Who Gives a Crap?

I suppose you've seen the ads on Facebook and elsewhere for Who Gives a Crap? I am always inclined to cringe a bit each time I see the name. I still remember coming home from 7th grade, feeling very cool and grown up and throwing out that word 'crap' in front of my mom. She promptly marched me to the bathroom and washed my mouth with soap. I was  too astonished at the whole process to resist, but I carefully watched my language around Mom from then on. 

I believe this is an Australian company. The advantages of ordering from them are 1) they donate half their profits to promote water, sanitation and hygiene projects in developing countries; 2) the come with pretty wrapping paper which can be seen in various craft projects; 3) it is delivered to your house via courier; 4) if you were so inclined, you could subscribe and never have to buy TP at the supermarket again. (However, you do have to get a bag to carry the stuff, make several trips upstairs and find a place for 48 rolls; in this case, the more loos you have, the better off you would be). 

I thought I'd give it a go, just out of curiosity. I ordered the regular TP, not the luxury bamboo type, though I might consider trying that later. Making a comparison with other toilet paper currently in the house will have to wait until we get another package down from the loft, as I never remember what qualities I've selected from the last shop. I tend to avoid brand names and definitely avoid anything scented. I sort of miss the pretty colours we used to get, but I gather this wasn't good for the environment. 

What I did do was weigh a regular toilet roll and a WGaC roll. The regular roll (quilted tp) weighed 85g. The WGaC weighed 182g. I noticed they were the same height, but the cardboard tube was much narrower for the WGaC roll. Also, the wrapping around the tube seemed tighter/more dense. I've noticed that the cardboard tube gets wider and wider with the off brands. In one case I saw that the rolls were also shorter. Mind, I don't spend a lot of time worrying about toilet paper, I just hate being ripped off. Also being treated as though I'm too stupid to notice such things.

That said, I did take note about how long each roll lasted. The ordinary one lasted from about mid-day on Wednesday to about mid-day Friday (2 days) The WGaC roll lasted from mid-day Friday to Monday evening (4 and a bit days), so a little over twice as long. This tp isn't quilted, it isn't very thick, but it's not the thinnest tp I've ever seen, but I do tend to use more of it than of the quilted.

Since I paid £36 for 48 rolls of tp, that is 75 pence per roll; the regular tp (according to Sainsbury's website) is about 25 pence per roll, but even if I use 50 pence in worth in the same time period, the WGaC is still slightly more expensive, which I don't mind given their charitable aims. My main concerns are two: 

1. Is the carbon cost of having it delivered to my house higher than having the supermarket deliver ordinary tp with all the rest of my groceries? (My guess is yes, but it is a guess).

2. What am I going to make with the pretty wrapping paper?

My Historical Life

Some of my (distant) cousins and I get together via email occasionally to share any small new finds - we found most of the major stuff - and just to check in generally. We are scattered from Ireland to Scotland, New York, England and both the east and west coasts of Australia. We were discussing what we would be looking for first when next year the 1921 British census is released. That got me to wondering when the 1950 US census will be released: 2022! I may have to disappear for most of next year...

One of my cousins was saying that she'd turned her attention for once to her husband's family history. She described his family as dysfunctional but didn't say why. Aren't we all, I'm thinking. She said that her mother-in-law was finally opening up about the family and that an uncle was gathering family photos, remarking that no one had ever wanted them before. We all treasure our skeletons far above all the 'normal' folks in our families so my cousin may manage to turn that family's self image around. 

I have always been in awe thinking about my grandparents and all that they survived: WWI, the influenza pandemic, the Great Depression, WWII, the polio epidemic and the pre-antibiotic era, not to mention that women only got the vote in the US in 1920. I've been a bit excited - weird, I know - to be living through a pandemic myself - and I was damned determined that Bill and I would survive. Then I got to thinking that actually I've lived through a lot of other things. 

I was in the third grade when JFK was assassinated (I skipped first grade). I remember having our Spanish lesson in front of the television when the principal came in and changed the station from the PBS channel to show the news about it. We were all sent home early that day. I remember thinking I should be happy to get let out early but I was sad and a little bit scared about what all this meant.

My generation at school narrowly missed the Vietnam war. I remember growing up hearing all the foreign names every night on the news and double digit reports of deaths almost daily. I was nearly numb to it up until high school when I realised people I knew might be in those casualty figures. A lot of my friends would be going to college and thus exempt, but not everyone could make the grade - or afford the tuition. 

