Surely this kind of claim is self-pitying nonsense of the first order? You know the kind: “I only get two days off at the weekend. And it always rains. And I feel tired. And I’ve got a bad leg,” etc etc.

Come off it, I thought. Get over yourself. Then he said the magic words: “It was on QI”.

Invoking Stephen Fry in these matters is, for me, an instant winner. Because Stephen Fry does not tolerate nonsense. It’s why I (and more than 6,000 others) are members of the Facebook group If Stephen Fry says it, then it must be true.

So when I Googled “more rain on Saturdays” or something similar, apart from zillions of unremarkable forecasts referring to “rain” and “Saturdays”, I did indeed get results of a non-wacky variety referring to the phenomenon.

Evidence for it was put forward ten years ago, by a team at Arizona State University. They found that, on the Atlantic Coast of the US, it was 22% more likely to rain on a Saturday than on a Monday.

The theory is this: the high levels of traffic and industrial activity on weekdays throws up more heat and pollution into the atmosphere, so by the time the weekend arrives there’s a higher chance that rain will be triggered.

As far as I can see, similar research hasn’t been done this side of the Atlantic. So I’m still suspicious that the Great British propensity to moan about the weather may have a strong role to play.

But if the climatologists’ theory is true, isn’t it (yet) another reason for us to get our emissions under control?

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Originally posted 2008-11-14 17:44:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Sitting in a cubicle for 40 minutes thumbing through a tattered copy of the Blackadder scripts may be a fine way to pass the time in your own WC, for example, but might make you pretty unpopular among work colleagues.

I have been informed by male workmates that it can also be quite difficult to pass water without letting the odd one rip – I wouldn’t know about these things for I am a girl and I smell of roses, but again, not really on in the office loos.

But how about flushing? What is the etiquette here?

We all know the rhyme – if it’s yellow let it mellow, etcetera. Not flushing every time you ’spend a penny’ is basic water-saving practice, and we can come to our own agreements about this at home. But is it appropriate to ‘let it mellow’ in the communal work bogs?

In our flash new office, the Living Team and friends are spread out over two floors, with each floor rented as a self-contained workspace. The lads, therefore, have had to bid – in many ways a happy – farewell to the urinals they shared in the old office and get used to a potentially-unisex cubicle arrangement.

General consensus and (non-violating) observation has concluded that each person in our office urinates around three times a day at work – now that is a lot of water flushed away to begin the energy-intensive process of rejoining the water cycle.

But if we don’t flush and the next person to use the cubicle sees our wee, is this embarrassing? Is it weird? If a client visits the office to find, of all things, urine in the toilet, is this unprofessional? If the generally freshly-flushed state of our office loos is anything to go by, yes, it is. Or so we have been socially conditioned to believe.

But as more of us switch to water meters in order to save money, we’re going to be keeping a tighter handle on our flushing activity – at home anyway.

If those paying the water rates on commercial buildings did the same, they may be more moved to encourage water-saving measures – complimenting ‘now wash your hands’ signs with rhymes on flushing etiquette perhaps. They could become as commonplace as recycling bins, and clients may be glad to be working with such an environmentally aware business.

Or it could just be weird…

HEADER IMAGE by Flickr user

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Originally posted 2009-04-06 15:14:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

To be fair, I’ve earned it.

While I was originally slated to give up my fridge-freezer for the month of October, it put something of a spanner in the works by breaking well ahead of schedule. No amount of coaxing could bring it back to life, so my fridgy-dare started three weeks early in a pile of mouldering dairy produce and defrosted frozen meals. Happily, it also ended three weeks early when, on Friday night, I got to turn on a brand new fridge-freezer.

And after 30 days of pared-down minimalism in the kitchen, this weekend saw me give in to home-economic hedonism. There was fresh food, cold beer, safe leftovers and – holy of holies – I could even go for some two-for-ones on fruit juice. As I write, I’ve a freezer full of frozen veggie chilli, ice cubes and bread, and a fridge with a half-used, two-pint milk bottle that won’t have evolved more intelligence than me. When I get home I’m cooking up perishable things I bought on Friday, with no fear for my life.

Over the past month I’ve been as careful as I could, but I reckon the food I’ve wasted amounts to about 2 1/2 pints of milk, a loaf of bread and perhaps 100 grams of butter. All would have been saved by a fridge or freezer, but then, when you have one it’s easy to become complacent: I bet I waste more in a typical month.

But if being without a fridge has made me appreciate how much we take them for granted, having a new one makes me realise how they’ve improved in the last 15 years or so. While my modest fridge-freezer is only a step up from the bargain basement one I had, it’s leagues ahead in quality, quiet and coldness.

And best of all, it uses much, much less electricity. More on that soon.

IMAGE by Flickr user SideLong

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Originally posted 2009-10-12 09:16:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

We need to change our shopping practices towards a more sustainable model by buying a lot less. Buy very beautiful pieces, and buy fewer of them. They’ll last longer, your total spend will probably be less, you are unlikely to throw clothes out and you probably need less storage space too. Spend your free time doing something else than shopping!

