recycling

I’m back up on my soap-box everyone: it’s been a while since I had a rant, and today I’m going back over some well-trodden ground. But feck me, the recycling situation here is still shite, and moving at snail’s pace. I’m talking about schools, businesses, community events; places where you imagine a system would be in place, but sadly not. I’m constantly gritting my teeth when I see everything being heaved into the bin together, unseparated at source and sent merrily off; no f**ks given.

Sometimes people are just honest: I’m too busy; I’m running a business here, I don’t have time, it’s not my problem. I appreciate that businesses have had a horrendous time of late but that argument won’t wash because the same people were wheeling out this argument long before Covid arrived. Others argue that the waste will be separated anyway when it moves along to the processing plant; however if the contents are contaminated by food waste or liquids then it rendered unsuitable for the next stage, and off it goes to landfill. What a wasted opportunity.

Let’s talk schools. Most of the schools in which I’ve worked are kept scrupulously clean and tidy. As well as the pupils binning their waste, I see caretakers diligently emptying bins and going round the playgrounds with litter pickers. This is how it should be of course, who doesn’t want a fresh and clean environment for their children, especially now. But from a teaching point of view, you feel like a right muppet when you’re banging on about our responsibility to the planet and the kids are still traipsing down the canteen to buy their chips in Styrofoam boxes and eat them with plastic forks. Poor Greta Thunberg would be having the dry bokes.

Apparently, it’s the schools, NOT the Department of Education who have to pay for their own recycling. This seems entirely wrong to me: is there not enough pressure on schools that the Department should just step up and resolve this? Of course not: they’re presently far too busy, making a total shambles of the transfer test, which, even if the poor kids GET, they still aren’t even guaranteed a place, in any school, in the whole country. I digress. Not like you, SWB, I hear you say. But in short, it’s up to a few members of staff who can’t stomach the waste to go ferreting about in bins, lifting out plastic bottles and cans and saving reams of paper from being dumped. It’s not fair.

To end on a positive, and on the fact which got me started in the first place, the Co-op has launched a way to recycle your soft plastics,* i.e. stuff that can’t go in the blue bin, (bread bags, crisp packets, microwavable rice packets etc). You can gather up any of these-and deposit them special  bins they have in store. I’ve already been down to the Co-op on Rosetta and the bin is easy to spot near the cash desk.  Radio 2’s Sara Cox was on talking to Frank about it on U105 this morning, and so I rang in too, as this is right up my Strasse. ‘What’s your tuppence worth on this Helen?’ he asked, somewhat warily. He’s used to me now, is Frank. ‘Tuppence?’ says I. ‘You’ll get at least 50p’s worth out of me on this.’ And off I went.

As Sara Cox rightly said, we only have to look out our window and see the weird weather that’s afoot, and here to stay. Small steps by all of us is the way forward, but applying some pressure on councils and the Department of Education wouldn’t be amiss either.

* These are the plastics that you can scrunch up in your hand and if they ping back then they are suitable for this type of recycling.

So today is Groundhog day and you may be forgiven for thinking, really, isn’t that every day at the minute? Or perhaps you’ve been reading my posts on Instagram and you’re thinking to yourself, fecking groundhog day again, she’s still on about the bloody environment, for the twentieth time this month.  You see, over January I came over all David Attenborourgh and did a series of posts about reducing waste. They were supposed to be daily updates, but I lacked the fortitude.  Hell, that was one LONG, torturous month, wasn’t it? But in addition to my being tired and fed up, I didn’t want to annoy people by posting every single day. Life, you may have noticed, is a bit on the shite side right now, and you are probably already pulled in seven different directions, and having someone harangue you about saving up your crisp packets might just have you on sipping gin with your toast of a morning. When stretched to your absolute limit, the thought of washing out period pants might just be beyond you. And that’s ok. As the statistics show, a million people making a few changes is better than a few doing everything.

However, I thought the posts might be useful for those of you who may have some extra  time or if your change in circumstances allows more flexibility. Last spring for example, I sent LSB off to B&Q to buy a water butt. We’d thought of getting one before but hadn’t bothered, then a neighbour mentioned how easy it was to get one and install it one. Since we had such a dry spell during the lockdown we made it a priority. Had we not both been at home so much, I know we still wouldn’t have one.

