Friday 2 January 2009

Friday 02/01/09

Here’s a good recycling tip Hay showed me yesterday. Take your 2008 Christmas cards and cut them up to make attractive and cost-effective labels for 2009 Christmas presents.

We used a couple of Caravan’s logs on the wood burner yesterday, leaving them to burn while we went out for a walk. By the time we got back, an hour and a half later, they were still burning as embers. Not having had a full 12 months to dry out they’re not very good at providing vast amounts of heat, but do burn slowly and so can be used to keep the home fires burning for a much longer period than sawn timber.

To date we’ve been using salvaged timber which has been recovered from various building projects in the area, the best we managed to scrounge being an entire oak floor which a neighbour replaced in the summer. The only problem is that sawn timber goes up in flames quicker than gunpowder.

About another four neighbours in the area have installed wood burners in the last couple of months resulting in intense competition for wood. We are now in the middle of the Great Old Sodbury Wood Shortage and if the grapevine should indicate a fallen tree in the area, various operations rooms are set up, foraging parties organised and plans made to guard the treasure once found. I’ve already seen Hay and Little Colin over the road racing each other to reach and claim a fallen branch out on the common.

I haven’t got a link to the news story, but an explorer is to travel on foot to the North Pole to measure ice thickness as part of an experiment concerned with global warming. Why the hell does he have to go on foot? Jeremy Clarkson and his mates went there by car last year. Wouldn’t that be a much quicker and simpler method? I fear too much is being made of global warming. What’s wrong with the earth heating up by a few degrees? The main problem I see with fossil fuels is that they are going to run out and they pollute the atmosphere – not that they contribute to global warming. A warmer earth should hold no terrors for man or beast.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

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Sorry for my bad English.

Chairman Bill said...

Dear Gabriele,

If I were fluent in Spanish, perhaps I would. Unfortunately my Spanis lapsed some 30 odd years ago on leaving school and I now speak a bastard mixture of schoolboy French and schoolboy Spanish.

Rgds/TC