Fran Macilvey's Blog, page 8

Spring clean personal effects

Spring clean personal effects

And an old favourite of mine: spring clean personal effects of anything you have not used for three years.

Many practitioners of the “tidy life” movement advocate “letting go” of anything that we have not used or admired for a period of six months. I prefer a period of at least a year, not only because our sentimental preferences may take a while to catch up with our more business-like decisions – sometime in the middle of the night, we may be frantic to find...

Using my mobile phone

Using my mobile phone

Recent family miscommunications have brought home to me the challenges I face when using my mobile phone. “I called you, use your phone!” is becoming a familiar refrain to me, while I cling to the old trusted methods of setting clear arrangements and sticking to them.

It rarely occurs to me to worry about such things, and I do adhere to the old-fashioned view that “I keep my mobile phone for emergencies,” usually quite comfortably. I work from home and am so often...

Carry a bag

Carry a bag

It should be easy for us to carry a bag by now. We’ve had charges for plastic carriers for a while, and increasingly supermarkets and suppliers are introducing heavy duty paper bags, cardboard boxes or zero waste options for transporting our groceries: all of which has a very “Seventies” vibe about it. If we acquire a few sturdy carrier bags, these can last literally for years.

But you can also carry any kind of bag or wrapping of the sort which you would find protecting new...

Eat less meat

Eat less meat

I have tried to live with the vegan diet. To be more precise, in my efforts to eat less meat, I thought it might be possible to go vegan. I was wrong: after a month, my whole system was so light, I almost floated away. Nowadays, I eat eggs, chicken and a moderate amount of pork and pork products. All else in the meat and animal line I either avoid or eat only occasionally: beef, I never eat, milk and cheese almost never and lamb not a lot…because it hardly ever occurs to me...

Get milk delivered

Get milk delivered

We get milk delivered. And have been doing so for so long, that I can’t quite remember how we got started with this. Hubby and I come from the generation who remember the milk delivery from the milk float to almost every home in our street: glass pint bottles left on doorsteps, used, washed collected and re-used, with minimal wastage of resources.

When I realised that a milk delivery in the locality was a possibility, I mentioned it to my husband and we set it up. Yes,...

Switch to an eco friendly energy supplier

Switch to an eco friendly energy supplier

At the suggestion of my sister, some years ago, I made the switch to an eco friendly energy supplier. (As an inducement, they promised her a free bottle of wine which never arrived. I like to think that they were inundated with requests and ran out of wine.) That was for 100% renewable electricity, and some years later I was prompted to sign up to the supplier’s dual energy supply which includes carbon-neutral gas.

My sister at the time was...

Our use of the kettle

Our use of the kettle

Continuing our look at kitchen economies and the environment, I am rather exercised by our use of the kettle every morning.

Typically, hubby will get up before me, put a lot of water in the kettle and boil it up to make himself a cup of tea. And that uses a lot of electricity. (I’m reminded of the story of the national power outage when everyone went to make cups of tea during the running of the TV series, “The Thornbirds”.)

I now get up rather earlier, chat to hubby...

Reusing plastic bags

Reusing plastic bags

We hear a lot about plastic waste, and I am evolving strategies for reusing all kinds of plastic bags and wrappers to limit the quantity of small plastic particles that end up seeping into the environment.

At the kitchen sink, I have a small bowl which I line with a thin plastic bag, the sort that is used to wrap bananas or bread from the supermarket. Ideally, of course, we should do without this plastic wrap altogether, and I’m working on it. Meantime, I put single...

Ten things I can do to make a difference

Ten things I can do.

We all know how perilous the situation of our planet is right now. And it’s tempting to pull the blinkers on, pull the bedcovers over our head and ignore the issues that challenge us all. But our young people are leading the way in tearing our blinkers off, while reminding us that there are things we can do. So here is a list of ten things I can do to make a difference. And I do most of them, most of the time, so that they form part of my daily routine to which I now...

Considering legal matters

Considering legal matters.

When we set out to write our memoirs we may find ourself considering legal matters. In summary, these are not as complex as people sometimes assume.

We do not need to do exhaustive research, we do not even need to get all our facts right – there are times when our recollection of events is less painful than what actually happened – and in general, we are given considerable leeway in what we write about, providing we remember:

~ To write our own life stories, not...