Dan(te)'s Inferno

I have to admit it, I actually pre-ordered Dan Brown's Inferno back in March. He gets such a bad press for being a poor writer, but I love his books. They do exactly what they say on the tin. He's not Dostoevsky and doesn't pretend to be. As he said himself, ' There are some people who understand what I do, and they sort of get on the train and go for a ride and have a great time, and there are other people who should probably just read somebody else.' And that's exactly how I approach his books. Lots of fun, perhaps bending the truth at times, but very enjoyable.

I was particularly keen to read this one once I found out that it's central theme was Dante's Inferno,which is one my favourite books, or poems. This will probably sound less pretentious when I say that I studied it as part of my Italian language and literature MA at Glasgow University, almost twenty years ago. Our tutor, Professor Miller, was passionate about Dante, and brought to life the grim sights and sounds of the Inferno in the gloomy lecture theatre on University Avenue where we had our weekly Dante lectures. Inferno, and the Divine Comedy as a whole, are difficult ones to read if you aren't being tutored through them; there's double meaning in every line of the beautiful poetry. And it is beautiful. The passage about the doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca, the original inspiration for Rodin's The Kiss, and consigned for all eternity to the circle of the lustful, are some of the most poignant lines ever written. There is no greater sorrow, than to recall the happy times in misery....Sob.

Anyway, I've just finished Dan Brown's Inferno, and now feel an urge to go and visit Florence, last seen on our honeymoon. This is one of my favourite pictures of Florence; Henry Holiday's rendition of the first time Dante set eyes on Beatrice, the love of his life. I did always feel sorry for his actual wife, Gemma Donati, though. Must be a bit of a blow, to have your husband write one of the greatest poems of all time, starring....not you. 

Bowls, brands and basics

It's nearly a year now that I handed in my notice at my fundraising job to become a stay at home mum, so for almost 12 months we've been adjusting to the realities of living on one salary. In that time I've had to get used to having less disposable income than before. It's hard at times, having to think twice about buying things that a year or so ago I'd have thrown in my basket without a second thought.

I have learned a lot about saving money, though, including, but not limited to....

Drop the brands. It is such an eye opener to realise the difference between branded goods and supermarket own brands lies only in the price. Take cereal, for example. I challenge anyone to tell the difference between a bowl of Cheerios and some Sainsbury's multigrain hooplas. There is none....despite the £1 or so more that the Cheerios cost.(Plus Cheerios are made by Nestle - another reason not to buy them).

We go through about three boxes of cereal a week as a family of seven. That's £3 a week we save - £132 a year, just by switching brands. I could buy seven of these lovely Emma Bridgewater cereal bowls with what I save to eat our Sainsbury's rice pops from. So if you're trying to save money, go for the supermarket own brand versions - you'll knock a fortune off your total shopping bill. Even the value lines are worth a look, though they can be hit and miss. The meat, dairy and cheese are probably to be avoided; experiment with what's good and what's best avoided. I recommend the Sainsbury's basics pancakes, 20p for six. Avoid their basics scourers though, the pancakes would probably do a better job of cleaning your dishes.

Make do and mend. I know, I know, it conjures up visions of patched up jeans and tights darned in about seven places. That's not what make do and mend needs to mean though! It's more about not chucking something out if it gets a stain on it, or gets ripped - instead, buy a couple of transfers and cover up the stains. I sound like my granny here, but clothes are not made to last as they were perhaps a decade or so ago - however, it's worth making the effort to patch them up or cover up stains and tears. 

Ditch the meat  Aside from the moral and environmental implications of eating meat, it's expensive! Particularly if you're buying the organic/free range stuff. Try it for a week, and see how much money you save.

Learn to cook from scratch. Sounds obvious, but I say this as a person who used to buy READY MADE MASHED POTATO. I know! Home made food tastes so much better....and costs so much less. It doesn't even need to take much time, once you know what you're doing. 

Meal plan, and shop online if you can Looking back, I cannot believe how much money, and food, I used to waste. I would go to Marks and Spencer's once a week and buy far too much food, then find myself five days later with three ready meals in the fridge, all of which went out of date two days before, none of which were freezable, trying to decide which one to eat and which one could last another day. Inevitably, something would get chucked out. 

I'd walk round Tesco, simply throwing things into the trolley without any real thought for how I'd use them....maybe I'd make a risotto with those fresh veg, or some pasta sauce... Then a week later, discover a rotting artichoke, aubergine and butternut squash at the back of the fridge that I'd forgotten about. That's not to mention the 'extra' purchases that you make when you go to the supermarket - a book here, a couple of magazines, some new pyjama bottoms, a cute little dress for Rose...then I'd be shocked when the bill came to £200. 

Now I plan all our meals. It makes life so much easier not to have to think too hard about what we're eating every day, and means you're not left with a fridge full of out of date food at the end of the week. And a top that you realise is actually quite disgusting when you get it home. Shopping online is free if you spend over £100, and it's so worth it.

