The Daily Mail says we Britons will chuck out 736,571 tonnes of refuse – just because of Christmas. Or, according to official sources, 3 tons (someone’s talking rubbish). Anyway – it’s a lot. Just look at my drive this morning. A family of 5 with relatives stopping over can generate a lot of junk. I’m glad we can recycle a lot, but it makes me ashamed to be putting out so much empty wrapping/ bottles/ food containers to celebrate that God came to a stable. This, in a world where more than 58 million kids are suffering acute malnutrition and 146 million are malnourished (a nice way to say they’re slowly starving to death). Starvation is the leading cause of child death in the world at the beginning of the (21st. Many of those who don’t actually die in the first couple of years will instead grow up stunted and deformed because of the deprivation of their early years. In 2000, our government and other world leaders promised to halve child poverty by 2015, back then it was at 29%. […]

Books. I spend too much money on books.  I love them. Especially new ones. The promise of learning something new. I wish I had the patience to get them from the library (or the discipline to take them back on time when I do). Yesterday I was thinking I either: 1) Buy less books 2) Buy a new bookcase. I think option 2 will prevail. Why can’t I just go (locally) somewhere like those Barnes & Nobles in the USA / Canada where I’ve happily spent half a day reading books I’ll probably not buy while drinking coffee? I’m marginally interested in Russell Brand’s ‘Booky Wook,’ mainly because I can’t understand why so many people are buying it (whether they actually read it is, of course, another thing entirely). I won’t buy it – unless it’s in 3 or 4 years in a charity shop for 50p, but I’d like to read it.