Biodegradable tea bags

 When the tea arrived in the on line shopping the other day I did not take too much notice of the packaging only that it was a substitute for whatever box I had ordered. Within days of opening it I was tearing my hair out.

Bag after bag exploded in the cups. Mug after mug of tea leaf strewn drink was going down the sink. Lockdown mind losing? Lost ability to make tea? In a petulant frame of mind (or generally p'eed off) I searched the box for a link to the complaints department.

Yes. Apparently I can't make tea. Who knew after 60 odd years of putting the kettle on? 

I don't like strong tea so for years and years the habit at home (and work) was to dip the tea bag and whip to a second cup with a few stirs the bag gave a decent second cup. No longer. Now we are "biodegradable" (ie now plastic based glue which is good) the given method apparently is to gently pour on the water and leave to soak. Using one bag per cup. It works, but is costing twice as much in tea bags (or less in wasted mugs of spoiled tea).

You can't order from my usual supermarket any other kind of tea bag in this my preferred black tea blend (I am sure that others are available elsewhere) and I am sure its good for the planet/us not to have the micro plastic glue but I do feel stupid and annoyed in equal measures.

When we can do more things (one day) I would love to do the guided walk round London to all the old tea traders and warehouses.  I heard about it on the radio some time ago and was fascinated by how tea is so embedded in UK history and buildings apparently.

Vaccines - bit like buses!

 Hubby having followed NHS instructions and booked the jab at the local theatre within 48 hours got  call from local GP to offer him an appointment as well! Decided not to mess around with their systems and stuck with the Sunday run to the local town. Only now its due to snow!   Hopefully we won't have to cancel after all.

Do you keep a diary? After 25 years of having an office diary full of meetings, due dates for projects, etc etc I was glad to ditch my paper diary. But the last 3 years we have kept a "growing" diary for our fruit and veg. Its useful in comparing what went in, when and where. Last week we looked up when we put in peppers and how long they took to show. This year after 15 days the same seeds are not doing a thing!

We also noted last year our water butts were bone dry by |March 5th and that the day time temperatures were 18C!!!! Bring it on! Up to our ankles in mud!

The one thing I regretted by the end of the year was I did not note the pandemic more. We argue about what happened when. |No doubt one day it will be in a history book.

Well done Cadbury's!!! Welcome back to the |UK to make our chocolates! I love British manufacturing.  Its a pity they cant rescue the Cadbury factory near Bristol too - I know if hit a big bit of the town when that closed and they moved everything abroad. 

I must note that I went to Bourneville when I was 15. I did not eat chocolate for 10 years as the smell and the sight of the manufacturing made me feel sick.  

Useless holiday TV

 Not only was the holiday TV useless (except the brilliant Worzel Gummidge!) I found myself keeping score on the useless adverts.

1. T UI holiday advert for summer - really? You really think that is going to happen safely?

2. Br  oncho cough syrup - really? Cures all coughs? ALL? Err.... that one too?

3. Sales in local department store - really? Not even open (Tier 4) are they?

Could go on, but won't. Just shows what a delay in TV planning there is.

Then there was a scary advert.

Emirates Air (I think) one of those posh ones any way. Brief glimpse of the air stewardess in a full white plastic PPE, mask and shield, and the cute little hat on top. Dr Who may adopt that but I would need advance notice to hide behind settee.

Husband gave up because of the moaning and searched Prime free videos for a series of independent, art films,  to keep me quiet. It was nice to have no violence, reasonably free of bad language, beautifully photographed films in strange places - Shell; Blown the man down; Waking Ned. 

Today its so cold we are indoors and we are watching comedy.  Sorry, that's not comedy is it?.  Recalled Parliament Live.

I am thinking up my new year resolutions too.  And like Frugal in Essex thinking a lot about structure to get through the next 3 months.

1950s

One of my grandsons goes to a very, very posh private school and is always set, at aged 6, some very interesting homework projects. This half term he has to find people who lived in the 1950s and find out what life was like. 

Well he found them. But we found it hard to explain TV.

