I had a good run. Covid may have got going in ’19, but it took it until ’23 to catch me. Or for me to catch it, depending on how you look at it.
In any case, I fell ill about a week after my last post, and though not badly ill, I was in isolation for the best part of two weeks. In terms of quantity, that is. In terms of quality, the best part of the two weeks was definitely the bit where I could cuddle the Caped Gooseberry once more.
How do you know what’s the most environmentally friendly way to wash dishes? You ask one of those nifty books that advise you of the “greenest” options for all the ordinary elements of quotidian life.
Except.
These books invariably (in my experience to date) recommend using a dishwasher instead of hand washing, as it uses less water. Which seemed odd to me – right up until I read the dishwashing section of How To Save Your Planet One Object At A Time by Dr Tara Shine.
Readers possessed of a better memory than mine may recall the post I wrote 2 1/4 years ago, about the garden patch and what turned out to be a Gestetner stylus found therein. I say a better memory than mine, because I had forgotten that I wrote it.
It refers to an “enormous black bag of weed roots – now too heavy to lift” and when I say enormous, I do not exaggerate. It looked like this:
That revolting brown thing is a fallen camellia flower. Why do they do that?
Do not be fooled into thinking that this is your common or garden black rubbish bag, vol. approx 60L. No, no. This black bag was about a metre by two metres when flat, and when full it was, as previously mentioned, too heavy for me to lift. I can lift a ten kilo sack and carry it on my head. In a previous job I used to lift twenty kilo sacks of popping corn (though I was not foolhardy enough to put them on my head). I can lift and carry a large tub full of hardwood logs for the fire. I could not lift this bag.