Archive for the ‘Ethical living’ Category

« Older Entries

Child Labour and Vanilla

Monday, March 15th, 2010

There was a pretty damning article in The Times yesterday about child labour and low prices paid for vanilla from Madagascar – see http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article7060962.ece, however rest assured our vanilla beans are not creating abuse like that.  Here is my full response to the article:

“At Steenbergs, we were one of the first people in Europe to start with Fairtrade spices before any of the supermarkets or other major spice brands.  We hate the fact that such a small amount is being on the high street for commodities that mean the difference between a sustainable living and real poverty and hunger for families in the developing world, including child labour on a big scale; a few pence saved by Tesco or Sainsbury translates into a huge difference back on the small farms in Madagascar, India and Sri Lanka.  When Axel Steenberg (that’s me) and Sophie Steenberg (my wife) started buying and selling organic spices back in 2003, there had been a few bad crops of vanilla in Madagascar so 90% of world supply disappeared overnight and the price of vanilla shot up to $500. We worked hard to pioneer Fairtrade spices and became one of the first to do these in the world.  As for vanilla, small farmers in India borrowed money and started planting vanilla plants to “cash in” on the boom, only for Madagascan supply to come back and the prices on the world market to collapse to below $20 now, leaving farmers in India with unpayable debts and suicides rising.  That’s where Fairtrade comes in, as it put a floor on the vanilla price purchased from source at $45 per kg of vanilla plus $6.50 as a Fairtrade premium, as well as having rules on using child labour and educating children and so on.

Fairtrade rules state that no child below the age of 15 may be employed (contracted) and any work may not interfere with schooling, or jeopardize “the social, moral or physical development of the young person”.  Also, the people involved must work under the Small Producers rules of Fairtrade and cannot be big industrial concerns.  This is audited annually by auditors working for Fairtrade as there is a fine line between a bit of casual work on the family farm (which is permitted and cannot be policed) and employed work which could drift to become like the article above.  The minimum price of $45 per kg is the price that is paid by our exporters of vanilla, whether from Madagascar or India, to the farmers groups plus the various costs of getting it here to Ripon in North Yorkshire.  We pay more for the gourmet high quality beans that we use for Steenbergs products or sell to people like Crazy Jack’s and a bit less for extract grade Fairtrade vanilla beans that go into Steenbergs organic Fairtrade vanilla extract, so when you buy these products we have paid minimum prices way above the world market price, as well as adhering to the rules of Fairtrade and a chain of custody that ensures money gets down to the people who matter.  We are currently redesigning our vanilla packaging and you will be able to get two Steenbergs organic Fairtrade vanilla beans for less than the price of non-organic vanilla in a supermarket – about £4.50 for two.

One of the things to look out for is that the vanilla in the your chocolate bars is actually from a Fairtrade vanilla.  So I am not convinced that your Fairtrade Dairy Milk Bar from Cadbury’s contains any Fairtrade vanilla, so it’s a bit of a swizz, just like the Green & Black’s Fairtrade Maya Chocolate Bar that does not include Fairtrade vanilla just a straight old organic one.

Find out more at http://www.steenbergs.co.uk/category/22/fairtrade-products for fairtrade products and about our ethics at http://www.steenbergs.co.uk/article/show/48/steenbergs-business-social-and-ethical-principles and about how Fairtrade works at http://www.steenbergs.co.uk/blog/2009/09/fairtrade-spices-standards-a-reprise/“

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Ethical living | No Comments »

How We Are Reducing Our Family Environmental Impact – Insulating the Loft

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

One of the major users of energy in a house is for heating the building.  Space and water heating in homes gives off about 20% of the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions, which is about 5 tonnes CO2 per home every year.

However, one of the key issues for old houses, and in our case very old house, is that they have not been built with the benefit of modern technology that has invested much time, effort and legislation to make housing more heat efficient and so retain much of the heat within the building rather than to radiate it out into North Yorkshire – it’s a godforsaken task to heat up Northern England.