1. Grandma did not have one till 1963. Grandad had one before that (he came from a posh family)

2. TV did not turn on till late afternoon and stopped for an hour for the country to sit down for evening meal.

3. TV was black and white in the early part of the 1950s. In fact we did not have a colour TV till 1971 (after we were married 3 years)

4.  You went to the cinema or local church hall to watch cartoons on a Saturday morning. Followed by a "cowboy" film or Lone Ranger type for the older kids.

Other things we did not have?

No washing machine. We had a boiler and a mangle. 

Clothes did not stretch. They were cotton or wool. There was no denim.

No central heating. We kept the clothes near the bed, dressed under the blankets and ran like hell down stairs to where the paraffin heater might be on if we were lucky. 

We did not go on holiday. Went on days out on the train. Grandad had holidays taken all over in a car (they WERE posh).

What did you do after school?   School ended at 4pm none of this barely 3pm nonsense.

We read books. Hundreds and hundreds. We went to the library or had books from school library.

We played board  games. Grandad listened to Dick Barton on the radio.

We played out till the sun set. Summers were long and hot and the winters cold and frosty and it often snowed. We rode our bikes everywhere.

We made things. Sewing, woodwork, anything we could find. Trollies were made one summer for racing down the hills. We took part in concerts. Some did a lot of sport (not me). 

We walked every other Sunday 5 miles to my Aunt's house for tea and 5 miles back in the evening as a family, talking, laughing, looking at things. Winter we went less often and it depended if we had spare money for the train or buses to bring us half way back.

Grandson has gone off the conference call to have a think about that. It was all a bit too much for his imagination!!

Blasted by storm

 I think we were the only bit of the UK last night to get high winds. It blasted at 60 mph gusts for a while and wrote off a 4 year old ornamental cherry tree and loosened two apple trees because their stakes had rotted off. Runner bean frame work was flattened too.  Autumn has arrived.

Decided to sit on settee for rest of today and read. Needing a new book I tried the county library e book service first 10 books I picked out of the catalogue listing all had waiting lists. Tried a new tack.  I went to page 456 and worked backwards through the catalogue! Success! I bet there are loads of good reads in the middle pages.   Bit like not going down certain aisles in the library?

Gloves

I have been thinking about gloves. I hate the thin disposable ones (shudder, too many genealogical exam thoughts!) and by the time I am half way round the local small supermarket my hands are all sweaty. Then you have got to peel them off and dispose of them properly. Far too many plastic gloves being seen littering the UK.

 But am I ready for  bare hands when out and about? (If I ever leave the house). Then using that gel stuff that is making hands all dry and painful till you get home for another lot of hand washing.

Back in the 1950s my (daft) mother thought it was really posh, and necessary, for us to wear gloves when going out on a Sunday outing. (You can imagine my rebellious 1960s years!) But before running her down was she right?

We were elegant and protected.  Well a bit. Like face coverings in cotton its not going to stop the deadly virus completely. Would still need to wash them after each use and your hands all the time but you may feel better.


Thinking about it there are still patterns out there to make thin cotton gloves and these days we have nice light stretchy fabric. I could reuse all those baby gros and things my grandchildren have given me for recycling.


You can even still buy pairs of 1940/50s gloves on various sites like Etsy.  These were £17!


Hang on. I think there is a pair of my mothers posh cotton gloves around somewhere with her pearls (fake). To the attic!!!!

Bunting

Was not going to do anything for VE day as a child of a Burma Campaign airman I resent the way my Dad was part of the "forgotten" who went on for 6 months more and by the time he got home all the attention, and housing, had gone. My parents started married life sharing with her sister and 4 boys in a bomb damaged house then in a Nissan hut vacated by Polish POWs till getting a council house in 1952!  Still I put my feelings aside when I found I had lots of triangles of blue all over the table from cutting the V necked scrub tops for the NHS. Roughly joined them to a left over strip, added a couple of white and a red triangle and hung on the garden gate to join my rainbow just to cheer our road up.

I had to bike round the village today to get some milk( about 2 miles) and in that distance only counted 5 other bunting efforts. Could have been more on the estates and closes off the roads but I thought there would be far more considering this is supposed to be a "retirement" village.

