A Nip in the Air

Autumn is definitely among us. There is a chill in the air and we have seen the leaves start to turn. We turned on the heat after getting *drenched* in a  seemingly endless freezing rain the other day. Yup, Autumn is definitely here.

 

We used to have a lovely wooden tree that was rather delicate that I used to decorate to celebrate each solstice (Summer and Winter) and each equinox (Spring and Autumn) because I like to keep up with the changing of the seasons and celebrate the wheel of the year, but also I just like to make stuff and decorate.

 

Sadly, as we were preparing to move it became abundantly clear that we could not take the wooden tree. It would never survive the move. It was too fragile. It wouldn’t fit into a box. All the bubble wrap in Arabia will not save this little tree (to paraphrase *very* loosely Lady MacBeth). So with a heavy heart I took it to a charity shop.

 

But we still wanted to do something to celebrate the seasons. Something big and something small. Something that didn’t take up much space, but something that filled up our lives.

 

Then it came to me. A tree doesn’t have to be 3D. A tree can be 2D. So I bought an inexpensive cork board and covered it with fabric I already had and made a felt tree and some seasonal leaves to go onto it.

click on it to see it in more detail.

I cleverly sewed thumbtacks into the back if it so that they would push into the cork without being seen. I was particularly proud of that idea.

 

It hangs on the landing and I can change the decorations for every season rather easily. That was the something small that didn’t take up much space bit. But what about the bigger, filling up our lives bit?

 

I have been thinking for a long time--what is the best bit about advent? For me, it is the ritual of reading a beloved seasonal poem as we sit down for a meal from December the first until Christmas. We have a running joke that I am going to sentimentally proclaim before every poem in a wistful voice, “Ohhh, this is one of my favourites!” Well of course it is. I chose all the poems so every one is a personal favourite!

 

So I decided to do the same for the other seasons. I would find a poem a day to read to count toward the solstice or equinox and I had better get cracking as September was only a few weeks away when I decided to do this so I searched and compiled a lovely list of poems and printed them off.   

 

It was a rousing success. It was a lovely, quiet moment before a meal to share some beautiful words and set our hearts towards the changes that lay ahead.

 

I leave you with my favourite poem (the favourite of the favourites, as it were) by Carl Sandburg.

 

I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

 

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper

Sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.

 

The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes,

New beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind,

And the old things go, not one lasts.

 

Happy Autumn everyone!

Personally Paper Product Free Part Two

More alliteration, jolly good! Now for the one you’ve been waiting for. Toilet paper. I know what you’re thinking, even someone as crunchy granola as Spidergrrl surely must wipe with toilet paper. Nope. Think again. I have used cloth toilet paper (referred to online as “family cloth” --go on google it, you know you want to) for urine for a few years but only recently have converted to using it for everything. Lots of people--particularly families with small children in nappies use it--so why not me? You can even buy posh wipes like these from WallyPop.   http://living.wallypop.net/wipes.html   

For years I used an old flannel sheet that I cut into squares. But over time it faded and grew stiffer and rougher from the hard water we have and lack of a tumble drier. At that rate I might as well have been using regular toilet paper. So I embarked on a quest to find a solution. I googled “family cloth” and read everything I could get my hands on. Most people were happy to tell you all about how they used it on their baby. How cloth wipes moistened with a bit of warm water and oil cleaned their precious baby’s bottom and they threw used wipes into the nappy pail and washed them that way. Many of these people said their whole family had converted to cloth themselves, but very few people went into details on their own adult personal habits. So I have collated the best of their ideas and plan to tell all. Spiderman, I think, is a bit worried about this disclosure (and wants me to assure everyone this is just me we’re talking about--although I hope to win him over one day) but I think a person needs to be educated. If you knew how easy and clean it was more people would be converted. So here goes:

Flannel is mega soft in the beginning, but only if you have soft water and/or a tumble drier. My experience is it goes all sandpapery which is to be avoided. My choice is fleece.  Not sheep fleece (although I once read something about this man who wiped his arse with a live goose--yuck) but the kind jumpers are made of--polyester fleece. I know some people complain that liquid beads up on fleece but I think this would only be an issue if you were weeing a fountain. The beading up can be solved by dampening the cloth slightly with a spray bottle. More on that in a bit. I have 2 kinds--some polar fleece that my friend who used cloth nappies gave me and some cut up jumpers. I wanted something soft, colourful (because let’s be honest, it is nicer to wipe with something purdy) and something that didn’t ravel in the wash. Also something that dried quickly. Fleece ticks all those boxes.  I bought 2 jumpers from a charity shop--one red and 1 salmon pink. I got them for £1.50 each because it was the end of the cold season and they were making way for summer gear. I cut them up into 6” by 8” rectangles (although the ones from the sleeves are more like 5” by 8”). The yellow fleece with cows used to be used a nappy liners (hence the kid friendly theme) but it was free and beggars can’t be choosers.

