Emergency measures

The alarm rings loudly.

"There's an unexpected item in packing area!" the automated voice tells all.

The alarm rings again.

Woah...calm down!

The only thing that's sitting in the packing area of the self-service till is my bag-for-life. I suppose it's a Waitrose bag in a Tesco Express store, so for some it could have been deemed mildly unexpected. But come on, this is 2008. We're all in this together!

Red faced, I look for the assistant. I avoid eye-contact with the other customers just in case they think I'm shoplifting. Ah but perhaps that's a sign of guilt? Maybe I should look each and everyone of them in they eye, like a jury ready to announce their verdict.

Phew, the lady arrives. Presses the release button.

I must have a trustworthy face, because she doesn't peer too closely in the bags.

With the first bag packed, I put my second in place, this time a smart little number in bright green.

"There's an unexpected item in packing area!"

Not again! At least by now, my queuing audience has disappeared.

The assistant smiles or perhaps grits her teeth as she presses the button for a second time.

All done.

I swipe my clubcard.

Another bleep.

A question.

"Number of own bags?"

I type in 2.


"Assistance Needed." flusters the computer, accompanied by the now familiar alarm bells.

I want to shout "Don't you believe me?"

Another smile to accompany another press of the release button.

I swipe, I pay and with a sense of relief I leave, with my emergency bank holiday supplies.

My reputation might be in tatters but at least my bags are intact.

And I swear I will never use those machines again!

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Please Take Your Pledge...and take it today!

It's the kind of thing you might say to your cleaner if you caught her deliberately overdoing it with the furniture polish instead of your beloved beeswax!

But when I say "Please take your Pledge", it is not in the context of my cleaning lady. The chance would be a fine thing.

No, the pledge that's on my mind today is the one that you can take at myzerowaste.com, where the fabulous Mr & Mrs Green have got just one week to go before they embark on their very own Zero Waste Week.

To round up support, they've gathered some fine sponsors including ECOutlet, EcoCentric and NaturalStore, plus many many more, offering prizes that should whet your appetite, no matter what time of day.

The only thing you have to do to be in with a chance of winning, is make one teeny weeny commitment to do something to reduce household waste, whether it's signing up a milkman, recycling your tetra paks or just telling a neighbour about a new recycling facility. You can even make up your own pledge. Just make sure you do it and pop back and tell them what you've done and how it went!

So please...before you have your breakfast, lunch, dinner or even supper, pop over and have a nosey.

I've done it! You see, no matter how slim your bin, there's always room for eliminating one more thing...and I'm even in with a chance of winning a cleaner.

What was that Mrs G?

It's not that kind of cleaner! Oh well, I'll be happy enough with the household cleaning kit from Ecover.

Of course, I'm not going to tell you what my pledge is...until later this week. If you want to find out sooner, just click on the big button below and after you've made your own pledge, check out the Competition Feedback.



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Ending World Waste: A conversation with three environmentalists

If you're concerned about world waste and are about in London on Monday 1st September at 7.30pm, then get yourself down to Stanfords in Covent Garden, where you can meet three inspirational people who will be looking at different ways to help the environment.

Author David Smith, who wrote the powerful book If the world were a village, will explain about how much we waste and what's in the waste. Environmental scientist and the founder of Planet Earth website, Lionel Smith will discuss how to reduce litter in the environment and my lovely friend Shirley Lewis (aka Baglady) will inject her fun perspective on living ASAP (as sustainably as possible). David will also be available to sign copies of his book, which will be available to buy on the night.

I would love to have joined in the natter, but it's the beginning of term so will have my feet firmly in Suffolk. However, if you can get into London, you will no doubt find this an interesting event.

You never know, Baglady may even be wearing her trademark dress.


If you can't make it, don't worry, please just spread the word and pop back soon when over the next few weeks I'll be featuring an interview with Baglady herself.

If you can get along, please remember to book tickets in advance. Details are below:

TICKETS: The event is held at Stanfords, 12-14 LongAcre, Covent Garden [nearest tube Covent Garden or Leicester Square]. There is a small charge of £3 to cover expenses, and tickets should be bought in advance in-store: by phone: 020 7836 1321, by email: sales@stanfords.co.uk.

Find out more about the speakers at their respective websites:

David Smith: www.mapping.com
Lionel Smith: www.24hoursonplanetearth.com
Shirley Lewis, the Baglady: www.bagladyproductions.org

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The Festive Opportunist: never too early to plan

Slap me round the face with a wet fish if this was just a bit too cheeky...