It was the same with the period pants – it was easier for me to make the switch to using them all the time because I wasn’t in school. No one wants to test drive bamboo pads when you’re standing in front of a class of year 12 boys and discover you have blood trickling down your leg. (Might I add here that this is MIGHTY UNLIKELY, because you’ll be changing them just like any other sanitary wear, as your flow dictates. The Mothership though, if she’s reading this, may be quite likely to have a mini-stroke: ‘Is there any NEED, Helen,’ she will say.)

Do you know what I really want though? For all this bullshit about periods being mystifying or embarrassing or dirty to be quashed underfoot. That is the DREAM.

But today, I am talking cardboard, or as those media types are now referring to it as: ‘beige gold’. We have an actual global shortage of paper, because we’ve all been buying our booze and frankly, everything else online. We won’t have any fecking forests left at this rate. I also believe I’m married to the main culprit, because LSB, despite my protestations, is never done ordering random shit off the internet. Often from Amazon too, and you know how much I fecking hate Amazon. I mean surely, SURELY, some clever people could work out how to reduce the packaging they use or have a returns policy organised with Prime? Those vans are never off our streets, so would it be too much of a stretch to hand them back some of the boxes and say, ‘give that another whirl?’ It would be easier than say, chopping down swathes of the Amazon? Just a thought. A friend ordered a pair of knitting needles, and not only were they delivered in a box large enough to fit one of my children in, but they were so wrapped in yards of paper. ‘What sort of eejit did that?’ I wondered to myself.  Probably some poor fecker who’s been working an 18 hour shift in a warehouse and pouring every remaining ounce of their energy  into maintaining the will to live, I imagine.

Anyway, rant over. Hopefully you don’t all think of me as a sanctimonious git running round in a sack cloth (I know it’s nearly Lent so I now have the image of John the Baptist in my head.) These are strange and frightening times but some of the comfort I glean is from studies which show a reduction in carbon emissions and the fact we can hear the birds better as their wee cheeps and caws aren’t drowned out by all the traffic. If we can at least keep up some of our efforts, then a tiny bit of good may be salvaged from this period of gloom.

I met my friend last night at an event. As she turned to speak me she turned her body a full 180 degrees instead of just inclining her head. ‘I’ve hurt my back,’ she explained, ‘falling UP the stairs.’ She tripped about three steps up, lost her balance and fell awkwardly. Her family came running to find her sprockled in the hallway. ‘Don’t move!’ ordered her son, who, 18 months into his St John’s Ambulance training, is the self-appointed medic in the house. ‘It could be a spinal injury,’ he added, which didn’t reassure my friend, who was hoping that no more than her pride was hurt. Happily she suffered no lasting damage and is just a bit stiff and sore. The culprit for her tumble? Her slippers. Readers, take this column as your friendly public service broadcast, and invest in a pair of solid, grip-soled, well-fitting house shoes. Google ‘slipper related injuries’  and articles such as ‘Beware of the Slipper’ appear, advising that one exercises great caution when considering the choice of indoor footwear. It advises particularly against ‘bulky out-sized novelty slippers,’ (these are unwise apparel for housework, it counsels), but number one risk is ‘tumbling downstairs’, as my friend can unfortunately attest.

You know what else are lethal? Fleecy socks, the type advertised with cuddly bears in pastel shades on the label which nauseatingly read, ‘cosy up, it’s snuggle-time!’ These should be banned, if you ask me. I speak with some authority on the matter, because for reasons best known only to himself, my husband donned a thick pair of socks when we were entertaining over the holidays. Yes, Easter this year was uncharacteristically nippy, but why he deemed them necessary I’m not sure. Anyhoo, treacherous socks combined with the frictionless surface of our tiled bathroom floor proved a bad combination. Down he went like a sack of spuds, emitting a blood-chilling howl, at 12.05, having nodded off on the sofa. Full disclosure folks; drink had been taken. He has a tendency to down red wine as a parched child would guzzle Ribena at a soft-play area, but sadly for him, our downstairs loo afforded no such padded surfaces. He thinks he may have cracked a rib. Listening to him bleat on about it has been a joy, I assure you. He claims that the socks were definitely more responsible than the shiraz and they have been since consigned to the fabric bin at Ormeau Recycling Centre.

