My favourite plastic swaps

I have been revisiting blog posts past and I have changed so much!  It is so WEIRD how I have integrated the changes into my life without even noticing.  But what are my favourite swaps?!

1. My ultimate favourite swap of all time is my Lavender Safety Razor for £23.99

I bought this is February from the link above and haven’t given it a moment’s thought since!  It is a total beauty – it is pretty and doesn’t look a day old.  I bought it with a bulk order of 100 double edged razor blades to put in it for £9.90.

For the princely sum of £23.99 I have a razor that will last me forever and TWO YEARS worth of blades for £9.90.

To compare, a venus razor holder costs £7.99 and 4 venus razor blades from Superdrug costs £8.75 – this adds up to £105 worth of blades a year!  This is a difference of £100, straight into your pocket.

And the shave?!  Excellent.  I was careful with it the first few times – it is heavy and SHARP.  But now I am as speedy and confident as I ever was with the venus blades with their protective shields.  The shave is close and clean and not at all irritating.  If you make one swap THIS has to be it!

2. My second favourite swap is my deodorant.

My deodorants now smell lovely and are as effective as I want them to be!  The natural deo co. is my favourite brand although Ihave come so far I can actually make my own now (!!).  They can be expensive at £11 a jar BUT they last about two months and become a special, thoughtful part of your bathroom cupboard, like moisturisers, perfumes and make-up.  Using this kind of deodorant means you are using a totally natural product, it is moisturising, keeps you clean and dry, can be applied with fingers and therefore reapplied when necessary, and is not plastic.  Those little deodorant balls come out of the tubes and get stuck in marine animals’ throats.  And it is obvious that the sprays are full of crap.  Not nice for anyone to smell or be around after the sprayer has long gone 😉

3.  My third favourite swap of all time is my wooden brush scrubber!  You can shop around but I like these – the scrubber lasts for ever and you can take the bristle head off when its tired and put it in the composting 🙂  Closed loop!

 

Plastic Free Hallowe’en

Oh it’s that time of year again.  The time of…  SWEETIES.  Sweeties everywhere!  In little metallic or plastic wrappers.  In cellophane.  And plastic pots for collecting treats, parties with disposable cups and cutlery and plates…  Balloons…

It is a single use plastic nightmare (or hell?!  Or heaven?!)  I cannot in good conscience keep watching blinking documentaries about plastic in the ocean and ignore this in my own life.  Plastic plastic plastic.  Plastic in gullets, plastic in nests.  Plastic in drains, in turtles, in ocean forests, on the ocean floor, in whales.

 

Sometimes I want to forget about it.  Sometimes maybe it has been a week or two since I saw anything that troubled me.  Sometimes I feel unmotivated.  And sometimes I just want my old life back!  The easier one!  The more fun one!  Being plastic free (or at least aware, if not free) can mean feeling like a fun sponge.  It means tutting at things that other people think are AMAZING or LOVELY or KIND or CELEBRATORY.  It means wondering why on EARTH those lovely people are buying plastic cups when they could have bought paper ones; how your friends managed to miss the memo about plastic straws; why your family walk around with takeaway cups of coffee and packet sandwiches.  It also means staring at balloons and just hating them – how grumpy is that?!  It means being agog when people let off chinese lanterns or clumps of helium balloons that will almost certainly litter the ocean until they break up into smaller, more edible yet still indigestible pieces.

Fun sponge.

And now it is Hallowe’en – one of my favourite times of year.  And you know why?!  Those wonderful little individually wrapped chocolates from cadbury’s that’s why.  I LOVE them!  And they are great for trick or treaters!  And I can take the best ones out first and eat them myself in front of the telly later!  YEAH, Hallowe’en!

But not this year, dear friends.  This year I cannot buy these.  They are dreadful pollutants, easily blown away in the wind and made of a material that will never break down, only ‘up’.  So I have not got any in.  Instead I have bought some big marshmallows, dipped them in chocolate and sprinkles and will be handing them out instead.  Of course, there is packaging with this but no where NEAR as much, and it is recyclable or reusable.  This is great for the world!  YEAH!  Imagine how much room in the world those horrible little chocolate wrappers take up between now and New Year?!  Unconscionable.