Eloise is involved in the Twelve Degrees of Ethical Fashion experience, the brain-child of Colin Firth and his film producer wife Livia, environmental journalist Lucy Siegle, fashion designer Orsola de Castro (who runs Esthetica at London Fashion Week) and ethical fashion expert Jocelyn Whipple. She runs her business from her website, www.eloisegrey.com, and has just opened a boutique in Farnham.

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Originally posted 2009-10-11 03:05:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Though it sounds like a charming but everyday send off, the small ceremony attracted media attention from across the world: the ships are part of Japan’s whaling fleet, and this year they are off to hunt humpback whales.

Japan’s Fisheries Agency maintains that most species of whale are not endangered, and continues to permit the country’s fleet to hunt them for “scientific” purposes under the annual JARPN II programme. This year, the country has awarded itself a quota of 50 of the once critically-endangered humpback.

Whale meat from such hunts is sold on the open market in Japan, and the proceeds used to fund further hunts. Australian journalist Justin McCurry ate at “one of the premier whale-meat restaurants in Japan” as part of his August 2006 article on the practice.

However, research from January 2006 suggests that stockpiles of whale meat in Japan are rising in the face of sluggish demand, while an article in the Independent yesterday claims that meat from the humpback “doesn’t even taste very good”. In May 2006, the Japanese Fisheries Agency reportedly backed a new wholesaler charged with boosting the consumption of whale meat.

Environmental groups have greeted the season’s start with dismay, while the Greenpeace ship Esperanza aims to shadow the fleet and use “direct, non-violent action” to stop the hunt. A post today on the ship’s blog, though, reveals that things didn’t quite start as planned.

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Originally posted 2007-11-20 23:02:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Making your own is easy. All you need are the following items and an ability to follow some simple instructions. We decided to do just that, following this recipe on the BBC website. Unfortunately, we didn’t quite follow it to the letter, and our egg didn’t turn out exactly like the luxury version held aloft by beaming catering college student Gary Johnstone.

On the plus side, we can tell you exactly where we went wrong so you can avoid making the same mistakes.

You will need:

Easter egg moulds (available from cookware shops for a few pounds each, or you could use a plastic mould left over from a shop-bought egg)
Cotton wool
Baking tray
Greaseproof paper
500g to 600g Fairtrade chocolate (milk, dark, or white).
Cotton wool
Large saucepan
Heatproof bowl
Cooking thermometer (optional)
Ladle
Dessert spoon
Pallet knife

The method

1. Wash the moulds with warm soapy water, dry and then polish with the cotton wool. The moulds must be bone dry with no fingerprints left inside.

2. Place the clean moulds on a piece of greaseproof paper on a baking tray. The jury’s out on the difference between that and the baking parchment we found, but it seemed to do just as well.

3. Break the chocolate into pieces and put in the oven proof bowl. This is where we made our first mistake by not buying enough chocolate. In our defence, 500g to 600g did seem like a lot for one little mould, and have you seen the price of Fairtrade? It’ll become clear why you need so much when it comes to filling up the mould, so don’t skimp.

4. Now fill half the saucepan with water and bring to the boil. Remove the saucepan from the heat and rest on a firm surface. We used water straight from a boiled kettle instead, but that was fine. Then we put the bowl with the chocolate in it on top of the saucepan, so that the bottom of the bowl was just above the water, but not touching it.

5. Next, keep stirring until the chocolate has melted using a cooking thermometer so the chocolate doesn’t go above 45C. We decided to risk it without one: we did look, but they were £12 from the cookware shop and we were still reeling from the price of the chocolate. It didn’t seem to matter much at this stage. The chocolate melted nicely but never seemed to get bubbling hot.

6. When melted, take the chocolate off the heat and cool it slightly over a bowl of cold water while you keep stirring. This is where having a thermometer would really have helped. The temperature of the chocolate should drop to about 25C, causing it to thicken up. Ours didn’t thicken much, which could explain some of the problems we had later…

7. Now boil the water in the saucepan again and place the bowl of thickened chocolate over it to warm it up, again stirring all the time. This time it should warm to around 30C. We had no clue what temperature our chocolate was at by this point, which wasn’t ideal, but it looked nicely runny and smelled even better.

8. Using the ladle, pour the chocolate into one half of the mould, completely filling it, then tap the outside with the handle of a spoon to get rid of any air bubbles. Then pour the chocolate out of the mould and back into the saucepan. Now pour the remaining chocolate into the second half of the mould. Unfortunately, the reason for needing such a large amount of chocolate became clear when we got to the second mould – we didn’t have enough to completely fill it up, leaving us trying to manoeuvre the chocolate around the top so that it would be a similar thickness the whole way round.

9. With the knife, scrape off any excess chocolate from the top of the mould. You’ll have loads of chocolate left over, so you could repeat with two smaller moulds. Turn the rest into biscuits by mixing them up with crushed digestives – waste not want not, we reckon.

10. Put the chocolate-filled moulds onto the greaseproof paper and put them in the fridge to set. This is where disaster really set in. Our chocolate was too runny, so it just poured straight out of the mould and onto the paper. We had to fill the moulds again, then leave them upturned to set. Even in the fridge, it took them ages to solidify properly.

