In for the long haul

After 18 days a certain ennui is starting to set in. The constant planning and thought which goes into every day is getting to be a bit of a grind. Major issues arose recently with the advent of the end-of-year party season for the University. My husband holds a party for his students which always revolves around strawberries and cream, with lots of exotic biscuits. This year he trekked out to a Pick-Your-Own place for the strawberries (only to find the nice cardboard punnets had plastic handles!), to be eaten without cream, and we bought all our biscuits at a bakery which sells them in paper bags. And for the next party he made some cheese straws - more fun, but much more time-consuming than buying them in the supermarket!

So how are we adapting? Fruit and veg are easy - just buy them on the market. Bread is easy too, and since we started buying all our bread on the market we are eating a lot of it - it just tastes so much nicer than the sliced-in-a-plastic-bag stuff we relied on before. We bake our biscuits. We have found one brand of ice-cream which comes in cardboard (Walls vanilla), and one brand of chocolate which comes in paper and cardboard. We have found one brand of butter wrapped in paper (Tesco's cheapest of the cheap...why is this one the paper-wrapped one? Who knows). Flour is easy, but only white sugar comes in paper. Brown is always plastic-wrapped. Baked beans are easy, as is tinned fish. But we have given up on yoghurt and other dairy desserts, pre-packed snack bars, and breakfast cereal. Fish needs plastic bags, and I will be writing more on the subject of plastic wrappings once I have regained my composure after round one of an exchange with supermarket consumer relations departments. On balance we are eating well.