Inside the Elephant Box - Part 1

There are two layers in my elephant box!

The box was given to my mother and grandmother by friends whose Victorian grandmother had been quite a collector...

As many of you guessed, it contains a lot of sewing equipment (no buttons, Betty, so you can read on!), including this quirky little pin cushion designed like a domino.

The domino pin cusion was in a compartment on the left, and, lifting the little lid above it, I found this leather needle case, the large 'needle' and the two amber rods... even after years of treating this box as my 'rainy day' box, to share with my grandmother, I really don't know everything that's in it!

Juanita makes a key point- not only is the box's inlay ivory, but the needle case seems to have snake skin on it and the 'needle' is almost certainly tortoise shell. My mother taught me to be horrified by the killing, but to respect these antique artefacts - I wonder what the rest of you think?

Just to add to my ethical issues over the ancient massacres of endangered animals, here is a collection of carved ivory bangles my mother bought in charity shops and (one of) my grandmother's crocodile-skin handbags. My mother bought the ivory bracelets because she couldn't bear to see something which represented so much life and work (obviously mainly on the part of the elephant) being sold as if it were plastic. She never wore them.  My grandmother bought the handbag because that was just what you did in those days... what do we do with it all now, I wonder?

The Green Chain Interview

Elizabeth Rimmer over at Burned Thumb at Luchair did a really interesting interview the other day, and it turns out that by taking the time to answer the questions, you can also donate money to an environmental charity of your choice. What a good idea! I really enjoyed reading Elizabeth's answers and was having a challenging time thinking of what my own answers would be, when I realised that in fact, I could join in. So, here goes:Turning the heating down by just one degree in your house saves 240kg of CO2 a year. It would take eight trees to soak up this amount of CO2! Are you currently doing anything to make your home eco-friendly?
j

Lucky us, living in the south of France! In late spring, summer and early autumn, we don't have to heat the house at all, and the house is designed to keep (fairly) cool in summer. So, we flake out during a heat wave, but it's not too often and at least we don't use air conditioning. Now, back to heating - we have a wood fire which can be closed down to act like a stove, sending heat around the house. Not perfect - in the cold weather we pile on jumpers and sit under blankets in the evening. In really cold weather we turn on an oil-burning stove too.

Last year I could get organic fuel for the stove locally, but this winter we resorted to burning fossil fuels. So, we're lucky, and we're doing something but we're not perfect yet.

j
Rainforests once covered 14% of the earth's land surface, now they only cover 2%. How are you reducing your use of paper?

j

The French tax system has just (yesterday) offered us the chance to go paperless - a lot of our bills can come online now rather than in the snail mail. We're able to save the records and back them up on the computer, so this is a new way we've started reducing our use of paper.
j

At PriceMinister we believe that trading second hand items online is a great way to extend the life span of products. Have you ever thought of buying or selling second hand items on or off line?

j

Oh, have I ever? I think it was this question, on which I win Brownie Points (or Greenie Points) that inspired me to answer this challenge! I love buying second hand, and the internet is often a good place to start. For us, finding English books in France isn't easy, and we buy a lot of books second hand from Amazon and their second hand traders. The books are often as good as new, and others give me a chance to read something out of print. I do tend to buy my French vintage stuff locally though, as I don't want to pay either postage or ebay prices.

j
One of the biggest environmental challenges we face is Freshwater Shortages. Are you taking measures to reduce your water consumption?

Yes. Elizabethd mentioned in April how expensive water is in France. To be honest, the fact that we're metered and pay for everything we use is a great incentive to reduce consumption. We're thoughtful and care for the environment, but I guess we care for our money even more! So up until last year we had two water butts to save rainwater for the garden. In an average French summer these empty very quickly indeed, so Ben spent over a year (on and off) digging a huge hole at the back of the garden.

This he has built up around the sides, lined, and lidded. Water now feeds off our roof into the two water butts and then on into the new cistern. It should hold enough water to irrigate our veg, flowers and trees for six weeks without summer rain. It nearly emptied in the April/May drought, but since then we've had tons of welcome rain - hurray! And you may notice we don't water our lawn. Only people with wells do that around here. The rest of us search for lawn alternatives (gravel, paving etc) or just put up with dead grass for five months of the year.

j
How do you choose the produce that goes into your shopping basket? (any favorite products?)

j
I buy with three main criteria. No, four, or five... Oh whatever... In no particular order my criteria are: cheap, local, seasonal, ethical, healthy. It's hard to buy ethical and cheap, but otherwise the criteria match each other quite well!

