Late night but it’s hard to actually sleep in so I got up to bring Jen to her photography course. Listened to ‘Falling to pieces’ by The Script on the radio on the way back – good song.

Breakfast of French toast (with bacon and maple syrup) and Earl Grey tea at The Lennox Café, our local that is all of a hop, skip and a jump from our door. Sitting in the morning sun reading The Sunday Times.

Some interesting articles:

Niall Toner on recycling…he speaks about the new thing in everyone’s life – waste – and how there are still a lot of materials and packaging that can’t be put in the green bin. My thinking is that one should put everything vaguely possible in there. NT mentions the necessity of removing the labels on cellophane…even I’ll admit this to be a bridge too far and a waste of time. I do wash out plastic meat trays (and take-away trays and microwave meal trays) and put them in the green bin, though.

He also mentions the depressing fact that a lot of our recycling gets shipped off to China. We should develop our recycling processing, surely? As an island we need to be self-sufficient with our disposal. Why not bury clean all-the-same-type plastic for future ‘harvesting’? It’s not going anywhere and might prove valuable (I’ve seen Back To The Future 2) whereas now it’s a costly headache. Let’s concentrate on the composting problem, which is much more pressing and smelly…

Good to see non-faith-based summer camps for kids springing up in the UK. Poor Richard Dawkins gets a bit of a bashing in Lois Rogers’ piece, although conspicuously more on the front page… He has done remarkable work.

Sarah McInerney writes about the Constitution. Seems like it needs changing (I have to admit I’ve never read it) to be, well, better. There have been loads of recommendations by committees of clever people that have been ignored by government. Change it! We can always fix it again down the line but let’s make it right now, for us and our children.

Family at the next table had a retired guide dog – lovely idea and I found myself smilingly respecting him or her. They also briefly talked about Michael Jackson’s death. The papers are full of more sordid detail (which I ignored). There is *perhaps* an argument for the usefulness of celebrity-watching as a moral reference point but it is such a shocking waste of time. I feel similarly about sport which is granted its own supplement so I can just ignore it. Is it too much to hope that papers might one day do the same with celebrity fluff?

Anyway, Michael Jackson is pop music for people of my age (+/- a generation). If you’re jaded by the same handful of songs that the radio will offer find ‘Speed Demon’ from the Bad album. Programmed bass line, blistering horn parts that’ll blow you away and that voice…brimming with energy and literally bursting out around the melody with soul. Genius.