To me, it's careful planning. To others it might feel a tad premature. But on Monday this little old Festive Opportunist struck lucky...and the best bit is it's only August.

I feel like I've beaten the High Street at its own game just before the Christmas cards hit the shops in September. That's right...in just a couple of weeks time, you'll start to see stores everywhere being feng shui'd and rearranged to entice you to start early with gift packs, cards and wrapping.

But this year I've crept up behind them with a boo!

It'll be no surprise that I'm aiming for a minimal waste Christmas...and if I'm going to succeed I need to get cracking. I'm going to have to be as creative as a cuckoo in a magpie's nest.

I've got four months to minimise as many excessive accessories as I can, whilst showing our friends and family that we still love, cherish and appreciate them perhaps even more than ever. It's going to be a tough one since most of our close family live in Wales, Scotland, Bristol and Switzerland and our friends are dotted around far and wide too.

Oh gee, what have I let myself in for? ... hopefully loads of fun and more cash in the pocket if it all goes to plan.

And it's kicked off with the most fabulous start, with a friend from Bedfordshire popping over for a rare visit with her two kids.

Imagine the scene...rainy day, small house and four boys, aged 4-6.

...friend wants a tour of Bury St Edmunds.

...[sub-text...friend would like to browse the town's beautiful independent shops]...

We pile into town, decide to settle in a cafe that also does pottery painting....

We enjoy coffee...the kids paint pottery...

My friend thinks it's lovely...

I pose the killer question...

"Do you mind if I make this an early Christmas present?"

I pause and worry she'll think I'm crackers. My time-check tells me it's still August.

But what a relief!

She thinks it's a great idea...I'm glad there's no packaging...the kids are just happy to have had a fun time. I've even saved money on wrapping paper and postage.

They won't miss one less present at Christmas. What's more special is that we had a great experience we shared in the cafe, the memories of which that will remain.

It think I've hit on the trick there...spreading Christmas across the year through shared experiences, with time to give creative personal gifts instead of buying all that Crimbo clutter. My friends will now be shaking in their shoes at the thought of what I'll be doing with those jam jars.

With careful planning I hope to enjoy the festive period as simply as we can, with carefully chosen food, carols and trips to the seaside.

I know, I know...I talk about Christmas in August and visit the seaside in December.

I'm about as unseasonal as snow in May.

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Almost Mrs Average meets Tracey Smith

"Oh dear, oh dear, I shall be too late!" I muttered, finding myself lost in Essex, feeling like the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland

Getting lost in Essex is something I rarely do. Lost in France may be, or even Cardiff Bay, but I've never lost myself in Essex.

First there was the missing road sign, which meant I had to navigate by hope alone. I tried the stars, but it was a cloudy night, so I used my natural instinct along the windy roads in the Essex countryside. When I finally thought I'd reached my bethlehem, it turned out to be wrong house!

The Wrong House!

The email said no 1....but the lights were out and no-one was home.

So... lost in Essex, with no phone signal, I was wondering what to do next.

If it hadn't been for the kind lady at no.2 spotting me from her lounge and asking me who I was looking for I would have missed my slot...a rare opportunity to rub shoulders with the Queen of Downshifting,... yes the one and only Tracey Smith...who just happened to be on holiday with her lovely family just a little further along the quiet idyllic road.

A very special lady, with a very special place in my heart.

I love Tracey. I love her warmth, her bubbliness and I adore the way she can laugh about things like solar powered vibrators without making me blush.

We first made contact three or four years ago with odd emails here and there about how an average woman can downshift. Then at the beginning of the year, things began to hot up with regular conversations, talking about nothing else but rubbish. How we laughed at some of my adventures in Zero Waste and how we celebrated the single plaster.

She also enjoyed talking trash with some of her fabulous friends as well as a whole bunch of celebrities including Brigit Strawbridge, Kim Wilde and Carl Honoré, whose latest book Under Pressure I enjoyed reading whilst in Switzerland. So you can see I felt very honoured to have enjoyed a slice of her time.

As an experienced broadcaster on Apple FM, she helped calm my nerves about the recordings for Woman's Hour. She did it again for my first live interview, but I'm not sure it worked on this occasion....as demonstrated by my nervous shout of "sanitary towels" on Irish Radio when probed for the one thing that should never go to landfill.

