Switching to natural and eco-friendly toiletries and cosmetics has been a breeze, apart from the underarm deodorant department, where things haven’t been breeze-like at all.  I just don’t seem to be able to find a natural product that does what it says on the bottle.  Are my expectations too high?  Most commercial deodorants available are actually anti-perspirants, while natural deodorants are just that, deodorants.  Is this why the one works and the other doesn’t work as well?  I’ve read that there may be a (as yet unproven) link between anti-perspirants and cancer, as well as a link between aluminium in odour control products and an increase in Alzheimers.  What to do?

I have tried both the crystal and liquid form of PitRok with disappointing results, Avalon Organics Peppermint Deodorant, Bionsen, Weleda and two different Tom’s of Maine flavours (these seemed to work best until I got a rash).   While I still have a few tricks up my sleeve, I seem to be running out of ideas and thinking about going back to using Dove anti-perpirant, which has been my old faithful for years.

Over the next couple of weeks I am going to be trying: drinking more water, baking powder and lemon mixed into a paste and plastered into pits, and a Lush deodorant.  I’ll report back on these, but in the meantime, if anyone has any foolproof, healthy, natural and eco-friendly eau de control ideas, I’d be very pleased indeed. 

Our new kitchen was completed a week ago.  Living without a kitchen with children is mental torture, not something that I would hope to repeat.  Feeding them becomes an ordeal, having beautiful fresh vegetables ripening at the allotment and not being able to do anything with them is frustrating, but it does pass, and we are back to enjoying good food with a better kitchen to prepare our meals in.

We decided to install an Ikea kitchen, not the most environmentally friendly option, and one that has already had me wondering whether we did the right thing.  So why did we do it?  We wanted a modern, fitted kitchen, and after looking at the options, we decided that as a company, Ikea had the best environmental philosophy.  The kitchen fitter we used suggested we buy our oak worktop from another FSC source, but we went for all A-rated appliances from Ikea’s Whirlpool range, and all of their kitchen cabinets, which they say are made from wood-chips from sustainable sources.

The end result looks good, we think, but from an environmental point of view and in retrospect, I think that we could have done better. 

Lying in bed on Saturday morning listening to the radio I was just a little amused by the news that a German company has been bugging our wheelie-bins.  It transpires that it’s not the Germans that are keeping an eye on us, but our very own councils who requested that the electronic bugging devices be installed by German companies.  So I went out to have a good look at our wheelie bin this morning, and lo and behold, we’ve been bugged!  This is a picture of our bug.

Apparently more that 500,000 British wheelie bins have been secretly bugged, and now the news is out, what do people think about it?  Well it seems that although some of us have reacted initially with amusement and then wary acceptance, others are taking this matter far more seriously indeed.  Here are some excerpts from the thisislondon.co.uk’s article on the bugging of our bins and a selection of public comments submitted in reaction to the article:

The official reason for the bugs is to ‘improve efficiency’ and settle disputes between neighbours over wheelie-bin ownership. But experts say the technology is actually intended to enable councils to impose fines on householders who exceed limits on the amount of non-recyclable waste they put out. New powers for councils to do this are expected to be introduced by the Government shortly.

But the revelation that the bins have already been altered ignited a ‘Bin Brother’ row over privacy and taxes. Conservative MP Andrew Pelling said burglars could hack into the computer system to see if sudden reductions in waste at individual households meant the owners were on holiday and the property empty.

He said: ‘This is nothing more than a spy in the bin and I don’t think even the old Soviet Union made such an intrusion into people’s personal lives.

‘It is Big Brother gone mad. I think a more British way of doing things is to seek to persuade people rather than spy on them.’

If I find one on my bin, I shall

1) Cease all recycling
2) Take a black & decker to said device

- Peter Chalmers, Oxford

As with many people in urban areas and London especially, I live in a block of flats with communial bins. If one of the residents insists on putting recycleable rubbish in the normal bins, what will they do? Will all the residents be rounded up and interrogated until the culprit owns up?

I’m off to wrap my bin in tinfoil.

- Neil Marklew, London

It occurs to me that now might be the time to form Anti-neighbourhood Watches with the aim of meeting once a week with your wheelie bin and swoping it with another member at random, thus at one masterfull stroke negating all the data collection.

This doesn’t stop them collecting the data, just that all their time and effort will be wasted as the data collected will be useless.

- Quantox, Wokingham, UK

Infringement of Civil Liberty? Still trying to fathom that out but to say I’m furious is an understatement.

I fail to understand why bugging my Green (paper) bin and my Grey (plastics) bin will help the council determine how much non-recyclable waste I am producing.

