Category Archives: Equipment

Laptop lunches, the best lunchboxes ever

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The Laptop Luncbox. Clockwise from top left: a popping candy chocolate lolly; grapes; fennel; ham sandwiches. Most of these inner boxes also have lids. But we never rarely feel the need to use them as the main lunch box has a lid that closes down on everything.

I need to warn you, immediately, that these lunchboxes are neither cheap, nor easy to get.

But they are worthwhile if you can get hold of one. Let me tell you about them.

Some years ago, in early 2008 to be precise, I was still co-founder, and a very active part of an excellent parenting website called I Want My Mum. It doesn’t exist anymore as we shut it down last year. But it was a great place for collective wisdom.

When my eldest was due to start school, I asked the mums and dads on there what lunchboxes they’d recommend and a few of them said Laptop Lunchboxes. Which were, then, available to buy in the UK.

LLBs consist of a main lunch box with a lid, and in this are four other boxes, some with lids, some without. The whole lot sits in an insulated, zip up bag. The beauty of it is that it helps you think outside the box (yes, yes) with what you put in the lunchbox, and also you don’t end up with loads of un-eco wrapping or loads of renegade plastic boxes. Of course, despite best intentions, our eldest still goes to school with sandwiches 99% of the time, but she also has crudites, potato salad, orange segments, grapes etc. They all fit beautifully inside and are protected from the disdain that a young child, quite rightly, treats its lunchbox. Her lunchbox (made mostly by her father) is a thing of beauty and the one I’ve photographed above is my youngest’s first lunch made in her lunch box. It was incredibly boring but she wanted something fast to take on a great cycling expedition around the garden and it’s the only photo I have. But imagine colourful wonderfulness spilling from every box and beautifully cut sandwiches that perfectly, perfectly fit the boxes and you’ll get an idea of the care taken by my partner in making his daughter’s lunch.

That first lunchbox cost about £25 as I remember. Not cheap but really good. It was so good I decided to buy us all one, but when I went to reorder, the website no longer did them and instead were offering frankly vastly inferior things that were little more than stacks of plastic boxes. I found LLBs in the States and emailed them. Good news! I could order direct from them! Bad news? With taxes and shipping it came to about £70.

It’s a good lunch box, but not that good.

My youngest is due to start school in a year’s time. My excellent friend and Godmother to one of my daughters, CC, was in American and due to come home for good. This was an excellent time to ask her if I could buy one and get it shipped to her and she could bring it back for me.

This is what happened and hence the youngest now has her own, and it cost £25-£30.

Of course, in the way of things, my eldest went through a stage of hating her lunch box and wanting one like everyone else. But now has come round to the fact that her lunch box is really cool and looks like new, after four years of continuous school service (she has a packed lunch every day, occasionally she will have soup in a food flask). This is something to remember when you buy something cheap that might not’t last. I reckon I’d have spent more than that by now on replacement boxes.

So I know this is a bit of an annoying post, but look, we live in the world of travel and have foreign friends. If you are going to America, or live there or know someone who does and can get it shipped to them and they send it on to you,  this is feasible.

And these are really good lunch boxes.

The selection is a bit mind blowing, you can get just the bag, just the box etc; but the ones I got were in the Bento Kit (bag, box with compartments, knife and fork). And although the colourway we have isn’t shown at present, this is identical to ours in all but colour: this one, with the bag with shoulder strap which I think is useful for children.

I had really good service from this company. There was a problem with my payment and a real person answered my emails and tried to help.

Pretty fairy lights, battery operated

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John Lewis LED finewire snowflake lights, £6

Some years ago, as a present, Tesco sent me some really pretty blue flowery fairy lights that were battery operated. Doesn’t sound like much now, but at the time, they were pretty innovative (the battery part). They cost £5 in the shops and I wish I’d bought more as they’ve proved strangely useful. My children use the in tents, we drape them over any corner that needs a little pretty illumination. I’ve been tempted to go out wearing them (you could, with the battery pack in a pocket. I mean, come on). I don’t know, they just make me feel good. Even though they are, you know, from Tesco’s.

Anyway. These are not like them. They are very very fine and delicate. The wire between them is really fine wire. But they still look nice on my mantelpiece and every evening, as dusk fades and “the clouds turn pink” as my daughter says, I switch them on and they make me go aaah.