Favourite products: Alter Eco fair trade chocolate. Local supermarket bread - really nice, because this is France!

j
What is your favourite green space near home? (a photo would be great!) This photo is by Son 2.

The Couleé Verte, where Ben jogs every morning, Son 1 walks the dog most afternoons, and the whole family mooches round wildlife-watching on a regular basis.

The name means something like 'Green Corridor' and the idea is that undeveloped land around the streams and rivers of our area forms a series of linked green spaces for the benefit of communities and nature alike. I think it works.

Which charity would you like to support and why? I'd like to support the Young People's Trust for the Environment, which is "a charity which aims to encourage young people's understanding of the environment and the need for sustainability".
The reason I chose this one is because as a teacher and as a mum I've seen how interested and concerned children and teenagers can be in the environment. In addition to their natural interest and sense of justice, they are also concerned because they will inherit the world as we leave it to them!

j

If you'd like to answer these questions on your blog, Price Minister will donate £10 to whichever of their nominated chairities you choose. It's well worth it - why not give it a go?

Paranoid Parenting, Nightingale Style

There comes a time in the life of every couple, when their youngster is ready to fly the nest. Here is Mrs Nightingale. She used to be a sweet singer, but is now reduced to nervous trilling at dogs, cats and humans who come near.

Voila her husband, Mr Rossignol. His elegant acrobatics as he caught flies around our garden entertained us earlier in the year, and his song charmed our sleep for weeks. Now he sits on the roof and 'twit, twit, twits' in harmony with his wife.

Here is the object of their paranoia. Blurry - mum and dad won't let me come close!

And a shot of him/her on Ben's makeshift electricity cable too.
Mum has proved more photogenic. As she scooted round the garden yesterday evening watching the progress of her offspring in alarming proximity to the cat and the dog, she landed on Son 2's shutters. Twit, twit, twit!And then she showed a bit of her husband's acrobatic ability by holding on briefly to the wall before taking off again. I think this was when her sproglet was on the electricity wire...For a long time they were both together, on the fence which screens our pool from the road. It would have been a delight if they hadn't been so clearly traumatised by this parenting teenagers business. (Dad is on the right - his red tail and underbelly are well disguised by our dead Leylandii).Finally, here are mother and baby, currently doing well...If you want to hear what they sound like before it all gets too much for them, you'll find a Youtube video in my post below!

j

Next post: London details.

Thrifty Week - Green Credentials

Whether by accident or design, being thrifty usually manages to end up being good for the environment too. Elizabethd and her husband are busy reducing tap-water consumption in northern France. Mrs Yappy Dog is reusing empty lemonade bottles. Jenevieve is making cloth nappies while waiting for a new arrival (and yes, cloth nappies nowadays really work brilliantly - you can forget those old Terries!). So thrift means reduce and reuse (recycle is the poor third relation in the Green Threesome - you don't need to recycle much if you reduce and reuse enough...) So here are a few of my thrifty ways which are also good for the environment - two old favourites and one real newbie! Firstly, cloth napkins are cheaper and more environmentally friendly than paper napkins or kitchen roll. And boy, do they look good for those who love vintage style! This is a snapshot of what's on our table at the moment - a rare example of all four of us having the same design. The boys usually complain when we all have the same napkins - they like the eclectic collections I build up and sort by colour. In my drawers I have a red set, a green set, a yellow/beige set and a blue set. Sorting by colours is enough to bring the disparate odds and ends I pick up in charity shops together. Washing and ironing them is no big deal - shirts are hard to iron, but squares of fabric are a doddle. I think we meet the criteria for style, convenience, thrift and creation-care with these napkins. I hope you agree!

The second old-favourite is using kitchen cloths instead of kitchen roll. I do keep a roll of paper for really nasty disasters (vomit-related, normally) but in the kitchen is a 'set' of blue cloths (some microfibre, some cut-up T-shirts) and in the utility room is 'the rest' - mankier cloths of all colours that can be used on the floor and for dusting. We help ourselves to them just as we would with kitchen roll, and then throw the cloths into a washing bin in the kitchen. I don't like them lying around damp waiting for re-use - they do breed bacteria. So I uses them once and wash them regularly. It works.

