Worm Toast

SO just when you thought you had nothing to write about, someone delivers a wormery. (Actually dumped on your doorstep more than delivered. The delivery guy was obviously not a worm fan, or he thinks people who buy wormeries are unhinged and doesn't want to talk to them.)

The wormery is the latest in mr and mrs househusbandnot's attempts to be a little more environmentally friendly. It is basically a stack of trays that you put worms in so they can eat your leftovers and stuff, and produce compost for you to use on your garden. (We don't have a garden here at househusbandnot HQ. We are on the top floor of three flats. But we have a small terrace by the kitchen and a roof terrace up top.) You can pretty much put anything in the wormery for the worms to munch on, including food, vacuum cleaner dust and hair (bleah), tea and coffee granules, and shredded paper. They don't like (I'm reading this from the instructions manual now) plant seeds, citric fruit, dog or cat droppings (because they carry human pathogens apparently [How does that work? I don't think I want to know.]), glossy printed paper, or glass or metal or plastic - so there goes mrs househusbandnot's agenda for 'recycling' my cd collection which is doing her head in at the moment. (My favourite instruction in the instruction manual was "Avoid all oral contact with the contents of the wormery".)

In between humming the theme tune to The Good Life, I put the wormery together yesterday and set it up on the terrace by our kitchen. It is kind of cool in a wormy, composty, mad way. It looks like a medium sized barbecue, with legs and a series of trays that you move around to rotate the worms and the stuff you put in there for them to eat. Once it was all set up, I dug around the kitchen for anything on the 'worms can eat' list, but couldn't find anything. So I made them some toast.

So technically, mrs househusbandnot and I now have pets - 1,000 of them. I'm also really tempted by that hen in a box you can buy, although as a hen I'm not sure I'd want to live in a box on someone's roof terrace. As a worm with 9,999 of my family I think I'd be cool, as long as the coffee was good and I didn't have to eat CDs.

I don't think househusbandnot is going to become some sort of diary about trying to be green in London, but I thought it would have been disingenuous not to mention our new pets. Here's to them, boom boom.

In other brief news, went to a great little party last night organised by my friend Nick who is over from San Francisco. At one point during the party a big picture fell off the wall right next to Nick and I. I hate when that happens. (I think it was the gay bloke who got a bit huffy when I asked him why he had a tattoo on the back of his neck, and he said it was so people would have something to look at when they were sitting behind him on the bus, and I said "I really thought the second part of that sentence was going to end differently".)