I have no concern over collecting metrics regarding waste but I am very concerned about the sneaky, underhand method used by my council to determine MY waste output.

- Peter S, Crewe and Nantwich, Cheshire

Again I’m finding some of this amusing.  I recycle as much as possible and try where I can to reduce non-recyclable waste, everyone else should be doing this too and if they aren’t there should be consequences.  I don’t like the idea of robbers hacking into the council’s website to find out when I’m away on holiday, but, quite frankly, it seems quite unlikely.  What do you think?

UPDATE: I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and my final word on the subject is: I’m far more scared of global warming than I am of having my "civil liberties" infringed upon by a council who is trying to encourage recycling. 

Apparently it’s not a snake, it’s a legless lizard called a slow worm.  It looks like a snake to me though, and I’ve seen a few, being an African girl.  On Sunday, Ayrton and I were picking some bits for supper at the allotment and I found this beauty when I lifted the carpet on top of the compost heap to add a few weeds.  It just lay there, perfectly still and waiting to be photographed.  Apparently slow worms are protected in England under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 from being killed, injured or sold.  We have invited our slow worm to stay and eat as many of our slugs as it likes.

Life as we know it has ground to a halt this week.  No freshly picked vegetables turned into mouthwatering dishes, because I no longer have a cooker.  No relaxing around our dining room table because it’s buried under power-tools and dust.  Ping-cuisine and hiding upstairs is the order of the day, or avoiding home as much as possible.  You may have guessed it, we’re having a new kitchen installed.  And is it going smoothly?  Well, do these things ever go smoothly.

Oh, and there’s no hanging out in the garden either, Pete’s building our new deck out there. 

Our spinach beet is growing beautifully at the allotment and it’s time to start eating it.  These pasties were inspired by the recipe for Chard Pasties in the Five-a-Day Fruit & Vegetable Cookbook.

450g spinach beet, trimmed and chopped including stalks
2 tbsp butter
2 small or 1 large onion, finely chopped
10 rashers streaky bacon, chopped
80g Gruyere cheese, grated
1/2 to 1 cup fresh brown breadcrumbs
6 tbsp single cream

For the pastry:
2 1/2 cups plain flour
generous 1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup grated cheddar cheese
beaten egg, for glazing 

To make the pastry, place the flour in a mixing bowl and rub in the butter.  Add the grated cheddar cheese and a little cold water to mix to a soft dough.  Add extra flour if the dough gets to sticky.  Knead gently on a floured surface.  Wrap in clingfilm and chill for 30 minutes.

Place spinach beet chopped leaves and stalks into a heavy-bottomed pan, cover and cook over a low heat for 8 minutes until the stalks are tender and the leaves wilted, shaking the pan occasionally.  Strain, pressing out the excess liquid and place in a mixing bowl to cool.

Melt the butter in a frying pan and fry the onion and bacon until the onion is lightly golden and the bacon is browned.

Add the onion and bacon to the spinach beet and stir in the Gruyere, breadcrumbs, cream and seasoning to taste.  Preheat the oven to 220′C/Gas 6.

Divide the pastry into four and roll out into rounds.  Spoon the filling onto the centre of each and dampen the edges with water.  Bring the sides together over the filling and press together to seal.  Brush with beaten egg and then put on a non-stick baking tray.  Bake for about 20 minutes until the pastry is golden.  With the leftover edges of the pastry rounds that I cut out, I rolled two smaller rounds and with a little filling saved, made two mini-pasties for the children. 

Here’s a recipe using cherry tomatoes and courgette, it was an experiment that turned out great!

50g pine nuts
pudding bowl full of cherry tomatoes, halved
1 medium sized yellow courgette, sliced
50g goats cheese
drizzle of sunflower oil
drizzle of balsamic vinegar
spaghetti

Put the pine nuts into a heated pan and stir until they go golden, then set aside and get the spaghetti cooking.  While spaghetti is boiling, drizzle oil over the courgette and cherry tomatoes and roast at gas mark 6 for 10 minutes.  Drain pasta and remove vegetables from oven.  Mix spaghetti into the roasting pan and add diced/crumbled goats cheese and the toasted pine nuts.  Finally, drizzle with some balsamic vinegar, mix together and serve. 

The next picking of cherry tomatoes from our crop of tumblers will be the last.  I picked a large bowlful  for our dinner of roast cherry tomatoes, courgettes and pasta tonight.  And so we are now into cherry tomato decline. 

But the next lot, the beef tomatoes, are starting to redden, so we’ll graduate to stuffed toms and greek salads by next week.  Mmmm! 

