And this week’s environmental outrage is...

Never forget...

How quickly we forget. This week, we’re all vexed about the amount of plastic packaging we use, and applauding Iceland for saying they’re going to phase out the use of it on their own-brand products by 2023.

I was delighted to see some of my Tesco fruit and veg arrive loose in a brown paper bag when our delivery arrived at the weekend. First time ever, mind.

But it was only a couple of weeks ago that disposable coffee cups were the enemy of the environment, and column inches were filled discussing the potential effectiveness of a ‘Latte Levy’ of 25p per cup for these single-use villains.

I’ve got another suggestion to put forward, which you can ponder whilst you enjoy your next Taxachino. How about a priority queue? You bring your own re-useable cup along, and by waving it in the air (and maybe in the increasingly angry faces of the cup-less) you get to move up the queue until you are behind other ever-so-slightly-smug cup claspers.

Apart from the warming drink, you also get the additional warm glow of knowing you haven’t further added to the tonnes of un-recyclable waste produced by our frothy coffee obsession. Plus, because human nature is a complicated thing, you get to feel superior to other people.

Are you listening, Costa, Starbucks and the other coffee giants? I’ll accept a year’s supply of cappuccino (dash of chocolate sprinkles and one sugar, thanks) as reward for my unbridled genius. And maybe some shortbread.

Warning: I wouldn’t recommend trying this until it has been officially introduced, or you may need the cup to carry your front teeth home in.

This post first appeared as the third piece in my column/page in The Mail and the News & Star, on the 19th of January 2018.

Although light-hearted in intent, I do actually think this could work...

Comments

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog