Blagger » Asides

What The Good Life can tell us about self-sufficiency

Nik — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:17:46 +0000

We’re re-watching The Good Life. It’s a lot gentler and rather more ‘situation’ than ‘comedy’ than might you remember, but it’s still an easy wind-down at the end of the day (and three of the characters, of course, were the inspiration for the names of our chickens).

The Guardian today has imagined the discussions that went on at the BBC when they were pitching the story, and pretty much shows us why self-sufficiency might be considered a bit silly in this day and age.

Stupid non-hippy hippy gives up a perfectly respectable job in order to become a horny-handed son of toil. Instead of trotting out to nearest, lovely, convenient supermarket for the week’s food, he wants to ignore 800 years of human effort, innovation and ingenuity – bringing us agonisedly to a point in history where we are finally free of the necessity of constant labouring for survival – and go back to growing his own instead? (full text on The Guardian)

But then perhaps vegetarianism is a bit silly, too. Humankind didn’t fight its way to the top of the food chain to eat leaves. Not that I’m going to go back to meat now.

I’ve embedded this Good Life clip before, but it still makes me laugh

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Free Delia Smith DVDs

Nik — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 11:01:02 +0000

Far be it from me to promote the Daily Mail, but the paper is giving away four Delia Smith DVDs this week. You have to pick up a paper every day, starting today and redeem the voucher inside it in WHSmith or Tesco. The three remaining tokens are printed on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

Money for nothing

Nik — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 21:17:56 +0000

Not only do we champion the low-cost lifestyle here at Blagger; we also like the idea of easy income, which is why we were interested to read strategies for prize-winning in the latest edition of The Week. Quoting from The Guardian, it has handy hints for getting onto TV quiz shows: ‘Remember personality is what counts at auditions. Play dumb: experienced players deliberately get up to a third of questions wrong at auditions.‘ So that explains Jade Goody’s extraordinary ‘celebrity’.

Compost

Nik — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 12:28:20 +0000

A little premature perhaps, but Compost Guide is an excellent source of information on – not surprisingly – composting your biodegradable home waste. I’m linking to it here for future reference, as it includes an excellent table of the products you can put in your home compost bin, and what kind of beneficial effects they will have on the finished product.

Green paper

Nik — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 11:19:36 +0000

Websites aren’t as fun to read as papers, but they are greener. So, get the best of both worlds with G24. It’s five condensed versions of the Guardian, updated throughout the day, available to download for free as a PDF. Best of all, they have the same look and feel as the printed paper itself.