Organic-Ally

For those who have not come to this blog via links I posted in other forums, this might be of interest: Destroying the Boreal Forest Back to Organic-Ally .

I've watched two or three Dragons' Den programme so far and I was really cross with what I saw in the last programme. A Yorkshire man who invented a device that would save water when flushing toilets was slagged off for being an 'eco-warrior' and written off as uninvestible. He was deemed more interested in saving the world than succeeding in his business. This inventor-entrepreneur was described as arrogant and questions were raised about whether he expected people to look at their own p-- before flushing. This requires a change in habit and the 'Dragons' were not convinced that the device would sell. These 'Dragons' simply didn't get it, did they? The environment has come to such a state that people MUST change their habits and if there are gadgets and tools to help people to do so, then such are to be applauded. They have no idea how fast the market size for earth-friendly products is growing. (As an aside, there is such a high incidence of colon

A lay member of the congregation preached today and reminded us of what Jesus said about a mustard seed: MT 13:31 He told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. 32 Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches." I first read the book Mustard Seed Conspiracy by Tom Sine many years ago when I was asked to lead a three-session workshop at the Varsity Christian Fellowship Annual Conference on 'Living Simply'. I didn't like the title of the workshop. It implies that we must 'simplify', reduce and do without. In other words, be poor. As I mingled incognito with the undergraduates, it was clear that many of those coming to my workshop were there only because they did not get their first three choices of workshops and had to come to mine. Poor things! These ar

Or Killing Two Birds with One Stone I think single-use p-per* wr-pper is such a waste of space. I shan't rehearse the arguments against it here. But you can read more about it here . I've been presenting gifts to my son's classmates in my cloth gift bags . But I was stuck once when a gift didn't fit in any of the bags I have and I was still awaiting delivery of the new stock of organic cotton fabric I had ordered. Solution? It was the summer holiday and I needed to keep my son occupied. We did some potato printing. We'd done this when he was much younger and he enjoyed it. You know the pap-r that comes in parcels as p-ck-ging? I smooth these pap-rs out for making (star) charts and for son to draw on. You can also use these for potato printing, kitchen-roll rolling (tie and tape jute string around the cardboard roll, brush over with paint and roll onto pap-r to make lovely patterns) or simply sponging. We became a little 'factory' making pap-r wr-pper and use

Son won the Junior School Shield this week. (Yay!) The Shield is awarded each week to a different boy for different achievements apart from showing 'the most consideration for others'. The boys know that it is an honour and my son was delighted. When Husband came back and asked him what he wanted for a reward for that unexpected achievement, his answer was: eat in front of the TV. He was watching his Children's Bedtime Hour and all he wanted was eat in front of the TV. Obviously this is not something he is allowed to do. We make it a habit to sit down for dinner and the TV is always switched off at meals. Husband came into the kitchen where I was and chuckled, 'That's all he wanted, eat in front of the TV.' Which reminded me of a conversation we had in the run-up to our wedding. We were in Singapore with the friend who was going to give the 'exhortation' at our wedding, and his family. His wife worked with very rich children in an international school an

I'd just sent off a courier who's driven up from Bristol to get my signature on an important form and now must get it back to Leeds. It was a matter of urgency as we were haemorrhaging money with each passing hour. The root of this? Incompetence. A simple thing like a document sent by registered post was signed for and then mysteriously disappeared meant that this courier needed to drive those miles with one piece of paper in one envelope to get to me, and drive many more miles even further away (to a third destination) to stop this haemorrhage. Incompetence costs money, I've always known that. But it made me realise that incompetence, a lousy work ethos, a lack of initiative, ignorance, etc all contribute to unnecessary damage to this earth. It's not only just a question of what we eat and drink, or wear, how we use water and power, etc. Back to Organic-Ally .

So I ripped off the title from The Times writer Martin Samuel. This is his piece on how 'Our food is either cheap (yes, please) or organic (gosh, a bit pricey). Amazingly enough, you can't have both': http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,171-1872148,00.html As I said before in my original website, BSE came about when people wanted to buy cheap. Cheap now often means a higher price further down the line. Changing the vegetarian diet of cattle led to disastrous results. The only people who did not get blamed for the BSE crisis were the consumers who wanted to buy cheap. There is a much higher price to buying cheap. Chicken is now cheap. As Martin Samuel said, this is achieved by 'putting fowl together in wire cages, with a legal space requirement per chicken that equates to three-quarters of a sheet of A4 paper'. So these chicken live and sleep in their own p--p (being very wary of the AdNoSense effect). Moral of the story: 'You can’t have cheap ethical chic

