I think being at home is bad for my psyche. I keep hearing stuff on the radio and TV news that makes me seethe with anger or just downright depressed. Today has been no exception. Still, I am pleased to be able to summon the energy to be angry after this last week.

Quite apart from the electioneering of the liars and cheats that make up the political map of this country spouting forth on what they will do when they win the election (and of course the things you actually WANT them to do are the things that get ‘accidentally’ forgotten while the ones you think are stupid ideas get hours of parliamentary hours wasted on them), there are a whole host of real issues that we as a nation just seem to lack the will to tackle. I must say, I’m at a loss to think which party I will vote for this time around.

Last time, I tactically voted for a party I wouldn’t normally give the time of day solely to try to give some opposition to Bliar and his crones but since the last election they seem to be becoming ever more frighteningly fascistic in their ideas. It galled me at the time to feel that was the best way to cast my vote but now I'd be too frightened to vote for them because as far as I can see, they'd start making laws that are so polar opposed to the values I hold that it'd be too dangerous to even consider it now. At least last time around, I knew that the best they could hope for was a few more seats on the opposition bench. I wonder how any of them think they are on a mandate from the people sometimes.

There was a gloomy news article at lunchtime on the Beeb that said that one third of all of the food produced in the UK ends up in landfill sites. Apparently it’s not the old-fashioned EEC style ‘butter mountain’ or ‘grain mountain’ that we once heard about that is causing this shameful waste, it is (once again) out and out consumerism.

The supermarkets want to sell more food, consumers have money to burn and so the supermarkets do bogof deals (buy one get one free), along with other types of promotion designed to get you to part with your hard-earned and buy food you don’t need, which consumers snap up with glee, despite already having fridges stuffed to the gunnels with stuff they’re not going to eat. The trouble is, the supermarkets are selling stuff in such big quantities to people that they just can’t consume them quickly enough so much of it ends up in the bin.

What’s worse is that the stuff that goes to landfill is a health hazard (rats are a huge problem across the world, not just here in the UK but when you can see them running around in Central London, completely without intimidation when people are around, you know they are barely, if at all, under control). Equally, as the stuff rots, it turns to methane, which mostly just gets discharged into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas. Isn’t that just such a double whammy of waste?

Someone (an economist) did an analysis of a few random loads of rubbish from around the country (nice work…..NOT!) and calculated the value of all this wasted food. By extrapolation to the population as a whole, it added up to be a larger sum of money than the citizens of this country spend on their Council Tax (the local taxation system we have in the UK). So, if we assume that this is a correct calculation, if people just bought what they are certain to eat, they could pay their Council Tax from the savings they are making each year and the fat cat supermarkets would have to look elsewhere for their next rise in profits.

Hmmmmm, now there is a revolutionary thought.


Last year I was lamenting the untimely death of the lovely Caron Keating from breast cancer and two years ago, I was counting my own good fortune!