So as a start, you need to keep as much heat in as possible.

So my theory has been simple work down from the roof to the ground floor slowly but surely insulating the house.  We will work from the top downwards, as hot air rises so you want to capture it as it tries to escape upwards first rather than worrying about the ground levels at the outset.

The first thing, we felt, was to get insulation laid in the roof between the joists.  This had been done using old fashioned roof insulation over 10 years ago, insulating to 100mm in depth.  But we decided to insulate again with a cross layer of 200mm recycled glass mineral wool blankets.  For the first attempt at this, we bought recycled mineral wool – each pack of this Knauf Insulation Space Blanket contains 2.4 wine bottles (it was a 200mm thick roll of 1.48m2) and has a R value of 4.50m2K/W.   Government advice is to get insulation to about 300mm.

I liked this because it comes in a roll and encased in fire retardant polyethylene film, so does not need all that cutting and special equipment that normal loft insulation needs, and even more important it’s currently subsidised by e.on under some Government scheme to mitigate climate change so it was half price at Homebase, costing just £5.74 per roll. 

It has got a metallic coating which Knauf Insulation claims reflects heat and so keeps more heat in – I think this sounds a bit spurious! 

That means that the 35 rolls that I bought cost £143.50; this should mean that we recoup the energy savings within 2 – 3 years (assuming that we will save 10% of our fuel bills and that we had covered the whole roof void with the same insulation, i.e. multiply cost by 3/2; 25% of heat loss in total is through the loft and we already had 100mm in place, so I reckon 10% would be a good estimate for additional savings). 

It was pretty easy to lay it and took me about 5 hours over the other weekend to buy the kit and lay it over two-thirds of the roof void. 

Typically, however, when I got into the roof, I discovered that the heating engineers (or plumbers as I would have known them) never completed the lagging of the pipes nor the insulation of the water tanks, which was okay as they never relaid the insulation so the heat from the house kept the area around the tank warm – so muggins here had to finish that off as well.

Now feeling a bit good about myself, I bought something last week that’s a bit less simple to lay but definitely a greener alternative. 

There are two main alternatives: one from newspapers (Warmcel) and the other from British sheep’s wool and recycled polyester (Thermafleece).  These both have the same levels of insulation capability as mineral wool, but I chose Warmcel and bought 15 bags of this from £165.27, costing £11.02 per bag inclusive of transport to us.  The Thermafleece is roughly double Warmcel again for the same price per m2 for the same depth, i.e. four times as expensive roughly as the recycled mineral wool insulation and so tripling the payback period.

So going back to my payback calculations – Warmcel has a payback of 4 – 6 years, which I am happy about, but Thermafleece has a payback of 8 – 12 years, which is too long for me.  Basically, I think for the cost-reward, it’s probably best to go with either the Space Blanket or (to give you a greener feeling about life) go with the Warmcel.  I cannot see the point with going for Thermafleece unless you feel romantically attached to lining your house in a woolly jumper. 

But you do need to put the insulation down yourself as it’s pretty simple, and if you get a builder to do the work, you will blow any meaningful chance at getting a payback.

To buy these greener insulation materials, try these to web sites:

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Ethical living | No Comments »

How We Are Reducing Our Family Environmental Impact – Getting Started

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

I thought we could share how we have tried to reduce our carbon footprint and what we are still looking at doing.

To start with, I need to give some background about us. 

We live in an old three bedroom cottage in a rural location.  The house is built of brick and the core of the house was built between 300 and 400 years ago, so (to repeat what was unhelpfully said in the survey when we bought the house) the house does not meet modern building standards, which (of course) was one of its key attractions to us.  It is also grade 2 listed which creates additional problems.  We are a family of four – two adults and two children who are not yet teenagers.  Both Sophie and I work together in our own small business 9 miles away.  Also, I absolutely hate doing DIY so we were never going to cleverly improve our house all by ourselves.

