A return

 Dear sadly neglected ecoblog... 

I'm returning for a few days. I've always used writing to get through my stresses. I've written a whole (almost secret) novel to get over bereavement - losing my mother only a few years into adulthood. You, my dear friend, Rosie's Ecoblog, have helped me get through many years of feeling bit of a loner in the big bad world of trash. When I started writing on this platform, not many people gave a thought to what happened to our waste, and nobody cared that we were wrapping up our whole lives in plastic, disposing of it willy, nilly and trashing this far earth in the process. 13 years on and things are different. 

I'm not sure I can quite use that important phrase, known as normative language, "most people", but certainly many people are now listening. My message, that I've persevered with and now turned into a business, is now being listened to, and people are wanting to join in, in droves, with the Zero Waste Lifestyle, I've be living and writing about for so more than a decade.

Most of my blogging now goes onto the Zero Waste Week blog, and most of the time, I leave the blogging to my Partner in Grime, Rachelle Strauss. I do the talking, she does the social media. We work well that way. 

Over the next few days, I'm returning to this blog, because a) the whole world doesn't read it - unlike Zero Waste Week and b) it might veer off topic slightly. I'm going to blog my experiences of a Zero Waster doing 10 days in quarantine. What we eat, and what we waste will be the biggest part, no doubt, but I'm also going to be mindful about the mental health aspects of quarantine and the word claustrophobia might feature occasionally too.

Almost two years ago, I moved from Oxfordshire in the UK, to Rheinland Pfalz in Germany. Last November I travelled back to the UK, to visit my family, and ended up staying for Lockdown 2. Then it transpired that things weren't getting any better and the Christmas booking in my house in Oxfordshire, that's now a holiday home, got cancelled so I snapped it up for myself. We normally have lots of family to visit over the Christmas period, but we were only allowed very limited guests and only for Christmas Day, but it was lovely being there with Dad and both daughters - home from uni for a while. Then,  a few days before we planned to travel back to Germany, Boris told us firmly that we weren't going anywhere. Essential travel only. Swapping one home office in one country for a home office in another country didn't feel essential, so we had a couple of months more camping out in our holiday home. But then the summons came, and we were informed that we have to turn up for a meeting in person in Germany to arrange, anew - post Brexit, our residency. Hence, yesterday we travelled back to Germany, armed with this document and that document and our negative copied test results and today is Day One of Quarantine. Okay, let's not go into the logic of a negative test - then quarantine. I handed my passport to a border force officer and he handed it back to me. I sanitised my hands straight after. I picked up some packaged food at the Eurotunnel  - could have been covered in cover virus! Anyway, we all have to do this. We are all in it together - one world, one big problem. Maybe it will teach us some powerful tools, so we can realise we can take action together for big issues. Then we can take action together for the climate crisis.

So here I go,  quarantine day one - dear Rosie. I'll keep you posted on how I get on.

The image shows the view from the window next to my desk. Can you just see that tower on top of that beautiful hill? In ten days time when I can next set foot outside my flat, this is the first place I want to go.