I store clean ones in a decorative basket made from woven banana leaves on the back of the toilet. After using one I store it in a mesh laundry bag--the kind for delicates or tights--that hangs up in a hook off the side of the washing machine. This air circulates through the mesh so there’s no smell. Then I just wash them with whatever laundry is going. But what about butt germs? That’s what you are really thinking at this point. I’m not putting butt germs in with everything else. Well, hear me out. This part may get a bit graphic so be warned. Spiderman, avert your eyes.

If you are going to just use them for a little dab o’ pee then what’s the big deal? Urine is essentially sterile. Lots of people just use it for number one--I did for years and if you are anything like me you wee about a dozen times a day. It saves on toilet paper and is softer on your girly bits. That’s fine. But what if you want to try the whole shebang? How do you do it to avoid the dreaded butt germs?

Okay, what you need is rinse system. The reason you use so much paper is because it is dry. Honest. I had to go back to regular TP on the Dr Who holiday and it was murder. You poo, then wipe, get more paper, then wipe, get more paper, then wipe--repeat until you are all covered in linty fluff and your bum hurts from all the rubbing. I know. You thought that’s how it always had to be. But it doesn’t. Rinsing then drying with cloth is so comfortable. But the rinse is the key. People in countries like India have been doing it for centuries, they use their hand to clean, although I advocate a cloth, but the rinsing bit is the part that makes the difference. Don’t you trust your Auntie Spidergrrl?

You need something to rinse with and an empty spray bottle. People from India have a lovely brass pouring pitcher to use but I find that too difficult. If you’ve had a baby and they gave you a “peri bottle” to soothe your torn perineum after birth those work great. I use one of those squeezy mustard bottles. I got it and a ketchup bottle for a total of 50p. I use the ketchup bottle to hold lavender scented vinegar for fabric softener for my wash--but that’s a different story. Fill the spray bottle with water and  glug of light oil (I like sunflower oil) and 3-4 drops lavender essential oil. The oil is there to make wiping easier (and the cloth easier to rinse if you need it) and the lavender is there to make it smell nice but also because lavender is antibacterial it helps cut down on odour or butt germs if you worry about that. 

When you are ready to have your BM fill the squirty bottle with warm water. Then sit down and do the business. When you finish hold the bottle behind you and aim the warm water towards the poop chute. You don’t need to get too close (no fear of contamination of the squirty bottle) the water will just squirt out and rinse. Rinse well. I usually do ¾ of a bottle of warm water. It feels nice because the water is warm. Pick up your spray bottle and give it a shake to mix the oil and water. Then take your soft fleece cloth and give it a few sprays. If it beads up on the fleece you are spraying too close. Move your hand back to allow a light mist to dampen the cloth.  Then give yourself a good old wipe. If you have rinsed well there will be little to no poo to wipe away. 9 times out of 10 there is none. On the occasion you get a tiny pea sized amount of poo on your cloth then give the cloth a quick rinse under the tap. The oil in the water helps the poo to just slide off. But this rarely happens. It fact it happens less and less the better I get at rinsing. Then take another dry cloth and dry yourself. Put them both in your mesh bag to dry and wash your hands.  I can't believe how *clean* I feel afterwards. The rinse really makes a difference. It's like going through a butt car wash. There, now that wasn’t so bad was it?

Now I just wash my fleece rags with whatever wash that’s going. Ewww…I hear you cry. I’m still worried about butt germs. Well, the crotch of your knickers has as much butt germs (more if you leave skid marks) as a wipe. Since I don’t leave skid marks because I have washed myself thoroughly and then dried I don’t feel this is an issue. We haven’t been sick or died yet so I think everything is hunky dory.

Still need convincing? Try these statistics courtesy of one of favourite eco blogs The Crunchy Chicken:

According to Charmin, consumers on average use 8.6 sheets per trip to the bathroom. That's a total of 57 sheets per day and an annual total of 20,805 sheets. There are 230 million adults in the U.S., each averaging a roll and a half per week. Since each roll of toilet paper averages about .5 a pound of paper, that's about 40 pounds of TP per year.