As a household, we now have total estimated greenhouse gas emissions as 9.2 tonnes CO2e per year, compared to the UK average of a total of 12.4 tonnes CO2e per year,  based on a carbon calculator provided by The Open University and stats that they use – different methods give different answers. 

The first thing we did was tackle all the easy things that we were terrible at.  Here are some of our howlers and some of those things that we have improved on very quickly:

  1. Changed the timing on the central heating from all day to 2 hours in the morning and the evening;
  2. Reduced temperature on thermostat by 3oC from 18oC to 15oC;
  3. Putting curtains up in every room and started closing the curtains at night or (in this cold winter) upstairs during the daytime;
  4. Changed all our light bulbs from old fashioned incandescent bulbs to low energy lamps;
  5. Switched off electrical appliances at the plug when not in use, especially computers, TVs and radios, i.e. no standby and computers and TVs are not on when no-one is around;
  6. Reduced, reused and recycled more of the packaging we get and unwanted  stuff like clothes, toys and books – friends and our local Oxfam have been very happy about this;
  7. Halved the number of fridges and freezers we had – we used to have two of each and have reduced that down to one of each.  Both were given to friends of friends rather than being chucked;
  8. Put low energy plugs onto the fridges and freezers reducing the general levels of electricity being used by the remaining appliances – not sure that these really work but they sounded neat;
  9. Share car journeys whenever possible, which as we work together means five days out of seven can be done in the same car – this reduced our car movements by ten every week.

And that’s about all we did.  We do not have a tumble drier and only iron rarely (a karate gi and my shirts but only so very rarely); we do not use mobile phones (I don’t actually have one, but Sophie does have one for emergencies) or similar things like Blackberries.  We already cooked most of our food from scratch, buying organic & Fairtrade, as well as local where possible.

For more on saving the world, there’s good information at:

What have other people done when getting started on being green?

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Ethical living | No Comments »

Carbon Offsets and Steenberg Carbon Footprints

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Every year on slightly ad hoc basis, I sit down and try and calculate our carbon footprint and then offset for the greenhouse gasses that make up our carbon footprint.  It’s a guesstimate because it does not include all aspects of the Steenbergs business, but we cover a much wider proportion of Steenbergs’ impact on the planet than most other people get round to doing.

Firstly, let me explain the things that we include and those that we exclude:

Carbon costs that are included: transport of raw materials and packaging from most recent supplier to Ripon; transport of Steenbergs goods from our Ripon factory to customers; transport of Steenbergs staff on business; and carbon cost of paper used in marketing and office functions

Carbon costs that are excluded: energy (as it is 100% from renewable sources via Good Energy, but see my note i below); staff travel to and from work; embedded carbon within Steenbergs raw materials and packaging (this is something we are still trying to collect all the data on)

We have used the Climatecare model for carbon costs and the total annual cost for 1 January – 31 December 2009 was 3.75 tonnes CO2 which is actually below (and I mean way below) the minimum that Climatecare will offset, which is an annual minimum of 10 tonnes.  So we pay the minimum of £75 + VAT to offset this rather than the actual cost of roughly half that.  Basically we are a carbon minnow, treading pretty lightly on the planet, but I do accept that this excludes the embedded carbon in our packaging materials, which may be horrible!

What is interesting and very shocking (at least to me) is the breakdown of our carbon costs, which shows that the cost of our paper is astronomic comprising half of our carbon costs.  We use even in our small business about 500-600kg of paper a year on stuff – I am going to get this figure down but it will be painful as everyone seems very attached to their own particular piece of paper for processing and/or recording our operations.

Our carbon costs from transport are actually quite low because we do not have our own transport and through using consolidated carriers from the Royal Mail to Palletline we optimise space utilisation on transport vehicles rather than inefficiently running our own vans at below full capacity.  In addition, we do next to no mileage for business purposes – we hardly do any direct face-to-face selling or account handling which perhaps we should do but is just not part of Sophie or my inner psyche.