So, friends, do take a moment to try and think of an alternative to the usual.  Marshmallows are easy, fun, everyone likes them and they don’t leak or melt.  Big packets of things is also the way forward – a single big pack of haribo, for example, would be better than those multipacks.  Until we can all get to a refill store for our treats or pick ‘n’ mix isn’t absurdly expensive we have to make do as best we can.  Avoid the teeny wrapped chocolates (don’t get me started on the new kitkat variety pack being advertised.  What stupid timing to bring out a new individually wrapped single use plastic product!  As if nestle weren’t bad enough.  As if kitkats weren’t my favourite chocolate.  Sob).  Or get big packs of sweets and make twists of them in some tissue paper instead of giving out plastic multipacks.  (It would look more thoughtful too.)

Am hoping that in looking forward to what we can do (and be) we won’t have to keep looking back.  In the meantime I will keep staring longingly at the celebrations and heroes and quality street and roses tubs in the stores, steel myself and walk on by.  I got marshmallows dipped in chocolate at home, s’all good here 🙂

 

Moving on!

I have stopped being a Plastic Free Community Campaigner with Surfers Against Sewage now so I can concentrate on other things in life that I am also passionate about.  even this blog was subsumed with the anti-plastic message and here in Cornwall it is truly getting through – which is wonderful!

So now I can turn my attentions to other things that interest me like foraging and living off what is all around us.  I love making my own bits and bobs and am a complete tinker.  Any rubbish I happily scrounge and try and turn into new things.  I sell my crochet bits and am also selling some of the hedgerow food I find – making sure of course that I am not plundering the local environs!  there is a bountiful harvest this year and so it is a great one for a first time forager like me 🙂

Some of this food and the bits I make with tat I will also be selling.  This isn’t my day job – I am actually a copywriter specialising in eco, sustainable, environmental and political writing and research – but it fits in neatly around it.

I love living in Cornwall and being part of the environment here.  I find that as I get more into this way of life my hair has got more unkempt, my nails are shorter and in need of more of a scrub than a gentle clean and I am totally behind on all things telly.  I am in wellies more than heeled shoes and my jeans stay clean for all of five minutes.  I am easily the scruffiest mum in the playground!

And I couldn’t be happier 🙂

Foraging: Sloe Gin!

Oh my gosh I am so so so soooooo excited this year.  Turns out that the berries I have been pondering about in a vague way all along the hedgerows for YEARS are sloe berries.  Oh my word of happiness!  Sloe gin is one of my all time best tipples.  And this year I get to make my own!  I have picked a gazillion sloes (leaving another gazillion for nature of course) and am ready to go.

I have perused a few different websites and recipes.  They vary from the artisanal, super old school advices to wait for the first frost (no can do – they’ll all be gone by then) and pick only with your left hand by moonlight to more normal just whack it in recipes.  I am going for the latter – most notably following Mr Jamie Oliver here: Jamie Oliver’s sloe gin recipe.  I am not really much of a one for watching JO about his telly business but I do like his recipes.  There are no proper measurements on his bumpf though – if you do want a proper recipe then this one from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is a good ‘un: River Cottage Sloe Gin. I like reading around a few recipes then going with the bits I like and leaving out the nonsense 🙂

Step one: I put my sloes in the freezer.  Everyone says to do this.  It is a neat little trick to ‘simulate the first frost’ though really it is to split open the skins to let the natural juices inside the tough exterior seep out and flavour your gin.  Now we have freezers we don’t need a real frost!  FYI I used a rinsed out bread bag to freeze them in – no unneceesary plastic here 🙂

Step two: I have bought some cheap gin.  (I KNOW!  Cheap gin!  Controversial!  I live on the wild side, what can I say.  It’s my first batch and I am a heathen – if it tastes nice I am more than happy.)  I have one litre of this.

Step three: find a suitable glass container for its first three months of storage.   I have two giant jars that had olives in.  Make sure they are dishwasher clean or sterilize them by putting them in the oven on a super low heat to kill off any bacteria.

Step four: half fill with sloes.

Step five: fill with Gin.

Step six: two tablespoons of sugar.

Step seven: put in a dark cupboard and shake/quarter turn every day or every other day for as long as it takes to dissolve the sugar.

Step eight: Check it lovingly every so often, give it a shake and a pep talk and feel immeasurably proud of you new baby (or babies if you are greedy for gin like me).