Tracey's been a brick and what I love best about her is that she accepts me for who I am, not a downshifter as such but more of a "downhill-shifter", with one foot throughly enjoying the exciting speed of 21st Century living and the other trailing behind at snail's pace, inticing me to slow down. She's encouraged me to swap some of my Phase Eight luxuries for Charity Shop bargains and ditch the office for my living room.

She knows I won't go all the way, with my love for modernity, the mainstream and mobile technology, but we still meet at the crossroads and laugh!

And here she is, the gorgeous lady, beaming at me like a ray of sunshine, about to give me something very, very special.



It had been wrapped up and ready to send in the post, beautifully packaged in compostable brown paper and string...which apparently is an unwelcome guest in automated sorting offices (for reasons of getting tangled in machinery), but which is more than welcome to me.

So... in the words of Rolf Harris, "Can you tell what it is yet?"

If you need any clues at all, it's got something to do with her disappearing off the face of the planet for months on end, bent over at her desk under a single lamp in her pyjamas....

....tapping at her keyboard...

...until...

...she got all her thoughts off her chest and emailed the final manuscript to Alastair Sawday...or rather his editor...and revealed to the world

...the beautiful thing she created...

...as shown here.

And it's not the compost bin...although that is a lovely sight in itself.



Yes Ladies & Gentlemen, I feel very privileged to be personally presented with one of the first preview copies of Tracey's fabulous new book...The Book of Rubbish Ideas, which comes with a special message, which I will treasure forever more.

Despite having very little free time on my hands, you can see that I couldn't wait to get cracking on it and settled myself down.

Okay, I confess, you've caught me out enjoying a moment of self-indulgence, reading the huge mention of The Rubbish Diet on page 105. And no better location eh, leaning comfortably against the compost bin, next to the slugs, for the beginning of an enjoyable read...

...allowing some time-out to flick through the rest of the content, a room-by-room guide, revealing a whole wealth of hints and tips about how you can reduce, reuse and recycle and even pull in the cash at the same time. There are even sample letters to encourage the silent but latent activists out there. It is the perfect addition to the Sawday's environmental range.

Of course, Tracey speedily pulled me up off the floor and we soon got back to our previous levels of excitement. Sitting in the front garden of her holiday home, on a sofa awaiting collection by a Freecycler, we cursed bars in Bury St Edmunds that don't recycle glass bottles, praised a company that recycles...er... vibrators...(oh, yes, see page 75)...and admired the bats that circled over our heads.

How surreal, being presented a book by Tracey with a message that reads "Get Writing Missus", at a time when she's finished her manuscript and I am enjoying the beginning of mine...just think eh...in 2009, we'll be doing the same again with The Rubbish Diet.

We've laughed before about being the Trinny and Susannah of bins, it's certainly beginning to feel that way...or is that Hinge and Bracket? (LOL...sorry Trace)

So join me in a toast to the lovely Tracey Smith, congratulating her on a major achievement, The Book of Rubbish Ideas, which can be bought for just half-price if you're quick and pre-register before it's published at the end of September.

As for me...I'm already dipping in...yes it's that type of book. So what are you waiting for? Come on...off you go.

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Swiss Rebellion: Throwing it all away

A personal insight into Pay Per Throw



"Clairette....do you really think this is plastic, what is it doing in here?"

The voice from the kitchen sounded shocked, bemused and irate.

Seconds later my French brother-in-law appeared at the dining table, brandishing a cardboard tube insert that had once belonged to a roll of kitchen paper.

My sister shrugged, threw a glance that led into a triple somersault of eye-rolling worthy of a new Olympic sport, and with a sip of red wine returned a "Non" as the beginning of her defence.

This was followed by a "Sorry, I was in a hurry. Anyway recycling is your department".

"But you can tell it's not plastique. I've even labelled the box", came the retort.

My brother-in-law threw me a look of camaraderie. We smiled. We both knew that recycling made sense in our reciprocal roles as defenders of the bins, but were we really in agreement? I guess only time would tell.

I can now hardly believe that it was two weeks ago that we had just arrived in Switzerland. We were greeted by a tour of relatively new house, in the lakeside village of Concise, which lies in the Canton of Vaud. A modest yet lovely open-plan family home, with lots of space, including a cellar.

A dream!

