What are you doing for Easter?

Here we are, with Christmas memories still lapping at the back of our mind's - and its Easter.

Greeks do Easter really well. Easter 2004 I was one of eight in a motley crew of backpackers who found themselves in a hostel on Corfu. It was the opening weekend of the season, and the family running the hostel weren’t quite sure what to do with us. So they just included us in the family’s Easter celebrations.

In between drinking and playing seemingly endless rounds of Kings and Assholes we were piled into a mini-bus and driven into town. Good Friday was full of pathos and candle lit pilgrimages through the old city. Saturday morning at exactly 11am all the locals threw clay pots out of their windows, smashing them in the street. Seriously crazy stuff. Dodging flying clay pots is a special skill. It is good luck to keep a piece of the pot; mine still lives on my shelf with other special treasures.

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I love balloons. The way they fly in silence has a magical quality.

I also love parties, particularly themed ones where we all get dressed up and create our own fantasy evening at a Roman feast or as part of a science fiction or fairy story. Parties and balloons go very well together.

Lately though, I have started to worry that using balloons was making me an evil polluter. I put off looking into this – as I really didn’t want to give up on my balloons.

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Choose Your Bottle

Now that we have all opted out of buying bottled water, let’s look at our refillable bottle options.

Keeping in mind the ‘good’ basics (good for the people that make them, sell them, buy them and good for the environment), I’ve been busy stocking up on water bottles. For those of you who are very organised, you are probably thinking ‘Can’t you just keep refilling one?’ Well – yes you can, but if you are a little vague and disorganised like me you need a lot of spares. Best to have a couple ready in the fridge that I can grab as I run out the door whilst running late having left my other three empties scattered in the car, other handbag, at Mum's...

Before talking bottles however, I would like to make a dedication to the CamelBak concept. For those of you who have ever done any hiking, you will know what I am talking about. It is this fantastic way of carrying water around in a plastic bladder (usually kept in a backpack) with a hose attached, so that you can drink via the ‘bite valve’ without having to stop and open a bottle. CamelBak call it a ‘Hands Free Hydration System’. You can drink pretty much constantly as you are walking, running, riding or whatever without breaking stride. I highly recommend this if you are off on your weekend adventure. The CamelBak is also very good for hanging from your bedhead when hungover and enabling water consumption without lifting your head from the pillow. Warning: Do not drink vodka this way.

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Your Butt is not Cute

Believe it or not, there are still people that smoke. I know – it is so seventies. Despite the fact that no matter where you look there is someone or something telling them how truly awful smoking is for their health.

To be honest, if people make a personal choice to smoke – I don’t really have a problem with it – it’s their life. But do they have to drop their butts everywhere? This I get heated about. How heated? I have been known to chase someone down the street to give them their butt back. It wasn’t pretty.

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The Great Garbage Hunt

I headed off this bright Sunday morning ready to hunt down garbage. It was especially exciting as the meeting point for my Clean Up Australia Day hunting troupe was at the Fire Station, known to be a likely hang out for firemen.

Alas, I got to the Fire Station and there was no one to be seen. Not to be deterred I trotted off down to the foreshore and hooked up with another group of garbage hunters, who were doing a stellar job cleaning up the foreshore. Got my hunting kit - bag and gloves - and started stalking garbage along the footpath.

It was interesting looking at the mix of what was actually strewn around (really – it was). I bagged the big five  - plastic bottles, plastic bags, glass beer bottles, take-away food containers and coffee cups. But it was the smaller species hidden in the undergrowth that filled the bag - lots and lots of cigarette butts, beer bottle lids and plastic straws.

It seemed to me that maybe people are a little better at putting the bigger items in the bin – but seem to think that the smaller stuff doesn’t really matter? Mmm.

What was really distressing were the plastic bags and bottles floating around in the water. They were often hard to get to – and all I could picture was them floating out to sea to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The hunt was on. There was one silver plastic bag that kept escaping my grasp. I was determined to reach it - struggling over oyster covered rocks – teetering on the edge of extreme embarrassment...

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Bottles, Bottles Everywhere

When I go for my daily walk...ok, my ‘few times a week’ walk... I walk past at least fifty people along Glebe foreshore. And every single one of them walks past this :

Two things struck me about the garbage that washes up here; it is almost entirely made of plastic water bottles – and no one ever stops to pick it up. Lucky it is Clean Up Australia Day tomorrow.

I remember when bottled water first appeared in Australia. It was actually seen as a bit of a joke at the time – I mean – what idiots would pay for water in a bottle when you can get it free from the tap? Australians now spend half a billion dollars on bottled water each year. Note that this does not even include sparkling water and the like – it refers specifically to still water sold in ‘single use’ plastic bottles. The global consumption of bottled water is upwards of 1.5 billion litres.

Producing and delivering a litre of bottled water can emit hundreds of times more greenhouse gases than a litre of tap water. According to British research, drinking one bottle of water has the same environmental impact as driving a car for a kilometre, and in many cases, a litre of bottled water is more expensive than a litre of petrol.

But the really scary thing is that those water bottles floating around on our beautiful Sydney Harbour don’t stay put. Oh so gradually all the plastic floating around our oceans will work its way to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A great ‘floating soup’ of plastic estimated to be twice the size of Texas.

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Jeans – Going Nudie

Did you know that the average American woman has eight pairs of jeans in her closet? This led me to look in my wardrobe (what we Australian’s call closets) – I have five pairs. I’m guessing this is because I’m either 1) not American or 2) below average. Let’s go with option 1).

Approximately 450 million pairs of jeans are sold in America each year. That’s 1.25 pairs of jeans for every person in America. In Australia and the UK we average out at more like 0.25 pairs of jeans per person per year. Keeping in mind this includes babies and grandmas this is still a lot of jeans.

Me – I pretty much buy one new pair every year as I rotate last year's into my ‘comfies’ pile. Just before Christmas, I realised I was overdue for an update. I was specifically after skinny leg, dark jeans that I could wear with my patent leather black heels.

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