What we did with our summer

Taking a look back

As the children have gone back to school/college I can settle back to my routine (which seems a bit of a struggle at the moment). We have had a good summer, we have taken full advantage of living so close to the sea by swimming a lot and being outdoors at every opportunity. It didn’t matter that our kitchen table got covered as breakfast, lunch and tea were eaten outside.

Getting into the swim of things

One of the things I did this summer was observe whether I thought there was less plastic around. We often swim at Lyme Regis first thing in the morning. One of the things they have is a tractor pulling a trailer that sieves the sand. We did try to time our swims so that there would be just our sets of footprints walking out of the sea on the sieved sand - Bond girl like!

We also play water polo at Lyme in the evening and I can’t recall there being much rubbish on the beach in the evening.

Music under sunny skies

We went to Carfest this year, the festival organised by Chris Evans originally on Radio 2 with the proceeds going to Children in Need. I haven’t been before so can’t compare it to last year. When we arrived to pitch our tent, we were given a leaflet about our rubbish and two bags a black one for general waste and a clear one for recycling. In the festival itself, general waste bins and recycling bins were next to each other so there was no reason not to put your rubbish in the correct bin. There was also some decorated bins made by Grundon.

There didn’t seem to be much litter, we did see people going around with litter pickers and there were litter picking stations. I think the only exception to this was after the bands finished one night we watched a couple pack away their things, they even checked around with their phone torch to make sure that they hadn’t left anything and they they left leaving pile of rubbish, for someone else to pick up! The bars at Carfest used reusable plastic glasses so there wasn’t any of the usual disposable glasses littered around.

There were loads of water refilling stations all around the festival, so there would have been no need to buy single use plastic bottles of water and also the water was lovely and cold, which we needed as it was a scorcher of a weekend. According to what we read, this was new for this year, so that was a significant step, especially, as it was freely available.

A challenge for 2020

The girls and I have recently decided to do the Moonwalk in London in May. This is a 26-mile walk through the night in aid of breast cancer research. This is our challenge for next year, to see whether we can walk through the night without any sleep and not get on each other’s nerves! We need to do our training through the winter, so there can be no excuses that it’s rainy. We are at present exploring all the lanes around Axminster.

Me and hubby will sometimes do a reccy  on our bikes first. As our training progresses, we will gradually increase our circle around Axminster. At the moment we are concentrating on increasing our pace and distance, but once we get fitter, I think our walks will also turn into litter picks, removing the rubbish thrown into the hedges.

 To read more blogs from Swizzle and Friends, click here

To find out more about Carfest, click here.