It’s not just footwear which can prove treacherous. Once one reaches a certain age, chronic pain can be precipitated by the most harmless-sounding activities. Two of friends have recently fallen victim to frozen shoulders and tennis elbow respectively. Both of these are entirely un-sport related, and were induced by knitting. Yes, knitting. ‘What are you made of, cotton wool?’ asked one of their less than sympathetic daughters. ‘It was rather a chunky yarn,’ one of them admitted, who was fashioning a cable-knit cardigan for her son, ‘and I did hurry myself to get it finished.’ I never had knitting down as an extreme sport, but sure, you read it here first.

I’d say we’re best up doing nothing, just sitting on the sofa nursing cups of tea, but the floor is better for all your joints apparently, and scalds from kettles are on the rise too. If you’ve any ideas for risk-free pursuits, do get in touch. I’m all ears.

I took a notion folks, and I acted spontaneously. I saw that Order in the House had a cancellation and in I swooped and snapped it up before anyone else languishing in their own chaos could beat me to it.

They came, they saw, and they sorted my shit out. Well, most of it, since it was only a half-day session and it was a VERY messy space. But miracle of miracles, I am typing this post sitting at a desk in a room which last week make me feel queasy, littered as it was with debris and unfulfilled potential. The room in question was supposed to be my study, but instead, it had become a repository for toys, junk, or anything which required a temporary home. The cats spent more time in it than anyone else, a fact to which the scratched sofa bears testimony.

Last Christmas we spent a day clearing it out and it remained pristine for a week before all the crap migrated back in. The floor vanished first and then, not to be out-done, so did the desk. I’m not exaggerating when I say that the shambolic state of the so-called study reflected the scattered feeling in my head.

Anyway, Claire and Lisa rocked up and pitched in, upending boxes and helping me see what could go. When you see your random stuff through the dispassionate eyes of a stranger, you do question your mental clarity. It turns out that I didn’t need my P6 vocabulary book, lovingly backed in 1980s superfresco wallpaper; nor did I need two scuffed Easter straw hats, or even a navy bag with a broken handle my dad had got free from Laithwaites.

My main problem was hoarding everything, with neither system for finding it, nor storage solutions to prevent it getting damaged. It rendered the whole process of keeping piles of teaching notes pointless as I could never find what I needed.

Prior to the girls’ arrival, they directed me to Homebase in search of ‘Really Useful Boxes’, since the key to successful storage is being able to see what you have. I have a problem with boxes, in that, if I happen upon what I consider to be a good box, I am reluctant to part with it. Many of my belongings where thus shoved into said boxes, willy-nilly. The problem was that my boxes were cardboard, and without opening each one and digging in, I could never find what I needed.

Turns out I’m not the only member of the ‘love a good box brigade,’ as when I reached the storage aisle in Homebase, I met an older gent, looking on with a beatific expression. ‘These are GREAT boxes,’ he said, ‘if you’re looking a box, don’t go past these ones.’ It was clear that he already had quite a few of the boxes already, but I saw him return to the aisle several times, clearly wondering whether he could justify buying some more. I bought four, and am inclined to agree that they are excellent indeed.

Three and half hours my professional declutterers were with me, sorting and labelling, organising and colour-coding, all the while gently challenging whether I needed to hoard all the things I had accumulated. Do you need it? When is the last time you used it? Is there a more natural place for it? (I love this last one, which is really just code for, why the hell is there a bra lying on the sofa? Why is there a linen tablecloth in a House of Fraser bag in the bottom of your slide-robe?)

Immediately after they left, I carted five large bags to the recycling centre (aka ‘the dump) lest I start rootling around in them, taking items back out and undoing all the work.

I learnt that I don’t have to keep all the girl’s exercise books, even if there are lots of pages left. Keep one and throw the rest into the paper bank. Broken toys go in the bin, not the floor. Bank statements go into a filing cabinet. If a sentimental item is worth keeping, then it goes in a designated box.