That equals 4.6 million tons of TP used each year. And that's just from adults. To take the calculation even further, if all U.S. adults used only Charmin toilet paper or the like (aka "virgin fiber" with 0% recycled content or post-consumer waste), the environmental cost is approximately (not including the issues with Dioxin):

  78.2 million trees

  1.35 million tons of air pollution

  32 trillion gallons of water

  2.1 trillion gallons of oil

  18.75 trillion Kilowatt hours of energy

All just to wipe your butt. Go green, go cloth! It’s softer on your bits and kinder to the environment.

Spiderman, you can open your eyes now. 

Like a Pig in Mud

I am describing the rest of the tree planting tale at the request of my dear old mum who laughed herself silly as I related it to her on the phone yesterday. We have the perfect arrangement--we talk on the phone while I am having lunch and she is having breakfast. The 6 hour time distance works like a dream.

As I said before, we left the school with shiny happy faces and (mostly) our spare shoes and snacks. We went by coach (bus) and had a jolly 1 hour drive with everyone singing and laughing (and the occasional person vomiting in a sick bag.) We arrived with clean boots and clean hearts to do our bit for the environment. But then things got sticky.

The mud did, rather. Because of England’s glorious rain the mud was really--muddy. Not the sort that you just wipe your feet on the mat and it’ll all be fine, but the thick, gooey, sticky, clay like sort of mud that stuck tenaciously to our boots. And after digging a few trees everyone was ankle deep in mud. You could try scraping it off with the spade, but after a minute or two it was back, thicker than ever and now seemed to be glued to the bottom of your trouser leg. In order to see if the hole was deep enough you had to get down eye level with the hole to see if the roots of your tree would stick out--and if they did, bad luck to you, dig it deeper. This meant that soon knees and elbows and coats were soon covered with the brown sticky earth. Mine too. My coat looked like I had rolled in it--which I had not (Some of the earthier children did though) I did slip once and fall on my bum but so did many others so I didn’t feel too embarrassed. Many of us (particularly those with glasses) had mud on their face. The rain kept making my glasses slip down and every time I pushed them up I got mud on my nose.

About 10:30 we all stopped for a snack. We kindly asked the instructors where we could wash our hands and the reply was “Water? There’s no water out here, love. Tell them just to eat with dirty hands.” So all the training we drill into them about hand washing went out the window. We all had to eat with mud caked hands. Those with cereal bars fared better as you could hold a muddy hand on the wrapper, but those with fruit struggled. Have you ever tried to eat an apple without touching it?

At last it was time to go home. With no water to even wash hands we were a mess. The coach driver looked like steam was going to come out his ears. Every child who had brought a change of shoes had to balance perilously while taking off their muddy wellies and putting them in a plastic bag whilst trying to put on their clean and dry shoes whilst standing in the mud on the side of the road. So even our clean shoes got dirty quickly. Those who had forgotten theirs had to get on the bus, take them off and pass the shoes to me where I could stow them in the luggage compartment (the driver refused to let us bring them on board) and they had to go home in sock feet. The driver took one look at our grubby hands and shouted “Nobody touch nuffin!” to which one smartarse replied “Then how are we meant to do up our seatbelts, sir?”

It was off home we travelled, less laughter, same amount of vomiting in sick bags and smelling like the back end of a farm. We arrived back at school and the children with no shoes had to wait on the steps of the coach and point to the wellies that belong to them--which was a wee bit difficult as they were all the same forest green model from Shoe Zone. I had to at one point say “Emily which green ones are yours?” Blank expression. “The large, the medium or the small ones?” Blank expression. “ Right, these look like they’ll fit. Off the coach. Next!”

When I got home I looked like I had been mud wrestling. If I lived in the sort of house where you could take off your clothes outside, I would have. I ran in and popped everything in the wash and then went to work on cleaning my wellies. Easier said than done. I had cleverly brought some paper towels from school (we don’t use paper towels at home) and had wiped off as much of the exterior mud as I could manage. Then I figured I would just give them a rinse under the tap and it would all be over with. But no, no, no. This was not to be. This was the mud that stuck like glue and so I ended up naked in the tub trying to pry the mud from the deep grooves at the bottom of my wellies with an old toothbrush. In the end the wellies were clean, but I and the tub were not. I was covered head to toe with mud. As we don’t have a shower this was difficult to rise away but I finally managed to get myself and the tub reasonably clean. Whew, I thought to myself. But  clearly I spoke too soon. I turned to get my towel and noticed that everywhere was splattered in mud—the toilet, the walls and the sink. I dried off and went to scrubbing up everything—using enough towels to require a full load of laundry in the process.

