The Bath Half

Two weeks ago today team 'now we are three' completed the Bath Half marathon. The sun shone for us, they music played and the atmosphere was amazing.

Lizzi was setting out with the pros and celebs and aiming to beat her previous Bath Half time of  1:48:45. (She started next to Russel Howard). My plan was just to get round and Richard's plan was to run with me to make sure I did that! It was like having my own personal trainer next to me all the way :) 

A huge cheer told us that the race had officially started. We couldn't see the start at this time and continued to shuffle forward with thousands of other people.  But just over 9 minutes later and we crossed that line. Within the first mile you get to the brow of a downhill stretch and so have full view of the thousands of people in front of you. Runners for as far as the eye could see.  No danger of going off too fast!

My feet hurt by mile five and we were overtaken on mile 6 by Darth Vader but we kept going and in fact we both knew we had Cheshire Cat grins pretty much all the way round. On the first lap just over a mile in, I noticed a spectator was holding out a board with a big pink spot on it that said 'Hit the spot to power up.' As We turned the corner to start our second lap of the circuit, I decided that if she was still there I'd be hitting that spot! I was totally loving the high fives with all the children along the way.  It was so much fun. Turning the corner at the end of the Upper Bristol Road to head back in towards town was such a great moment. It felt like the home straight and we were running at quite a pace (for me). The lead singer of the band at the far end of the Lower Bristol Road shouted, "Come on, you've trained for this, we haven't." I loved the sign that declared 'blisters are in this year' and one that said 'Go Mum'.  They kept me going, as did my personal trainer, each time he said 'How are you doing, shall we give it a little more?'

We did manage to up the gear a bit every now and then as the mileage went up and the distance to that finish line came down.  It was only on mile 12, which for me was uncharted territory, that I said to Rich, "This feels hard now." I think he said "It's meant to be hard. It's a half marathon! We pushed on up the hill just keeping the pace as best I could and Rich staying with me. I said,"There's no way I can sprint at the end." "Don't worry, we already are." We turned the corner and we could see the finish line. I felt as though I couldn't believe it was coming to the end. I had been so nervous about it before I started - but I loved every minute of it - all 2 hours 15.35 minutes of it.

Lizzi beat her time, coming in at 1:48:10 (and in front of Russel Howard and Greg James. And not only that she has already run another half marathon on Cardiff yesterday. Would I do it again?

The whole experience was thoroughly enjoyable and I am itching to do another one.

So team 'now we are three' may well run again  or maybe the team will grow to become four.  We have some takers!

Talking Rubbish with That's Oxford TV

A few weeks ago I was invited to talk to Robin Shuckburgh about how to reduce waste and make better use of our resources.  Here's the Youtube video.

A year without plastic - the good bits

Trying to avoid single-use plastic for a year is the hardest challenge I have tried. The reason behind this strange decision that we took was this: I wanted to see if today’s highly packaged lifestyle is necessary and beneficial or not.  How uncomfortable would it be to manage without plastic packaging?

For me, the most uncomfortable part of the whole challenge is that it involved my family and not just myself.  When I have set myself challenges before, which I do most years, it has really been only up to me whether or not I succeeded in my challenge. Involving other people is always going to be harder, but it can also seem more rewarding - or at least that's what I feel now, looking back on what we achieved as a family. 

It was at times frustrating, like when I asked at the covered market in Oxford if I could have some cheese without any plastic wrapper - the guy said "yes, of course" then snuck in the plastic wrapping anyway. Uhh!  Like when I carefully look for packaging that seems plastic free - I open up a cardboard box and find that inside the contents are wrapped in plastic. But I'm getting wise to that one now!

So, it wasn't 100% successful.  However, it was certainly not all bad. In one year we’ve ended up with a 2.5kg cat food bag filled with scrunched up plastic.  It weighed 770 grams.  Even though I can’t say we achieved our challenge, we have cut down our packaging enormously. I’m pretty sure I used to produce about that much plastic in a month, never mind a year.