During our 'weekend away', the speaker also dwelt on discipline as we continued our study of the Book of Hebrews: HEB 12:7 Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? 8 If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. 9 Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. The speaker shared of her knowledge of Chinese families where parents give no encouragement at all to their children. If they came back with 95% on a test, they are asked what happened to the five per cent they did not attain instead of commending their children for doing well. I understood what she said. Mother was the encourager. She was the one who checked my homework and made sure I had all my sums right. She expected me to go to university. I worried about not being able to pay tuition fees. She said, 'You just continue to work as you d

I've just come back from a lovely church 'weekend away'. The speakers were missionaries out in Asia. We were looking in Hebrews 12 and how we are to 'run the race'. This was compared with running a marathon. There were also many references to Eric Liddell made famous in the film 'Chariots of Fire'. I first met the speaker many years ago in Bangkok on a mission trip. He later came to speak at my university and impressed on me the need to 'travel light' for those who are preparing to go into missionary service. I have taken that advice very literally. I left Singapore in 1991 with one suitcase to go into full-time Christian ministry. We sang the song 'Majesty' (Worship his majesty, unto Jesus be all glory, power and praise ....) and immediately it took me back to a Varsity Christian Fellowship camp on the beach back in Singapore, O, so many years ago. The question heavy on my mind was 'Where are all my mates from the Christian Fellowship al

From which planet do our government ministers come from? http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,172-1864565,00.html In a new Bill being proposed, under-threes in the care of nurseries and childminders will be legally required to be taught a National Curriculum. To be policed by Ofsted, this is to ensure that children are taught mathematics, reading and writing. Why? Because three-year-olds have been found to enter PLAYschool (NB emphasis on PLAY) without the necessary basic knowledge. Yet three-year-olds are known to be excluded from playschools for their ability to swear. How do you square this? Who teaches young children to swear? Who teaches young children to count? Is the government now saying that mothers cannot be trusted to teach their own children? Or are they waking up to the fact that too many children are left in the care of institutions and now these institutions must step up on their surrogate parent roles? In either case, the reasoning is flawed. The government is trea

I just thought it might be a bit of fun to sign up for Google AdSense to see what ads they might place on this blog spot. Before you sign up, they tell you that you can filter out undesirable ads. So imagine my shock when I checked the site early Monday morning and found that they have listed pl--t-c b-gs and pap-r stuff like that, on a site that is trying to get people to STOP using p-as-i- ba-s and p-p-r. I'm not spelling those words out in full in the (vain) hope that the Robot crawler that scans the site might be confused and not place any more of those offending ads on the site. In my simple mind, one should be able to write instructions to tell a machine/software to 'exclude', 'negate', 'ignore' etc so that it does not do what it is doing to my site. Imagine a site extolling the virtues of vegetarianism. We live in world of binary opposition. When we talk of vegetables, we often do so as in opposition to me-t (muscle from animals). The Robot, it appear

For those of you (yes, all eight of you!!) who do read this blog, you would know where my stand on plastic is. So why are there GoogleAds on p_a_stic on this site? I don't understand either. But I am getting the technical people to sort it out. Meanwhile, just ignore the 'pl_st_c' ads. Back to Organic-Ally .

I'm delighted that the silk wine gift bags I ordered some four months ago will be available for sale later this week on the Organic-Ally website. Here are some pictures: These bags are made from silk, locally sourced and woven, by women of Tabitha in Cambodia. This organization has been helping the poorest of the poor in this country for the past ten years. Tabitha provides a regular income for widowed mothers, land mine victims, displaced war and famine victims, etc. Every item of craft they produce is unique and beautiful. I had some of these bags for sale at an event promoting 'fair trade' at Milton Keynes last week. The lovely customers there tell me that I was selling these bags too cheaply. Organic-Ally will also be returning all post-tax profits to Tabitha. It is a rare phenomenon these days when the purchase of a lovely object would mean that (1) the producer is genuinely helped, (2) the recipient of this gift would be delighted, and (3) the environment will als

My son's headmaster drew parents' attention to this report in the Daily Telegraph : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/10/29/nclasses29.xml The gist of it is that middle-class parents who try to give their children a headstart by filling their children's days with all sorts of 'enhancement' activities (French, dance, piano, violin, swimming, computer, etc) might be stunting their children's development. Children need to develop at their own pace. Filling their days with structured activities does not always guarantee desirable results. Tee-hee! I thought, rubbing my hands together (mentally). Vindicated once again. In Singapore for our first holiday since son's arrival I was trying to get books in Chinese to get him started on a second language. A former professor said, 'Books? Who reads books these days? Get him CD-ROMs. Teach him how to use a computer.' It echoed friends' and neighbours' comments that I should invest

