So we got to the end of our Lenten plastic fast and here is the sum of the plastic we bought in the 40 days:

We then split the pile into the stuff that we can’t recycle (bottom left) and that which we can (bottom right). We think that it’s not bad going for 40 days, although as blogged about previously, we couldn’t survive without plastic totally for that time. In addition to our previously declared “failures” (where we’ve bought plastic), in the last couple of weeks we added:

• A bag of cous cous – this was to accompany stuffed aubergines that we did when we had friends round, and we couldn’t find it anywhere without plastic packaging.
• A bag of rice – as above, we were entertaining and had decided to do a vegetable curry…which you have to have rice to go with. Try as we might, the only rice without plastic packaging that we found was risotto rice.
• More vegetable stickers – to our joy we discovered satsumas in cardboard packaging, so that reduced the number of stickers, but we still ended up with lots of pepper, apple and aubergine stickers!
• Two bottles of Pepsi – now this one we’re really embarrassed about…we entirely forgot that we were doing the plastic fast until we came to recycling them after buying and consuming them!
• Antibiotics – unavoidable really!

So two weeks have now passed since Easter and has our outlook on plastic changed in life? We’d like to say “yes”…but if we’re being honest, the convenience and cost of things in plastic mean that we’ve strayed a bit. Why would we buy individual peppers at 80p each when we could get a bag of 4 “basics” peppers for the equivalent of 37p each? We also immediately re-stocked the herbs and spices as well as buying a jar of peanut butter once we could buy plastic again (small pleasures!).

Where possible we still buy our vegetables loose – onions and carrots rolling about in the bottom of a basket aren’t any inconvenience for us. We’re determined to continue making our own bread – it may take a little longer, but it’s cheaper and you can’t beat the smell of fresh bread! We’ve also tried to keep the amount of meat that we eat low, as that previously was an area of our diet that generated lots of plastic.

All in all it’s been an interesting journey of awareness for us and we’d really recommend the experience to anyone else. Will we do the same again next Lent? Probably not…but we’ll try to do something equally as creative!

Nearly a month after we bought Bertha (our beast of a 1990 motorhome), we’ve finally had a free weekend to start some work on her. We chose to begin by giving her a good clean inside and out, but also by investigating a little damp bit of carpet we’d spotted beneath the rear seat in the back corner (opposite the toilet). We’d done some detective work online and found this posting about some damp made by the previous owner back in 2010 (shortly after he bought her), however we didn’t know the extent of any fixes he had made.

After we’d dismantled the seat, stripped back the carpet and pulled away rotten and sodden walls, this is what we’re left with:

So we set up a heater to dry it out so that we can assess the damage a little more, but we think we’ve found the culprit – the seams at the rear were pretty badly sealed (as mentioned in the previous owner’s posting). So we cleaned the seams properly and as we were doing so, the wooden batons inside changed from damp to wet. We then applied a little bit of lots of Sikaflex (caravan sealant – nasty stuff to work with) and have left it to dry with the heater sorting out the interior. Once that’s done we can replace all of the rotten batons, polystyrene insulation and plywood inside. Here’s one of the seams in all its glory – covered first in nastiness, then cleaned, then slathered in Sikaflex:

In other news, as we tested out the water pump for the first time today, water gushed from our Paloma heater (obviously added by the previous owner as per his posting). We checked the drainage plug on the heater which was very stiff and very closed, so we guess that water was left in there during the winter, which has burst a pipe or component inside. What fun! That’s for another time!

As for the cleaning? Well, Bertha is now much cleaner on the outside and we’ve made a start on the inside, but there’s still plenty to do!