Riverside finds

Pete, Nicola, Lola and Nell love to travel the world but like to find original ways to keep their carbon footprint down for the journey. This time we went back to medieval London

There's no such thing as away. When it comes to plastic bags in landfill this is a disaster. When it comes to the excitement of finding a 500 year old sole by the River Thames it's exciting.

Lola, Nell and I were showing a 9-year-old friend from Yorkshire, Izzy, around the South Bank recently and found an old shoe sole with little nails sticking out on the beach below the Tate Modern after getting our eye in spotting lots of bits of broken clay smoking pipes.

We gave the sole to our visitor to take home and her mum Julia showed it to an archaeologist. Can you believe it was more than 500 years old? Here's what the archaeologist said:

"I have looked at the shoe in the Museum of London Finds Catalogue and it is Medieval. It is a standard man's shoe (small size) that would probably have been worn by an artisan or merchant.Unfortunately its design remained the same for a very long period indeed and so it could date from anywhere from 1175 to about 1450. Aristocratic footware,the platform built pattens and pointy poulaines changed design frequently and so are more easily datable."

Taking the dogs out (style 3)

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Nicola (pic is of Fleur)

We think we may get a dog in September when we are back home, so caring for our friends' dogs has been a good trial run. I especially like the way they eat up food scraps: our hens are so fussy in comparison.

This lovely lady, Fleur, gets a lot of attention on walks, takes up a whole sofa, and is far too big to carry. That's why I'm hoping that the girls will be willing to have a much smaller (maybe handbag-sized?), pavement-shaded, London-savvy companion which will whisk out its own plastic bags to wrap up its poos and be able to fetch the newspaper on Sundays.

Time off in loo

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Pete, off-message but heartfelt he says (pic of an outdoor poo-er)

“There are loo seats I’ll remember all my life…” as the Beatles might have put it. Arriving in Glasgow on the sleeper at 7am, unable to use the loo while the train was in the station because of the anti-social consequences, it was a huge relief to find a clean, presentable Gents available for just 20p on the concourse. A contented traveller needs a decent loo. From my pre-climate awareness days there are many horrific lav stories; a drop loo in the Solomons where coconut crabs lay ready to nip your privates; the pungent pong of stale urine overflowing in a Bangkok bus station; Greek loos that didn’t take paper; continental squatting models; and more latterly tiger worms lurking beneath the sawdust in a green’s compost loo and the blue hell of the chemical toilet in the Dalmally bothy.

And now, for an anally retentive man, came the ultimate challenge; camping for four days at an Ullswater boat house without running water or loo facilities of any kind. Thus bowel movements involved unspeakable activities with trowels and paper burying the evidence among the trees, bracken, thistles, nettles and flies. Often amid a deluge. Soon we became expert at restraining nature and holding on until the café at the perhaps aptly-named Pooley Bridge (outside loo with cold water and a mirror) or the National Trust toilets at Aira Force (smelly but effective). What bliss to now be in Aberdeen with a fully functioning flush toilet. Thomas Crapper, inventor of the original water closet, you are a much-neglected genius.

What a lot of rubbish

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Nicola (the pic is taken in Carlisle)

Now that recycling is a part of most people's psyche - or at least with the weekly doorstep collections in London where we live there's no excuse for it not to be - it comes as a HORRIBLE shock to discover how terrible recycling collections are in some parts of the country still.

Obviously reusing is the best option, but lots of people don't seem to have even got recycling...

After the hottest day on record this year (26 degrees) most of the campers crowding Loch Lomond, now a national park, seemed to drive home leaving their rubbish behind. On just one small bay I picked up SIX bags of rubbish, including disposable BBQs, full tins of beans and packets of bacon. As there's no recycling down the long, winding lane to Rowardenan all this gets dumped in landfill. No Australian or Kiwi would do this - in the USA national parks visitors even tupperware their poo out.

It was a relief to find that mountain walkers don't seem to dump litter in the same way - on Skiddaw I found just one sweetie wrapper (yes, I picked it up) and Pete says Ben Lomond was litter free.

Wherever we've gone it's been hard to get rid of the rubbish we've collected. In Argyll & Bute - an area the size of Greater London - the supermarket at Oban has a couple of recycling bins and at Dalmally there are three bottle banks (for clear, green and brown glass) beside cattle crushes that have been unused for so long they have sprouted foxgloves. In the district of Stirling there were no alumnium recycling spots for visitors, cans can only be recycled in the domestic collections. This is mystifying as Scotland has millions of visitors who'll be struggling to get rid of their drinks' containers responsibly.

Further south, in the Lake District, Cockermouth town council allegedly plans to close one of its public glass recycling spots because it's inconvenincing mums on the school run (this sounds so crazy I wonder if I read it right).

None of the big train/bus stations we've been through - Euston, Glasgow, Workington (though it holds the record for being the first UK-purpose built bus station with covered roof!), or Carlisle have recycling facilities either for water bottles or coke cans.

If you are unlucky enough to live in a place where you still struggle to recycle you could try contacting your local Friends of the Earth group http://www.foe.co.uk/ which is sure to be up on what you can do to help sort it out.