I’m easily pleased.

They also come in little green trees, red hearts or blue stars. And the size above is about actual size.

Buy them here.

Head torches

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Petzl Tikkina XP 2. My headtorch. Pick it up for between £35-£50.

Whenever anyone asks me what they should someone for a present, be that person a child or an adult, the first thing I always say is: a head torch.

They are fab. Admittedly if you live in a city, and are an adult, you probably don’t fully understand the need for them; but if you’re a child they can be used in tents, hidey holes, under bed clothes etc. And if you’re an adult and you live in the country they are, I think, essential for getting firewood, putting the bins out, getting to your car (this will sound crazy to those with street lighting…). I also use mine when cycling or running.

The one I have is, of course, top of the range with a price tag to match: the Petzl Tikka XP 2 (but I have just the head torch, not the charger etc). Mine has three different white light permutations (bright, economy, flashing) and it can also go to a red light (which preserves night vision) in constant or flashing. It tilts (a really useful facility so you can look at things on the ground or straight ahead) and is very bright. Most normal people don’t need this but as I also use mine for the aforementioned cycling and running, it’s pretty imports for me. Mine costs between £35-£50 (do a search on Google they’re not difficult to find), but although it’s top of that range, there are others that go up to £200, but really for people climbing Everest..

Petzl Tikkina 2, for about £15.

Otherwise the Petzl Tikkina 2 is the one to get. It has two white light modes (strong or economy) and tilts and is really everything you’d need. You can pick them up for about £15 and they’re – Petzl’s -vastly superior to any other head torch I’ve tried. Also comes in pink, blue, green, gold.

Tab grabber, aka a clever way to keep hold bits of paper

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Tab grabber. Just one small section..

Tab grabbers are those things you see in restaurants. You place an order, the waiter writes it on a piece of paper and then s/he sticks it into a tab grabber for the kitchen staff.

Well they’re also a great way of holding other bits of paper in the home. I have an entire run of them under my window sill, right by my desk. And although a part of it is used to keep drawings that my children do for me, I use them largely to hold invites to forthcoming work events.

You can get them in all different lengths, or obviously use more than one. They’re like metal bars with marbles inside, and it’s the marbles that hold the bits of paper up.. Bit hard to explain unless you know what I’m talking about…No sticky tape or drawing pins are needed so it’s a great way to just hold stuff and because of this especially easy and safe for children to use. Purposeful, industrious, totally unmarking. You can stick them on the wall – they come with sticky pads – or screw them in, I strongly recommend the latter.

We also have one on the back of the front door for things to remember: shopping lists, letters to post, those bits of paper you have to return to school. Note: you can also use them for photographs, but you lose about an eighth of the photo in the marble bit.

They cost from about £10. Just put Tab Grabber into Google. You can get them from various places on line that don’t pay their taxes. Or try commercial kitchen shops.

Hot Dog and Hot Duck

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Hot Duck and Hot Dog. 

I bought these last Christmas for my girls to give each other in an incredibly contrived gift exchange.

They are cuddly toys with some sort of stuff inside that you can heat up in a microwave. Hence why these are called Hot Dog and Hot Duck.

Living in the country it’s colder here, sooner and for longer than in the city. Plus I keep the heating right down, because I’m mean like that. So Hot Dog and Hot Duck make a nice companion at bedtime, or on cold early morning car journeys; my youngest has even been known to take it with her in the front of my bike. They feel like bean bags so are actually pretty tactile. I am not a cuddly toy person but have even been known to treat these quite well.

You chuck them in the microwave for a couple of minutes and bingo. I got mine from a large organisation which is now being investigated for tax reasons, but you can get these anywhere. Perhaps even support your local shop…Mine cost under a tenner each and are made by Intelex and the range is called ‘Cozy Plush’ (sic).

Cast iron pans ‘n’ skillets

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Everyone seems to have a tale of the cast iron frying pan that never got washed and was passed down from mother to child. I certainly have. Whenever I did the drying up with my Ma, and that drying up involved the frying pan (not a cast iron one), she would tell me about her Ma’s frying pan which never got washed, just wiped.

This queer little detail fascinated me for ages. How could you not wash a frying pan?