I have a plan to have one at christmas and the other will be a special bottle.  I want to save it until April when we will go on our annual seaside holiday with my best friend and her family and, next year, we will celebrate our 40ths with my homemade brew 🙂  Seeing as we met at University when only Fosters at £1 a pint would be necessary for a fine night out it will no doubt be a talking point regarding our grown up hipster selves 😉

I am off to take photos!

Life Hack: Compost

Composting.  It is the easiest, most satisfying thing EVER.

Well, not ever.  But it really is marvellous.  I have been doing it for nearly a year (with nowhere to put my compost by the way or any gardening skills) and I love it.  I was reminded of how much I love it just now as I went to my compost bin and started mucking it all around with my giant garden fork and saw how all the nonsense I have been putting into it over the past few months has turned into lovely, nourishing SOIL.

Now, me being me, it also has lots of tree branches, toys, balls and lego in it.  It also has some of my experiments!  And so let me tell you that:

• Cardboard breaks down a treat
• Leaves and veg peelings rot wonderfully
• Coffee grains?  Gone.

But…

• ‘biodegradable’ vegware coffee cups are still there
• ‘biodegradable’ compostable plastic straws are still there
• ‘biodegradable’ balloons are still there
• ‘biodegradable’ dog poo bags are still there

The plastics have stayed whole (e.g. the cup and straw) or become fragile and holey (the balloon and compostable plastic film coverings for magazines/salads/lily’s kitchen dog food).  These pieces are microplastics.

So what are companies that sell us ‘biodegradable’ plastic doing about this?  What about the Advertising Standards Agency?  Do all companies (some are very small independents) even KNOW that their products are only biodegradable in industrial grade composting machines?  Because this is not making the problem better but (with the bigger orgs in mind) it *is* shifting units.

Isn’t this, at some point, becoming too shady to remain legal?  Can you say that something is biodegradable when it isn’t?  Can you sell a product to businesses that isn’t what it says it is?  We desparately need more nuance when talking about ‘compostable’ and ‘biodegradable’ products.  Because if it doesn’t break down, it is bullshit.

I am going to message a few people.  I will come back with the answers!

Laters!

Life Hack: Cloths NOT Wipes!

This post is about how to swap-in cloths for wipes.  Slowly add cloths to your house in place of wipes and before you know it you’ll be off and running wipe-free!  Why?  Wipes clog up our drains, litter our beaches, and are eaten by sea creatures.  It also talks about greenwashing and microfibres and sponges and the beautiful nuance of choosing the right textured cloth for the right job.  Listen up, people! 🙂

How many wipes do you think you use a day?  One for the kitchen table?  Well, maybe two or three.  One for your face this morning?  A few on your baby’s/toddler’s nappy change.  One to clean that spillage on the floor.  One for a quick wipe around the toilet seat and another for the sink.  Ah, sod it I’ll just pop it in the loo.  Listen, people:  WE NEED TO STOP USING WIPES.  And we definitely need to stop chucking them down the toilet.  Even the wipe makers ask us to do that.  *No toilets for wipes*.  As my good friend who worked in a water company said, wipes don’t go through the filtration system properly.  They sneak through and clog up the filtration, then the pipes that lead out to sea, then the drains and finally, the gullets of birds that pick them up in the ocean.  The national marine and conservation charity, Surfers Against Sewage, have had a particular issue with this over decades: Think Before You Flush!

We DO need to start using cloths!  CLOTHS CLOTHS CLOTHS CLOTHS CLOTHS!

Let me show you how and why.  Cloths are amazing.  You can use them, then wash them in the washing machine and then use them AGAIN!  YEAH!  Now, when I made the switch I had one problem with cloths – I could never find them when I needed them!  But wipes?  Well, I would buy them in their specially labelled packets and scatter them around my house.  Kitchen ones for the kitchen; bathroom ones for the bathroom; dusting ones for the sitting room; floor ones for the floors (lovely apple smell); all purpose ones for anywhere; baby wipes for the babies bum/face/hands; wipes in my bag and fancy face wipes for my face.  That is a LOT of wipes!  Dear reader, I loved them.