Then I sat down for a snack and only then realized that the rocks were still in my rucksack. Sigh….And you may ask why I had a bunch of dirty great rocks in my backpack, but I assure you there is a reason. I am working on a storytelling for World Book Day—an Armenian version of Snow White called Nourie Hadig and one of the props needed is something called “the stone of patience” which is a stone that swells until it bursts when you tell it your troubles. Now I had racked my brains as to how I was going to come up with 3 similar rocks all in different sizes and one that could crack open. I had resigned myself to building them from paper mache when it suddenly hit me as I stood covered in mud at the tree farm. There were tones of rocks here—kids were always digging them up with their spades. So I began to look and as soon as children cottoned on to what I needed they kept bringing me rocks until I had a set of 3 including a large one that was in halves that came together perfectly. So I reluctantly got out the old toothbrush and scrubbed all the rocks in the in sink and they have come up a treat. Perfect for my storytelling. But now I had to clean the bloody sink again.

So that is the dirty tale of me and the mud. I am still finding places in the house that have splatters or dibbles of mud—including fingerprints on the fridge that I somehow missed the first few times round. But it was worth it—the trees we planted will be a beacon of hope for those kids. But if you were to ask me again to go out in the mud to plant trees, the answer would not be no. It would hell no.

A Love for Trees

Yesterday I went on a trip with year 5 and 6 to a large field in St Albans where 500,000 trees are being planted over the next few weeks. All of the trees are being planted by school children which makes this a remarkable feat.

God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees and in the flowers and clouds and stars.

Martin Luther

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t that keen about going at first. Don’t get me wrong, I love trees. I love what trees do for us. I have been known to spontaneously hug a tree that I find beautiful. However, I was told at very short notice that my services would be needed and besides it was cold. And wet-that ever constant dreary drizzle that is forever England. But seeing as I am the Eco Council sponsor and it wouldn’t do to see an adult with lacklustre enthusiasm so off we went with a cheerful enthusiasm. And I am so glad I did.

The trip was very well organised and we all got free fleecy hats from the Woodland Trust, so it can’t be all bad. The children were given clear instructions on how to dig their own holes, measure to see if their hole was deep enough and how to plant the sapling (really just a stick with feathery roots.) We also had to do the “tree dance” --a way of stomping the earth flat around the sapling followed by speaking to the tree up close. You were to say hello and give it a name just to give it a burst of CO2 for luck. At one point I was singing Heartbreak Hotel to a tree called Elvis. Thank you very much.

All in all we planted 555 trees with just 75 children. Thank goodness for the ever present drizzle because the ground was soft enough for small children to do most of the digging themselves. But on the other hand we were all FILTHY by the end. We were told to bring a change of shoes for the way home and several children (despite being reminded a dozen times and were not allowed out of the classroom without answering the question “Do you have your snack and spare shoes?”) FORGOT their shoes or their snack or the brains back in the school (every one of those children had answered YES to the question about snack and shoes) and had to go home barefoot because we were all ankle deep in sticky mud. But despite being covered in it, there was a real sense of achievement. We have planted trees that these children will be able to take their grandchildren to see. This wood will never be cut down for paper or lumber or to make houses. It is there to be a wood--a magical forest giving us oxygen and hope.

Men will become poor because they don’t have a love for trees….If you don’t love trees you don’t love God.

Nikephoros of Chios (1750-1821) A lack of Trees Brings Poverty

I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees

It happened. It finally happened. They pollarded our trees. We knew the day would come, but it was a shock nonetheless. We live opposite a Medieval church and our front window looks onto the Cloisters--a green sanctuary of trees and a few graves. We have named all the trees after people from the Bible--it seemed fitting somehow being opposite the church. But now Jesus, Mary and Joseph have been pruned back. When you pollard a tree you leave the trunk but cut all the branches. It leaves a very awkward looking tree for a time until it grows back.

I am sad that these beautiful, majestic trees have had to be cut back so severely--and quite so ugly. But it needed to be done. They were smack up against the flat and were causing all sorts of trouble such as clogged gutters which caused a leaky roof and  mildew on our ceilings. We also had no light coming through the bedroom window making early mornings a bit of bother.

But now, they are gone. Well not gone, but  unrecognizable as trees. It is no wonder that the character from Little Britain is named Vicki Pollard--it is an ugly sight. But all is not lost. Cutting back will make them grow back thicker and more beautiful. It may take time, but they will be trees once more. And at least we still have the Disciples to look at.