5 Fake Meats For The Next Decade
If you’re a vegetarian, or if you eat “proper” meats, you might laugh at tales of tumours and lips found in low quality meats. But what exactly goes in to fake meats? Those waxy strips of plasticine, spongy blobs and weird flexible patties. Perhaps they pile parsnip anuses into these things?
Three Years Later: An Allotment
Three years ago I joined a list. The infamous Allotment List. If, like many urban Tiny Gardeners, you too have entertained ideas of growing your own vegetables on one of these hallowed sites, chances are your dreams crashed back down to earth with a wet thud.
Apparently, for every allotment plot in the UK, there are 30 people (or 300 eager green fingers) waiting to grab it. The waiting list for some Central London plots can be up to 10 years. In Camden, it’s 40 years. FORTY YEARS! You could grow another limb in that time.
Trash talk
AMSTERDAM - Long before the ‘plastic soup’, the huge floating rubbish dump in the Pacific, hit the headlines, I had an odd fascination with litter. As a kid, while my friends were doing sponsored walks to raise money for charity, I was doing sponsored litter picks. On a three-kilometre stretch of road near my house, I could fill 10 bin bags with refuse that passing motorists had thrown out of their windows.
Say nuts to soap?
LONDON - Have you heard of soap nuts? The natural alternative to detergents? We decided to put them to the test.
Honestly, the last thing that comes to mind when you see the little brown pellets is soap. They grow on the branches of the tropical sapindus shrub. But, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they’ve been squeezed direct from the buttocks of jungle beasts.
Nazi courgette
LONDON - If a pigeon lands in your garden, does it get wedged? Would a drinking straw function as a perfectly good garden hose for your crop? If you want to grow your own vegetables, but you’re space-challenged, read on. I propose starting a help group of sorts. You know, to get things out in the open. We’ll call it The Tiny Garden Movement. I’ll kick things off: “My name is Paul and I have a tiny garden. I said GARDEN”.
Paint like poo
AMSTERDAM - The earth’s natural resources are running out but more and more people are cutting the crap and changing their lifestyles to do their bit for the planet. In order to ‘walk the talk’ I’m trying to do my part, one step at a time. This week: paint like poo!
Sir Dave, saviour of the universe
“Sir Dave, Gentle Voice
Calmly Explaining the Fact
That we’re all doomed”
There, that’s my David Attenborough haiku. I’m sorry to put you through it.
You see, I saw the great man speak last night at the Brighton Festival. Frankly, I would happily listen to him read the instructions to a flat-pack wardrobe.
Photo by: Slimmer Jimmer
Mysterious bike theft in Paris
A while ago I was in Paris. I visited the vertical gardens, sipped ten euro beers (slowly) and dodged Velib hire bikes. Have you seen these things? They’re great.
You pay for a kind of cycle travel card, then pick one of 20,000 bikes from over a thousand parking spots citywide and drop them off when you’re done. The actual bikes are right out of those “Technology of the Futuuuuurrrre” films from the 1950s (with a tad less hovering, obviously).
Charles
We have a cleaner. His name is Charles. Charles is a man of few words. When he picks up the phone all he mumbles is: “Charles”. At first I can never figure out who’s calling me. “Who’s there?” I say. He responds with more mumbling, until eventually he screams his name out of pure frustration:
Photo by: Kate Yay
Albino and fox save city trees
Who’d be a city tree? Shat upon by hordes of feral pigeons. Lubricated and pebble-dashed by vomiting and urinating humans. Gnawed to matchsticks by vicious squirrels and deranged bankers. Yup, it’s a tough life, this tree life. But all is not lost.