But I realised that I couldn’t keep using wipes because they are not at all degradable (see here: Biodegradable? Sort of… Maybe… Compostable? Well, no. Welcome to Greenwashing.)  So I got rid of all my wipes and bought more cloths.  You can get a pack of about 5 BIG cotton cloths for the kitchen from £1 and, as I said, wash and reuse them forever.  Now, cotton is great.  Microfibre is not.  DON’T be tempted to buy ‘modern’ microfibre cloths because these are another form of pollution.  Microfibres break off when washing, enter the water cycle and are eaten by plankton, fish and us!  I know:  Microfibre Bad.  (And, while we’re at it, definitely, definitely never ever buy one of those ubiquitous green and yellow scrubbing sponges.  NO, no, no, no, no, no.  Not only are they criminally ugly they break up into lots of little pieces and never, ever biodegrade.  They degrade, yes, into teeny bits that are ingested by animals and simply pollute the land.  They do NOT ‘bio’ degrade.  Leave them well alone.  For super scrubbing replacements have a look at the home-compostable safix scrubbing pad and wooden, replaceable headed brush (see post: Scrubbing Brush!))

So, *cotton* cloths.  You can buy different coloured cloths for different purposes (like they do in hotels – I was a chambermaid once).  Have one colour cloth for the loo and another for sinks and baths.  Have more for floors (or use a mop.  Or even a steam cleaner – WOO)…

Baby wipes?  You can bulk buy special cloths or re-purpose old towels or flannels for cleaning babies’ bums (that have FAR more traction than wipes and so leave bums cleaner (oh, *and* you can use the homemade, antibacterial but oh-so-gentle wipe solution I use (see earlier post on Bottom Wiping 🙂).  I put the solution in a tub next to the changing area then lay about 10 wipes in it to use as and when – just like wipes.  Dirty wipes go in a mesh bag and at the end of the day they go – you guessed it – in the wash.

You can have beautiful handmade crocheted cloths for the house too (I make these if you want some!) that you can easily learn to make yourself or buy.  Because you will come to appreciate that not all cloths are equal!  (*geek alert*)  You can have knobbly bobbly cloths for cleaning kitchen ovens and hobs.  (Next step: dip into bicarb and grapefuit essential oil solution and job’s a good’un – see post: Bicarbonate Of Soda.) You can have looser cloth weaves with flatter textures for all-purpose cleaning.  You can have a medium textured ‘grippy’ weave for cleaning surfaces and toilets.  And then there are so many colours!    And then when you’re done… you can pop them in the wash.

You can have cloths in the kitchen drawer to grab when you need to clean dirty hands and faces.  No chemicals needed – the action of rubbing with a soapy cloth is sufficiently antibacterial in itself ( see this 2017 cleaning article on usefulness of wipes).

In place of face wipes I have a konjac sponge (info here) that, just like a wipe, needs no soap on it for a quick facial cleanse or refresh with a bit of water.  For more of nighttime deep-clean I have crocheted soft, textured cotton cloths for removing eye make-up, slightly bigger ones for cleansing my face, slightly rougher ones for washing my face and ANOTHER one for a flannel.  It is a lovely set!  I use them a couple of times and then… wash them.  I make these, ask if you want any; but you can also buy cotton cloth style bits like these from the Wise House that are just lovely!

For here and there you can also reuse old clothing for casual cloths.  Use pinking shears to prevent fraying.  Old muslins from babies are fab around the house, knackered cotton clothing, old flannels etc.

The clue is to have LOTS of cloths of all different sizes, colours and textures.  Have a lovely big basket with lots of different types and sizes of cloth in.  Don’t have one or two or you won’t know where to find them when you need them.  Just like wipes you can dot them around the house.  Or hang them up even – my crocheted cloths are pretty and I like to show them off!

So there you are.  Ditch the wipes.  Look around you with new eyes and see CLOTHS in old clothing, in cotton yarn, and from budget shops.  Wash them, pop them in your basket and you’re good to go again.

CLOTHS!

 

Attenborough on Plastic.

Just a wee reminder on why the plastic problem matters from our High Priest of Antiplastic, Sir David Attenborough.

 

 

We Love Him 🙂

Back from my euro-walkabout!

