Antique? Well not quite but old, pre stainless steel certainly and quick to rust, if not dried after use.

But the decision made us also think about how best to store all the knives for easy retrieval. So this last Sunday after a lunch time discussion of alternatives, we decided on a magnetic knife holder.

They work like magic. I’d always fancied one but we’d never had the right space for it.

So log on to Amazon – yes we could have one and at 3.32 pm an email confirmed the 40 cms long rack had been dispatched with free next day delivery.

As promised, the van drew up a little after 2.00 pm on Monday and the parcel was handed over and signed off.

Amazon had got the rack selected, packed and delivered to a country area in under 24 hours from a Sunday start. Impressive.

No complaints there. This is online shopping at its best and saved me a lot of time.

But the box (opposite) was a different matter!

Slitting it open I wondered first if there was anything there. Loads of brown scrumpled up paper tumbled out, but no sign of the rack.

Finally I found it at the bottom, well packed in its own box. It measured 2 x 5 x 47 cms, so it didn’t take long to work out the Amazon delivery box (11 x 35 x 55 cms) would have held easily 34 of the racks – if I had wanted that many!

And that scrumpled up paper? On inspection it turned into a long seamless sausage-like creation, which flattened out into one continuous length of paper over five metres long by 38 cms wide.

For just one knife rack they had needed, because of the over large box, a length of packing paper that stretched from the eaves of the cottage to the flower bed – as you can see in the photo at the top of the page.

I’m a fan of online shopping because it can save on ‘travel to search’ time and costs. But the calculations from this example about use of resources are pretty scary. Just a hundred similar Amazon deliveries would use up 500 metres of the packing paper, which would either be thrown away or recycled at best. How many trees do you need for this and for the over large packaging?

The knives look great now and I had them installed on the new rack by 3.30 pm on Monday. That’s good going – a 24 hour turn round for job completion is fast. But isn’t it time Amazon looked at its wasteful packaging policies? No gold stars here for good environmental practice.

This revolution is particularly affecting communications and the transmission of information, shaking up industries like newspapers, publishing, book selling and telecoms. But will all the old ways just wither away? We think not and here’s an example in advertising of what we mean.

We like people to stay at The Larches because it’s a great place with an intriguing garden and belvedere. We tell the world about the cottage and facilities through our website and via the agents. But now we have hit on a simple non-digital idea: a card box for passers-by at the front of the cottage. The photo opposite shows the box by the road with the belvedere in the background at the top of the fellside garden.

Anyone interested in staying here and liking the look of the place can simply take a card with the address, postcode and booking details. A blended solution, mixing the old with the new!

And what’s so special about the card box? Made of recycled wood, it has a 20 mms thick perspex block at the front, enabling the cards to be seen but crucially kept set back from a possible wet front. [The close up photo below shows the rain on the lid.]

The lid lifts up to enable you to get your hand in to take the card; and there is a 15 mms deep wooden block above the sloping roof, which sheds the rain away from the hinge and area where there might be leakage.

Screwed to the gate post, the back base is made from waste oak flooring, with glue channels at the rear to allow the rain to drain down behind. All very practical and environmentally sound! We will have to explore patenting it.

PS We’re not forgetting the digital world completely! Just type “Lakeland belvedere” into Google maps and you’ll get full directions, telephone etc for The Larches. And if you have stayed at the cottage, you can write a review.

You can click on twitter.com/thelarches to get our latest tweets.

We’re also looking at the use of QR (Quick Response) coding with these cards. QR barcodes are easily created and can provide information (URL, location, contact number etc), which can be read instantly by a smartphone.

This includes a searchable database. You can type in your postcode and find out more about local practice and the policies of your local authority for the recycling of different kinds of materials. This is useful because these are changing as new techniques of sorting enable more to be collected and saved.

Allerdale local authority had managed in 2009 to achieve a recycling rate of 45%, but last year the figure dropped to 44%. When I asked Stephanie Fleming, Allerdale’s recycling officer about this, she replied “the weather’s got to take the blame here”. 

With so much flooding in November, the Council was overwhelmed with the sheer task of getting areas cleared and houses habitable. Water was covering huge areas and recycling for a while had had to take second place. Hard to argue about that!

But there is a bigger question here we need to ask. The EU has set a 50% target by 2020 for household recycling for the UK as a whole, but both Scotland and Wales have set their own higher targets of 70% for 2025. With no targets set for English authorities does this mean, say Friends of the Earth that we’ll shelter under the skirts of the Scots and the Welsh and lag behind? 

We know this Government is averse to the ‘nanny state’, but let’s see a bit more forceful direction on this front! Surely we need this if we’re going to create a green economy, which Ministers tell us they want.

