Pomegranates - the land fill connection

Pomegranates. Punica granatum. Love them or hate them, you can't ignore them. Or maybe you can. In fact I think I did ignore them for far too long. Even now they are an occasional purchase that enter my fruit eating orbit about twice a year.

The problem with pomegranates is their packaging. Their leathery skin is the devil to peel. It's easy to be too rough and split the pips with all its sticky consequences. Equally it is difficult to avoid the bitter-tasting yellow pith that binds the pips together.

Having said that, there are few sights in nature more satisfying than the snugly fitting arrangement of pips on the inside of a pomegranate.

My quandry is whether they are worth the effort. Down at my local Waitrose I was about to reach for one of these six-monthly challenges when out of the corner of my eye I saw a flat-pack plastic box of pomegranate pips. I guess there would have been the equivalent of a single fruit.

Comparing costs, the ready-pipped fruit was priced about the same as the full fruit. The equation didn't stack up. I would have thought that "pomegranate minus effort" would have been more expensive than "pomegranate plus labour". So I bought the box, feeling a little bit pleased with myself... until I got home.

"You should have bought the pomegranate," said Gill. "The last thing we need is more packaging. We have to take a stand."

Gill, my wife, is our household recycling gauleiter. This means we have upended tin cans drying on the radiator and more uses for a plastic milk container than Blue Peter had for its ubiquitous Squeezy bottle.

The rest of the family has been a little tardy in learning all we need to know about recycyling but Gill appears to be ahead of the game since there are new proposals for councils to penalise those who don't recycle and reward those who do.

The danger here is that penalties will encourage fly tipping or the clandestine emptying of rubbish in to the bins of neighbours. How long will it be before we have locking wheelie bins? I would go for incentives every time. I remember taking back crates of bottles for the refunds you had on the empties when I was a boy. At the same time we carted old woollens to the "rag man" and bits of lead and copper to the scrap metal dealer. Recycling is virtuous and necessary. We don't have the land fill to cope with increasing levels of waste.

Incentives or taxes should also be levied on those who produce packaging such as the pomegranate pippers. As a born-again recycler I must recant any previous attraction to packaged pips. How could anyone believe they could better nature's glorious packaging? The pomegranate is the future, sticky pips, pith and all.

Cupboard love

They call it cupboard love when your cat rubs against your leg and purrs for the sole purpose of gaining your attention, a strategy with one end in mind - food. The cat knows how to push our buttons and we fall for it every time. So it's cupboard love, we argue. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

No-one understands this interaction better than the public relations industry. The PRs have my telephone number. They know that I answer my own phone. So they ring and they ring and they ring. The sad thing is, if they didn't ring, I would probably start to feel lonely.

There are times when the PR has been desperate to get off the line as I tell them my life story. It's their own fault. Whether they are men or women, most PRs are brimming with empathy. I think they must manufacture the stuff in the back room. Before they make their call they take a good munch on their empathy bar.

I know that PRs - the good ones, at least - are reading this blog. They visit my site to find out what I'm up to. So here is a message for you: yes, I am a moody bugger and yes, if I sound clipped or sharp on the phone, it does mean that I'm under deadline pressure. Either that or I am temporarily annoyed at one of the countless irritations that bug me every day.

If you have a juicy report don't email it as a pdf. My printer is disconnected because some kind of software conflict crashed my computer. There is another that I can use in an emergency but I am reluctant to do so and it involves sending the report on by email to my wife's machine. Anyway, the long and the short of it is, if you really want me to read a report then send it the old fashioned way, by post. My address is on the site under "contact details". I'm not sure how I can make myself more accessible.

You don't need to call me to say that it's coming, or call to ask whether I have received it, or call to ask what I think of it or whether I shall be using it. But you will because that's part of your training, because you know that I get so much stuff I can't take it all in. You know that stuff gets overlooked. You know that I'm not at all organised. You know also that I would rather not use your stuff unless it is really adding something to our sum total of knowledge which, let's face it, that cursory ring around your friends - loosely called a survey - rarely does.

Sometimes you call to ask me what I think of a prospective client. What's that all about? I don't like having my brains picked. The stuff inside my head is my meal ticket. I not only write for cash (see A black day for England, my first post), I think for cash too. Some of the stuff I think about is good-for-nothing rubbish. Some has potential, but needs a bit of work. And some is pure, applied, down-on-screen reader-loving prose soon to be jetting its way to a hungry publisher who I love in the way that a cat loves its keeper. Which, I think, is where we came in.

So keep it coming PRs. I love you all. I'd love to see your comments on this or any post. Go on, you know you want to. I can take it.