Ahhh I had a WONDERFUL holiday!  We went to Paris – Strasbourg – Black Forest – Luxembourg City – Lille – Bruges – Home over two weeks.  It was fantastic and exciting and our brains are full of new sights and sounds and languages and smells and food 🙂  We have expanded our brains and our sense of who we are – mainland Europe is vast and full of opportunity to access the world compared to our dinky, inwards-looking and defensive island, surrounded by cold, tricky seas and the lands of Other, Foreign People.

We stayed in a few airbnb places, a lovely posh hotel and the main part was a static caravan on a campsite for a whole week with friends in the Black Forest.  So blinking beautiful.  We drove and drove along motorways and autobahns from Le Shuttle in Calais; we stopped at services and roadside picnic stops and sometimes didn’t stop at all. We went on the Paris Metro, saw the Eiffel Tower, the Sacre Coeur, hung out in a studio flat with a secret, vine-filled courtyard in Montmartre, climbed tree top walkways in the Black Forest, walked along the beautiful and carefully tended bridges of Strasbourg.  We saw Gothic cathedrals and exquisite fountains and a lot of scuptural, heavyweight political and religious art from big squares and lawns or parks without spending a penny on entrance fees or tour guides.  We passed refugee camps and roadside settlements, were sometimes overwhelmed by the begging and touting and graffiti, and saddened by stories told on lamp-posts and bridges from the disenfranchised and ignored.  We rode on funicular railways and gasped at scenery: acres and acres of cityscape unfolding underneath us and the accompanying mass of humanity also visiting the Sacre Coeur.  The brash, loud creations of humanity were clearly displayed in this concept of a ‘city’.  Later, more quietly in the Black Forest we were looking at trees for miles and miles and miles on a glorious summer’s day.  That which we neglect was just getting on doing its hundreds of years old thing.

Humanity clearly demonstrates a sense of importance in its cities – past experiences and triumphs are trumpeted right in your face: ‘We did this!’ The noise arguably belies our insecurities and fragile egos.  But in another place a quietly vast sculptural experience in a forest compliments the natural surroundings, making us look up and look down.  Making us aware of how small we can be in our world.  In another place a ‘barefoot walk’ taught us to be calmer and more at peace with our own corporeal animalistic selves, here and now, with a lack of trumpets and triumph but with fun and acceptance.  We are just mortal animals.  To be barefoot and sensual in a place traditionally associated with hardcore hiking boots which immediately separate our selves from the natural place we are visiting was an amazing experience and utterly without any moralistic preaching.  The message was inherent to the walk itself.  But, as this walk demonstrated, we are not visiting.  We are part of this natural world.  We are animals too, like the bears and the wolves and the rats and the squirrels.  Humans.  What is in a name?

I found out the other day that my lovely little goldfish, Devon and Charlie, are not actually goldfish at all but are carp.  I can honestly say that I have never wanted to have carp as pets in my life.  The idea of sharing my home with carp makes me giggle.  But it would seem that my lovely ‘goldfish’ don’t exist.  (And one isn’t even gold any more which should have been a clue.)  We created the idea of goldfish and a whole discourse around them which told us they are small and easy to look after.  This, as the owner of two, is not true.  They are filthy, they poo a lot, they need a lot of room and cleaning and filtration and fresh water and air and food, they need stimulation and they definitely have memories and feelings (mine sulked for days after we came back from holiday).  And we read or watch telly to discover that dolphins talk and Orca have dialects and fish change gender and pigs like problem solving and we are surprised.  Why?!    Because, apparently, nature is so passively dumb and, goddammit, we humans made rules!  Gender is gender and humans speak and problem solve – why, this is what makes us so marvellous!  *pats on back*.  And it makes me wonder – in the end are nature documentaries like Planet Earth helping or hindering these ideas?  Rather than informing are they now serving to maintain a distance between us ‘humans’ goggling at the weirdness of our planetary companions like the social anthropologists did while studying pacific islanders in the 50s and 60s?  Are we perpetuating the idea of our planetary buddies as ‘others’ – animals that are not ‘us’ – not as clever or as creative or as Enlightened and therefore, as deserving of space here?  We are ignoring the fact that we are an intrinsic part of this planetscape we marvel at from our sofas.  And so often what we find marvellous is not that these creatures exist but that we found out about them, with our expensive, fragile submarines and clunking big cameras.  Well, fancy that! *more pats on backs*.