Perhaps I will do a display for VJ day in August!

Meanwhile lockdown drags on a bit for us. My husband decided he wanted to finish a boat model project he started 20 years ago. He dragged out the hull and the wood for it from storage but could not find the plans. Hardly surprising as we have moved at least half a dozen times since then! He went on a boat model forum and someone in France offered him the plans within 2 days! Marvellous thing this internet, and, Google translate!  They apologised (in French) that he may have to wait 2/3 weeks and he replied that after 20 years that would be fine!

Milk jug/ turning into our mothers?

The one job I insist my husband does everyday is make me a pot of nice coffee in the peculator at 11am. We then sit together and share our interest in the news or something on YouTube (or sit in the garden). For ages he has been saying he find the plastic big jugs of milk a bit difficult with his arthritis and I argue back we use so much milk in custards etc that we need the big supply.

Last week I conceded we needed a milk jug "like our mothers used to have". So I went to the charity shop and found one for £1.50. Filled at early morning tea making it lasts all day for cups of coffee and tea and saves getting the big supply out.

It reminded me that my mother and aunts would gather round a kitchen table with a pot of tea and milk in the jug of course, for that daily catch up!!  Husband's mother was dead posh. Her tea set matched.

Gosh, turning into our mothers for sure.

Sanitary wear

Ok.  Not your usual subject and probably a bit of a turn off. But we were watching that BBC Parliament live again this week and the subject came up in a debate. I know. We are sad. But we have fun rating the MPs performances (marks out of 10 for speaking clearly, saying something sensible, etc).
Anyway, back to the subject. I vaguely remember some time ago the debate on VAT being on these ladies products (including incontinence) and thought it had all been sorted. There had been a TV campaign recently on in-affordability but I thought that was about poverty and food banks etc. So I was surprised to learn the UK still charges 5% tax for being a woman!!!!

Apparently, we got into this mess because the EU made us charge VAT on luxury goods and these products according to them are a luxury item.  Gordon Brown (good lord, I am praising HIM?) went against the EU and reduced the rate to 5% but as we are still under EU regulations and cannot just get rid of it until we leave the EU (roll on March). The EU promised reform years ago and have done nothing about it.  Some supermarkets apparently absorbed the tax and have not put prices up. No one would know what we are paying since the VAT is not marked on the goods or on your receipts. We were in Ireland recently where the supermarket did show taxes paid, and it did show with a star which items were solely produced in Ireland and which were imported. What a good idea!

The debate this week was about UK taking back and reforming our VAT legislation. There were lots of other "daft" things that needed reform and would not cost the government but would make the general public a lot better off. One was scrapping the 5% tax on heating fuels. We paid £60 tax on our last purchase of heating oil.  A weeks grocery money.

I am not in the consistency of the proposing MP for this Bill in Parliament (Christchurch in Dorset) but if I was he would have by support. I may write to my MP and demand he supports this Bill for VAT reform!!

The BBC have an article and a calculator in it about how much tax you may have paid since 1973 on these products. I think it is a bit under calculated but I would not mind having my £200 contribution back (please).

Confused son

Youngest son (aged nearly 35) rang.  He'd just watched Swallows and Amazons (2016 film) with his 4 year old who had loved it (its the family boating gene) but where/how did these Russian spies come into it?

 "I know I was not as keen on reading as the rest of the family" he complained "but I can't remember any Russians. Have you still got the books?" 

Of course I have them all (except the Big Six one), but they are falling apart from frequent reading past and present as  even now I indulge in a bit of S&A reading.  I reassured the confused.  There are NO Russians in Arthur Ransom's Swallows and Amazons and the girl's name is Titty, not Tatty.  Good lord can't they leave great things alone???

I rang off and started Christmas list - for son and grandson a set of Swallows and Amazon books (well at least the first 4 as Swallowdale and Winter Holiday and Picts and Martyrs are better than the first one). Preferably original prints in better order than mine.  I can see me haunting the Charity and second hand book shops over the next few months as I see it would be over £50 on Amazon for these!

