terracycle

More lockdown reflections, and Ecobricks – again

The Everyday Radical1 Comment
Photo by Margot RICHARD on Unsplash

I keep seeing posts and memes on Facebook telling me to make the most of this lockdown period to reflect, slow down, think about what’s important in life. I must confess, in weeks 1-2 of lockdown, these posts made me feel pretty stabby. especially this poem:

And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently.

And the people healed. And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.

And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed.

It’s by a contemporary American writer called Kitty O’Meara, but it’s been widely and wrongly attributed to another poet named Kathleen O’Meara, supposedly writing during the 1860s cholera outbreak – I don’t even know if there actually was a cholera outbreak where she lived in France (although she was originally from Ireland). This annoyed me a lot – I felt like it was trying to attribute some sort of universal pandemic commonality of suffering across the centuries, when the reality of course is that not many Catholics in the 1860s would have been particularly into meditating, most people wouldn’t have had any books in their homes, and they most likely would have been more interested in preventing starvation and death anyway.

So I read this stuff, and raged about how tactless it is to celebrate being able to meditate when there are people dying alone in under-staffed ITUs, and people are losing their jobs and struggling to feed their families, and single mothers are being driven mental by small children cooped up all day. I raged a bit more about how bloody unfair it is that I haven’t got any time to read books and do puzzles and watch Andrew Lloyd-Webber musicals on YouTube (here’s the link for you lucky bastards who do have time – and if you can watch this without shedding a tear, you’ve got a heart of stone, dude).

Then my paid work finally all evaporated, and we got ourselves into a bit of a routine of sharing childcare and getting some exercise, and it all feels a tiny bit less awful now. Plus I also understand that boredom and loneliness are terrible things too, and people alone in lockdown with no toddler to distract them may also be suffering. I do acknowledge, occasionally, that it’s not all about me.

Then I wrote this post and realised that going back to normal isn’t an option afterwards; we have got to work harder on the eco stuff, or our way of life and all that we hold dear will slip from our grasp, and soon. Sorry, this is long already and I haven’t even starting talking about ecobricks. I will get on with it now.

I wrote this post quite a while ago about ecobricks and my various conflicts about them. There are definite pros and cons to the concept.

It’s incredibly hard to find a local project to donate completed bricks to and there’s pressure from within the Ecobrick movement away from “dropping off” your plastic and passing on responsibility to someone else for your waste. You’re encouraged to make something yourself or set up a local project in your community.. We still haven’t found a local project to give them too (although I may possibly have found one further afield that we can contribute to), and I have no enthusiasm for building something myself (the small one and I made a space hedgehog today out of spaghetti and play doh – picture at the bottom – you’ll see why I’m not confident of my abilities to make a planter out of bottles and mud).

(NB the idea of “shipping” bricks to developing countries to use as a building material is a common misconception, but it’s not at all recommended UK Ecobrick trainers and there’s no system to support it happening).

There are plenty of great examples though of people making the process work, making switches to reduce their consumption of plastic packaged goods, inspired into more mindful shopping by the volume of plastic waste they are having to process into an ecobrick and being motivated to reduce it. (There’s a side issue here which I find really interesting, which is that this more mindful shopping often involves visiting multiple shops and paying a “zero waste” premium, which assumes not only a certain level of income but also assumes time to shop like this, and maybe assumes there’s someone full time “at home” – probably a woman – who’s taking responsibility for this process. More on this one day.)

An empty landfill bin is an indicator of success in ecobricking, and the best brick you make is the one that you can’t fill because you’ve stopped buying plastic. So the idea that ecobricking encourages plastics use and the purchase of plastic bottles to fill is false. Aside from the slight concern I have that a lot of school projects involving ecobricks aren’t fully informed, I do think that teaching kids about ecobricks is likely to improve their awareness of the issues with single-use plastic, rather than encourage them to buy more of it to fill their bricks – mainly because the plastic harvesting is pretty boring. More likely, their parents (mothers?) will end up doing it for them when they get bored.