Blue Planet recently broke this fiction by allowing us to glimpse the reality of the production team’s experience – time consuming, obsessive, dangerous and sometimes tedious work to bring us a second of an Orca’s life.  And then there is the other fiction that this world on telly is untouched.  Rather, they confessed, they were surrounded by litter and plastic, by animals dying from eating our human-made debris.  This was a brave, understandably tentative and apologetic break from a traditional, more glossy and romantic narrative.  It was essential to stop perpetuating the idea that nature is always lovely when actually it is being trashed.  By our species.  We had a wee peek through the looking glass.  I picked up straws in Paris; microplastics in the Black Forest; drove past trashed verges and laybys in Luxembourg, walked past overflowing bins being scavenged at by gulls; picked up fag butts and straw packets and takeaway boxes and plastic forks and ketchup packets and coffee cup lids.  It was ugly and distressing and complicated and it showed me that wherever I am the world can never be the same again.  This is a really, really bitter pill to swallow and I am so reluctant to have these memories as part of our family experience.  I am reluctant to talk about the horror of the plastic that was in the quietest and calmest of places because it will ruin my holiday’s narrative and turn it into something ‘negative’.  My husband desperately wanted me to stop being ‘on duty’ but when this is our reality I cannot ignore it and paint a nice, distant picture of an experience that didn’t happen. On the positive side I saw some lovely anti-rubbish, anti-plastic and pro-recycling initiatives that I am looking forward to sharing here and with my local townsfolk.  There are efforts being made.  But culturally I would say that we are still hugely in denial.

Our human rubbish is *everywhere*.

And so onto us as ‘humans’ – as ‘civilisation’ – does this exist?  We are animals, we are earthly, we are not distinct from ‘the natural world’.  Like goldfish that are actually carp, humans are not special or immortal or uniquely marvellous rather we are simple carbon atoms – like the wood of trees, or paper, or diamonds, or the stars.  Just carbon.  We need to understand ourselves more as animals, like those we study in a zoo or a nature documentary.  See ourselves from the outside-in.  We need to change how we see our planet and our place in it.  We are not brilliant.  We just are.

I have to walk my wolf-pet now with my small human beings in a beautiful, quiet field on this planet I am lucky enough to call home.

BYE!

Not Bags: Boxes

The future is in cardboard boxes.  I saw it this week, and it pleased me.

Cardboard boxes are stackable

Cardboard boxes are cheap

Cardboard boxes are reusable

Cardboard boxes can be decorated/branded

Cardboard boxes are easily and widely recyclable

Cardboard boxes are not complicated

Cardboard boxes rarely need any kind of plastic fasteners

Cardboard boxes can have lids

Cardboard boxes can be flatpacked

Cardboard boxes can have holes in or not

Cardboard boxes can be thick or thin

Cardboard boxes can be any size

Cardboard boxes are biodegradable – in the truest sense of the word.

 

Now, I know that cardboard is no good for soft fruit because fruit is largely water and just makes the cardboard all wet and decomposes.  Plastic really is the best thing for soft fruit and veg that needs to last.  If you want soft fruit and veg and to be plastic free the best thing you can do is buy it from your local grocer or farm shop.  Our local corner shop has punnets of strawberries in cardboard…

BUT – is the tide turning?! I see that lidl are now selling off boxes of end of life fruit and veg for £1.50!  Such an ingenious way to combat food waste that supermarkets are worried about!  (Using as an excuse to drag their heels…)  This is really exciting in more than the anti-plastic sense.  It makes varieties of fruit and veg available and affordable to everyone.  There is such food snobbery and fear about different food in the UK.  I think this will do really well to make good food available to everyone 🙂

Boxes should also be used instead of bags for life.  Don’t use plastic bags AT ALL.  Even bags for life are not actually bags for life AND need to be used 144 times to warrant their production in comparison with a traditional plastic bag.  Cotton bags are also intensive to produce and make.  Cardboard can be sustainable.

So I am delighted to see avocados being sold in boxes by Tesco – at an affordable price – and boxes of oranges in Co-op.

Boxes!  Not bags!

 

Tesco in Truro, Cornwall

Oh my days.  I am in such a state of plastic-induced horror I have verily harrumphed myself into something measurable only on the glasgow scale.

