Sun is out and only a slight breeze, it’s almost warm, must be spring at last. Over-trousers are out and I have my shorts on today! Mind you that may be something to do with the fact that I have an early hockey game today and had to pitch up today ready changed. Luckily, for all concerned, the amount of extra clobber we wear nowadays means that any upsetting excess flesh is hidden away under long socks, shin pads, knee pads and long shorts. The only daft bit of kit we have, considering this is a winter sport, is short sleeved shirts, there are too many young folk playing these days who are keen to expose themselves, which is fine in the right place but not in old boys games.

New little car going well (mid 50’s mpg) although Caroline did come back last weekend saying she had had a nasty experience in it. Now considering it’s a Toyota, I did wonder if something had dropped off but no, she had gone through a puddle. Unfortunately it was no ordinary puddle, it was coming from a broken and over flowing sewage drain! Although the bulk of it was on the other side of the road she had the misfortune to time her passing at the same moment as someone coming from the opposite direction. The car got covered and the smell was apparently overwhelming. In need of immediate cleaning, I did the decent thing and made sure she was wearing adequate protection with stout gloves and wellies.

Big van went in for MOT this week and passed, hooray, but it did mean we had to hire one for a couple of days. I’m sure it’s just us, but why when we get a hire van do they always breakdown? Our thanks go to those customers who put up with us hanging about waiting to be mended, helped out with forklift unloading, or had their deliveries delayed 24 hrs. It turned out to be down to new batteries being incorrectly fitted and a tail lift with some sort of independent thought process of its own!

We have a new 3.5 ton small van coming in a couple of weeks which will be nice and give us a bit more flexibility for zipping about with local drops.

Eco Update

We have been asked to attend the local Parish Council meeting in Crawley on Monday to answer questions and put our case. I have heard that they are planning to object to the proposals on visual grounds, which is a shame. We were a bit disappointed that they haven’t even visited the site but there you go, we will see how it goes. Whatever happens at the meeting the planning application will be going in next week if all goes to plan.

You can see the outline proposal in our ‘Dear Neighbour’ letter and the full details of the planning backup documentation at http://www.kirtonfarm.co.uk/ and http://www.hairypotplants.co.uk/

10:10 filming got cancelled due to their heavy work-load.  Hope they hadn’t read the blog site about removing trousers!

Had another PLATO Sustain group meeting last week which was good. The group has created a ‘toolkit’ for recording lots of info (electric, water, gas, oil, transport, waste (recycled, landfill, hazardous and by type), production of green energy, procurement (main material purchases by type, cost, volume etc) and company background details (turnover, area, employees etc). All the info is combined to produce progress reports on environmental performance (KPI’s), waste percentages and a basic carbon footprint summary. It’s not perfect but it’s a start and does give us some way of measuring progress and gives us indicators to show how we compare with others.

Nature notes

No frogspawn yet in any of our ponds, but have seen a frog in the pond (looking a bit dopey, it was icy)
Birds still chomping through kilos of feed and doing a lot of singing.

Have a good week.