The most convincing criticism of ecobricking I’ve seen is that it’s guilt offset – people make bricks to make themselves feel better, and don’t make any lifestyle changes to reduce their plastic consumption. And this is where it gets personal for me. We basically haven’t made any major switches for ages and we are just bricking a load of plastic, and putting a load more into our Terracycle collection. Our Terracycle collection has been suspended at the moment due to safety concerns, understandably, so we would have to find somewhere to store it all. And it’s all loads of work washing and drying all the plastic, and we’re knackered with no childcare at the moment, and looking for things to stop doing to help us survive this time, so we talked about giving up bricking. Then I realised that the reason it’s so annoying is because we are, of course, doing it wrong by not making any further effort to reduce our plastic. The whole point of ecobricks is that they’re really annoying to make – the process is supposed to put people off making them so they look for ways to reduce their plastic. It doesn’t feel rewarding to us because it’s not reducing.

The various food chain issues we’ve all endured recently has also got me thinking. We are so far removed now from the production of our food. I don’t know where lentils grow (they do grow, right?) or where the plastic packaging they come in is made, I’ve stopped thinking about palm oil too and put a whole load of stuff in the “too difficult”pile.

So maybe now is not the time to make huge changes, because we can’t get to the zero waste shop or the market very easily and there’s limited options available in some shops round here still. But there is an opportunity to pause, maybe, and have a think about what’s going into the collection system for the bricks and Terracycle – we’re not giving up, we’re going to carry on suffering – and think about what we could do differently in the new world. I’m writing a list of what goes into each waste stream and have a vague idea of a post-lockdown action plan… (I’m not writing strategy anymore, folks, so I need an action plan of some sort in my life). Plus I’m going to find out if lentils grow on trees, or what…

Here’s the space hedgehog, just to remind us all why craft projects and me are not a great combination.

Now for something completely different… (plus a lapse in my rules about stationery purchases)

The Everyday Radical3 Comments

This is just a quick post, completely unrelated to the Everyday Radical mission, but I wanted to share an exciting thing which has happened.

I have been working on crafting my skills as a writer in various different formats recently, and I submitted a piece of flash fiction – which may possibly be an excerpt from a forthcoming novel, in about ten years’ time – to the very excellent collaborative writers’ blog, The Finest Example (the guys who also published my article about “zero waste” as a troublesome concept).

And here it is, A King in Darkness. I’m very proud of it and super stoked that someone else thinks it’s worthy of publishing (yes, imposter syndrome having a field day here!) So if you like it, please flatter me and say nice things and share it far and wide! Also you might want to follow my other blog, Secret Scribbles in London (not so secret any more, kids!), where I share flash fiction, poetry and ramblings about my life. I have 10 followers, it’s practically a viral internet sensation already!

Just a small aside, to keep some relevance to the eco theme in case my shameless plugging is too annoying. I’ve written here about my deep and long-lasting love for stationery (which I have now learnt to spell correctly, at last). I have not, since that post, bought myself any new stationery at all. But I bought a new note-pad today for £2.49 from Ryman, because my note-pad I use for meal planning and budgeting and other fun adulting activities has just run out. The keeping of this “housewife” pad definitely contributes to reducing our food waste, so technically today’s purchase is saving the planet. And I’m a published author now, so it’s allowed. I didn’t buy any new pens though. So I still get to be smug about being zero waste. (Incidentally, they have Terracycle collections in Ryman branches now for recycling used up pens, so don’t bin your biros, folks!)

Photo by Artsy Vibes on Unsplash

Confessions of a zero waste sceptic

The Everyday Radical2 Comments

So I’ve been threatening to write something about the whole “zero waste” concept for a while. I wrote a piece for The Finest Example, a really great writers’ blog of creative collaboration, hosted by one of my favourite bloggers and writers, Peter Wyn Mosey Link to my article is here – it was fun to write and contains another Gruffalo reference, for those of you who remember my Terracycle post.

Essentially, the whole zero waste concept probably irrationally annoys me because of the way people have made it an aspirational, Instagrammable thing (and I’m a bit jealous of all the eco-blogs which are more successful than mine and look prettier and have ad revenue…) There are lots of useful zero waste groups on Facebook, where helpful information is shared, but they all have this propensity to descend into ridiculous bickering and one-upmanship. It usually goes like this:

“I found this great plastic free thing!” Often it’s a straw, so let’s use that example – “zero waste” straw options include paper, bamboo, glass, metal, silicone, pasta… endless possibilities. Half a million plastic straws are used across the world every day, so plastic-free options must be a good thing, right?

