Things useful for the task of bringing up children without a car

Besides a pram, we used to find a baby sling useful.

Before the baby can sit up there's no way of carrying it on a bicycle, but you can strap it to your body and ride a bicycle with the baby held firmly to your front. The sling needs to be one that holds the baby's wobbly head in position, and won't drop baby out as you whizz round corners.

I think nowadays people sometimes use one of those trailers that goes behind a bicycle and maybe you can put the baby to lie down in it, or put a car-seat type baby carrier in it.

I think it's debatable whether that's safer than a baby sling. I'm not sure I'd terribly want to cycle on the road with baby in a trailer down there behind, where the cars can't see.

The flag at the back rather suggests that the parent is not entirely confident that the cars won't just drive over it.

Chocolate

Results of anti-soya chocolate investigations shows the following ranking.

First prize to Traidcraft Organic Swiss Made Chocolate. The Cappuccino variety is heavenly, despite containing some vegetable oils. Other varieties sampled so far are also delicious: the milk chocolate version has nothing but wholesome ingredients.

These chocolate bars contain no emulsifier at all.

Runners up:
Plamil Organics, non-dairy and gluten free. Contains sunflower lecithin.
Peter Rabbit Organics. Seems to be designed for children, but is sadly dairy free and made with fructose not sucrose. Contains sunflower lecithin.

Flavour not wonderful in either case, doubtless due to the lack of the yummy bits like sugar and milk.

Also ran:
Tesco value chocolate, contains lecithin from Rapeseed. The flavour is fine, but I don't really approve of rape plantations, or of Tesco.

Heating 5

I've been doing some experiments with my electricity consumption in Norwich. For two weeks (one cold and one mild) I kept the heater in the living room on all the time instead of on a time switch. I used 266 units of electricity in the cold week and 198 in the mild week. Last week, which was mild, I had it on the time switch. I used 119 units.

This suggests that it is more economical to have it on only some of the time. HOWEVER this doesn't take any account of my gas consumption (the more I use the gas fire, the more the electric heater will switch off). So I really ought to read my gas meter as well.

How complicated.

What this is all leading to is my wondering whether the best solution to being a bit greener about my energy would be to install a wind turbine, rahter than have some gas central heating. Because basically it takes quite a lot of energy to heat the place, and whether that's electricity or gas it is using precious resources and giving off greenhouse gases unless I can find a way to secure some renewable energy to feed it. I've got a pile of logs in the garden, but the gas fire occupies the place where I'd burn logs so that's not an option right now.

Things calculated to make a cyclist angry

Speed Humps

Example: the new work on the Avenues in Norwich.

Where there used to be a bicycle lane there is now no bicycle lane, but rather a series of terrible humps and a 20 mph speed limit, which is a volatile combination that causes the motor traffic to be a serious nuisance to bicycles, and bikes to be a serious hazard to motors.

Here, for instance, in the space of three minutes are some of the consequences.


1 The humps are placed such that a car must squeeze in close to the left to get a wheel either side of the hump. As a bike approaches a hump, the car behind must hang back to wait until after the bike has gone past.




2 If the motor vehicle chooses not to hang back and wait, it may pass the cycle at the hump by travelling on the wrong side of the road. However, since it is limited to 20 mph it will need to spend some considerable time on the other side.



3. If there is traffic coming in the opposite direction, overtaking on the right is not an option. The motor vehicle must stay behind.








4 However, 20 mph is not sufficient speed to pass a sequnce of cyclists between humps. If the cycles are travelling at 10 or 12 mph and the motor vehicle is travelling at 20 mph it will not have time to pass even one cyclist, let alone several, before coinciding with a cyclist at the next hump.

In order to get past, then, the motor vehicle is obliged to move out to the right hand side of the road and accelerate as fast as possible, rush past the cyclists on the wrong side of the road, and then swerve urgently into the extreme left, cutting in in front of a cyclist, so as to have its wheels square on either side of the left hump.

5 The alternative is to drive on the right hand side of the road at break neck speed the whole length of the Avenues, hoping that nothing will come in the opposite direction.

It is, of course, also impossible for cyclists to overtake each other between the humps. In the three minutes I spent getting these photos I didn't catch one of the problems that ensue for the cyclist who needs to get past a slower moving cyclist. Maybe in another post...

Tescos train

Good news that Tescos are moving goods by train (so I discovered from a leaflet they sent round recently). It's a bit hard to discover any details on their web site, other than a press release from May last year. There's also a report in the Guardian from the same time which claims that Asda do so too and have been doing so for longer. It also looks as though Tesco were talking only about non-food products.

Still, maybe if I'm looking for ways to justify the occasional visit to my local Tesco Metro (which has quite appalling lorries cluttering up the narrow lanes in Norwich, especially in the morning when I'm trying to squeeze past on a bike), perhaps I can add the expectation of more train transport to the list of plausible excuses?

Sad news on the Urban Farm Shop

I tried to go to the Urban Farm Shop to buy cooking apples today and found that it has shut down. Alas.

Reflections on why it was not a success: one would be its opening hours. It opened too late in the morning. For instance, on a Saturday morning, you couldn't go there first, to buy whatever was obtainable there, and then finish your shopping at the market or the supermarket. But it didn't make sense to do it the other way round, because the range available at the Farm Shop was more limited, and you didn't know what to hope for there.

Also, unlike the Green Grocers, it was not in close proximity to a supermarket or other staple shops, so you couldn't go there in the knowledge that everything you needed could be bought in the vicinity.

Also I think that because of the late opening hour it must have missed out on the mothers taking their children to school, who should have been able to go to school with little Billy, carrying his book folder and lunch box, leave him there and go back empty handed, stopping on the way to buy the vegetables and meat for the evening meal. You don't want to do that shopping when you fetch little Billy from School in the afternoon, because then you have an arm full of his gym kit, lunch box, the paintings he has to take home for the kitchen wall and the invitation thrust into your hand by Emily's mother outside the school gates. Also you need to hold Billy's hand. So doing the shopping then is much less satisfactory than the morning slot after you've dropped Billy at School. So if you open your shop at 10 a.m. you've missed the key moment, if your shop is on the prime route to the primary school.

Parking £3.20 all day

Parking £3.20 all day.

This is what it says on a large sign facing the railway just outside Norwich station.
It's obviously addressed to people travelling on the train. I assumed initially that this must be to allow commuters who catch the train from Norwich to see that they could park their car near the station for the day and then take the train (to London, say). It now occurs to me that it might be addressing those who commute into Norwich from Norfolk, Suffolk or wherever, suggesting that you could travel by car instead and here's a place to park that will be just as good as coming in by train.

I imagine some people whose train ticket costs more than £3.20 a day might be tempted to think they'd save some money that way. It's a sad situation that many people seem to judge their happiness and well-being by the immediate amount of money going in and out of their purses in obvious, measurable amounts.

One morning last week on Radio Norfolk there was another example of that. It was a discussion of the declining quality and increasing cost of the bus service. It's true that the service is declining and the ticket prices have risen sharply. That is at least partly due to the government cutting the grants that assist with provision of services to rural communities. Such is the government's commitment to the environment, and supporting efforts towards sustainable lifestyles.

But however much one laments the failure to subsidise country buses, here is a very stupid thought, uttered by one of the listeners who phoned in:

"The car park costs less than the bus fare so it's cheaper to drive in than to take the bus."

How many mistakes is this person making when she thinks like that?