Pens, so many pens, and colouring pencils. I was instructed to ask my girls to sharpen the pencils they wanted and store them neatly, and to try the felt tips and bin the dud ones. What is, of course irksome, is that I KNOW all the this. But when you pay for a service, it forces you to keep at the task, not make yourself a cup of tea and wander off after twenty minutes. I know this because this is what I do when I try to do the job myself. I have failed. Every. Single. Time.

Yes, it was expensive. Yes, I had ‘decision fatigue’ after it, and felt a bit emotionally drained. But I have a study now, all bright and clear and spacious. I can breathe now. Was it worth it? Absolutely.

There’s always the worry, isn’t there, when one is as vocal as me the topic of recycling, that one will be caught out and held to account.

The very thing happened to me yesterday, when LSB remarked that he and the girls play a fun game of a morning, while I am upstairs, otherwise engaged doing my toilette. The game they rejoices in the name of ‘Is this butter?’, so called because of the number of times they open a tub of Lurpak, only to find concealed within some forlorn sausages (mouldy), a small pile of fusilli (mouldy) or this week’s treat, elderly baked beans, and you’ve guessed it, not only mouldy, but potentially growing another life form.*

It pains me to admit it, but I’m a wishful user-upper, a wannabe zero-waster, and perhaps just an aspirational arse. I’m forever scraping out whatever’s caked to the bottom of the pot and telling myself earnestly that it will form the basis of tomorrow’s lunch, then forgetting all about it. It really isn’t good enough, especially since I was on with Frank on Thursday morning, chatting animatedly on ways to eke out** dinners such chicken tikka-masala and spaghetti bolognese in these fiscally fraught times. And do you know what he had the cheek to tell me, live on air?

‘Helen,’ he says, interrupting my spiel, ‘you’re obviously very accomplished in the kitchen, whipping up these fancy meals of an evening!’ I swiftly disabused him of this notion, telling him that my culinary skills have dwindled to nothing of late, since time, lack of imagination and fussy eaters have leached away any enthusiasm I once had. ‘I rely heavily on bought sauces,’ I told him frostily, ‘and jazz them up a bit with a few herbs and extra garlic and ginger.’ Well, some listeners took umbrage with that too, when I said I chopped up the aromatics and fired them in the freezer for easy access of an evening, (about what exactly their issue was, I am still unsure.) I started on the ‘chop, bag and freeze’ after finding too many knobs of ginger lurking at the back of the fridge like some wizened appendages, and one can’t be having that if one is apparently opposed to waste.

But do you know what pisses me off no end? So much of household recycling falls to the woman of the house; it’s we who are micro-managing the clothing, the laundering, the shopping and subsequent sorting of the by-products. It’s the fridge blindness and overall vagueness of my husband when it comes food in general that shreds my nerves.

Case in point, say I were to lovingly prepare him a bowl of strawberries and sliced pear for a late afternoon snack while he’s writing away at his code, or whatever the f**k he does at the computer. ‘Oh, lovely!’ he’ll say, horsing it into him. But it would NEVER cross his mind to source such a snack for himself. Same with the lunch items. He’ll take the most cursory glance at the front of the fridge, then leg it down to the Super Spar on Sunnyside Street to buy sausages and chips. I falls upon me to yell, ‘THERE’S CHILLI CHICKEN CHUNKS BESIDE THE YOGURTS IN THE FRIDGE,’ as I race out to work. In his defence, he says that he’s so melted ushering me out the door making sure I have my phone, keys, wallet, laptop-bag and my coffee, (hot in my little flask); THEN switching his attentions to the children and the dog, that he’s almost passed himself by lunch time.

Anyway, what I started off to say was this: sometimes I’m rubbish at the whole shebang. It’s damn near impossible to be zero-waste in this world, but one reason I do try to recycle so much is to assuage my guilt for how un-green I am in other departments. You can’t do it all, and sometimes I don’t manage any of it. Cleaning, tidying and decluttering are my absolute nemesis. But I can still persevere. Any ideas welcome!