I have already exclaimed on facebook about the INDIVIDUALLY WRAPPED DISCOUNTED LIMES that were all together in a tray.  Someone had bothered to bag and tag about 50 limes in those flimsy grocery bags to show their new price.  Well, thought I, they must be different prices.  NO!  Dear reader, hold onto your sandals for they were ALL the same price!

WHY NOT JUST PUT THEM ALL IN THE TRAY WITH ONE SIGN?!  Seriously, I know you want the barcode on them to differentiate them from other limes but a bag for EVERY lime?!  Take the financial hit and compost the blighters.  Give them away.  Stop being so bloody ridiculous and heartless.

ARRRRRGHHHHH.  The stupidity.  I was in a major hurry trying to avoid meltdown-mania from my increasingly rebellious brethren and only in the wretched store because they own the car park (next to where, incidentally, I am working on a stall highlighting the perils of plastic litter.  FML.)  I know supermarkets are not ideal places for planet conscious types and will always raise our ire in some way.  But the limes stopped me in my tracks.  Because a person DID this.  One of the people in that store.  They did this with their hands and their time and their mind.  And everyone else in that store thought it was OK with their minds.  Despite moaning children I tried to pick up a handful to take to customer services.  I wanted to say, ‘Do you think this is OK?!  This is NOT OK!  When you took my son round on your ‘farm to fork’ advertorial journey around your store with his Scout group, did you say about how you are smothering anything farmers try to grow in bloody plastic shit?  DID YOU?’

However, I was thwarted by the limes themselves – the stickers had all stuck together so they were all falling out in a ruddy great big lime train.  I must’ve looked super keen for those plastic-wrapped limes.  Not one would suffice.  I needed ALL of them!  Half price limes everyone!  They’re mine!

Anyway, I digress.  I did not go and holler hellup at customer services with all my limes in tow because I couldn’t carry them with the baby as well and they wouldn’t have given a monkey’s anyway.  So instead I thought, ‘I will send them an angry tweet’.  But my phone was out of battery.  No photo.  No tweet.

Now, if I had been in my right mind I would have bought all the limes and then bloody well boxed the lot (twitching at the post office lady who always asks me what is in my parcel because, obviously, I might be a cornish mum lady terrorist.  Though copme to think of it – is sending limes in an angry way to someone a terrorist act?) and sent it off to HQ with a terse note demanding significant demonstrations of remorse and promises to change.  Instead I blew my top quietly inside my mind and headed off to find some lettuce.

And the lettuce!  Oh, dear reader, the lettuce!  Rows and rows of wonderfully chilled bagged and chopped/shredded, washed ‘lettuce’.  It was a sanitised version of lettuce-like food on the aisle, all bagged up in stiff plastic.  And this wasn’t just the brands like florette who do fancy lettuces or rocket or whatever.  Tesco had bothered to chop up iceberg lettuce and seal it in a bag.  Iceberg lettuce.  The most banal, quotidian of lettuces that everyone knows how to prepare.  WHY?!  Honestly.  Kids are not going to have a clue about fruit and veg if it is like this.  They’ll think it is 3D printed all chopped up in a bag.  Potatoes come in packets and boxes frozen and half baked.  Carrots are called ‘batons’.  (Harrumph)

And so onto the avocados.  This was actually – hold onto your hats – pleasing!  They had job lots of avocados in really hard boxes for £3.  This is lovely and my dog has had the best afternoon trying to get her treats out of the box (not the avocados, dog treats).  It can be reused or composted.  Ideal.

And then onto trying to leave the store where I was faced with a veritable wall of discounted multipack bottles of water, wrapped together in plastic.  WHYYYYY?!  Why can’t they have a wall of reusable, funky bottles instead and a ReFill fountain?!!  Why bottled water?!  ARRRRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!  It is almost a cliche about bottled water we all know about it so much.  It costs 5000 times as much to buy a bottle of water as fill one up at home.  WTAF.

And this was in a whirlwind 20min max visit.  You then come out of the store to see the estuary at low tide, littered with plastic crap.

It hurts!  The bloody frustration and futility of it all!  There’s me on my stall about 200m away, trying to engage the public in understanding how important picking up litter is, trying to stop them dropping it and demonstrating the skanky perils of bottled water and plastic lids and packaging on our habitat and then…  and then…

…Tesco.

I am not a fan of Tesco right now.