pumpkinstrokemarrow

But eco-budget not looking so good. I have now spent about £15 on materials to build this buttress, which will prolong the life of the compost bin for some years, which sum perhaps converts into £7.50 petrol's worth. Now today's average price over the 109 petrol stations within 10 miles of the compost bin is 103.3p per litre (see http://www.petrolprices.com). Which means that I have spent 7.26 litres of petrol on this aid for home conservation. Now, as I understand things, the garden and kitchen waste which goes into the compost bin is partially consumed by a variety of macro and microscopic animals, converting quite a lot of it back from carbohydrates, fats and proteins into carbon dioxide and water. So my contribution to the carbon situation so far negative. What is left goes on the garden. No idea how much of what is left is just inert humus - what they call fibre at Kellogs - and how much is actually plant food. Not at all clear that the eco-benefit of all this humus is going to amount to all those litres of petrol. But good fun making it.

Had we gone for the other option and had the large lorry from the council collect the stuff, would they have done any better? Would they have extracted all the energy from said waste (perhaps using the contraption from the film in which they made soylent green out of corpses. A subject on which Mr G. is positively fulsome) and fed it into the national grid? Would that have shown a profit after paying for the large lorry and paying all the people to sit in it? I shall keep an eye on the Guardian eco-section just in case the eco-warriers change gear and decide that making compost at home is indeed bad for the planet.

Apart from that, I have been puzzling about the relationship between the words idle and idol. At first blush, one might have thought there was one. However, close inspection of the OED reveals that idle is an old German word, or to be particular, old Frisian, amongst others. Started off by meaning empty. Then empty thoughts, that is to say idle thoughts. Then onto idle machinery and people. So a machine could be said to be idling without being rude about it. A neutral statement. But then the term acquired a generally critical tone. Idle was bad. Idol, on the other hand, seems to be an old French word from the Greek via late Latin. Started off by meaning the phantom or insubstantial. An image in water or a mirror. A mental image or fancy and then onto a material image or fancy. Which sense was then appropriated by the Jews and Christians to describe objects of worship for pagans. Brass Apollos and golden calves. As with idle, a word which started off morally fairly nuetral, became highly charged. Idol was very bad.

But I still hanker after a connection. OED might say one comes from up north and the other comes from down south, but the starting point of both is more or less 'empty'. Is there a common Aryan root unknown to the compilers of the OED all those years ago?

I feel I should close with an honourable mention for http://venusreinvented.blogspot.com/. Someone who is clearly very keen on libraries. Libraries of all sorts: domestic, collector, local, regional and national. I already know something about libararies in the UK, using their generally excellent Internet connectivity. But maybe I should take a leaf out of her book and start visiting libraries as I travel around, rather as I presently visit churches. I can already claim visits to the Bibliotheque Nationale and to various civil service libaries (these days sadly diminished by loss of their floor space to people and their books to auction houses); maybe it is time I checked off the British Library.