*The Mothership was on the blower and suggests placing leftovers in jam jars so one can clearly see the contents. Bon Maman jars are particularly good for this since they are wider and also aesthetically pleasing. One day I will strive towards this level of organisation.

**Can I have a big drum roll please for LENTILS? I routinely throw half a cup of red lentils into Bolognese and curry. They thicken up the sauce nicely and with the addition of extra veg means I can reduce the amount of meat without it being too obvious. In my pre-lentil days, anytime we made curry there was often wastage in the form of a gloopy sauce with a few sad bits of onions floating about in it. Now what we are left with is of a more dahl like consistency and its super tasty.

Can you imagine, what with all the awful stuff happening in the world right now, the added horror of not having your bin collected? I’d be pure raging. That’s precisely the situation facing many residents in the Lisburn City and Castlereagh Council Area. I hope the tossers at the top start prioritising what’s important and rewarding the workers who help us manage our waste, before the situation becomes truly disgusting, with bins lying for weeks without being emptied. One would imagine, what with the proposal for a twelve and half percent hike in rates, that council workers on the bottom rungs might see a share of this. Yesterday I was chatting to John Daly, who was standing in for Frank on the U105 Phone-In, about how to manage our rubbish and our recycling in the home, so that we don’t consign mountains of waste to landfill.

Here are a few of the points I made:

I saw a request on Facebook for bedding donations for Almost Home Animal Shelter. I had an old duvet, a couple of pillows and some elderly towels, so I thought, now there’s the very place! The Mothership doesn’t like to think of animals being chilly, so she had a root about the hot press and gave me some items of which she was looking rid. The Small Child also contributed her old dressing gown. A delightful volunteer arrived at my door and was delighted with the rake of stuff we had. She sent me a photo of a cosy bed yesterday, made up for a little dog called Bella, complete with colourful dressing gown. This is a brilliant way to recycle bulky items which would otherwise end up being turfed into landfill. It’s a win-win for wee creatures everywhere.

Anyone fancy a spot of can crushing? You know all about my foibles when it comes to bin-hoking and can-collecting, but this week LSB took a boot load of cans up to Bryson House in Mallusk and got £20 for his trouble. This is an excellent fund-raising idea for any sports or youth clubs. All they need are fizzy drink enthusiasts, somewhere to store the cans so they don’t get all wet and dirty, and a van to transport them up to Mallusk. Check here for details.

Many’s a time I’ve mentioned this before, but I save crisp and sweet wrappers, toothpaste tubes and coffee bags for Terracycle, through Kicks Count NI. I drop off my bags at the Conservation Volunteers on the Ravenhill Road when I’m down that way (I don’t be going down one errand, no siree!) Click on the link above to find hints, tips and local hubs for collection. It may sound overwhelming at first, but by siphoning off just a few difficult to recycle items, you will see a significant drop in your black bin waste.

You may also want to consider the following:

Trot to the Co-op with soft plastic wrapping that you can’t recycle at home. Rosetta has a wee box you can fire these into, and I save up all packaging in a bread bag. (I’m talking plastic wrappers for pasta/rice and the film off punnets of fruit and vegetables.)

Drop excess plastic bags and packaging off to charity shops; they always seem grateful to receive them.

Eliminate waste at source by bringing your Keep Cup to coffee shops or sitting in while you sip.

Give the Refill Quarter shops a blast, and try the Body Shop in town which now has a facility to bring your own containers and fill them up in the shop. I’ve taken takeaway boxes the butchers in Forestside in the past and they’ve been happy to fill them with mince for me, so I haven’t needed to take plastic bags.

Switch to reusable period wear like WUKA pants, or try a moon cup if you can stomach it. Personally this was a no-go for me after I kept getting them stuck and was almost taking myself to A&E one a couple of occasions to have the f**king thing extracted.

It’s still a source of huge irritation to me, but here in Northern Ireland we don’t have the same system for recycling everywhere, and the advice given is often confusing and misleading. For a comprehensive list of what can go in to which bins, we can access the Binovation app. This is certainly applicable to Belfast, Bangor and Ards, but I’m not sure about the rest of the six counties. My friend Mary who works for Belfast City Council, tells me that if we wash out our containers at home and provide a higher quality of material, then we will see more products made from our recycling created here in Northern Ireland. This sounds like it has the potential to boost businesses here, so maybe we could get in on some of the growth that the Tories have been banging on about at the party conference all week. ‘Green Growth’- now that doesn’t sound like rubbish to me.