After the tour of their home, came the tour of the recycling. I guess there aren't many house-guests who suggest such a thing but my brother-in-law was more than happy to oblige.



With a smooth pull of the under-sink cupboard, a nifty little bin was revealed with compartments for compostable waste and general rubbish. A step in the other direction, he opened the large larder cupboard which harboured a host of delights including boxes for paper, PET bottles, mixed plastics and "autre choses"for glass and aluminium cans. Soiled nappies, from their two very young children, are stored outside and are collected weekly for incineration.

The rest of their rubbish amounts to a small 17 litre bag per week, which is taken for collection to a communal spot about 200 metres from their house. It's a case of O marks the spot!



"C'est parfait" I said, pretty impressed at the efforts by my continental family.

Even more impressive was that they have no such luxury as a doorstep recycling collection and that every ten days or so, when the cupboard is full to capacity, my brother-in-law drops them at their local household waste recycling centre, which in that part of Switzerland is called a Déchetterie or Centre de Tri de la Collure.

That's what I call commitment! Storing every piece of recycling material for two whole weeks in the kitchen before DRIVING a few kilometres to the recycling centre.

But that's Switzerland for you! A green country full of waste-conscious people.

Except....

...fast forward a few days, when our days in Concise were up and we were introduced to their holiday home in the beautiful Alpine village of Leysin, where they visit regularly in the Winter and every few weeks in the Summer.

A most beautiful and serene place...

Well mostly serene until a sudden shriek of "Quelle Horreur" stopped even the cows in their tracks.

The sight of my brother-in-law filling a bin bag with not just yoghurt pots, but aluminium cans, and kitchen waste was surely a case of the Body Snatchers. He was not just filling it, he was over-filling it, already using up one of their 17 litre bags in just one day. The only things that were saved from the bag were glass bottles, which were taken to a a local collection point and old paper which is collected once a month from the bottom of their garden.

Dear me, what was going on? They had a cellar for storage and the local déchetterie was just as close. And if you look closely at the recycling opportunities, you'll see that most things are accounted for.


My brother-in-law looked the same, sounded the same and even had the same mannerisms. But he was acting very oddly. He was just bunging everything in the bin...almost as happily as Almost Mr Average on holiday.

Oh no, what if they'd been conferring! That Mr A, he can be a bad influence you know.

Tut, tut... me of little faith! I should have guessed. It had nothing to do with coercion, or change of heart or some freak event involving alien forces.

It all came down to money. Just like many other things.

You see, there's one thing you should know about my sister and her lovely husband. They're a thrifty pair. Always have been and always will. Not tight, not mean, but they enjoy many a financial opportunity that comes their way and that includes the opportunity to save money too.

Yes ladies and gentlemen, let me present a positive case for PAY PER THROW and a tale of two villages.

In Concise, households pay the equivalent of about 50 pence for every 17 litre bag of rubbish that they throw out. Those with young families are supported in that nappies are collected separately in clear bags, without additional charge.

This means that even with a 70 litre load of dirty nappies, my sister and her family pay less than £30 per year to get rid of their rubbish.

Yes £30 quid! Now that's what I call a bargain.

The system is simple. Residents buy stickers denoting the size of their bin bags, 1 Swiss Franc for a 17 litre bag and 2 Swiss Francs for 35 litres. I suppose you could consider it a similar process to buying stamps, except you're paying to have your waste collected instead of posting a letter.

The sticker is placed on the bag, which is then taken to a central point for collection, a communal point on a main road. In theory any "unstickered" bags remain uncollected and what's amazing is that it appears to work.

No wonder my brother-in-law was as keen as a rat up a drainpipe. With a nose for saving money, there was every incentive to get that recycling system in order.

By comparison, at their holiday home in Leysin, their waste bill comes to £250 per year, a standard flat-fee bill, which is not influenced by how much a resident recycles. It was the same in another village that they once lived, although the annual bill was higher there, as much as £400. In both locations, their weekly waste amounts to about 70 litres, excluding nappies.

My brother-in-law was kind enough to give me his perspective.

"Most people don't want to move to the sticker system. When we first moved to Concise it puzzled me and I was not sure how it would work. But now it really frustrates me that I have to pay the amount that I do in Leysin and can’t do anything about it. So why should I sort the rubbish there for recycling. If we could pay per throw in Leysin, we would feel the benefits."