As part of my Open University course, I also had to do my personal carbon footprint last year using their Quick EYE-OU greenhouse gas emissions programme.  This came up with a personal score of 9.2 tonnes CO2e per year which is actually 3.2 tonnes (-25.8%) below the UK average.   This comprised direct CO2e from home energy, personal food and travel of 6.0 tonnes CO2e and embedded carbon of 3.2 tonnes CO2e from indirect goods and services (such as goods and services purchased and my share of governmental CO2e).

To put it into perspective, the US average is 19.9 tonnes CO2 per person, but the Indian average is 1.2 tonnes CO2, the Brazilian 2.1 tonnes CO2 and the Chinese 4.8 tonnes CO2  per person (see Timesonline article).  The article also shows UK’s carbon to be 9.3 tonnes CO2 per person, which does not match the information above, because this study does not include all greenhouse gas emissions or non household carbon.  So even if my contribution to climate change is low compared to the UK average, it is a big clumpy footprint stamping down on our planet.

It is interesting to see that my personal totals are much higher than Steenbergs as a business.  This is partly because we have ignored the embedded CO2e at work from goods and services purchased, as well as in packaging materials.  But also, we are much more profligate with energy at home than at work, plus travel is less efficient than the consolidation carried out at work.

One of the conclusions I came to when I did calculations for work back in 2007 was that personal travel is the real swinging factor.  Energy will eventually be tackled via nuclear power (whether you approve of it or not, and I don’t, but Professor James Lovelock is probably correct on this one).  More CO2e is generated by staff travelling to and from work than the business as a whole; similarly, more CO2e is probably generated by shoppers going to and from the shops than the embedded carbon in the products and/or services that they purchase in those shops. 

Basically the cost of our personal freedom through the car is hugely inefficient and as a nation we must come to terms with reconfiguring our relationship with transport if we ever want to really grapple with climate change. 

But I suspect the price of this will be too hard to bear and it just won’t be tackled by any MP or Minister in any UK Government, of whatever political persuasion.

Note i: if you did include office and factory energy, we used 2572kWh which equates to 1.36 tonnes CO2 and would add another £20.17 in offset costs.  So while I exclude this from our calculations, it is actually covered by the minimum carbon cost per reporting period that we have bought carbon offsets for.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Ethical living | 1 Comment »

Development thoughts about vanilla from the Congo

Friday, January 29th, 2010

I like the vanilla beans from the Congo because of their story.  I like the idea that the vanilla beans are grown in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Virunga National Park.  I, also, like the fact that this is a fair trade story, where local people are striving to improve their lives through high quality agriculture.  It shows how fairtrade is part of the process of international development and not the only solution. 

Mountain gorilla in Virunga

Mountain gorilla in Virunga

Just like at Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, the Virunga National Park has a popular and successful gorilla tourism program whereby relatively wealthy people from the developed world pay $500 to spend 1 hour looking at the mountain gorillas, plus the cost of general tourism like hotels, catering and transport, and then there are the game reserves throughout the region, for example the Queen Elizabeth and Rwenzori Mountains National Parks in Uganda.  So you have got tourism and premium agriculture bringing in foreign currency to this poor region and helping to lift the region out of pure poverty. 

However, still it needs to develop its own bedrock of economic activity, rather than purely be reliant on sales of vanilla beans to Europe or tourism to Europe and America, so that’s where NGOs can step in, developing and nurturing small entrepreneurial activity.  I love the dried mushrooms that we get from Tropical Wholefoods, which are grown and dried by farmers in Colombia and Zambia and apricots from the Hunza in Northern Pakistan.  The Hunzas were one of the people studied by British colonialists that became the germ of the idea of organic agriculture, and was written up by Sir Robert McCarrison who felt the Hunzas to be the “direct embodiment of an ideal of health and whose food was derived from soil kept in a state of the highest natural fertility” (quoted from Sir Albert Howard’s “Farming & Gardening for Health or Disease”).