It’s 3-45am in Dublin Airport, and apparently we’re in the fast track lane. However, we haven’t moved an inch. The air is tight with the frustrations of hundreds of passengers all crammed together, hot and breathless under their face masks. I feel sweat run down my back in rivulets and gather at the base of my spine. ‘If you can’t say something helpful, just keep your mouth bloody well closed,’ snaps the girl behind us (who bears an almost freakish resemblance to Peter Griffin in Family Guy) to her travelling companion. Suddenly security opens and the queues shuffle forward. They are mercifully efficient and soon we are disgorged through to the departure lounge where I think longingly of coffee, until I see there’s at least a twenty-minute wait between me and a latte. LSB’s eyes wander towards the bar and I can almost hear his brain trying to compute whether it’s too early or too late for a Guinness. Either way, the bustling mass in line for their pints seems to put him off the notion.

And yet, I am not oozing my usual anger and impatience because despite it all, I am here, and even making it to Dublin to fly to Barcelona feels like a miracle. I will be meeting my friend Rhaiza for the first time in two years. I haven’t seen   her daughter since she was four, and next month she turns fourteen. This all feels very wrong. It has been a marathon to get to this point with both parents finally catching Covid and my dad ending up in hospital. All this when my brother made it back from UAE for the first time in three years. For over a week my stomach has been in a swirl, and I’ve been demented. ‘You can’t smell burnt toast, can you?’* asks LSB, when after a lengthy search, he relocates all the passports, which he diligently left on the table, and I have swept into the blue recycling bin with a pile of newspapers the day before we leave.

Incredibly, our Ryan Air flight gets us into Barcelona ten minutes ahead of schedule. The airport feels almost empty compared to Dublin and the sky is a dazzling blue when we step out to hail a cab. There is initial confusion when I tell the driver to take us to the ‘Attico’ district in Sarrià, and he looks bewildered. I show him the address and he informs me that ‘Attico’ means ‘the top floor’, so I just sit back and let him drive, without embarrassing myself further.  Upon reaching the apartment block I am practically out of the car before the driver has the brakes on, leaving LSB to pay up. Too impatient to wait for the lift, I run up nine flights of stairs by which stage I am almost too breathless to even manage ‘Hola’ as Rhaiza opens the door. The others have beaten me to it and as we all pour in, Jason the bulldog jumps joyfully around our feet and the preceding week of chaos melts away.

Follow up post coming soon on the delights of the Sarrià area where we stayed.

*apparently a sign of stroke. I did not know this.

Last Sunday we should have been tucking into fresh croissants and hot coffee in the Royal Marine Hotel in Dún Laoghaire, prior to a dander round the town where I entertained options of bumping into Marian Keyes and being all, ‘well it’s never yerself is it?’ and she’d be like ‘It is to be sure and aren’t you gas craic, will we stop off here for a cup of tea and a bun?’

Anyway, that never happened, because Covid hit everyone in the family aside from me, and instead we hunkered down while Storm Dudley battered the windows and I said to Himself, ‘there’s nothing else for it, we may tackle the front room.’ The front room is where hope goes to die in our house. It started off life as our bedroom, because when we moved in here back in 2011 I was pregnant and so huge and buggered of back that I couldn’t climb the stairs.

Its next incarnation was guest bedroom, which worked a treat when we had guests, but in between times the bed just became a receptable for shite. It was the room where everything was pitched, often with force, when friends came for dinner and we had to do the ‘emergency tidy’. Then LSB (without so much as asking) took over the desk I used in his study, and set up two screens so he could escape to play Halo with his head-phones on and ignore us all. There I was, a nomad in my home, ousted and deskless. I demanded action. Down came the bed nobody slept on and he installed a desk for me and I up-cycled a chair I rescued from a skip with a pretty floral cover. Up went shelves onto which went a spider plant, some photos and a picture of a tree I bought on Etsy. So far so ‘Good Housekeeping.’ I think I sat at the desk about three times, and then the room filled with clutter again, as all manner of ephemera accumulated. There were papers, so many papers. An overabundance of toys. Coats I like but never wear. And so last Sunday we cleared and hoovered and dusted and between Zero Waste Freecycle and the recycling centre at Ormeau we established some order.