Then there were the civil rights rights, the assassinations of MLK and Bobby. My parents were sympathetic to the plight of black people but we worried about whether the violence might impact on us. Judge Luther Bohanon determined that Oklahoma schools would be desegregated and this led to a certain amount of violence in high schools. Something like three deaths occurred in the early 1970s. This led to high school councillors proposing that kids could graduate early if they avoided study hall periods and earned extra credits in summer school. This charted my future: I took English Literature one summer and Algebra the next and I graduated in 1972 rather than 1973. I turned 16 two weeks after graduation and grown up life began for me when most had to wait until 18 or 19. I stumbled a lot.

I remember the US Presidents during my lifetime, though I can't name them in order. I didn't take much interest in politics - it just made people yell at one another - until Clinton. People were outraged at the influence Hillary Clinton had with her husband. I thought that sounded like a great reason to vote for him even though I knew nothing about his policies. I've learned more about the political history of the US by reading John Kenneth Galbraithe's World Economy Since the Wars and Barack Obama's book The Audacity of Hope. I was fascinated to read about things that happened during my lifetime that I only heard in passing at the time. 

I'm conscious that in the 1990 census I found myself as the main bread-winner who was also the Responsible Person in the family. My then husband had brought me a surprise 20-month-old step-son 17 days after our wedding and then informed me that 'child-rearing was woman's work'. So when I filled out the census form, I put myself down as head of the household. No doubt his son's descendants will remark that I must have been a difficult person. With any luck, I'll live long enough to see the release of the 1960 (76), 1970 (86) and maybe even the 1980 (96) US censuses!

And now I've lived through Trump and Brexit. We are now in the Covid Pandemic and the sixth mass extinction (climate change). It will be interesting to see how things unfold. 

Had you ever considered your Historical Life?

My Dad's Birthday

Today would have been my Dad's 103rd birthday, were such a thing even possible. Of course it is possible for a human to live to the age of 103 years, but not my Dad. His smoking, his diet and his sedentary nature all denied him that. Just as his half-brother, Albert, had his life cut short, only much shorter.

Albert - yes! I have an Uncle Albert! - was born three years before my Dad, almost to the day - on the 16th rather than the 17th of April. He was christened Albert Martin Brown in the Lutheran church on the 21st of January 1916. He is shown as resident in the Owatonna State School in the 1920 census. I'm told he was adopted in 1922 - at the age of 7. 

A letter from his mother, Marit / Mary, to the Minnesota state officials in 1939 tells us he has died from drowning at the age of 24. The people who adopted him apparently knew how to contact his birth mother. Having lost one son - she feels due to carelessness on the part of the adopting parents - she is desperate to know where her youngest son - my Dad - has been placed. It is a heart breaking letter.

Of course my Dad lived to the age of 71. His adoptive parents were anything but neglectful. And of course my Dad never knew he had a half-brother. It always strikes me as a bit surreal to think of all the things he didn't know about himself - and all the things I didn't know until someone dropped this piece of information on me and I pursued the story. It often crosses my mind that there are likely other things I don't know, or only think I 'know'.

I am practically wishing this year away when I realise I can obtain Albert's adoption information from the Minnesota Historical Society, or perhaps from the courts, I'll have to figure it out. It will then be 100 years since his adoption and the records will no longer be sealed. I'll then know the names of his adoptive parents and can look for his death certificate. Perhaps there will have been an inquest or other records to shed more light on the circumstances. I will be able to search for him in the 1930 census and perhaps there might be a marriage record, who knows? Wouldn't it be wonderful if there was a photograph somewhere and I could see a resemblance to my Dad - or even to me? 

Bless him, he didn't make it to be in the 1940 census. How very much of life he missed out on, passing at 24. Makes me feel terribly ancient and extremely fortunate. Also to realise that even though I've always felt cheated that each of my parents died at the age of 71, they did get to experience most of what life was going to hand them by then, except perhaps something negative about growing old. So I'll not wish for what can't be anyhow. 

Happy birthday, Daddy.

Reading

When I returned home from the library last Friday, I unpacked my backpack to see which books had been loaned to me.  One of them, a biography, I had no memory of requesting. I knew neither the name of the author (Hermoine Lee) or the subject of the book, Penelope Fitzgerald. I decided to read it anyhow, given that Fitzgerald was known for having published her first book at the age of 60 and having won the Booker Prize aged 73. Another three of her novels were shortlisted; not a bad record for the author of nine novels. I'm always happy to be inspired by a late bloomer, given the number of things I still aspire to accomplish in spite of soon turning 65. 

