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.
Out yesterday in the late afternoon, I surprised myself how quickly I could get down to Bassenthwaite’s shoreline. Just 25 minutes walking from The Larches and I was looking across to Ullock Pike and Dodd Wood and facing a stiff wind from the NE, which was furrowing the lake’s surface and throwing up threads of plume as the waves hit the shore. A friendly greeting from a kissing couple was all but lost on the gusting wind.
We’ve been fans of Keswick’s Saturday market for years, so it was natural that we would want to take a look this month at the 
Only a mile from Chicago’s downtown skyscrapers, the Lincoln Park market stalls are full of a wide range of produce and provide a marvellous contrast of colours.
But this is not big business like the average 450 acre farms in the prairies of Illinois and Iowa, where millions of tons of field corn (or maize) are grown every year for home beef production, for the rapidly expanding Chinese market and for ethanol production.
The same however does not apply to the farmers’ markets in rural areas where jobs are limited and wages low and unemployment, well over the national rate of 9%, is hitting communities hard.