Buy frozen Fresh isn't necessarily always better. Fresh fruit and vegetables can lose up to 45% of their nutrients by the time they reach your plate, and they're also far more expensive. A study by Sheffield Hallam University found that frozen fruit and veg can be nutritionally superior to fresh - so instead of spending £4 on a punnet of fresh raspberries, spend £2 on a bag of frozen ones - you'll get four times the amount, and they may even be healthier.

Hope these are helpful - please share any more if you have them!

The best vegan cupcakes in the world

That's all really. I've been trying to make perfect vegan cupcakes since I became vegan - and never succeeded in making anything that tasted as good as the non vegan version. They were either biscuity, or underbaked with a hard crust.

Then this book came into my life by way of a preview copy that my journalist husband Colin was given at work. You'll need to buy it when it's released next month if you want to know the secrets of the perfect vegan cupcake - but if you follow the tips in the book your vegan cakes will be fluffy, moist and gooey without a hint of crustiness about them! I'm going to make the chocolate marshmallow fried sandwiches next. Because I'm feeling greedy.

Anyway, these are my chocolate peanut butter cupcakes. Like all of the recipes in the book, they're made with ingredients that can be easily bought in the supermarket, and most of which you probably already have at home. I actually could have eaten the whole tray, even if I do say so myself.

This week, I want...

Feeling very materialistic this week, with lots of things that I want to buy and need to have. As soon as  I find that spare few hundred pounds I know I've got lying around somewhere.

I would like the following things to arrive by mail order next week;

Some new dining chairs. The ones we got as a wedding present have absolutely had their day. I want these funky green ones. Six of them.

These cat face shoes. They are so cute.

This dress for Rose - I love the city collage print.

and these cloud trousers for Toby.

This tea dress for Polly;

These yellow skinny jeans for Zoe;

And this for Sophia.

Strangely, given the content of this post, I also want this book. I love the TV series. Though sometimes their scrimping tips are questionable - see their home made ketchup.

Finally, I've fallen in love with these bunk beds for Rose and Toby. They will be needing bunk beds at some point. Perhaps for Xmas. These are the nicest bunk beds I've seen after a lot of searching.

Unfortunately, all this adds up to quite a lot of money that I should be spending on far more sensible and boring things. Last week, a lady from the US contacted me to see if I could make her five sets of my retro blocks - unfortunately, she needed them by next Friday. There was no way it could be done. That would have bought me two chairs at least. Never mind. Perhaps we'll win the lottery soon...

Ikea upgrade

I customised Rose's bookcase this weekend. It's a cheapo Ikea one that got wet because SOMEONE spilt tea on it, and the top layer just disintegrated. So it looked pretty awful after that.

Here's how it turned out.
                                                                                                                               

It's easy to do something like this yourself, with a bit of patience. You'll need the following;

• Mod podge glue - I've used Matte here, but you can also use a gloss version.
• Paper to cover the surface - choose thicker paper if this is the first time you've attempted decoupage. I would also go for something with quite a detailed pattern - this will cover any mistakes or wrinkles better! The stuff I used here is actually wrapping paper.
• A medium sized paintbrush
• A brayer to iron out any bubbles 
• A ruler
• Sandpaper or a hand sander if you have one

Firstly, measure the area you want to cover and cut the paper to size.  You'll get best results with a steel ruler and craft knife if you have one.

Then you'll want to sand the area you're going to cover. It's so important you get the surface as smooth as possible - any bumps will show up as wrinkles in the paper if the surface isn't smooth.

Paint the surface with a thin coating of Mod Podge glue. Too much glue = wrinkled, bumpy paper. Let it dry for about a minute so it's not too sticky.

This is the tricky bit. Very slowly smooth the paper onto the surface. You might want to use a brayer at this point to iron out air bubbles - be gentle here, and careful not to rip the paper which will be damp with glue. Sometimes the bubbles can take a minute or two to appear, so keep an eye on the paper for a few minutes and carefully smooth out any that do.

Now leave the paper for half an hour or so. Go back to it and paint the surface with the Mod Podge. Do this under a good light to make sure there's no lumps of glue to get the best finish possible.

You can add another coat once the first one's dry, but I only needed one here.....I do plan to do the other shelves at some point, maybe with different paper.

Cheerio to Cheerios

I used to think that the Nestle boycott was something of a remnant from the 80s. That people who continued to observe it were a little hippyish and stuck in the past. Nestle had cleaned up their act, hadn't they? They'd moved on, surely, from the days of dressing their saleswomen up as nurses and sending them out to the world's poorest countries to sell formula milk to poor mothers?

Then I read the Politics of Breastfeeding by Gabrielle Palmer, and realised that nothing, nothing, has changed about this morally repugnant organisation and others like it.

These companies are still aggressively marketing their products to women in poor countries. They bribe medical staff with generous benefits to promote their products and encourage new mothers not to breastfeed. They suggest that mother's breast milk 'might not be enough' (when in fact only a very small percentage of women are physiologically unable to breastfeed) and recommend their product instead. Local advertising campaigns claim that if mothers use formula their children will be gifted, intelligent, and healthier. How unforgivable, to rob women of their faith in their own bodies; to make them believe they cannot feed their own babies.