However, there needs also to be the development of a manufacturing sector in these countries that trades locally within Africa.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Ethical living | 1 Comment »

The Three Wise Men Give Gold, Frankincense And Myrrh

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

We went to the pantomine at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle last weekend, and as usual it was fantastic with good songs, amazing costumes and some great contraptions – a flying pegasus that pulled Cinderella’s coach was a highlight.  Then there were the normal slapstick scenes and great local humour, led along by Clive Webb, Danny Adams and the Dame (Chris Hayward), who as last year were a complete hoot. 

Anyway, having parked in Pilgrim Street, we made the traditional detour via the Fenwick’s Christmas display which this year was of the Nativity Story. 

It was beautiful with amazing puppetry, delightful scenes and some hidden humour, such as the wife with a rolling pin carved into the Roman sculptures of a temple in the background, as well as directions to Caesar’s Palace (as in the one in Los Angeles).  Two of the scenes included the Magi – one with King Herod and one giving their three gifts to Jesus – and it got me to thinking about these gifts. 

I apologise for the length of the next quote, which is taken from St Matthew, Chapter 2, verses 1 to 12 from an old St James’s Bible that belonged to my Great Aunt, Elfie Steenberg, and is signed by her and dated “Nov 10 1903”; however, it is the best and almost only way to introduce the concept of “gold, frankincense and myrrh“. 

So here is the story of the three wise men, which must be one of the most famous passages within the Bible and one that all Christian children and adults learn from a very early age:

“Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judæa in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, saying Where is he that is born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.

When Herod the king heard these things, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him.  And when he had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he demanded of them where Christ should be born.

And they said unto him, in Bethlehem of Judæa: for thus it is written by the prophet, and thou Bethlehem, in the land of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda: for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel.

Then Herod, when he had privily called the wise men, enquired of them diligently what time the star appeared.  And he sent them to Bethlehem, and said, Go and search diligently for the young child; and when ye have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him also.

When they had heard the king, they departed; and, lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was.  When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.

The three magi giving gifts in our crib

The three magi giving gifts in our crib

And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts: gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.

And being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way.”

What remains interesting in this familiar Biblical passage?

The key things for me in the passage despite its familiarity are: 

(i) they are not kings but wise men or magi in spite of the Christmas carol “We three kings of Orient are” etc;
(ii) we do not know their names or where they came from save that they came from the east;
(iii) we don’t actually know how many wise men their were except that they gave three gifts and so it has always been assumed that there were three;
(iv) they gave gifts of “gold, frankincense and myrrh”.

The names of the three wise men have become in my mind “Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar” as whenever I went on holiday to Bavaria when I was young you would see chalked above the door frames of the main rooms the date and the initials “C  M  B”, so for 2010, you would see “20 C M B 10”.

When I asked what it meant, I was told that on Twelfth Night (Epiphany), which is the traditional date for the arrival of the wise men and the old date for Christmas Day, the Catholic priest would come and would bless the house with holy water and write the initials above the doors.  I read on the web that some people say that it actually means “Christus mansionem benedicat” (Christ bless this house), but that’s not what I was told nor what the people we stayed with believed.

It is also the traditional date for adding the three wise men to your crib and for taking down your Christmas decorations.

Twelfth Night is also the old date for Christmas Day and the day when the Holy thorn of Glastonbury, faithful to the old Calendar, is said to blossom exactly at midnight.  

Nowadays, it’s not much of a day, but in older times it was a festival of great importance.  In Gloucestershire, 13 fires were lit in the fields in honour of Jesus and his 12 Apostles, with the fire named for Judas stamped out immediately while the others were left to burn right down.  In Herefordshire, the wassail-bowl was taken to the cow-byre and the cattle were toasted.  Sometimes a cake with a hole in the middle was hung on the horns of an ox; if he tossed it behind him, the mistress of the house had it, if in front, it went to the bailiff or headman of the farm.