“Why do you need to use a straw anyway, are you a child? Just sip from a cup like a grown-up!”

Cue – flurry of posts about this being an ablist position and reminding us that a lot of disabled people need to use plastic straws. Some more posts about choice and how we all have vices and use stuff which is technically unnecessary to our basic survival sometimes (personally I don’t use straws but for a lot of people, it’s what makes life fun, apparently). Some more posts about the people who have died in metal straw-related injuries (this is a real, very rare but genuinely tragic story). Yet more posts about how stopping using plastic straws is a drop in the ocean (literally), and we should actually be giving up eating fish, as 20% of ocean plastic waste is from fishing equipment. (I’ve also read 46% in other places; how this can possibly be calculated accurately across the whole planet, I have no clue.)

Some of these debates get really vitriolic, and it honestly gives me playground flashbacks of nasty bullying girls making you feel like no matter what you do, it will never be good enough, and you won’t ever fit into the cool gang of eco-people who are “properly” zero waste. I’m sure this trigger isn’t universal and possibly says more about me than it does about them, but I’m sure I’m not entirely alone in feeling this way.

I think the absolutist nature of the statement is the most problematic for me. It’s intimidating and exclusionary and frankly unhelpful and I honestly don’t think there is any such thing as zero waste – as I outline in the article linked above. If you replace your plastic bottles with glass, they look prettier and you get to take pictures of your zero waste kitchen for Instagram, but glass uses more energy to produce, it’s heavier to transport and the glass recycling process is extremely energy-hungry. There’s a footprint to anything and everything we use and everything we do, every single day.

I thought about this earlier in the week as I sat with my husband at a concert of Beethoven symphonies at the absolutely amazing Southbank Centre. Tickets to this were my “zero waste” Christmas gift to him. But then I thought about the carbon footprint of 1000 people travelling into central London, of the power supply and heating for the auditorium, all the (presumably) single use plastic cups we were drinking our wine out of during the interval, the programmes given out for free on the door, the e-tickets I had to print out… Then I thought about all the “experience” gifts that people suggest buying for children as “zero waste” gifts, instead of the ubiquitous plastic toys. None of these will be without a carbon footprint of some kind.

So the concept of zero waste is massively flawed in my view (like any absolutist position really – any sentences that involve the words “you should always” or “you should never” make me suspicious in principle). Shoot me if you like, but I prefer “low waste” as a label, and a wider and more far-reaching view of the world than simply aspiring to be plastic-free.

Speaking of which… remember the great deodorant experiment? In which we compared the longevity and effectiveness of a £7 “natural” deodorant vs. a £1.99 “conventional” one – available in supermarkets, plastic packaging of questionable recyclability. Findings as follows: the natural deodorant I chose wasn’t really up to the job all summer long. I kept going with it for a good while, but felt pretty anti-socially aromatic at times. I reverted to my spare plastic one after my mother very politely informed me that I was extremely smelly (I had just been to the gym, to be fair). But now that one is used up so I’m in a bit of a quandry. I want to use up the natural one before I try another brand (otherwise it’s not really very zero waste at all, is it, boys and girls?), but I also want to keep my friends. So. I’ll keep you posted.

Coming up later in the week – how to “green” your cat. I’m sure he will still love me, no matter how bad I smell.

Adventures in baking with a grotty toddler

The Everyday Radical2 Comments

So the weather here has been grim this week, and the toddler has been struck down with toddler-grot lurgy. He’s been that super fun mix of too poorly to go out to playgroups and cough all over other children (whose mothers would tut at me disapprovingly, no doubt), but well enough to be bored and grumpy at home. So we did BAKING. Because I am a wholesome mummy, and all that.

I’ve been agonising recently about our consumption of snack bars, chocolate bars etc. My husband has crisps and a chocolate bar at work most days, and the small one likes the baby crisps, rice cakes and oaty snack bars from Aldi – he calls them cakies and it’s pretty cute really (other brands of toddler snack are available). All the wrappers can go in our local Terracycle collection. But I had a bit of a revelation this week in response to the news that Burger King are going to stop giving away free plastic toys with their kids meals. They are inviting people to bring back unwanted toys to their restaurants to be melted down to make restaurant items such as new trays and play areas. They’re working with a company called Pentatotnic, who develop closed loop recycling solutions and state that no harmful gases will be released into the environment when these plastics are melted. They claim that using recycled polypropylene to make a tray rather than virgin plastic would result in an 88% reduction in total energy consumption and a 70% reduction in carbon emissions.