"Behaviour is so motivated by such financial benefits. The only way you can make a change is for people to pay. The majority of people will benefit. Even those who don’t care won’t pay any more than they normally do anyway."

Blimey, what a dark horse eh. And that could be said about the country too, which at first glance appears to be top notch at Le Recyclage, with recycling rates reaching over the 50% mark.

But when you delve below the surface and talk to people like my brother-in-law, it becomes clear that what gives Switzerland its reputation as being one of Europe's (if not the world's) most effective countries when it comes to recycling, is the effort that's made in the East of the country, amongst the German speaking Cantons.

According to my brother-in-law, the French-speaking regions to the west are playing catch-up. Like the UK, Switzerland has a non-uniform system of collecting waste, with the country consisting of 26 Cantons, which in turn comprise any number of Communes. These are the authorities that hold local responsibility for waste management.

The pay-per-throw sticker system that is well established in East is now gradually being rolled out to the West.

The Canton of Vaud, which encompasses both the villages of Concise and Leysin, has been making significant efforts to improved the recycling rates through extra collection points and increasing the frequency of collections.

This is evident from the number of PET collection bins that are dotted around towns at regular intervals, as well as the mini recycling points for glass and cardboard that can be found in places like Leysin, which don't have pay-per-throw systems. With facilities like these within extremely convenient reach, it is hardly surprising that Switzerland's recycling rate for glass is as high as 95%.




The Canton published its plan in 2004, which set the recycling targets for the Vaud region at 60% by 2020. The latest figures from 2005 showed a rate of 41%, which represents a 1% increase on the previous year. It has been acknowledged that fixed targets in terms of recycling taxes have helped as well as the introduction of the pay-per-throw sticker system in a small number of villages.

I would never have thought I would be in support of pay-per-throw, especially given the controversy over tests in the UK. You've only got to read articles such as the one in The Telegraph and The Mail as examples of how unpopular the suggestion is, with people calling for a burn it not sort it solution.

But are things as simple as that? After all, Switzerland incinerates most of its rubbish, creating 3% of the country's energy. Yet the country still invests heavily in recycling facilities, to rescue most resources from the incinerators.

There is still a back up system of landfill but made up of the remains of combusted waste, some building materials and industrial waste.

But could such a system really work in the UK? Again the papers say that pay-per-throw would hurt the middle classes. Yet I would categorise my sister and her husband as Middle Class by UK standards. It works for them. So could it work for others?

The newspapers really make grim reading, painting the impression of the UK population as a wasteful bunch of layabouts with heaving, over-filled bins. Anyone who gets fined for too much recycling gets to make the headlines, as do those who may have not put their bin in the proper location for collection to find the binmen have left it behind.

No wonder pay-per-throw is represented as so unpopular. If this is the picture of what our country throws away, it looks as unsurmountable as some of the Alpine glaciers.

Of course that is the reality in many parts, but is it not also the case that thousands if not millions of people in the UK are efficient recyclers? Actually I don't know, because these people are not headline material for our daily press... Mr X celebrates his 5th bin bag in as many years hardly makes front page news.

Perhaps it may be a case of taking small babysteps with this pay-per-throw lark, giving people the choice in the similar way to water metering. Those that sign up could have they council tax reduced and pay for the small amount that they throw out. Then let's see the results. The proof could definitely be in the lack of last night's pudding, along with the visual evidence and word of mouth.

And if participants are put off by the threat of unruly neighbours topping up their very empty wheelie bins, then ditch the bins. Are bins with detectors that measure and weigh the contents really necessary, especially when other systems have proved to be effective? Could a sticker and bin-bag system really work over here or would there be another opportunity for fraudsters to print off their own to cheat the system? Or would people sign up, pay for a few stickers and bung the rest of their rubbish elsewhere?

Listen to my suspicious mind in action. What am I like?

Perhaps it's now time for us to start having faith in our country and not be dismayed by the headlines that hit the press. Perhaps it's also time to stop treating government and local councils as public enemy number one and all start working together to help the country's targets.

As you know, I'm no expert on such matters of policy, politics or indeed sociology. I'm just a member of the electorate, who could be simply eying up an opportunity to save herself some money at a time when the Credit Crunch may be hitting home.

I don't know. Maybe it's just another case of my naivety. I can only highlight what I have seen with my own eyes, which could be just a biased view from only one week spent in one country.