In Somerset and Devonshire, on Twelfth Night (and in some places on old Twelfth Night i.e. January 17th) the apple trees may be “wassailed” with bands of men going into the orchards at night and fire guns through the trees; cider is poured round the roots of the trees and cake or toast soaked in cider is set in the fork of the tree.  The object of this ceremony is to urge the apple trees to greater efforts in the coming year.  Sometimes, they would even be sung to:

“Here’s to thee, old apple tree,
Whence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst blow,
Whence thou mayst bear apples enow!
Hats full! Caps full!
Three score bushels full!
And my pockets full, too!
Huzza! Huzza! Huzza!”

For more on wassailing, follow this link.

And then there are the gifts of “gold, frankincense and myrrh”, but why these gifts and why are these gifts so important for an important “young child” who shall become “a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel.”

Gold – the metal of kings

Gold still evokes the riches of kings and seems a good thing to offer the Lord Jesus.  Even in its rather more debased form of nowadays, gold still holds some allure – it’s the store of wealth that people turn to when times are bad.

Aztec Gold Xipe Totep Mask

Aztec Gold Xipe Totep Mask

But gold still looks fabulous and conjures up the wealth of ancient kingdoms.  For example, the death mask of Tutankhamun from 1325BC or the fabled gold of the Aztecs pillaged by Cortes such as this Xipe Totep Mask which is pure gold.

Gold is said to represent the divine, immortality and purity.  All of these seem sensible symbols of something that the Magi might wish to give Jesus.

Frankincense and myrrh

But what of frankincense and myrrh?  I shall come to those in separate blogs.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Ethical living | No Comments »

Kit-Kat Goes Fairtrade

Monday, December 7th, 2009

Fairtrade has just announced that Kit-Kat, the massive brand of Nestlé in the UK, is switching its cocoa over to Fairtrade.  This will start in mid January 2010 and is obviously a reaction to Cadbury’s Dairy Milk going Fairtrade in Summer 2009.  See press release.

That’s great news for the Fairtrade movement and cocoa farmers. 

However, I am sure that many fairtrade compaigners and ethical entrepreneurs will be bemused, and have quite a lot to say, that Fairtrade has become so mainstream that Nestlé, often regarded as the devil incarnate, should be embraced so closely by Fairtrade.

It will be good news in terms of cash, but it probably means that small businesses like Steenbergs will become ever more marginalised within Fairtrade as we become regarded as irritable fleas upon the greater ethical system, and (horror of horrors) views and opinions on Fairtrade.  Internal systems will be devised to meet the requirements of big business, rather than being entrepreneurial in its structure, so discriminating against smaller UK manufacturers; but does that matter if producers in the developing world are benefitting from the extra cash – probably not as long as the influence of the large brands and multiples does not start to dilute down the principles of Fairtrade and/or the rake off of the Fairtrade premium to the producers.

We shall plough on regardless, however.  Maybe, there could be a system more focused on smaller family-owned enterprises in the UK that target the independent sectors, rather than the major multiples, but ideally such an initiative would be within the wider Fairtrade framework enabling it to nurture newer ethical brands.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Ethical living | No Comments »

A Christmas Traditional Craft – Making A Pomander

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

Today we’ve had a ago at making pomanders.  Pomanders were used in England from the medieval period until the 18th century as a way of perfuming the air.

They are pretty fiddly when you’ve got clunky fingers like me and the cloves start hurting your thumbs after a bit, but they are good family bit of fun and are another tradition around the holiday season.