I think it’s a brilliant move from Burger King, and I hope other chains follow suit, including producers of magazines and comics for kids which all seem to contain plastic tat. And toddler advent calendars – oh my goodness, the volume of plastic is scary (do NOT get me started on Hallowe’en, either).

But Terraycle are in the playground making game too, and I’m sure other similar schemes exist – and it just got me wondering. How many more playgrounds do we need, and what is the actual end point for this material? It’s being re-purposed, great, but it still exists and will exist for an unimaginably long time. We are pouring more and more plastic into these recycling schemes to assuage our consumer guilt, but what we really need to do is turn off the tap.

So, enter the toddler bake-off. I thought it would be a good thing to do to start home baking more of our treats and snacks, to reduce the waste impact. Plus fun and wholesome and all that. So we made chocolate chip cookies yesterday and we had a lot of fun – the small one spent quite a lot of time throwing flour on the floor and smearing his grubby little paw prints all over Daddy’s coffee machine, but he also did some stirring and mixing (one of his favourite things), a bit of pouring and quite a lot of squidging of dough. And we produced 17 of these bad boys.

And they were YUM.

But of course, the majority of the ingredients came in plastic… It kind of feels like one step forward and two steps back!

Butter – mixed material wrapping, not recyclable. Is there butter out there wrapped in recyclable wrapping? Add to the list of things to research.

Self-raising flour and caster sugar – in paper packaging. Hurrah.

Muscovado sugar – in plastic and cardboard packaging.

Milk – plastic bottle, I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that milk bottles are high grade plastic and sought after for recycling, so hopefully it will end up actually recycled rather than rotting on a riverbank in Malaysia, but still. I can’t face the admin of glass bottled milk at the moment as we don’t use much, but it’s on the endless list of things to investigate.

Chocolate (not in the picture… hmmm…. wonder why not?) – packaging went into Terracycle bag *facepalm*

Pecan nuts – in plastic, not recyclable.

Baking paper – never researched this but I expect it’s got some sort of plastic in it. So what to do…?

I need to research a few options and check out what baking ingredients I can get at SWOP – my Buy Nothing Group co founder is kindly going to give me some jars to fill. SWOP’s range is great but will I expect be more expensive. So I will keep you posted on this little field trip, when we do it.

Step by step, people. Step by step. Flapjacks next week I think. Or muffins. Or flapjacks. Hmmm. And I will go to the gym. I absolutely will. (What’s the carbon footprint of a gym, I wonder? Endless questions).

How to green your kitchen part 2 – in which we finally write about Ecobricks

The Everyday Radical7 Comments

So I’ve been threatening to write about ecobricks for a while, and a discussion on a Facebook group last night prompted me to get on with it, once and for all. I’ve been feeling conflicted about the ecobrick concept for a while, and I’m hoping that writing about it will bring me nearer to a conclusive decision.

Here’s a summary article about the whole ecobrick concept. Essentially, you take all your non-recyclable plastic, chop it up small and shove it into an empty plastic bottle (which has to be clean and scrupulously dry to prevent mould forming), to a specified density. It can then be used as a building block. The idea is that this prevents this plastic from entering landfill, being incinerated (creating CO2 emissions) or ending up in the ocean; effectively, it locks the plastic away from the ecosystem and transforms it into a useful material which is beneficial to the community, and maximises plastic’s durable nature. As I keep on coming back to, I think that plastic itself is not the enemy; the overuse of single use plastic and the disposal thereof is problematic, but long-term durable plastic, looked after and used sensibly, is actually pretty useful. (Remember how much I love tupperware, for example).

Critical to the ecobrick mission is the idea that the very time-consuming process of washing and drying your plastic is a meditation on your use of single-use plastic, and should prompt you to consider how you can reduce and refuse, rather than using the ecobrick as a form of appeasing your conscience for your plastic use.

