an Epic, though.

I had a meeting in Peterborough and, having had some bad journeys there in the past on the trains, I’d decided to go down by car.  What a day to have chosen that.

Although the journey over there (on the M62 and A1) was no more than a little congested,  the journey back was utter mayhem.  On the A1, heading north, I had to queue several times for uprooted trees lying strewn across the carriageway, and saw four blown-over high sided lorries (one ‘freshly’ blown over, with its driver climbing out of the cab window!).

Diverted from the closed A1 near Melton Mowbray, I had the luck of seeing someone with Sat Nav taking a country lane, so followed him.  Some great ducking and diving around the lanes brought us back onto the A1 further up, but after several more long queues for debris / vehicles, I took a break in some services at Blythe.  I had a look in an atlas (didn’t have one in the hire car!), and then decided to head cross country across some lanes to Rotherham and onwards to the M1.  By the time I reached it, things had eased a bit (but not on the A1 according to the radio – wise move!).  Journey took six hours – could have been worse.  At one point, I was seriously thinking travelodge, but I think I got lucky with my move across country.  Epic day!