‘Feverish’ and ‘frenzied’ would be the adjectives which best described my mindset. It wasn’t really about the room. It was just a desperate attempt to control something. Under my breath I was singing ‘Jesus loves me this I know’ in some sort of plea that things could go back to normal. The Older Child overheard me and asked, ‘WHAT NOW?’ as usually when she hears me saying ‘Jesus’ I’m not humming a hymn, so she assumed I was cursing under my breath. Isn’t that just a terrible state of affairs?

The next morning I woke up and practised some yoga on the floor. It felt good, amazing even. On Tuesday morning I came down to see a damp patch where an animal had relieved itself. Not only that, but the dog had fished a packet of Gourmet Purina out of the bin and bits of gravy and foil lay strewn on the carpet. Out came the hoover and on went the Marigolds. I didn’t bother doing yoga that morning, and haven’t done any since, if I’m honest.

I still have three bags of stuff left to sort and tired tripping over them in the hall, I’ve shifted them back in again. I’m not sure that the universe wants me to have this room. Maybe it’s a sign to stop writing? I don’t know. But I did order a new carpet, so I’m not giving up on it yet.

So we’ve hit ‘Twixt-mas’, that irksome period where nothing makes much sense, after a couple of years which haven’t made much sense either. It’s not much wonder we’re feeling more discombobulated than usual.

The children serve as a pleasant distraction on one level, while ramping up the crazy on the other. The older one landed down for her lunch yesterday with bubble wrap wound tightly around her arm, fastened with a white hair bobble. It was somewhat distracting, trying to eat my leftover turkey and ham with her opposite me looking like she’d just returned from the burn’s unit of the Royal. Later it lay discarded on the carpet, looking disconcertingly like a used condom.

One wonders idly what to do with the long drizzly days. In the ‘Before Times,’ LSB and I would have been donning matching elf outfits and trainers as we zoomed down to Castlewellan for the annual Christmas Cracker Race. Eight miles over mountain trails we ran, with the air taking on various hues of blue as I puffed out expletives with every excruciating step as we neared the finish line. And yet, this never seemed out of the ordinary for me; it was a delightful antidote to the peculiarity that is endless lounging coupled with fizzing adrenalin which characterises ‘Twixt-mas’.

Since this year I have all the energy of a semi-deflated balloon, I batted away all thoughts of fell-running, and yesterday I was that person, the one still wearing their pyjamas at four pm, Googling recipes for what to make with all the Snickers languishing at the bottom of the boxes of Celebrations. I used to enjoy a Snickers, but now I find all the peanutty pieces get lodged between my molars. I did however, read almost all of a Jo Jo Moyle’s novel, while the tree lights twinkled and the warm scent of the fig and winter berry candle almost concealed the wet dog smell emanating from the snoozing greyhound beside me.

At least LSB and I have plans for tomorrow night as it’s our anniversary (11 years- wow!) so out to dinner we shall skip, and I shall divest myself of the pjs and may even don a frock.

He really is a good sort, all things considered, tholing all my neurosis, which in recent times have been many and varied. How he hasn’t sought a divorce after this omnishambles of a year I don’t know. His patience with all the animals, which I insisted on getting, has been remarkable, especially when I complain about the smell of piss that still lingers on the rug we had professionally cleaned (twice) and the cat hair which tickles my nose when we go to bed and keeps me, and thus him, awake. He walks the dog in the rain and picks up not only her poop, but other mounds of shite left by other less conscientious owners* on the street.

My increasingly obsessive recycling habits don’t seem to have struck him as bizarre. He holds the door when I come home from school burdened with cans and papers and bottles, and obligingly jumps in the blue bin to make room for all the excess. He doesn’t mind when I stop in the street to pick up cans; in fact he now keeps a plastic bag in his pocket for the purpose. I’m full of fun facts these days, chuntering on about how aluminium is infinitely recyclable. Funny how one’s goals change. We used to talk about Personal Bests, but now I say things like: ‘I got five cans between Forestside and the house!’ and he’ll comment: ‘That’s a bumper loot!’