Though I'm now barely into the second chapter - this book has tiny print and is not an easy read, I spent much of the first chapter referring back to the family tree at the front, which had annotations that didn't become clear until I'd read well through that chapter - I believe I'm going to enjoy this challenging book. Fitzgerald lived between 1916 and 2000 and grew up in an illustrious family full of Church of England bishops, Catholic priests and writers - her father was editor of Punch magazine. Fitzgerald described her childhood home well enough to make one bask in the cosiness of interwar England. 

"She recreated the vanished 1920's Hampstead of her childhood with pleasure and precision. 

The village - and Hampstead still felt itself very much a village - was a place of high thinking, plain living and small economies. The steep charming old streets were full of ham and beef shops, old bookstalls, and an amazing number of cleaners and repairers, all helpful to shabby refugees and literary men. There was even a jeweller's where one bead could be bought at a time, for all the Hampstead ladies wore long necklaces. The livery stables had only just turned into a garage...poets walked the streets, Stanley Spencer pushed his pramful of painting materials aimiably across the Health...

This was a Georgian childhood. The streets in her memory were not only full of poets in their 'wide brimmed black hats', but also of lamplighters coming round to light the gas lamps, muffin men in winter, and lavender sellers in summer, knife grinders and chair menders, pony-carts brining dairy milk from the farm at Highgate. Gazes the drapers had everything you needed in 'the button, woollen, stockings and knicker line'; Knowles Brown the clockmaker had a silver clock in the window in the shape of a spaniel whose tongue moved up and down with every tick; small shops sold 'pennyworths of licorice'. 

Hampstead was literary, poetic, artistic, rural, part-bohemian, part-genteel. It was not a bit like Bloomsbury...Hampstead was 'undemanding' and 'homely'."

Fitzgerald's father and his brothers all went to Oxford. Two of her grandfathers were vicars and then bishops. The cosiness of their time is in part due to their station in life as much as in the time in which they lived. I'm always rather envious of the descriptions of the gardens / orchards / vicarages / country houses, all down south where they actually experience summer most years. 

My local library has only a couple of her books, but the Lit and Phil has more, including The Bookshop. I see that Hermione Lee has also written biographies of Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, also two intriguing books, The Lives of Houses and The London Scene. I don't think I'll ever run out of what to read!

Vegetable Tangerine

Our next WI has started having Zoom coffee mornings with a theme. The next Saturday's theme is 'Positive things that came out of the pandemic'. I'm still thinking on this, but one of them I think is that people got re-acquainted with their kitchens. I think cooking from ingredients is a vital life skill and that it is idiocy to be dependent on eating out / fast food / processed convenience foods. I almost see it as a form of slow suicide. I've noticed the older I get the less moderate my opinions.

I can't say the pandemic reintroduced me to my kitchen, but rather it reminded me I had a load of cookbooks - and acquired more - with recipes I'd never tried. I started our WI's Food Group on Facebook and the lady who agreed to take it over - I can't run everything - felt that photos were important so I've tried to take pictures. Mine are never as good as hers - my kitchen must not have the right lighting, but Bill and I have enjoyed greater variety in our meals. 

The Food Group also introduced me to some new cookbooks called A Pinch of Nom. I guess 'nom' must be the British version of 'yum'? I like these books because they have calorie counts. I'm only interested in those under 300 calories. I generally find I can make the recipes faster each time I make them and find shortcuts. For example, I make cauliflower rice in the microwave rather than adding it to the chicken and spices in a Harry Dieters Fast Food recipe. 

One of Bill's favourites is from A Pinch of Nom and it is called Vegetable Tagine. I'm still working on finding shortcuts for this, but I already have substituted potato for the parsnip and swede I didn't have; also tumeric for the saffron I'm not likely to ever have and ground cinnamon instead of sticks. Also, this recipe says to use a large frying pan on top of the stove, not the conical shaped clay dish which is also called a tagine. The first time I made it I sent Bill after a pomegranate to garnish the dish, my first ever encounter with a pomegranate. I thought it was delicious, but awfully fiddly, even with instructions from the internet. Subsequent uses of this recipe have omitted that garnish.

 I struggle to say this word, wanting to make it tan-gine and then Bill turned that into tangerine. We're pretty silly around here sometimes. I wondered how one should actually say 'tagine'. It turns out that there are two ways, a British and an American pronunciation. The British word sounds like 'ta-ching' as in money. No doubt Bill will have fun playing with that as well. I notice the American pronunciation has a softer 'g', like the French use. Doing something other than way the French speak seems to be a hallmark in British differences.