Igenlode Wordsmith

NB Mordaunt (the son of Milady by her second husband) in Twenty Years After is played by the Count of Monte Cristo :-D
(a.k.a. Viktor Avilov, evidently making the most of his sinister looks)
I recognised him almost immediately, whereas I'm not sure I should necessarily have recognised d'Artagnan playing Fernand (a.k.a. Mikhail Boyarsky) if I hadn't been primed to await his appearance!

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I had yet another go at the 1920s rhubarb pie that I keep optimistically attempting, and this time I made a full-size one with three sticks of rhubarb and a whole egg, but only the juice of a tiny bargain lemon (about the size of a lime: they were on special offer, and since I mainly use them for salad dressing it seemed a good home for fruit that would otherwise be wasted due to being 'sub-standard'). But I really do think the baking instructions on this one must be wrong.

( Accidental success )

(It wasn't actually pure butter this time round, which might or might not have been significant; in my periodic check on the margarine shelves I discovered that there actually *was* a margarine product that was made of local vegetable oil instead of the ubiquitous cheap (and destructive) imported palm oil, just as they all used to be back before palm oil got pushed as the next big industry ingredient. Flora has rebranded itself as "now free from palm oil" and "made with natural ingredients" (the two are not in any way synonymous; palm oil *is* natural, just as organic food contains 'minerals'!) and I felt it deserved to be rewarded for the effort, so I bought some. ( Read more... )

I completed my week's Big Plastic Count data for this year -- to my surprise it was actually one item fewer than in 2022 (12 items as versus 13), despite the fact that it was not a very representative week in terms of the amount of plastic waste generated.

During the count period I happened to get given a fair few plastic-packaged items of food by other people to use up, including a packet of crisps, a plastic pint bottle of milk on the turn, and two plastic packages of fresh herbs, none of which would have featured in a normal week! I also succumbed to the lure of massively-reduced supermarket vegetables on the bargain aisle (rhubarb for 63p instead of over £2 unpackaged at the greengrocer's) and ended up finishing those during the count period....

https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/can-britain-feed-itself
https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/sites/default/files/can_britain_feed_itself.pdf (with tables referred to in main text)

Food self-sufficiency: 1975 versus 2009 (of course the urban population has gone up even further since then). ( Read more... )

The Government wants everybody to have a 'smart meter' installed on their electricity supply, claiming that it will save the population vast amounts of money.

We had a smart meter fitted years ago, and it was pretty much useless from that point of view; when we changed supplier it stopped working, and there didn't seem any point in doing anything about it since it wasn't giving any information to speak of. The only thing it showed was that when you used electricity to heat up water, power consumption shot through the roof (boiling a kettle or heating the washing machine water), and since heating things using electricity is basically achieved by massively inefficient transmission (which is why an incandescent bulb, which works by heating the element until it glows, uses so much more power than LED lighting) that was not exactly news. ( Read more... )

It's that time of year again... my current gas supplier's contract is ending, and I have to decide whether or not to roll over onto their recommended 'cheapest like-for-like' option or not.

Last year I very nearly chose to switch my gas over to Ecotricity's new 'green gas' supply, alongside their longstanding electricity supply. Only they totally failed to respond to my contact until long after the two-week switch window had closed, which was not very good commercial strategy on their part as they lost a potential customer (and not particularly reassuring in terms of general competence). ( Read more... )

I ran out of fruit (and the last of the apples turned out to be rotten round the stem, which I've never seen before) so I did an emergency visit to the supermarket. After a lot of shelf-edge agonising -- an option I don't get with the greengrocer, who simply tells you what's currently in season without telling you where it came from! -- I ended up buying a plastic box of grapes because they were marked down from £2·10 to 54p on account of date-expiring (fine, so long as you eat the ones that are going brown at the bottom first!, which I always end up doing with grapes anyway), and added in some Spanish pak choi because it was marked down to 60p for a similar reason, although quite frankly that one looked absolutely fine whereas the grapes were visibly substandard. That was a reasoned decision, although one that always makes me feel a bit guilty because the stuff is still being flown in from abroad.

It wasn't until I got home that I noticed the full-price bunch of beetroot I'd bought was also from Spain -- I really didn't expect root vegetables to be imported...