Here’s a picture of our plastic management system – it’s a sock drier I think, hanging up in our kitchen at the moment (conveniently next to the cleaning cupboard, in a clockwise direction in the spirit of How to green your kitchen part 1). When it’s sunny we hang it outside on the washing line – our neighbours must think we’re pretty mad to be drying our salad bags in the sunshine. Some of the stuff hanging on here at the moment is actually for Terracycle (I’ll come back to Terracycle another time, as I’m having continuing qualms about it since my original post), and the big freezer bag I will reuse until it disintegrates. The process has really helped us to review what we’re using and make different choices, such as almost completly stopping using microrice and switching to bigger pots of yoghurt and washing powder in a box rather than tablets in plastic casing.

BUT I’ve got some problems with the concept.

Firstly, it’s really, really hard to find a project to take your bricks. Theoretically, there’s a network called GoBrik which exists to help you find where you can drop off your bricks to become part of a community project to build garden furniture or playground equipment for example. But a lot of the projects listed seem to be defunct, and people don’t reply to messages of inquiry, or there’s nothing local available. However, the official Ecobrick stance encourages people to take responsibility for their own plastic and retain their bricks themselves by making something for their own home or garden. The idea is that the “throwaway” idea of giving away your waste to someone else reduces your sense of responsibility and is the same as simply putting everything in the recycling bin without thinking about what really happens to it. Do we believe our local authorities are actually processing everything for recycling, or do we suspect that hard-to-recycle plastic is being sent overseas and ending up in the ocean? Equally, do we know that the project where we drop off our ecobrick is going to use it responsibly, to the end of its life?

But what if you haven’t got the time or the skills to build something yourself? If you actively seek a project to drop your bricks off to on the Facebook network, the response can be quite aggressive, with lots of people telling you to make something yourself rather than outsourcing the problem. In fact, the aggressive nature of the Ecobrick Facebook community is pretty off-putting in itself. So you end up with a bunch of bricks in your shed and no idea what to do with them.

Say you do find a project, or build a planter out of your bricks for your own garden. What happens in 500 years? Will they explode and spread tiny particles of plastic everywhere? Is it a time bomb? Would it have been better for it to be incinerated after all? Similarly worryingly, I know of some projects in schools which have been run by volunteers who aren’t properly clued up about the density requirements, so they may well be making structures for children to use which aren’t safely load-bearing, or using bricks that will go mouldy and degrade because people haven’t been instructed clearly enough on how rigorous the cleaning process has to be.

I also see scarily frequent posts on social media talking about how ecobricks can be “sent to developing countries for building projects” – I’m assuming that this has become mythologised because the concept originated in Indonesia, but I feel that this perpetuates the post-colonial approach to waste disposal, when we’ve seen the consequences of western/developed countries sending their unwanted waste to developing countries that haven’t got the infrastructure to deal with it properly, and the environmental carnage this is causing. (Sorry if I’m using the wrong words, it’s difficult to know what the least patronising phraseology is).

So I don’t feel too great about Ecobricks at the moment. I’m still trying to find a project, either in London or near to where other family members live to enable drop-off, while being mindful of the need to avoid complacency and a “giving away the problem” mentality. I may end up making a crap plant pot out of ours in the end (I am notoriously shit at artistic endeavors), then bequeathing it through the next 25 generations of my family… Unless we can start breeding plastic-eating worms to deal with the problem for us. But I do think it’s a useful process in monitoring your single-use plastic use, so for now we will carry on doing it. And suffering the very unbeautiful plastic sock sculpture in our kitchen as penance for our plastic sins.

This is a contentious topic and I would love to know other people’s thoughts on this. So press the comment button and argue with me please! (in a respectful way, of course – unless I’ve inadvertently said something really daft).

Peace and love xx

Terracycle – terribly good, or terribly bad?

The Everyday Radical11 Comments

Who is this creature with terrible claws, and terrible teeth in its terrible jaws? Oh help, oh no…. it’s a Facebook eco group sniping at people for trying their best. Scherioushly…

So I’ve mentioned this before, but I think the current #WarOnPlastic agenda becoming so popular has caused some long-term environmentalists to be a bit annoyed that they’re not quite so alternative anymore. Some of them seem to be using the anonymity of the internet to shoot people down in flames who are new to the mission and maybe don’t fully understand the complexity of it all. Some of this is valid but just maybe ill-phrased (e.g. do you really know what’s happening to your recycling?), but some of it is just plain unnecessary. For example, a recent post I saw of someone celebrating the introduction of paper straws in Tesco was met with a bunch of people asking the poster why they needed straws in the first place (maybe a fair point, but also potentially ablist), then criticising the plastic bottles of fizzy drinks behind the straws in the photograph – which the original poster may or may not have been buying anyway. Blah. It’s pretty boring really and gets in the way of useful information sharing and mutual encouragement for people making changes to help the planet.