One thing I do know, is that as a country we are already paying to throw our rubbish away. What my brother-in-law has shown me has certainly struck a chord. Maybe there are millions of people across the country who are looking for the same opportunity to save some money. We just don't know.

Of course neither Switzerland or I may be perfect in our thinking or indeed actions. With regard to contemporary forums on Zero Waste, environmental consequences of incineration is still very much under debate and it has been said that that despite Switzerland's excellent performance in recycling, much is left to be desired when it comes to reducing its use of raw materials.

As for me, well I was on holiday. Little Miss Perfect might have dragged her husband to the Déchetterie, for a good old sort, but not even I was up for that. After doing our best with the local facilities around the village, I just bunged everything else in our rubbish bin. I have a poor excuse, a lot of packaging gave me permission to do this, with cute little rubbish bag symbols.



We didn't do too badly though. Having recycled the paper, the PET, the glass, the milk bottles and bread we ended up just throwing away food waste, kitchen scraps and tetra paks along with plastic packaging. All this came to just one 35 litre bag, which was half of what I would have thrown away a year ago. In Concise that would have cost me just a pound.




But I have a real confession. That scruffy old purse, the one which was really just too grotty to offer to a charity shop or give away... well I did something quite naughty.

I couldn't bear the thought of it sitting in the UK's landfill for all those years, so guess what...

I donated it to the Swiss incinerator system.

By now, someone somewhere will have probably have made some toast thanks to the energy from my purse.

But hey, I'm not quite ready for the incineration debate yet and all the implications of energy through waste. I've used up all my own energy just discussing my brother-in-law's waste. So, I think I'll leave that for another day...

...and leave you with some of my happy memories.


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Blogging on the Radio: The Full Story Recycled

How truth can be stranger than fiction.


10.50 am... Bury St Edmunds train station...

Ruby and I sat quietly on a bench, as quietly as two chattering friends could. We were waiting patiently for a train to Ipswich, as excited as two little schoolgirls who hadn't seen each other all summer. It was the start of a very exciting day.

Suffering from a terrible headache, I put my hand into my jacket pocket and retrieved the paracetamol tablets that I'd bought at the local garage that morning. I was thankful that they were in a plastic container and not those terrible blister packs made from inseparable foil and plastic, which infuriates many of my acquaintances.

Ruby also decided to take her own dose of medication that she'd collected from the pharmacy only 10 minutes earlier.

The scene was developing into a vision of the future, morphing into two elderly ladies nursing our respective ailments.


11:26am.....Ipswich Train Station.

Ruby and I stepped off the train, giggling over the events of the previous evening. We'd been out to a trendy bar in town to celebrate my book deal and to commiserate over her leaving Bury St Edmunds for good. There had been much laughter, political discussion and gossip. There was even rumour that Amy Whitehouse was moving to Bury. An interesting choice we thought.

We put all this behind us, as we got down to the real business of the day. We were off to the county's radio station BBC Radio Suffolk, as sofa guests on Lesley Dolphin's lunchtime show, where we'd been invited to talk about blogging.


12.25pm... BBC Radio Suffolk.

Sat on Lesley's Sofa in the radio studio, Ruby and I waited nervously to be introduced.

I thought back to my last visit to the studio. It was in March, when I'd been invited to the James Hazell show to recount the successes of the Zero Waste challenge.

This time was more relaxing. The sofa most definitely helped and to be sat on it with a friend was even more helpful.

The opportunity to talk about Bury, Bins and Blogging, all in one go. And our friendship too. Such a delight.

Then came the quick-fire questions, with different answers to reveal our true selves.

Ruby: CDs; Trousers; Brown Wheelie Bin
Me: iPod: Dresses; Compost Bin

How different we were but how close we've become. I will miss Ruby when she leaves on Sunday.

Lesley played Ruby Tuesday, in honour of her leaving.

Ruby talked about her blog, her 100,000 visitors and leaving behind both the primness and grimness of the town that she's lived in for 11 years.

I revealed the news about my book deal.

Then we both talked about blogging.

We couldn't agree more that Lesley had been the most wonderful host and took some photos to add to our respective albums.

The fun, the memories. I think we've even inspired Lesley to blog too.

And of course, I couldn't resist a photo of Lesley with the studio bin....
and it had to be a recycling one at that.


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Ruby's story can be found over on her blog, by clicking here.

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