We are always glad to have suggestions for improvements at the Larches and rapidly decided we needed to get two new knives – a bread knife and cook’s knife – when our New Year guests commented about the existing ones.
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.
There’s been plenty of rain around in January but it has only stopped us from going up on the cloud covered high tops. There’s lots else to do!
We’ve been delighted to see that the snowdrops are well out already in the garden and on the lane running up to the cottage. These ‘harbingers of Spring’ as Wordsworth called them – have come really early this year and there are even daffodils appearing in the road to Thornthwaite off the A66.
There may be snow on occasions on high ground – to try out your crampons and ice axe techniques if you wish – and you have the fells to yourself for much of the time, quite often with sun and blue skies.
Yes, you’ll have guessed that we are talking about the ospreys, who returned this year to the Derwent Valley in April. Since we built the Belvedere three years ago with its wide range view across the marshes, we’ve been keeping an eye out for the ospreys. In 2008 they moved, conveniently for us, to a site in Dodd Wood which was visible from the Belvedere, though hard to see in any detail as over 1.5 miles distant.
We received news however last week from Lee Gretton who was staying at The Larches in August. He confirmed what we thought: “The osprey’s nest is easy to view from the Belvedere. I spent quite a lot of time with the binoculars watching them flying across the marshes”. The photo at the top shows the view through the binoculars of the bare tree with the nest. The site is indicated with a grey magnifying glass at bottom left of the photo.