Compost Mentis

All this talk of the humble loo-roll being elevated to the position of moral barometer of the nation (at this point my Editor is warning me of the dangers of being too verbose) reminds me of a recent, and very entertaining, lunchtime. But how I got there is a bit of a tale. Bear with me...

About this time of year two years ago, I was on a train North of here, which took me through grain farming country: to be more specific, bare fields in the spring (pedantic note: technically it is still spring until the longest day). There had been driving rain all night, but the wind had finally blown it all away and the sun was shining on the newly-ploughed fields. The rain may have gone but the wind had unfinished business. In field after field, I could see a sort of earthy spindrift blowing from the crests of each ploughed ridge, forming faint brown clouds which billowed away, presumably into the North Sea. No photographic equipment was available, so I'm afraid readers of this blog will just have to slum it with a picture of part of Chateau Lunchista's loo-roll-tube hoard (we use them for planting beans in).

Now I am no farmer, but I have a vicarious interest in other people's farms because their produce, by a long and tortuous route, eventually becomes my lunch. And so I began to wonder, is it possible to run out of soil? Which is how I ended up on the mailing list of The Rotters, who do what they can to promote things like composting.

An email came through asking if anyone could donate loo-roll tubes, so I took our hoard round to Rotter HQ. It transpired that they had arranged for a stall at a schools' science festival, and parts of the rota needed extra hands, so I took lunchtime on the opening day. Groups of 20 or so children came and sat at our tables, on which we had deployed all the kit: compost caddies (full), scissors, sellotape, newspaper, and loo-rolls.

We had exactly 20 minutes to explain what compost is, then on to how to cut, fold and tape up the loo-rolls into miniature plant-pots, help everybody do this (without mistakes), watch them fill the little pots up with compost, put a sunflower seed in each, show how they could be wrapped with newspaper so that they could be taken home without spilling compost everywhere (again without mistakes), before finally handing out information sheets about compost and the care of sunflowers, waving cheerio to everybody, tidying up and setting out the next lot of kit. You couldn't hang about.

I might as well mention the backdrop for all this worthy activity: we were in the cavernous main hall of the city's Railway Museum. Great for a bit of trainspotting, not so hot for being able to hear yourself think. Since Teacher was therefore out of earshot (but not out of sight) we could have a bit of a laugh. Swapping the scissors for the left-handers: "All the best people are left-handed: President Obama, Prince William, Napoleon..." Describing how to wrap up the little tubes became "Imagine you're wrapping up a bottle of gin for your granny for Christmas" (well it could have been worse: it could have been a Molotov), and of course someone, inevitably, asked about slugs. "Oooh yes, you get great big fat ones, you have to keep them off your sunflower" "How d'you do that, Miss?" "You go out at night after it's been raining, you find them and you squash them with a brick!" Lots of people asked if you got bugs of various sorts in compost: it could get quite graphic. Ever noticed you can get a lot of kudos from a ten-year-old for that kind of thing?

Apart from trying to out-gross me (and not succeeding!), the kids were actually quite well-behaved. They seemed to enjoy making their little sunflower Molotovs and were perhaps even relishing the prospect of nagging their parents about composting when they got home. There was no swearing or lobbing great fistfuls of compost into the delicate inner workings of the Flying Scotsman. Lunchista would make a terrible teacher though: I'm just incorrigible!