Those readers in the UK who have been following avidly Penney Poyser's series on No Waste Like Home might remember the scene where she shows us how to shower. Yes, wet, soap and rinse. No problem there. But when it comes to hair, her advice was wet, turn off shower, shampoo, and then rinse. We saw footage of her shampooing her beautiful long black hair. My toes froze. The idea is that we do not waste water by leaving the shower on while we shampoo. Easy to do that in the summer, but in the freezing weather, we tend to leave the shower on (I do, I'm afraid), face away from the shower and shampoo while the warm water keeps me, well, warm. This is a far cry from being in Singapore where typically we turn off the shower to soap and shampoo. But it's constantly 33 degrees C out there. In fact I remember when we had droughts and the daily national water consumption and (lack of) rainfall were closely monitored. As we do not have large porcelain/enamel/whatever bath tubs in our l

In a previous post I noted the need for people to form a habit for recycling and caring for the environment. Here's a lesson I learned from my Art teacher at 13, and I have never forgotten it. The word HABIT. Take away 'H', and you still have A-BIT. Take away 'A', you are left with BIT Take away 'B', you are still left with IT. You see, HABITS are rather difficult to get rid of. So, let's make sure that we only try to form good habits instead of bad. This is a serious lesson for us parents, I think. Back to Organic-Ally .

I am showing you a picture of my forlorn looking empty kitchen towel roll languishing on its stand. Why? It is testimony to what happens when one switches to cloth table napkins. When this roll was full I didn't think anything of tearing off a sheet or two to clean the table, wipe my mouth, etc. Since reverting to cloth table napkins, we don't actually miss the paper. The down-side is we often get our napkins (in natural unbleached organic cotton) mixed up*. No, to say that we use a clean napkin at every meal would be telling a lie. But if they are used only once at the end of a meal to clean some greasy lips, there is no real need to wash them after each use. *Solution: I'm buying different coloured organic cotton napkins from the Hankettes range so that each member of the family has a different colour napkin. Well, until I am able to find eco-friendly napkin rings that could be personalized. As for cleaning the table, well, I've learned to be less lazy. Because our d

Here in the UK the clocks were put back on Saturday. Effectively we had an extra hour. Sunday mornings are usually manic in our household as we try to have a lie-in (but not too much) and get ready for church. Well, yesterday, despite husband having to drive to Gatwick to make an unexpected pick-up (his brother lost the car keys while on holiday in Florida), son and I actually managed to get things done. We even managed to get on the bus and got to church on time! So having an extra hour a day does help. The problem is: we can't have this extra hour every day. And then we lose that hour come summer. You win some, you lose some. Back to Organic-Ally .

We managed to get back to the Farmers' Market this last weekend ( see previous post ). Some of the prices were crazy. We got a large punnet of Egremont Russet apples for £1.50. Husband didn't mind the £1.50 but was thrilled that they were ER apples. We asked the stallholder to just tip the apples into our organic cotton string bag , which he did, and he was able to re-use his pl_stic punnet. Later on we saw another stallholder tip a punnet of pears into a pla_tic bag another shopper had brought with her. Further along another lady shopper told the butcher, 'No, no, I've got my own bags.' She had a lovely wicker basket and several 'long life' pl_stic bags. At the baker's, he simply wrapped up our loaf in recycled paper and put it into the string bag I was holding open. None of that 'Would you like a plas_ic bag?' business. I was really encouraged to see how in the space of a few minutes we could observe several people consciously doing their bit f

While on holiday I could not help but notice how much space some restaurants have 'invested' in play areas. One restaurant we went to had a space that could easily take another 35 to 40 diners devoted to children. They had built a wonderful obstacle course and soft play area that my son kept wanting to return to. When I first worked in the UK the only children we saw at restaurants were Chinese ones, in one particular Chinese restaurant. There was, and still is, no play area for the children. Children were expected to sit quietly during the meal and ate just like adults. The only distraction was a fish tank. My own childhood experience of restaurants was just like that. We sat at huge round tables. We sat and made polite conversation. We sat and answered questions by relations we do not recognize at wedding banquets, etc. We sat and ate what the adults ate. When we got bored we were taken to the aquarium to watch the fishes. Some restaurants have other types of fish tanks. Occa