Anyway…. back to the point. Terracycle. I discovered this quite recently, as a new drop-off point has been set up very near our house. This article is a really useful summary of what it’s all about – essentially, Terracycle partner with big brands to set up recycling programmes for waste which isn’t accepted by most kerbside recycling services. There are local drop-off points at churches, schools, community centres etc. and the recyclers can earn points which turn into charitable donations. Brilliant.

We were excited to find that our local drop-off point takes pet food pouches. Our (non-vegan) cat has the most expensive cat food in the world, special medicated stuff for his troublesome bladder and kidneys. I can’t give him cheaper canned stuff, with more easily recycled packaging, as it would make him ill and cost us a huge amount of money to keep him alive, again. So these pouches are non-negotiable plastic use for us while he’s still shuffling across this mortal coil. Additionally, they collect crisp and snack packets, bread bags and various other things. There’s also a national contact lens recycling scheme, with collection points at opticians. Again, this is non-negotiable plastic use for me (blind as a bat, crap peripheral vision in glasses, plus, you know, vanity) and I’ve felt guilty about it for years, so hooray.

Terracylcle say that they recycle 97% of the waste they receive, and promise that nothing goes to landfill (some is reused or composted). This is how they do it. I tweeted them directly about the contact lens scheme and they said that the plastic is used to make products such as benches, and “mostly” recycled in the UK, “rarely” in Europe.

So far so good. Then I stepped down the internet rabbit hole. Terracycle is perpetuating the problem, getting into bed with big corporations (Nestle, PepsiCo, Walkers) to keep us consuming – Walkers want you to keep eating crisps, Terracycle want you to keep eating crisps, you want to keep eating crisps – so if a guilt-free solution to your crisp eating can be found, everyone’s a winner. Except we keep making more and more plastic, downcycling it into products that will end up in landfill in the end, and there’s no pressure on manufacturers to develop better packaging, and no pressure on us to change our ways. This article explains a bit more about the business model, and says that Terracycle is a profiteering middle-man (they don’t actually own any processing plants themselves). Even Wikipedia contains some accusations of green-washing, and a fellow blogger is particularly scathing here.

So I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week, as I’ve been sorting through our stash of stuff for drop-off, and trying to balance out the conflicting views I’ve seen on this. My conclusions, for what they’re worth, are as follows:

Yes, Terracycle is a business, trying to make money. We live in a capitalist society, like it or fight it. They are guaranteeing to recycle stuff, though, in comparison with our own local authorities, who have no audit trail of what has happened to huge amounts of exported waste. Yes, it’s a lot of green-washing from big corporates, but they are funding the recycling and preventing this stuff going to landfill or being incinerated, and it does benefit local charities and schools. Also the soon-to-be-launched Loop programme, described in this interview with Terracycle founder Tom Szaky, looks really interesting. I think he’s right when he says that consumers want to live a waste-free life but won’t sacrifice on affordability and convenience. We’re all clamouring for big business to do something to make the change, so maybe this is the beginning of progress?

Maybe I’m hugely naive or poorly-informed about capitalism and consumerism, and I should be more radical, but I am going to carry on collecting for our local drop-off point and saving up my contact lenses.

I agree we have to focus on reducing consumption and analysing what we really do need in our lives; the faff of separating out the waste does make you more mindful of this, and about what could be reduced or reused before being recycled. For example bread bags – could I take these to the supermarket and use for loose veg? Could I use them instead of freezer bags? (which I use about 897 times before throwing away anyway). Does my husband REALLY need to eat a bag of crisps and a bar of chocolate every day with his packed lunch? Yes, yes he does. Unless I do more baking, of course. Which would correlate directly with more CBeebies (causing brain-rot, of course), and/or less naptime blogging – which would make you lot sad, and interfere with my plans to become the next Jack Monroe (she’s ace, by the way) and change the world, one rambling post at a time.