Two other good Government websites on green issues are worth looking at. A more technical waste data flow site, (http://www.wastedataflow.org/) provides additional information about waste management across the country.  You need to register to get access to the data.

The second is for the Department of Energy and Climate Control  (http://www. decc.gov.uk/). This includes information about the Government’s Green Deal programme, with more details due out soon.

A new year’s resolution got us finally to move! And when the roof was stripped the rotten soffits and some defective joists proved how right we were. 

It’s been interesting to pull back the curtain of time to get a glimpse of how the house was built over 125 years ago and to see how roofing techniques while modified, still retain much of the traditional practice. Perhaps the biggest difference comes with the weather and wind proofing. 

The old roof was sealed throughout by parging. This is a method of coating the batons and the undersides of the tiles with parget – a mortar of lime and horsehair. Nowadays this has been replaced with a much simpler and quicker method, where a breathable membrane sheet is secured under the batons and the slates are nailed to the batons.       

Fortunately the original Borrowdale slates (about 10 mm thick) were strong and of good quality, as Frank the roofer had predicted, and the majority could be resized and reused without breakage. In this way the vernacular style of a graduated roof can be retained with the largest slates being used at the bottom and the smallest (and shortest) ones covering the top rows of the roof. Replacement ones are primarily for the bottom rows.

Since modern slates are almost invariably thinner (to reduce costs), second hand Borrowdale slates, suitable for environmentally sensitive areas and similar to the ones we have, are hard to come by and now sell at a premium price of £3,000 a ton.

The photos below show the back roof ready for the slates, the roofers working up the rows from the bottom, the look of the completed roof after a chimney has been removed and finally the filled lorry after the scaffolders have spent a morning dangling acrobatically from poles as they dismantled the scaffold and boards. It’s been fascinating to walk all round the house at roof level to see the work, but now we’re glad to be back to normal.

Are we doing enough though to create that inclusive world that recognises the needs of all, rich and poor alike? Recently retired UN climate negotiator Yvo de Boer thinks not. In an interview (24 November 2010) with the Guardian’s John Vidal, he argues that slow progress has been made with climate change negotiations because developing countries are suspicious that rich countries use the issue as a way of keeping them poor and are not sufficiently committed to green growth economies.

The follow-up international conference on climate change is to be held in Cancún, Mexico next week and already there’s a mood that the high hopes of last December’s Copenhagen conference have to be replaced with more modest objectives if anything is to be achieved.

In The Economist’s lead article this week “How to live with climate change”, there is the sobering conclusion that climate change ” . . . remains the craziest experiment mankind has ever conducted. Maybe in the long run it will be brought under control. For the foreseeable future, though . . . the human race must live with the problem as best it can.”  

Living and working in the same spot since 1902, they trace their antecedents back to John Harris, a Tyneside basket weaver who settled in the area in the 1850s, working initially as a forester and timber merchant. By the 1860s he had started the fairground business with his sons, buying one of their early steam roundabouts from a Tewksbury manufacturer in 1890.

Now run by five brothers and two sisters, the business involves transporting equipment and running their fairground in villages and towns all over this area of rolling downs, meadows and woodland. They also hire out individual items for weddings and special events. Volunteers, who love the laughter and excitement of the fairground scene join in regularly to help with the swing boats, roundabouts, gallopers and side shows.

Hard to classify, fun to be with and dining mostly together, the family extending across generations is like some utopian example of the Arts and Crafts movement – a time capsule that has refused to die. Living close to nature, they are above all immensely practical, turning their hands to any job.

They’re experts too at recycling, throwing little away and collecting useful items over the years. “Just put it under the hedge – you never know when it will come in handy”, says Rob, one of the brothers when I asked what they did with old gear. (See photo of field opposite they have recently acquired.) It reminded me of the MOMA Waste not installation we saw in New York last year.

The Scammel trucks for towing the equipment are ex WW2 stock, so you can’t just pick up the phone for a new spare part. A replacement for an axle on one was found from a hedged machine. Another truck was re-fitted with an old Rolls Royce engine (See photo at the top).

With a little imagination there’s not much they can’t find a useful home for. An old shop display model now keeps watch in a large greenhouse where the tent canvases are dried after a downpour. An old galloper (below) has been put out to grass – for the time being – on an empty landing. Objets trouvés like the old cow advert (below) reflect a simpler rural economy.

Can this real life example of Cameron’s Big Society idea – with up to 70 people actively involved in a small community based business – survive in an increasingly competitive and slick leisure field? The work is hard and seasonal and depends on hours of unpaid labour. Time only with tell. But if you have a chance, try out the Gallopers or the Paratroopers at their next Fun Fair. You won’t be disappointed with the experience or the friendliness of the Harris fairground.

