They say that a picture speaks a thousand words. These thousand words are a few weeks old, but I think that there is enough in there to get the rough jist of the message across.
I hear you cry, “does this signal a return to blogging for the Uborka couple?!?”
Well, you’ll have to wait and see. Happy 2006 everyone, by the way.
Ladies and Gents, much as we have enjoyed entertaining you, we must say toodle pip for a while. We don’t know exactly how long, but there are just a few real-world things that demand our undivided attention for now.
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Take care of yourselves. And eachother.
Pete is under the weather, weakly lying in bed demanding cups of jasmine tea to soothe his throat. This has interfered immensely with my day off, wherein the first thing I was planning to do was have a long lie-in, featuring the whole bed to myself. Never mind. I shall make the christmas cake instead.
Meanwhile, since it’s Friday, the bar opens at three. Anyone fancy a cocktail?
We cleaned and tidied the house thoroughly this weekend, in preparation for visitors* who are not now going to visit.
We live opposite a train station, and there is always a lot of litter in our front yard. While doing my Monday night chore of putting out the rubbish and recyclables, I paused, just before tying up the black binbag, and decided to go and get my gardening gloves, and put all the litter into the binbag, so that the outside of the house looked as lovely as the inside, because at that point I didn’t know that the visitors wouldn’t be visiting.
At that moment, the telephone rang, so I left the front door wide open, the black binbag in the yard, and went to answer it. It was my mum, telling me someone had died, but it wasn’t anyone close so you needn’t send a card. While offering standard sympathy to mum, Pete came home. He strode manfully through the house to the kitchen, where we keep the gardening gloves, and went back outside to collect the litter in the front yard.
It was rather like I had left the idea of picking up the litter hovering in the front yard, and he absorbed it as he walked through.
*The visitors have little or no relevance to this post.
For those of you who wish to see some sort of evidence of the size of our harvest of chillis, here is a photo. Please bear in mind that these are just the ones that we haven’t eaten yet.
In other news, my new bits arrived yesterday, and I installed them last night. The only significant problem that I encountered was Linux support for the video chipset on the motherboard, but the generic vesa drivers seem to work okay. Google is your friend, but you knew that already.
I left the computer off overnight and turned it on this morning with my fingers metaphorically crossed. Detecting IDE devices… and frozen. Turned off, turned back on again, everything’s fine. I’m trying to cross-reference this to what I know from my tests, and the only item that seems to have been present in all situations is the power supply, which is only a year old, and rated at 350W. So I guess that means this evening I’ll be pulling Karen’s out of her computer.
The “problem”, if you’d like to call it that, is that the temperature is dropping, and so the computer will be entering its “it’s winter, I’m going to behave” phase, which makes it hard to really figure out what’s going on.
And before you go off on a “Haha, Pete wasted all that money!” song and dance, last night I plugged my recording desk into the line-in and managed to record a nice high quality mix without any furriness or distortion. Which means that I can abandon Windows forever. Woo!
Ah, well. Happens.
Knowledge is a terrible thing.
Six months ago, I could still shop in blissful ignorance of working conditions in the Far East. I was far more concerned about going ten minutes over my own 37 hour week, than considerate of the fact that somewhere in China, 15 year old kids are working twice that for £40 a month. Now I’ve seen and read too much, and it’s so hard to shop.
But what can you do? You need clothes and shoes. There is a very limited range of stuff marketed deliberately at people who want to shop ethically. There’s a good directory of ethical businesses here, but of course it doesn’t tell you which of the high street retailers have good social compliance programmes. That’s because so few of them do; but it would be nice to know which ones they were, so that I wasn’t stuck with a choice between tie-dyed sarongs, hemp hoodies, and bags made out of recycled inner tubes. Bags made from inner tubes are very ugly.
Another option would be to become more self-sufficient, make things myself; but although I admire Pix’s adventures in knitting, I’m simply not very good with my hands. I am also slightly stupid when it comes to purchasing raw materials – where do I start? And how do I know that the fabrics were manufactured ethically, anyway?
And what if, by making my own clothes, I am in a small way doing some Chinese child out of a job? You see, making things better is a very big, daunting task.
So, assuming we can’t make our own, and we don’t want to wear organic clothing with unfinished edges, how do we know which high street retailers are good? It’s impossible. Obviously you can look at their website, and if you’re persistent then you might find something like the social compliance statement made by the Arcadia Group, which owns Dorothy Perkins, Burtons etc. If you get the Flash site, go to About Us and click on Ethical Policy. This will show you their code of conduct, which is fairly standard, roughly based on SA8000; but scroll to the end and check out the bit about Monitoring & Inspection: it doesn’t say anything about enforcement, does it?
In a desparate attempt to feel better about buying so many pairs of shoes, I emailed Faith to find out what their attitude was. They replied that they had an internal monitoring programme. This generally means that they tell the factories that they have to be nice, and leave it at that; what it most certainly does NOT mean, is that they make regular checks and drop the factories who systematically violate human rights. No, because those are the cheapest ones.
So should I only shop at stores that belong to my own clients? Because frankly, they’re just as bad. I have one client who dropped their entire compliance programme, because the audit results were so horrific. I won’t be shopping there. I have other clients who are impressively committed, but it’s like painting the Forth Bridge, really it is. They try, but there are so many factories, and the ones who get the highest grades are probably the ones most skilled at bamboozling auditors.
The best option seems to be to support the shops who try, and avoid the ones who transparently only do this to prevent a Nike-style PR disaster. Of course, I can’t ever tell you which is which, because I would lose my own job. Google is your friend.
Finally, you may be interested to learn that there are 720 factories worldwide that are certified to SA8000. Here is a map showing you where they are.
In an office full of travelling foodies, we collect tidbits from around the world. We have one spare desk, on which pile all our loot; and people visit us from other departments to taste where we have been.
Currently we are stocking:
So many things from Holland, because two of us have been there in the last few weeks:
Recently, I decided to re-read a couple of books by A.S. Byatt, both of which I’ve owned for about ten years. I started with Possession
After a few pages, I realised that this was the one I had liked less; it’s an extremely dense text, heavy on the invented blank verse of a pair of fictional Victorian poets. Doctor Pockless would love it. Possession certainly has its own corner in the field that includes the works of Richard Groats and John Shade
This is a literary detective story, uncovering the romance bewteen two Victorian poets, who – until the discovery of a love letter – were considered by the establishment to be a feminist lesbian and a respectable married man. It isn’t a light read, but as more clues are uncovered, you find yourself going back to re-read parts of it. The ending is very satisfying.
One of the things about re-reading books that I first visited in my early twenties, is that I find I have a lot more in myself to contribute to my reading of them, now. In fact I don’t see how I could have begun to imagine the state of mind of some of these characters, when hardly anything had happened to me. Of course, you will argue, that’s exactly what imagination is for; but this book was far more colourful, read with empathy.
I am now a few chapters into The Virgin In The Garden
Meanwhile, in a cute coincidence, the postman failed to alert us to the existence of a parcel this morning. However we have just walked into town and picked it up, and some unknown benefactor has sent me an unexpected Amazon package, which includes Babel Tower, by A.S. Byatt