Strange goings on and a bit environmental stuff!

Today began with a bang! Rather a lot of bangs in fact! At 8.00am I swear someone was firing a cannon somewhere around here ... over and over and over again! So is there something special about the 3rd of August? Is it another of those feasts on the religious calendar that an Anglican/Methodist upbringing doesn’t tell you about? Later in the morning there was singing coming from the nearby church, which might indicate something, although I am not sure what. And as today is Saturday rather than Sunday you don’t expect singing from the church in the late morning, not as a general rule.

Maybe the cannon fire was a measure to disperse fog. Is that even a scientific possibility? Fog there certainly was. I looked at the weather app on my phone to see if there was a chance of it dispersing - yes, there was and it did - and it confirmed it: Vigo - fog! And it was fog rather than mist: dense and grey rather than wispy and white. Like a rather dirty blanket it hung over the estuary but above it the sky was blue and clear.

 Maybe we are suffering from some kind of false memory syndrome but neither Phil or I remember as many foggy mornings, indeed foggy days, as this summer seems to have provided. Sometimes it moves in late in the afternoon, more white and misty then rather like a roll of cotton wool unfurling over the water. Maybe it has something to do with global warming, more evaporation from the ocean or something of that nature. Certainly there are days when you can almost see the pollution hanging in there. You look put towards the invisible Islas Cíes, lost in a dank grey mass. Of course, it could just be a perfectly natural phenomenon and one that we need to take no action about at all.

Pollution is being taken seriously by some organisations. I read about a hotel chain that plans to remove all small plastic toiletry bottles from its 843,000 rooms in 5,600 hotels. They will still provide shampoo and shower gel but in bulk dispensers which can be refilled. Apparently some people will miss those little bottles. A journalist wrote:
 “But upmarket miniatures will be a loss. Brands such as Molton Brown are beloved by those who practise “the sweep”.
 This is when, in the dying seconds of your stay, you swipe a crooked arm across the bathroom surfaces and bundle every miniature into your suitcase.”

We’ve done that in the past, not quite a “sweep” but a bit of a collection. We stopped doing so when we found ourselves with a mass of little bottles in the bathroom at home, toiletries that guests might use but rarely do. Personally I don’t use the little bottles of toiletries, although I confess to collecting the shower caps provided by hotels. They are useful to have when guests come to stay and forget to bring their own. And that does happen. The little bottles are really only useful if you empty them and then use them to carry a small amount of your own choice if shampoo and conditioner in quantities small enough to go through airport security in your regulation size liquids bag!

On the subject of plastics, I notice that the Mercadona supermarket next door to our flats, which made a big thing about using paper carrier bags earlier this year, seems to have reverted to plastic bags. I may be doing them a great injustice of course. Their “plastic” bags might well be made out of biodegradable vegetable material. As I usually take a re-usable shopping bag I have had no occasion recently to acquire a Mercadona “plastic” carrier.

We might be fighting a losing battle on the plastic front and, in any case, I am rather more worried about the plastic we can’t see, the micro stuff that they say we have ingested and which is floating about in all our bodies.

Frightening stuff!