Update

Its been so cold here that it has been difficult to get motivated.  If we turning the house heating on during the day to stop it drifting down to 16 C indoors I find it difficult to justify going to my sewing cabin and putting on the expensive electric fire to try and get it up to 10 C which is just bearable.

So I have been drifting around on this and that. 

Watching the bird population. Its was so cold and ground frozen a pheasant came to find left over bird seed.

The sparrows would not come out while it was there and sat tweeting loudly in the hedge so I had to chase the pheasant off.

Our little open boat down on one of the Fen rivers is a bit smaller than the average so it struggles on the moorings supplied by the Environmental Agency.  We have buoys, some bits of board wrapped in foam, and various ropes but we really needed a small tire, like a wheelbarrow one,  to screw to the pontoon. We started spotting those tires dumped on the roadside - too big, too much steel in the walls, too far into the dyke to rescue, on a main road.  Finally as I went to get some extra milk on my bike I spotted this in the lay by 150 yards down the road.

I have always envied Life After Money's Ilona skip finds but not sure I would have her confidence. No one around when I slipped this over the handlebars and scuttled home. Next warmish, dry day my husband can hang over the pontoon edge and attach it while I hold the boat off.

I have been trying to change our meals around a bit to stave off boredom and came across this on our local CoOp shelves.

Never seen this in a tub before. For £1.50 it was a good stand by as I could make up small servings as needed.

Mostly I have been using my Xmas present of Ancestry and spending hours building a family tree. Looking at census to see where people lived and their jobs is the most interesting for me. Occasional stories present themselves.  Distant cousin of husband's went of Chicago from Kent, then had to serve in American Civil War and later owned a very large farm in Ohio. Another went to New Zealand and became a Governor of Christchurch.  My grandmother's brother went to India in 1939 as a policeman, married and had children, he brought them back to my hometown in 1947, after his wife died, and then he went back to India 6 months later and stayed there till he died aged 90.  I can see why people people become obsessed.  I fully expect not to touch it once the weather improves and I can get out gardening!  I really enjoyed the BBC4 programme on the history of a house in Liverpool recently - it was a great way to see how the house and society changed.

Specialist shops

As we crossed London over Xmas we took the opportunity to visit Campden street market and look at the old stables that served the railway and canal complex in Victorian times around Campden locks.  We loved the atmosphere of street food, vintage clothes, ethnic lighting and jewelers. But there were two specialist shops that made us smile.

A FLIP FLOP shoe specialist shop.

and the Moomin specialist!!!

Moulton Windmill and reclamation yards

Hi
We went inland for our day-out this week and had a look at some of the fenland just inside Lincolnshire. We had a look at the windmill in Moulton which is in the centre of the attractive Georgian village. Nice flower show in the church too.

The sun was out and the rape fields are very bright. Not a drop of rain fell from the large clouds!

We wandered on, strangely every road we took for "bendy" - usually its dead flat and straight! - and we ended up at a reclamation yard we had been told about. We went for a look around.

There were probably hundreds of up cycling projects in here but it was so muddled and confusing at first; it was definitely a case of  not seeing the wood for the trees. My husband was hoping for some seasoned wood for furniture making but nothing you could actually reach and see clearly appealed.

Stained glass window panels

Old bikes

Log burners and fire surrounds?

The yard was on the site of an old railway station and we did admire the signal box and signals!

Think that Mini behind the signals is definately past reclaiming!

Nylon shirts?

I have just been reading a novel by Sian Thomas (the late wife of Robert Preston the economics journalist  BBC) called An uncommon murder. She sets the atmosphere well in 1946/7, especially the grey post war with rationing. BUT at least two of the male characters are described as wearing nylon shirts.

My husband and I compared memories and could not recall nylon shirts being worn by males in our families before the 1960s. I can't find any clear information on the Web either only that there were nylon stockings of course.  Can you remember when nylon shirts became commonplace?

We enjoy reading a lot, getting through 5 or 6 books a week, and often discuss how well books are written and their accuracy!