Here’s what I’ve learnt.
1. Living without plastic requires organisation. It’s when I haven’t planned ahead that I’ve had to buy plastic packaged goods. Having a good stock of dry goods, store cupboard ingredients and buying cat food in bulk helps.
2. Plastic avoidance requires making sure you take lunch, snacks and drinks with you when you are out and about (a huge money saver!) I have a stainless steel flask for water and I make a lunch of leftovers, or a couscous or pasta salad in a Tupperware container. For that boredom/comfort eating I take a small pot of dried fruit and nuts, which I buy in bulk from refill outlets such as Wholefoods Market in Cheltenham or SESI in Oxford when I’m passing by that way.
3. I bake my own bread, cakes, biscuits and oatcakes. Much tastier than anything shop-bought.
4. I cut out crisps, sweets and other plastic wrapped snacks. For me crisps were the hardest challenge, but finding other snacks like nuts, olives, roasted giant corn and dried fruit has helped. Much healthier!
5. Going plastic free gets easier as you learn how and where to shop. At first I thought I was spending more money, but now I’ve learnt where to shop, I save money.
6.Fresh fruit and vegetables are easily found. Sainsbury’s and Waitrose have plenty of loose fruit and veg, and Coop has some availability. I'm sure other supermarkets are the same. However, the best place I found was a local green grocer - the traditional kind - my local is Alan’s Orchard in Carterton and it really is excellent.
7. I buy good local meat and eggs, unpackaged (as you can take your own tubs/reuse your egg-boxes) at my local Butcher's - Patrick Strainge in Bampton.  If you are in the area - don't miss it! It is well-known for its award winning sausages. They also have wonderful pasties, sausage rolls and that sort of thing, which we've used as a way of keeping our holiday travel plastic free.  We have just taken a big tub with a clip lid with us on the day of departure (or the day before) and filled it with goodies.  Much nicer than anything I've ever had from a plastic packet.

So that's the good bits. What about the bad bits? Cheese, cucumber and peas unpackaged? Forget it. Way too stressful!

A year without plastic

Well we have completed our strange experiment. We have tried and failed of course to manage a whole year without purchasing anything packaged in single use plastic.

We did try quite hard most of the time, but this has certainly been the hardest eco challenge that I have attempted so far. It was bound to be hard. The challenges I've undertaken so far, like a year of buying only second hand clothes, a year of not buying new books, are things that only affect me. It has been up to me and me only to succeed or fail. I like a challenge so I have found it fairly easy to stick to my decisions. This year, though, my challenge has affected my whole family, my guests, my pets even. Now that's a lot harder. But it hasn't been a complete fail.

First of all here's the sum total of our single use plastic for the year.

I tried to get Smarty the Cat to stand in front of the bag to show the scale of our year of plastic, but he wouldn't oblige for long enough for me to snap a picture of him with the bag. He is nearly as tall as the bag.   Does that help give an idea?

All of this plastic is squashed inside a 2.5kg bag of cat food (almost).  When I chose this challenge, I decided that I wasn't going to go anything like as far as trying to make my own cat food.  So I found these clear bags of cat food at Countrywide.  They have been a success with the cats, and this was the first bag of the year, when I found that they also did 10kg sacks. However, I didn't want to find that the cats didn't like it, so I tried the small bag first. We then swapped to buying 10kg sacks which are not squashed inside this bag, because they are being re-deployed for various purposes like storing wood chippings, kindling etc.  So, that way, they are exempt from the single use plastic.

I can't decide whether this looks like a lot of plastic or a little, because I didn't really ever measure the amount of plastic we got through before, and I had already tried to cut out any non-recyclable plastic.  So how does it compare to plastic in a 'normal' household, I wonder?

There's something else missing from this bag too.  Quite a lot of other plastic that I didn't stock up, as I was trying to concentrate mainly on my own shopping habits rather than other people's habits, and the less I used plastic, the more I noticed how much plastic was brought into the house brother people.  If anyone bought something wrapped in plastic, I put it into another plastic bag and sent it out with my weekly recycling (most plastic in West Oxfordshire is recycled).  I think I've put out plastic recycling from other people maybe six to eight times this year as it has taken that long to fill a bag to a reasonable amount to put it out.