I’m sure you must get sick of all this,’ I said to him the other night, as I stood on the Ormeau emptying half a tin of White Lightning into the gutter. ‘To have and to hold, to collect and to crush,’ was his reply. Readers, I think I got a good one.

* (or will be just call them what they are, selfish, lazy bastards.)

Do you know what has me stressed out no end? Climate change, obviously, and the doom mongers who tell us that, even if we buy electric cars and rely on wind turbines we’re still only clinging to the precipice of disaster with our fingertips.

It’s hard to fathom that Cop 26 is happening in Scotland, next week, and Johnston is making sweeping, grandiose statements when he’s content to ignore tons of untreated sewage to flood our waterways, and send tons of plastic to Malaysia to be ‘recycled’, when in fact it’s just dumped on unsuspecting villagers who are subjected to toxic fumes while the remnants of our ready meal containers are burnt in a field beside them.

But what to do, when Johnson goes round telling school children that recycling isn’t the answer? (Well obviously it isn’t, when he’s just sending it overseas where it’s just not our problem anymore.)

The message of Cop 26 is that we must collectively make radical changes to our lives, but how exactly that is supposed to happen, given the timeframe which should have been implement thirty years ago, is difficult to compute.

Much of our inability to change is simply through ignorance. Take a recent purchase by me as an example. After freezing our arses off in the garden during the first lockdown, I nipped up to Hillmount to buy a fire pit.  It was in the trolley when I clapped eyes on a gas burner and bought that instead, so I didn’t have to tend a fire while I served chilled Sauvignon which comes from, you’ve guessed it, the vineyards on New Zealand’s South Island. Did it enter my head that burning gas in my back yard was perhaps a big ‘no no’, especially for one who’s so keen on eco issues? Of course it didn’t; I just thought it would be nice to chat to my friends in peace without waving smoke out of my eyes.

One of the major obstacles in our inability to make changes isn’t through laziness or a disbelief that the planet’s in trouble, it’s because we just don’t think, and we don’t often see it modelled to us.

Take local schools and businesses for example. Most homeowners will recycle, sorting their rubbish into bins. But trot into shops or cafés and you’ll see cardboard cups and cans and food waste all chucked in together where, thus contaminated, it will be shipped off to landfill. Case in point, I hoked a few cans out of a bin in a café on the Ormeau on Friday. I asked a barista first and he was very nice about it. ‘Knock yourself out,’ he said, kindly handing me fairy liquid and a towel to wash and dry my hands when I was finished. ‘Dunno why they don’t do that here,’ he said. ‘I do it at home, but not in the café.’ This makes no sense to me at all. Why aren’t there facilities provided? Isn’t this is a perfect example of individuals being asked to do one thing and businesses another?

On to food waste. Not being a scientist, I didn’t realise that when food breaks down it produces methane, which is why it should be kept separately to make compost.  Now that I know this, it’s cracking me up when I see food scraps shoved in with everything else.  School canteens often rely heavily on plastic cutlery and polystyrene containers. Pupils and teachers alike STILL use these without a second thought, then chuck them into a bin-liner along with leftover food. Every. Single. Day.

Surely there are  environmental experts who could interject and show businesses and schools how they could do this better; perhaps with a small financial incentive to do so. It would, I imagine, be easier to tackle these problems at source than try to strain our oceans of detritus after.

So in short, despite Boris making a total bollocks of himself and telling children that recycling isn’t the answer, we need to start small, work out what will help and try to implement it.  In short, nobody’s perfect- like me and my gas burner. Being a bit more mindful is at least the start, but it’s hard when global conglomerates are still shunting all the responsibility on to the individual and doing what they want. There has been no central lead on recycling from our government. Ever. They may parrot Greta Thunberg to sound good- but that’s all it is, meaningless rhetoric until they legislate for companies to produce less packaging and make it easier for people to recycle.