rain stopped play

The FSA has advised that eggs may safely be eaten two days after the 'best before' date.  My initial reaction on hearing this was surprise that Hector Sants was concerning himself with eggs, when he had so many other things to worry about, before working out that it was not that FSA, but the other one.  I ate a couple of eggs yesterday for lunch which were the last two in a box marked 'best before 15 November', and I seem to be OK some twenty-seven hours later.  They were supermarket eggs, as our chickens have gone off-lay for the winter.  Home-produced eggs do not come with a reassuring 'best before' date, but our rule of thumb is that they will keep for up to six weeks, no problem.  We don't give them to unsuspecting visitors, but happily eat them ourselves, without any ill effects so far.  This theory is based not on any advice from the FSA (Food Standards Agency as opposed to Financial Services Authority), which is far more conservative about the shelf life of eggs, but on articles about provisioning yachts for long-distance blue water voyages.  If you are half way across the Pacific in a small boat you really don't want to lay yourself low with food poisoning, and so advice on food storage methods, temperatures and safe use-by cut-offs from experienced deep-sea sailors is going to be pretty reliable.  Which said, I still haven't tried making the rillettes whose authors claim 'These keep unrefrigerated for a month'.

It rained today, mingled with a few flakes of snow, which meant I had to wash the kitchen floor.  I would have done it before, until the Systems Administrator told me that the sinister red splodge near the bins was not where the cats had eaten a mouse, but just the juice from a slice of red pepper that got dropped and trodden on during the preparation of Sichuan beef.  Then I wrapped up Christmas presents while listening to the R5 Live film programme.  I am quite eco-conscious and frugal about a lot of things, but have little patience with the annual clamour that we should give up wrapping paper for the good of the planet, and wrap our presents in re-usable cloth like the Japanese allegedly do, or use newspaper, or not wrap them, or not give presents.  Before washing the kitchen floor I sorted out the pile of papers and magazines on the end of the kitchen table that had accumulated over the past few weeks, and the weight of surplus paper generated by that exercise was much more than my three rolls of wrapping paper.  We signed up to the mailing preference service a few years ago, which has reduced the quantity of stuff dropping through the letter box, but that still leaves the inserts for conservatories, hearing aids, care plans and escorted foreign holidays that come with the garden magazines (guess what the demographic of the RHS membership is), the umpteenth Toast and Boden catalogues to have arrived this winter (I've already bought a scarf and a shirt, I'm not buying any more), the fund raising appeals thinly disguised as newsletters from our Alma Mater, the children's nature detective kit (not sure why the Woodland Trust sent me that.  Maybe they thought I'd like to see what it looks like) and so on and so on.  When the English Garden magazine stops sending me leaflets about the Times Wine Club and The Folio Society maybe then I'll rethink my stance on wrapping paper.

It's like with low energy light bulbs.  I haven't flown since 2004 on ecological grounds (as well as the fact that I hate flying).  I am sitting typing this in a room heated only by our own logs, wearing thermals under my trousers.  I don't leave my phone charger plugged in when I'm not charging the phone.  So why I am I not allowed to buy lightbulbs that I can actually see by?  The other day I had to go and get a torch to find the clothes I was searching for in the wardrobe, because even when I put the bedroom light on I still couldn't see what I was doing.  Couldn't I be allowed to have more of a say in how I personally wanted to make savings, instead of having relatively small and inconvenient savings thrust upon me by others, while far more profligate uses of energy go unchallenged (weekend break in Barcelona, anyone?).  Or failing that, maybe somebody could invent a low energy bulb that adequately illuminates a room, and without taking half an hour to warm up.  The SA claims to have heard that at least some people are getting round the problem of initial ultra-dullness by leaving their lights on all the time.  After all, they're low energy.  They can't be using much power.