“When we trust the makers of baby formula more than we do our own ability to nourish our babies, we lose a chance to claim an aspect of our power as women."
Christine Northrup, MD.

Formula milk is not poison; however, in the wrong circumstances, it might as well be. Women who have limited access to clean water and not enough money to boil and sterilise water and equipment several times a day cannot hope to safely bottle feed.  Their babies develop diarrhoea and gastric problems which they often tragically succumb to.The World Health Organisation estimates that 1.5 million babies die every year because they are not breastfed.Companies like Nestle and Wyeth know that most women in the majority world are too poor to safely bottle feed. Yet still they pour millions into marketing their products and persuading women in poor countries to part with the meagre amounts of money they have to buy their expensive products, sometimes priced at almost one third of the average monthly local salary.

“Breastfeeding is a natural “safety net” against the worst effects of poverty. If the child survives the first month of life (the most dangerous period of childhood) then for the next four months or so, exclusive breastfeeding goes a long way toward cancelling out the health difference between being born into poverty and being born into affluence …. It is almost as if breastfeeding takes the infant out of poverty for those first few months in order to give the child a fairer start in life and compensate for the injustice of the world into which it was born.”
–James P. Grant, former Executive Director, UNICEF 

While reading the book, I watched this film - Formula for Disaster. It's a documentary that was made by Baby Milk Action, the UK charity who campaign against inappropriate marketing of formula feeding. It is disturbing and shocking viewing to see how corporate giants such as Nestle and Wyeth have almost managed to successfully eradicate breastfeeding in the Philippines. 

Everyone should read this book. It will leave you wondering what kind of world we inhabit, where babies lives are sacrificed for profit. I will absolutely be observing the boycott from now on. I don't fool myself that this will make a difference to the obscene profits of this immoral corporate giant; however, at least I can sleep easier knowing that I have not directly funded their campaigns.

"They will end by destroying our planet and making us believe their wasteland is what we want"
Gabrielle Palmer.

Counting my blessings

I watched Red Nose Day on Friday night with two of my children. Some of the footage about the awful suffering that children in the UK and overseas have to go through, for reasons that are entirely preventable, left us unable to get to sleep that night.

One video told the story of a small boy called Richard who contracted tetanus after he cut his foot during a football game. I didn't catch the name of the country he lived in - I think it was Uganda. As he hadn't been vaccinated, he developed tetanus very quickly which left his little body spasming in agony. His spasms were so severe that his jaw locked and he bit through his tongue, which then had to be removed. His poor mother was unable to touch him or comfort him as it might set off another attack. It was heartbreaking to watch. The film didn't say if Richard survived, but the doctor in the footage said it was unlikely.

I can't imagine the pain of watching your child dying, in agony. Comic Relief ended up raising £75 million on Friday night - a good proportion of this will go towards a vaccination programme for children like Richard.

It frustrates me when I hear people saying that there's no point donating to causes like Comic Relief, as nothing seems to change, and there are people still starving in Africa. I used to hear this a lot when I worked as a fundraiser for an aid organisation. Of course there are people who are still starving! To expect otherwise is to completely underestimate the sheer scale of the problem. It's both unreasonable and naive to expect complex problems like world poverty to be solved in a couple of decades through foreign aid alone. To solve world poverty, aid is never going to be enough. The unfair systems and structures that make and keep people poor must be challenged. And changed. 

Systems such as taxation, which allow companies to plunder poor countries of their resources then cook the books so they don't pay the tax they owe - tax that could pay for education, healthcare, sanitation and vaccinations. Take a look here for more info on how you can campaign against this injustice.

Or laws that allow companies such as Wyeth and Nestle to aggressively market their formula milk products in poor countries and practically eradicate breastfeeding, thereby costing the lives of thousands of babies who would have flourished on breast milk but die from gastric problems caused by bottle feeding with dirty water and unsanitary equipment. Speak out against this here.

In the meantime, it's so important we keep giving to causes like Comic Relief. 

Aid does make a difference. Just look at the figures for the number of children under five who die every year.  Back in 1960 it was over 20 million, now it's just over 8 million, despite the fact that the global population has exploded over the past fifty years. Vaccination programmes mean that polio has practically been eradicated, and measles is close behind. Here's a great article explaining how aid has changed the face of Ethiopia. There is still a long way to go, but people must not lose heart because they don't see immediate results.

We are all global citizens, and just because the poorest people in the world don't share a language with us, or look like us, we still owe them a moral debt. We're happy to consume the products that are manufactured by the world's poorest countries, and visit them sometimes as tourists. We don't live like them, only by a fortunate accident of birth. We are no better than them, just luckier. Here's the link - you can still give - it will make a huge difference. Your donation won't solve poverty overnight, but it might save one child like Richard from dying in agony - and the importance of that can't be put into words.