I have the feeling that I was misunderstood first time round, so I’m trying again.  Here’s my second email to Waitrose customer services:

Dear Lorraine,

Thanks for your email, but I think that you have missed the point of my original email.

I understand that it is company policy to insist on customers having a partnership or account card to use your quick scan service, and that is what I am querying the ethics of.

It seems unethical to insist that customers apply for credit with you to use the quick scan service, even though, as your very friendly and helpful quick scan lady told me, you don’t have to use the credit card.  But is that not putting unnecessary temptation to use credit in the way of customers who simply want to use the quick scan service?  You only have to read the newspapers these days to be told that record numbers of the British public are in debt up to their eyeballs, and that three times the number of people have declared themselves bankrupt this year compared to just 2 years ago.

The quick scan service is attractive to me, and so I’m sure to many other housewives and mothers too.  Many people will, therefore, have no problem in applying for credit so that they can use this service.  Once the credit card is there, it’s easier to spend on it without thinking about it.

I will not apply for a credit card on principle, and am therefore excluded from being able to use a service that would be most useful to me during Waitrose shopping trips.  So, to improve my supermarket experience with small children, I will consider taking my custom to Sainbury’s where I can use their quick scan service without being required to sign up for one of their "financial services".

To re-iterate what I said in my previous email, I have chosen Waitrose as a place I like to shop because of your admirable ethics, sourcing local foods, making sure that products are from fairly traded sources, and stocking so many natural and eco-friendly cleaning products and toiletries.  So this approach to getting people to sign up for credit took me by surprise, I didn’t expect it from Waitrose.

Yours sincerely,

Tracy Stokes 

Well, it seems that I received the standard customer services reply from Waitrose, and that no-one bothered to read my email properly.  Here’s what I got:

Dear Ms Stokes, 

Thank you for your E-mail

I was most concerned to learn of your experience when shopping at our Goldsworth Park branch, and I hope you will accept my sincere apologies.

We pride ourselves at Waitrose on the emphasis we put on Customer Service and quite simply in your case we have let ourselves down. I have taken this opportunity to discuss your concerns with the Branch Duty Manager who would like to extend his apologies.

However he has stated that it is the company policy in order to use the quick check you would have to have a partnership or account card . Payment for goods does need to be made using this card so only needed in order to release the handset .

Please accept my apologies for any inconvience or dissappointment caused .

Thank you again for taking the time and trouble to bring this matter to my attention. I can assure you that your experience does not reflect the high standards we aim to achieve and hope you will continue to shop with us at Waitrose in Goldsworth Park.

Regards,

Lorraine Laye

Waitrose Customer Service.

It is with a certain degree of guilt that I set off on supermarket shopping trips these days.  I believe that locally sourced food is better for the environment and the local economy, and so I prefer to shop at a local farm shop when possible.  But, and it’s a big but, I still need things that aren’t available at the farm shop or in a local shop, our village has become one of take-aways, estate agents and very few proper local shops since Sainsburys arrived on the scene a few years ago.

We have a Co-op in the village that is good for picking up organic milk and the odd Ecover product, but I can’t get Ecover dishwasher tablets, rinse-aid or washing powder there.  They don’t stock much organic produce, and what they do is imported.

The nearest alternative to Sainsburys is Waitrose.  It is situated in a shopping centre in the centre of a housing estate near our village, is closer for me to get to than Sainsbury’s, and although it is smaller, it is often less crowded.  The store recently re-opened with a bigger store and a better selection of organic products, I was delighted to see that I’ll now easily be able to get hold of natural shampoos, conditioners, hand soap, cleaning products as well as ethically fished seafood, local(ish) meat and organic British veggies (not that we need many of these with the allotment).  I was quite excited to see that they had introduced a new "quick scan" service to speed up the queueing process at the end (people with small children appreciate this sort of technology), however, you have to sign up for a  credit card in order to use this service.  Ethical alarm-bells starting going off!  How ethical is it to force customers to apply for credit in order to use store-services?  I’ve writted to Waitrose to enquire about the ethics of this and wait to hear from them.

In the meantime, I still hestitate over my shopping choices. 

The courgette glut continues… I’ve tried the chocolate courgette cake recipe, what a disaster.  It didn’t rise for some reason.  I’m usually pretty good at baking cakes, but this one has me worried.

The Irish Marrow Chutney has been bottled up.  It needs to be matured for a few months before eating, so I’ll report back on that later in the year.

Tonight we’re having baked courgettes stuffed with goats cheese, along with our very first cauliflower (probably with a cheesy bacon sauce) and green beans (our Blauhildes are coming thick and fast).