What you need

Ingredients for pomander

Ingredients for pomander

1 medium sized orange
25g organic cloves (whole)
1tsp orris root powder
1tsp organic Fairtrade cinnamon powder
Some ribbon and tape
A few pins and a cocktail stick
A paper bag or greaseproof paper 

  1. Gently need the orange in your hands to soften the skinDSC_0756_edited-1
  2. Divide the surface of the orange into 4 equal parts and pin the tape into place.  This is where the ribbon will be attached later.
  3. Pierce the skin of the orange with the cocktail stick and set in the organic cloves.  Completely cover the orange with organic cloves.
  4. Mix together the organic cinnamon and orris root powder and put this mix into a paper bag or on a sheet of greaseproof paper.  Roll the orange in the spices mix.
  5. Leave the orange in the paper bag and store in a warm, dry place, or (alternatively) wrap the orange in tissue paper.  An airing cupboard is ideal.  Leave until the skin under the tape is dry.
  6. When dry, remove the tape and decorate with the ribbon and with a bow.
Pomanders

Pomanders

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Ethical living | No Comments »

Give A Christmas Present Today

Saturday, November 7th, 2009

It’s the end of the ancient British year as we move from the bright, warm summer period into the winter period.  It’s a time to reflect on where we are.  As we move into the colder, winter months, it is a time to be thankful for what we have got and realise that everyone in Britain – yes everyone – is so lucky compared to many parts of the world.

It’s a time to give something back, however small, however seemingly insignificant.  Turn down your heating a bit and save the planet for future generations and other parts of the world.  Or perhaps give something to charity.

We like to give Christmas boxes to children in poorer, more disadvantaged parts of the world.  We do this through Samaritan’s Purse which can be accessed via http://www.operationchristmaschild.org.uk/. This year we have given 2 boxes - one for a boy and another for a girl, i.e. one from each of our children.

Boxes for Operation Christmas Child

Boxes for Operation Christmas Child

We have decorated the boxes with some jolly wrapping paper and stuffed them full of gifts: a tennis ball, a pack of ballpoint pens, a pack of Haribo sweets, soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, combs, hair bobbles, a toy car, a toy doll and face towels.  As the Steenberg family, we all hope that someone feels happy from the gift, yet even though we will never know, it is still a great feeling when you drop off the box at school or whichever drop-off point you choose.

Politicians fight wars, make people’s lives miserable.  They don’t give presents from the heart.  That’s what individuals are for – go on make someone happy today.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Ethical living | No Comments »

Autumn Poems

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Perhaps Autumn is a time for poetry.  So here are a few poems that conjur up the period for me. 

I found the poem by Keats in an ancient copy of “The Golden Treasury” inscribed by my great aunt with the words “Elfie Steenberg July 1 1918″:

Ode To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run:
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With sweet kernel; to set budding more
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease;
For Summer has o’erbrimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen Thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinéd flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Aye, where are they?
Think not of them, – thou hast thy music too,
While barréd clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river-sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Or perhaps something more modern from Ted Hughes’ book of poems “Season Songs”:

Leaves

Who’s killed the leaves?
Me, says the apple, I’ve killed them all.
Fat as a bomb or a cannonball
I’ve killed the leaves.

Who sees them drop?
Me, says the pear, they will leave me all bare
So all the people can point and stare.
I see them drop.

Who’ll catch their blood?
Me, me, me, says the marrow, the marrow.
I’ll get so rotund that they’ll need a wheelbarrow.
I’ll catch their blood.

Who’ll make their shroud?
Me, says the swallow, there’s just time enough
Before I must pack all my spools and be off.
I’ll make their shroud.

Who’ll dig their grave?
Me, says the river, with the power of the clouds
A brown deep grave I’ll dig under my floods.
I’ll dig their grave.

Who’ll be their parson?
Me, says the Crow, for it is well-known
I study the bible right down to the bone.
I’ll be their parson.

Who’ll be chief mourner?
Me, says the wind, I will cry through the grass
The people will pale and go cold when I pass.
I’ll be chief mourner.

Who’ll carry the coffin?
Me, says the sunset, the whole world will weep
To see me lower it into the deep.
I’ll carry the coffin.

Who’ll sing a psalm?
Me, says the tractor, with mu gear grinding glottle
I’ll plough Up the stubble and sing through my throttle.
I’ll sing the psalm.

Who’ll toll the bell?
Me, says the robin, my song in October
Will tell the still gardens the leaves are over.
I’ll toll the bell.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Ethical living | No Comments »

« Older Entries