We take for granted our sophisticated municipal services, but in the Berber villages, connected only by mule tracks and in cities like Fez, Meknes and Marrakech with their overcrowding, narrow alleys and limited resources, it’s hard to produce more than primitive refuse collection and recycling systems (See photo opposite in Marrakech).

Infrastructure and road schemes are helping to grow the economy fast and to address sub-regional disparities but they can be double edged. They have enabled fish caught in Essaouira to be distributed quickly to the north and abroad (Photo); and encourage industrial activity. But in coastal Safi intensive phosphate processing is hungry for water and has brought heavy atmospheric pollution.

Addressing global warming, pollution and resources depletion is complicated so generating public awareness is crucial. This is happening here with the UK’s 10:10 campaign to reduce carbon emissions by 10% by the end of 2010 (see Guardian Halfway report, “So far, so good” 10 July 2010).

But in developing countries this is a far harder task. In sun-soaked Morocco the Government’s commitment to provide electricity supply for all by 2010 (not actually fulfilled) seems if anything to have dampened enthusiasm for harnessing solar energy.

While trekking I only saw three small photovoltaic (PV) cell panels in use; whilst in Marrakech a rooftop snapshot from my riad showed one PV cell panel outnumbered by 18 satellite TV dishes. (See photo below of PV panel on Lepiney Refuge at 3000 m near Toubkal summit – © Athol Lester; and of Marrakech rooftops.)

Water too is a critical issue. Blessed with rainfall brought by Atlantic winds hitting the Atlas mountains, Morocco has a long history of capturing water for irrigation (see Photo right), but the growth of industry and tourism is increasing demand inexorably. Yet water seems to be treated as an endless supply and no attempt is made in hotels or elsewhere to encourage careful use and conservation.

It’s a good recycling story too. A schoolboy’s sturdy tuck box in the 1920s, it was converted into a traditional haybox in the seventies and then re-purposed again into a cluttered toolbox in the nineties. Neither of these uses had worked that well (hay is not a perfect insulator!) and a recent purchase of two smaller wooden toolboxes got me thinking of a greener future for the old family friend.

I found the ideal insulation material at B&Q for maintaining the existing heat in a casserole dish – a sheet of Polyfoam XPS 222551 Space Board (Dimensions: 1200mm x 500mm x 52.mm). Designed for lofts, it has the same energy saving capacity as 270 mm thick mineral wool insulation; and subsidised under the Government’s Carbon Emissions Reduction targets, it costs under £4 a sheet.

With a ruler, tape and sharp knife I soon had a central chamber created with two small cotton bags full of polystyrene packing chips to cover the lid of the 2-litre Le Creuset dish. A precisely cut piece of Space Board (with handles provided) is eased down to form the final sealing panel for the cooking chamber. It’s a simple way to cut energy use and save you money! (See photos below of the haybox in use).

Making it work is easy too. Prepare the stew or curry in the morning, fill the Le Creuset dish to within ½ inch of the top and bring the contents to a bubbling heat in the conventional oven. Then transfer it (Photo No 2) to the chamber of the Hi-tec haybox in the bootroom at The Larches and leave for 7-8 hours. There’s plenty for six people.

The verdict from Petra and Diana, our visitors this week from Schwerin in Mecklenberg-Western Pomerania? “Why’s it so hot after 8 hours and the meat so tasty and tender? …we need our husbands on the job next week to bring out a German version”!

Note also the pile of stones in the second photo. Rescued from an old building undergoing renovation, they’ll come in handy with a fellside rockery we’re designing for 2010. This will be on the left of the flight of steps leading from the Breakfast terrace up to the Belvedere. We plan to clear the ground of any bracken first. Let us know if you have ideas of particular alpine plants you’d like to see there.

This summer’s been warm – and wet at times – so plants and trees have grown rapidly. That’s not so good with the bracken which always needs pulling and cutting back, but the grass of the new south lawn (see photo opposite) has had a great start.

With the new containing walls, acer tree and seat it’s already looking like it’s been there for years!

Locking in the top of the path to the start of the stairway was always going to be tricky as we’d built the path a year before the Belvedere was even started and before we had decided how exactly the decking round the Belvedere would be linked to the path.

The result? The stairway down to the path was almost twice the width of the path and in limited light someone might step off the stairway – not onto the path – but onto a steep slope and lose their balance. The path needed widening. What could we use? Enter the old sandstone hearth (see top picture above).

This was making way for a new oak floor in a Victorian house of a similar vintage to The Larches but had been broken into separate pieces to enable its removal.

Measuring up showed we had a near perfect match (see 2nd picture) for the start of the path which could be then feathered into the existing path by adjusting the margin and using slate chippings. A great result! Good too that our first guests after installation were encouraged last week to have pre-dinner drinks in the Belvedere on six out of their seven nights here!