pumpkinstrokemarrow

Epsom has just been flooded with brown wheelie bins. I think the idea is that we put our garden waste in them. What I want to know is where the sums that show that this is a good idea are. To my mind the cost in fossil fuel of making thousands of large brown bins plus that of large lorries trundling around our streets (knocking chunks out of our roadside trees while they are at it) to collect the contents of these bins must be large - although it does help make work for the bin factories and for sundry central Europeans. Some of whom are so primitive as to want to smoke while on duty - at their workplace, on the street, even. So what are Epsom council doing with all the stuff that they are so laboriously collecting? Spending more fossil fuel to mince it up and spread it over municipal flower beds? As reported previously, my vote is to pour it into a large hole in the ground, laying down the fossil fuel for some future life form. Furthermore, we ourselves try quite hard to contain our garden waste in our garden - although it has to be admitted that a suburban kitchen and garden can generate more waste than one can comfortably handle. The soft stuff is OK but the hard stuff - all those trees we have to get permission in triplicate to prune (despite the fact that one might have planted the thing in the first place) - is not. It would be OK if we were content to let everything grow and to live in the resulting wood, which is what I guess the climatic climax vegetation (if I remember my eco-jargon correctly) would be if we let it. But the BH is quite keen on getting some sun from time to time so that is not a runner.

In the same vein, I gather that some worthy of central or local government is encouraging us to remove the plastic windows from window envelopes so that the plastic window can be placed in the plastic recycling receptacle and what is left of the envelope can be placed in the paper recycling receptacle. Ditto those all those cereal boxes which have sprouted windows so that you can view your luxury meusli (enhanced with sugar full dried fruit for greater palability) before making a purchase decision. Perhaps the government should lean on the various meusli trade associations and get them to persuade their members from putting windows in their boxes.

And talking of palatability, I decided today that what I needed to kick start the morning was a peanut butter sandwich. Reading the ingredients list I find that oil, sugar and salt have been added to the peanuts to make them palatable. So maybe what I was really after was a sugar and salt fix.

And on the economic front, slightly puzzled by all this talk of short selling. So people are betting on the price of shares falling and maybe some of them are spreading rumours to encourage such falls - this last practise being distinctly unsporting. Chaps have been chucked out of the Garrick for less. Short selling in large volumes is said to be upsetting the market, to be causing unhelpful fluctuations in share prices. My puzzle is that the people doing this have to find someone to bet with. If I held lots of shares in Lemon Bros (for example) why would I lend them to you in the knowledge that you believed that their price was going to fall. Presumably because I am happy to take your borrowing fee because I believe the price was not going to fall. Otherwise I would sell and have done with. So all I have got as a third party, is that one lot of people think the price is going to fall, and another lot think that it is not. Granted, in this story, there is not a third lot of people who think that the price is going to rise, so there is down vote of sorts. But it is really enough to generate a panic?

Now completed my third Simenon novel, not counting the autobiographical 'Pedigree'. Unlike the first two - 'The snow was dirty' and 'The widow' - this one does not contain any psychopaths. I was starting to worry about the state of the late Simenon's own psyche, but worries now put to rest by 'Maigret and the old boys' which only contains the sort of peccadillos that Inspector Barnaby might turn up in Midsomer Multravers. It does not even contain a murder although it does contain a corpse.