REFUGEES, TREES AND COAT HANGERS

Hallo, I'm Fennie Somerville - officially Assistant Editor of EuropaWorld, but really just general dogsbody. Or General Dogsbody if I'm feeling cross and bossy. Anyway it's my turn to write the blog this week. Our second entry as it were.

Looks like I'm going to have to live up to the General Dogsbody title - for I'm going to tell you you to make a dive for two websites that you'll pick up if you read Europaworld attentively (which I know you all do!) but which to save time I shall repeat here.

The first is just a search engine - http://click4thecause.live.com/ but every time you look something up Microsoft will give a donation to the UN's Refugee Agency, UNHCR, to provide sports and education facilities for refugee children around the world. Look something up now and you'll have the satisfaction of having made the world a (slightly) better place.

If you become bored with this and want some other stimulation you can turn to another website www.unep.org/billiontreecampaign. The United Nations Environment Programme are looking for people and organisations to pledge themselves to plant trees to help offset the damage done by fossil fuel carbon emissions. You can pledge yourself to plant any number of trees and of any sort. I visited their website and pledged to plant two - a walnut and a chestnut - which I rescued when on holiday.

They will go into my garden and will begin assimilating carbon dioxide, just as soon as their leaves open in Spring. It may only be a tiny step but if everybody that reads EuropaWorld pledged to plant just two trees a year, we'd have a sizeable forest before long.
But it won't be enough just to plant trees. We'll have to cut down on waste as well. This is not always easy as the following little story (well this is supposed to be a blog!) shows

Standing in the payment queue recently with a basket of trophies carefully won from the sale racks of our local Marks and Spencer store, I was beckoned forward by a delightful lady behind the desk who spoke in a deep, husky voice, heavy with Slavic drawl. I suspect she may have been Polish.

We could have talked about Poland. But no, we didn't talk about Poland, we talked about coat hangars. No, we didn't talk about coat hangers, we negotiated about coat hangers. I had three hangers in my basket and a legion of hangers surplus to requirements in my wardrobe. "Do you want the hangers," she intoned, fixing me with her dark and glowing eyes."No thanks, I've got plenty," I replied airily.

Those were the opening gambits on both sides. She was insistent that hangars were what was needed to stop the wardrobe filling up with clothes. I said there were charity shops, which were always glad of one's surplus vestments. She sighed. There followed a negotiation - she extolling the virtues of coat hangers and I desperately trying to get her to take them from me. These are hangers, I wanted to say, not orphan kittens.

Needless to say she won. Two one in fact. Fennie had to keep two hangers, while she sighed and sorrowfully agreed to keep one. Other people have arguments over the price of the goods or about whether there is a minute tear on the sleeve. I have arguments over clothes hangers. And all the time we are creating mountains of waste!

Posted by Fennie Somerville