As I returned from my run yesterday morning, I spotted my milkman and I stepped up the pace so that I could catch him and pay the latest milk bill. I could pay him online but if I can catch him and pay him directly it somehow feels better. So I handed over the cash - one of the few things I actually use cash for - and, noticing that milk had not yet been delivered to my door, went and got the empty bottle off my doorstep ready to swap it for a full one. We have a litre of milk four days a week, delivered in recyclable glass bottles with a metal screw top. As I handed the empty bottle over the milkman said, “Don’t bother returning the tops. Pop them in your recycling.” Presumably it’s too much of an effort to clean and sterilise the tops for re-use, but it really seems like a waste to me to use new lids for each bottling.
Now, which recycling bin do I put metal tops from milk bottle in? The instruction for the glass and plastic recycling bin is to remove the tops from bottles and throw them in the general rubbish. The lids are the “wrong” kind of plastic, as are yogurt pots, margarine tubs, cream containers!! However, it is okay to put tin cans, drinks cans and baked beans tins and the like, in with the glass and plastic. So maybe that’s where the metal tops from my milk bottle should go.
It’s all very confusing. I try to be a good, eco-aware citizen but, boy, they do make it hard sometimes!
I drink my tea these days without milk. Not that I have any objection to milk. My eco-awareness has limits. I add milk to my breakfast muesli and drink my coffee with milk. But I prefer my tea black. Some people go on about how we should use a milk substitute - soya milk, almond milk, oat milk and whatever other vegetable milk substitute you can come up with. One of these is journalist Emma Beddington, who was writing about it in today’s Guardian. She has tried a range of milk substitutes and has found them all unsatisfactory, some of them even causing her to be sick. “I have been experimenting with plant-based options, prompted by many helpful suggestions from non-dairy evangelists.” she wrote, “This has involved numerous sacrifices to the dark lord Tetra Pak, and the kind of side-effects you see on medicine packaging: nausea, dysphagia and vomiting.”
So why does she not simply drink her tea black? Because: “I’m ultra-sensitive to tannin, but addicted to tea, and plant milks do not seem to neutralise its nausea-inducing effect the way cow’s milk does.”
Is it really possible to be addicted to something that has a “nausea-inducing effect”? Maybe so. If I were Emma Beddingtom, however, I think I would wean myself off tea, going cold turkey if necessary, and maybe move on to fruit based infusions. I can recommend lemon and ginger!
Addiction to gambling is a different thing, a proper addiction, you might say. I read about a gentleman who, in order to fund his habit, stole vast amounts of money from the company he worked for, who incidentally paid him £50,000 a year.
Apparently the betting companies encouraged his habit by giving him incentives such as free bets and tickets to race meets, football and rugby matches, details obtained via a subject access request show. The report went on to say:
“But they did little to check he could afford his habit, or find out where the money came from, until he had racked up huge losses.”
I my oddly naive fashion, I thought these companies were in the business of making money, stealing money from fools you might say! Surely it’s not really their job to check that the gambler can afford to gamble. They aren’t social workers or counsellors whose job is to help prevent people from falling into bad habits. No amount of ending their advertisements with then refrain, “Always gamble responsibly” is really going to stop addicts. It’s the same thing as tobacco companies putting alarming pictures on their cigarette packets, with the warning “SMOKING KILLS” - it almost certainly does not deter many addicts. The advice has to be: DON’T START”.
That’s enough gloomy stuff.
Here’s something more light-hearted:-
The fashion pundits appear to have seen light at the end of the tunnel and are no longer going on about how wonderful certain kinds of leisure wear are. Now that people are meeting face to face more frequently and not just showing their top half in zoom encounters of one kind or another, fashionistas are concentrating again on the whole body look. And so it came about that I was reading about what the fashion world calls Dad Pants, smart wide-leg trousers for ladies, tailored to the waist, ideally worn with a smart 2 inch wide leather belt, to show off your tidy figure. As these are the kind of trousers Diane Keaton wore long ago in the film Annie Hall, at least one fashion writer would like them to be called “Annie Hall trousers”, but apparently Zara has already named them “Dad Pants”. So there it is.
Trousers have not always been acceptable, or indeed respectable, wear for ladies. According to the article I read, “In Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, published in 1930, Agatha Runcible is turned away from a country hotel on account of wearing trousers. (“They made Miss Runcible stay outside, and brought her cold lamb and pickles in the car.”) In 1951, Katharine Hepburn used the staff entrance during her stay at Claridge’s because the London hotel did not permit women to wear “slacks” in the lobby.”
I wonder what those who banned ladies in trousers would make nowadays of women who team their trousers with crop tops, showing off an expanse of tanned and toned (or occasionally pale and flabby) flesh.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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