Before I commit this little bag of plastic to the recycling I'm going to have a good think about what has been good and what has been not so good about our year without single use plastic (nearly). But that's for another day I think.  Today I'm just going to say that it is done and my family can no doubt heave their sighs of relief, at least for a bit, until I decide how many of the new plastic free habits are going to remain in the Pitt household.  I dare say some of them will be willingly accepted, but not all of them.  I can't remember how far through the year the term 'illegals' became a Pitt family thing - as in "Sorry, Mum, I've brought illegals".  Over the next few weeks, I will tell all, maybe!

In the meantime, Happy New Year!

Zero waste week days four and five

Well done and thank you to Rae Strauss for another inspiring and informative zero waste week. Day four was all about WEEE and furniture. So I thought I would share my most recent furniture makeover.

My daughter found this in a charity shop and I gave the white drawers a coat of paint to freshen it up. It definitely has a few more years of use left in it.

On the WEEE front, I've managed to recycle a very old pair of curling tongues that were my grandmother's and I was concerned for the safety implications of anyone plugging them in.  I also recycled an old camera and a broken torch that I felt was beyond repair and in truth was never much good anyway!

Day Five all about paper is one I'm going to tackle when I get back home.  I've decided to have another go at slimming down the paperwork in my office.  Despite my clear out a couple of years ago I still have way too much paper, and I have way too many books.  That will be my post holiday challenge to get down to the minimum of paperwork and to give away yet more books.  I want to see at least part of a tree put back into use instead of sitting on my book shelves and inside my filing cabinet.

Back to La Belle France, I was pleased to see that one of the supermarkets here has a row of recycling boxes for batteries, light bulbs and printer cartridges. A step in the right direction :)  The amount of rubbish in the general waste bins here shows that it is really only the first step of what needs to be a marathon.  We are lucky that we do have very good recycling facilities in the UK - we just need to use them.  I think the same is true in France - just not enough care and attention is put into the issue of what we throw away.

Happy recycling  and reusing all you Zero Heroes!  If you haven't yet signed up for Zero Waste Week, it is well worth doing so.  There will be monthly updates to keep you going until Zero Waste Week next year.  If you've been on board this year, please do share you reuse projects on social media.  It all helps to spread the word and in turn reduce the amount of needless waste.

Zero Waste Week Day Three

So today is all about food waste and how to avoid it , and how to reduce the packaging associated with it. My speciality! But today it is going to be harder. Much harder as I am now in France, separated from my food waste bin and my compost heap. On the plus side, to minimize packaging, we've brought our Onya weigh bags and the supermarket here were fine with them. There are no single use bags in French supermarkets, but we brought a plentiful supply of reusable bags. All our fruit and veg was packaging free. Meat on the other hand was a challenge. In France meat packaging is often polystyrene and no recycling facilities exist here for that. Plan is to have not much of it. There's also no separate food waste so we have already thrown some melon skin and seeds in the general waste. I don't know what happens to it thereafter. To minimize avoidable food waste we brought the contents of our fridge with us in a cool bag and that provided us our first meal. We plan to get inventive with bread. Croutons for goats cheese salad is our first use it up plan. Bon appetit!

Zero Waste Week - Day 2

I'm feeling good about my empty carrier bag store and I've managed to mend the drying rack.

Today it is all about reusing glass.

Here are some of the things I already do.  We are fortunate to have a milkman so we get our milk delivered to our door in reusable glass bottles.  We also buy orange juice in reusable glass bottles from our milkman.  I'm sure this makes a big reduction to our weekly packaging output.

I'also refill some rather lovely glass decanters with rape seed oil and sunflower oil from SESI in Oxford.  It has unfortunately recently been made illegal to refill your own containers with Olive Oil, so I now buy my olive oil in a big tin.  However, you can still refill your own bottles with oil oil mixes such as olive oil and rosemary or olive oil with chilli.

Here's the legislation about the olive oil refills ban for anyone who would like to know more about this.


Inspired by today's Zero Waste Week email I'm planning to tackle a storage issue I've been stressing over for a while now.  It's the tool shed.

Everything is a mess in here.  It always takes a while to find what we need when we need it, so I'm implementing the glass bottle storage system so we can see everything and so we can make much better use of the shelving.  I don't have time to do it today, but I've glued one jars lid to the underside of the metal shelving and filled it with some screws.  I'll see if it holds and then if it does I'll do some more!  If it works, I'll make sure I add nice clear labels to my jars too.

I love Zero Waste Week!