This baby is the new thrifty/green addition to our life - I bought it with some Christmas money. It's a steam mop - no more shopping for floor cleaning products! The hot steam disinfects as it removes the dirt, and the floor dries pretty quickly as it the water is so hot. If you need to really disinfect an area (this is the patch under the stairs where the dog eats and sleeps, so as you can see it gets truly grubby), you just leave the mop in one place for nine seconds and the steam kills all known germs - dead, or whatever those cleaning products promise. As Mrs Yappy Dog mentioned the other day, it's a bit odd to have really clean floors without a really clean smell - you KNOW your floor is clean if it stinks of pine - but that's something I'm getting used to. I bought mine, in true British fashion, at Lakeland Ltd.

j

Do visit Mrs Yappy Dog to pick up more tips and links for Thrifty Week. And have a look at my prayer for our children, below - there's a story attached to today's post - synchronicity is happening!

The Joy of Handkerchiefs!

Oh, the joy of having washing on the line again! And, perhaps more of an eccentric pleasure, the joy of having a neat pile of ironed handkerchiefs ready to go back into the drawer for daily use...

Shall we have a little peep at this pile of hankies? They're just the random results of my washing and ironing over the last week:

At first, I switched from paper tissues to cloth handkerchiefs for environmental reasons - we'd been using regularly-washed cloths instead of kitchen roll for years.

Then we replaced 'kiddy-wiping cloths' at the table with proper cloth napkins - just as good for the environment but a bit more grown up!Having more or less eliminated paper kitchen rolls in this way, it seemed a bit silly for me to be using a pack of paper tissues a day, so I decided to look out for vintage cloth hankies in the charity shops.And there they were, in beautiful detail and appropriate quality!

At first, I'll be honest, I didn't iron them, or the napkins either. They were a 'green' necessity, not something else to go in the ironing pile. But something strange has happened in the last few years.

I've read a few books and blogs. I've realised that being fairly tidy and organised can be rather more of a delight than a bind. I've discovered that, for me, ironing my well-chosen handkerchiefs and napkins is a simple pleasure, which makes the day seem that much more pleasant.

You don't have to feel the same way - isn't variety the spice of life? But you might like to Google 'handkerchief quilts' if you're wondering what to do with your handkerchiefs that you don't want to use on a daily basis!

You might also like to pop over my blog shop, because I found so many handkerchiefs the other day that I've finally felt generous enought to share some of them!

Tell me - did you or do you use cloth handkerchiefs? What do you think about them? And don't forget to find out who won my OWOH giveaway, in the post below...

A Fourth Pause in Lent - The Green One!

Every now and then I get a wonderful opportunity to share ideas with other mums – I get invited to speak at the local (and only existing French) group of MOPS. MOPS means Mothers of Preschoolers, and it’s a great idea which allows a local church to run a group which supports mums themselves, providing childcare and a chance for mothers to take time out to explore what being a good mum means in the very widest context. I’ve been asked to speak at MOPS three times and you’re going to recognise the themes – Celebrating Advent with Children and Celebrating Easter with Children were the first two. You can see how much the preparation and then our discussions influenced me, as I went on to explore those themes here on my blog.So it’s not surprising that last Thursday’s topic has influenced my Pause in Lent this week, and that last week’s Pause in Lent on Compartmentalising things was the starting point for my MOPS talk!The title I’d been given this time was Going Green in a Godly Way. I liked this, as it helped to overcome the ‘compartments’ I break my life into: yes, I am a Christian, yes, I am a mum, yes, I care about the environment. So here’s the big question – are those facts separate, or are they in fact, related? Do they, in fact, become stronger and more influential if I allow them to connect?I’m only going to tell you a tiny bit about what I said, because the really good things I want to tell you about came from the other mums. What I said was that, yes, those things I’ve listed above connect, because God has made a beautiful world and given us responsibility for it, that we have quite spectacularly failed to look after it properly, and that the responsibility now needs to be taken up by adults and by children, and particularly looking to the children as it’s their future we will be creating as we endeavour to look after the world better. There, that’s my bit. Now over to what I LEARNED! We focused mainly on the ideas of Reducing and Reusing, rather than recycling, as recycling is the least useful, most costly little brother to the two other Rs of green living.Two of the mums there were using washable nappies, and neither had tumble dryers. (Oops, a laundry reference!) One mum could get her nappies dry in a day and a half, and got by through having a lot of nappies. That’s how we used to manage it too, although, being in Newcastle upon Tyne, I have to admit that we did have a dryer for those rainy nappy days…. But the other mum has MICROFIBRE NAPPIES that dry naturally in 4 hours! Excuse me shouting, but this seems like the holy grail of washable nappies. You can see one, above. Too cute.She also told us about websites which sell second hand nappies – this is a great idea, as after both our boys, our nappies were mostly still in great condition.