11. When your eggs are ready, the chocolate will shrink slightly and naturally fall away from the mould. The first mould was fine, but on the second one the chocolate was too thin at the top and broke off, leaving an egg that looked like it had hatched.

12. Finally, warm a baking tray in the oven, take it out then rest your two halves of egg on the tray to slightly melt the edges so they glue together – you could even put sweets inside the egg before you do this. Frankly, with our broken, sad-looking specimens, we didn’t even attempt this one.

The verdict:

Practise makes perfect and we reckon if we did it again armed with the requisite amount of chocolate and a cooking thermometer they would come out much better. On the price side, although the initial outlay is quite large (once you’ve bought the moulds and the cooking thermometer) you’re all set for years to come. You wouldn’t want to give our failed attempts to your mum (even if she’s normally charmed with any old rubbish), but the mistakes still tasted very nice.

Posted by Tamsin on 17 March 08

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Originally posted 2008-03-18 00:44:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Yesterday 36 BA flights had to be cancelled in what, the airline’s head has conceded, wasn’t its finest hour. According to BA’s website it’s only expecting to operate 80% of T5 flights today.

Clearly things weren’t quite ready for take off at Heathrow, then, but watching high-profile British engineering projects get off to a less than first-class start is an oddly familiar pastime. Here are a few other hitches that spring to mind…

London’s Millennium Bridge

The Millennium Bridge’s June 2000 opening has become something of a yardstick for high-profile opening day disasters, but what actually happened?

Although the bridge was plenty strong enough to deal with the large number of pedestrians eager to use the first new Thames crossing in London since 1894, designers hadn’t fully reckoned on the fact that they might fall in step with each other. Once this started, the bridge began to resonate, famously wobbling in sympathy with the pedestrians, who were forced to stride in time. This, of course, just made the whole thing worse.

Authorities tried to limit the number of pedestrians crossing the bridge at any one time, but within a couple of days it was clear that the problem wouldn’t go away. The bridge closed for nearly 20 months while engineers fitted huge dampers to prevent any motion getting out of hand.

What was it with millennium projects? Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower was originally intended to be one, but it was quietly renamed at some point during the six years of delays that led to its (slightly less epoch-marking) 2005 opening.

Hugely over budget and behind schedule, the tower chose the opening day to extract its revenge on members of the project management and building team, trapping them in the external glass lift for 90 minutes while they waited for abseiling rescuers. The lift remains closed.

Tilting trains

Although they’re running at full-tilt these days, trains that lean into bends got off to a rocky start in this country. It all began in the 1970s with British Rail boffins, who worked out that, if you couldn’t make Britain’s rail tracks straighter, you could speed up trains by making them lean around corners a bit like a cyclist does.

The APT wasn’t helped by the first ever public run, from Glasgow to Euston in 1981, which suffered from some technical glitches. Passengers complained of queasiness at the way the train took corners. Admittedly, many of them were members of the press who were, allegedly, the worse for wear after one too many visits to the buffet car.

Skip onwards to 2002, when Virgin introduced its first Pendolino tilting trains to the UK. Delays with preparing the track meant that Pendolinos couldn’t lean either for a couple of years, but in mid-2004 Britain finally got its first mainstream tilting train service. Ironically, the trains’ Italian manufacturer designed the tilting mechanism with the help of science bits developed for the APT, and bought from BR after the project failed.

That sinking feeling

Still, they may be laughing now, but the Italians can show us Brits a thing or two when it comes to opening day disasters. And, as this footage shows, they haven’t always had the best of balance themselves.

IMAGES by Flickr users Kieran Lynam, geishaboy500 and Gene Hunt

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Originally posted 2008-03-28 16:51:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

I’ve spent the time since I first announced my challenge calibrating my measurement of success – an all-important element of the challenge, in my opinion. (Or perhaps I’m just over-compensating for how easy my challenge is compared with Lee’s challenge to live without warmth!)

Here’s how the calibration worked: I attached an energy meter to the socket where I plug in my washing machine, and merrily washed away for a fortnight, with little thought to efficiency, planning or necessity.

Here’s what my laundry diary looked like:

Day 2 – Sunday:
2 x 40 degree shorter washes (full machine) – using a total of 1.22 kwh (0.61 kwh / wash)

Day 3 – Monday
1 x “quick wash” (re-wash of previous wash) – using 0.52 kwh

Day 5 – Thursday
1 x “quick wash” (quarter full machine) – using 0.41 kwh

Day 7 – Saturday
2 x 90 degree wash (full machine) – using a total of 2.92 kwh (1.46 kwh / wash)

Day 8 – Sunday
2 x 40 degree wash (full machine) – using a total of 1.34 kwh (0.67 kwh / wash)

Day 10 – Tuesday
1 x 40 degree wash (half full machine) – using 0.61 kwh

Day 14 – Saturday
3 x 40 degree washes (full machine) – using a total of 2.01 kwh (0.67kwh / wash)

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