On our list we ended up with: sorting toys with your children to donate them to charity, appreciating gifts that didn’t cost money, buying or exchanging second hand clothes and toys, buying organic, local seasonal food and starting up water recycling and a compost bin in the garden. All of these things are activities that the mums were doing along with their children, so that the children could pick up the idea of living an environmentally friendly lifestyle without effort.
A lot of the conversation the mums shared was about simplicity of life, and tied in so much with things I’ve been exploring through my Simple Abundance book. It seems that we recognise that a lot of the pressures on us to consume and to lead less environmentally friendly lifestyles are driven by the same kind of advertising I was talking about on Friday – we must have more, we must have newer, we must have better! One mum told us how they’d contacted Philips to have a chip repaired in a widescreen TV and had been told to bin the TV and a newer replacement would be sent, rather than the old one repaired.

Another told of how they’d moved to Japan and had been advised that they’d be able to furnish their new flat by collecting from the objects thrown away (like our Ramassage des Encombrants here in France) BUT that they’d have to go at midnight, as these relatively new and completely functioning items were destined for landfill only, and were guarded so that no one would take them away for re-use.Several mums discussed the pressure that people are facing at work to own and use BlackBerries at all times of the day and night, and how this erodes family and social time. One mum pointed out that anyone who turns off their BlackBerry at the weekend turns up at work on Monday morning to find themselves sidelined from their own projects, as decisions have been made over the weekend without them. We didn’t come to any hard and fast decisions on that one – the pressures of modern life are very hard and it’s not for us to tell other people how to respond to them. But it is a matter of concern, surely. You see we moved from ‘green’ issues as such to the wider issue of simple living – but the link seemed so natural to us all, and was a good example of connecting things rather than compartmentalising them, I think.

To sum up, I gave the mums a sheet of possible internet links. I’ll give you a few of them here. In the USA, the ‘Going Green in a Godly Way’ issue is really well addressed by the Evangelical Environmental Network, amongst others. This is important to me, as American Evangelicals have sometimes had a reputation for ignoring climate problems and environmental concerns, and I am really glad to see that, in fact, that’s not the real picture. In the UK, there’s a coalition called Stop Climate Chaos, which many big Christian charities have joined, along with other non-religious organisations – they have one goal, so they have united to make their voice heard.

The reason that the Christian charities are so active in calling for environmental action is that they realise that the poorest people in the world are the ones who are getting hit first and hardest by the climate change that our richer countries have exacerbated. They are following Jesus’ ‘Golden Rule’:

“Do to others as you would have them do to you”.

Luke 6:31

Chief amongst them is Tearfund, running a Carbon Fast for Lent like the one that Elizabeth has told us about. I’ll end with a prayer from the daily Carbon Fast emails:

"Father, show me where I need to change, where my life is burdening others and hurting you. Release me to worship you more fully and help me to strive for justice for the oppressed and marginalised."

Sounds of Spring in Southern France

I try to give a good impression of what it's like to be here near Toulouse through my photos, but recently I've been so much enjoying the sounds of spring that I wanted to try to share some those with you too.

The sounds of a morning bike ride:

The wind in my ears
a frog in the ditch. The sounds of an evening dog walk:

Screaming boys

and cicadas on the way home.The sounds of the Veti Relais car park (my favourite charity shop):

Planes taking off from Toulouse airport

and the song of the skylark. © Arthur Grosset

Hope everyone's having a good weekend!