Fast forward many years later.  And all my well meaning friends, the one who breastfeed for years and have home births and make their own bread and are…generally just like me. Well they started going on and on about cast iron frying pans. How non stick made you die, how canaries in rooms with non stick frying pans just dropped down dead.

It was really boring, so I thought I’d buy a cast iron frying pan, if for no other reason than, when they came round, I could whack them round the head with it.

And now, here I am being just like them and going ON about cast iron. It’s true, owning a cast iron frying pan is like having another member of the family, someone you love and trust and who never lets you down.

Only kidding. It’s not. It’s a frying pan for goodness sake. But yes, there is something really nice about the weight, the solidity of a cast iron fucking frying pan. And I was actually getting fed up of non stick stuff lasting just a few years before it started to fall apart (and I’m not talking cheap pans, either, all of my non-stick pans were Berndes).

I now have three cast iron frying pans (aka skillets). They’re all from Lodge. They’re not expensive (I got mine from Amazon) and I stripped them all down (they come pre-seasoned, but I wanted to season them myself, so I stripped them down using oven cleaner) using this incredibly complicated, scientific formula from this rather fabulous website.

Even once you’ve done the seasoning in the oven, with the organic linseed oil, the prescribed six times (you need to feel the pain), it still takes a few uses for them to become really non stick, but then, you’re flying (frying…).

So, the first few times you cook with them, don’t use them for something where the non stick properties are really important.

Oh and according to Sheryl Canter (writer of the blog post on how to season your pan, above) you can wash your cast iron pans. We do. I gently wipe them with a non-scratch pad, hot water, occasionally a bit of washing up liquid. As she points out, the seasoning got there via a long process, a bit of hot water and soap ain’t gonna get it off. Then I dry them on the hob for a couple of minutes and apply a slick of olive oil to cover the whole pan. If any bits get stuck on, if you heat up the pan you can get them off with a wooden spoon or some other more gentle implement. Don’t use the pans to heat up water or anything with tomatoes in – the acid can damage the pan. You need your stainless steel pans for stuff like that. I recommend Le Pentole, superb. Mine are still going strong some 25 years after I bought them. (They’re not cheap.)

A few other advantages of cast iron:

It gets really hot and retains the heat, so great for fast cooking but also great for long, slow cooking where you can turn the heat right down.

You can cook something on the hob and then transfer it to the oven (like tarte tartin).

Works out your biceps and triceps every time you lift the damn things up (that’s actually a pain but I’m trying to make it into a positive).

I’m sure my cast iron pans will last for many years, and I’m sure my children will be delighted that instead of passing down my diamonds,  I’ll be passing down my non-canary killing skillets.

ps: Don’t confuse the cast iron I’m talking about here with enameled cast iron (viz Le Creuset).

pps: to answer Claire (below, who has asked me a question on Facebook), yes I do use my cast iron frying pan to make pancakes in. This is the pan I use.

Tagalong bikes or trailer bikes

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The Roland Add-a-Bike

 

I ride a Nihola trike and have done for about four years now. It’s what I do the school run on and, aside from the harshest day in winter, I use it instead of the car for around town.

I will do a review on the Nihola soon, just haven’t yet. I don’t know why I just never seem to get down to it even though I love my Nihola more than is decent.

When my eldest got to eight years old, I thought it was about time she started to ride her own bike to school. Except. I wasn’t really ready for her to ride her own bike to school. I mean, she can ride, beautifully (we are Islabike fans) but we tend to let her ride mostly off road or just meander along. As a parent I realise you take all sorts of risks you’re comfortable with. I co-sleep with my children, which some consider a risk. I pick them up when they cry, which some consider a risk (that they will turn into monsters and be forever crying just to be picked up). I let them feed themselves, which some would worry about (the choking). I don’t Dettox everything and let them eat things that have fallen onto the floor (at home) and don’t always insist they wash their hands. I let them climb walls and trees. And I let my children use screens: iPads, computers etc. All of which some parents consider risky, irresponsible behaviour.

But I’m comfortable with all of that.

I’m not, however, comfortable with letting my eldest cycle to school, yet. So I thought a trailer bike was in order. You know the things? They hook up to the back of a normal bike, so the child gets a sense of being in traffic, she cycles, so gets valuable exercise (and believe me, this is a help when you’re cycling a Nihola with another child already in the box trailer up front) but is totally attached to the adult.

I’d written about tagalongs a while ago and done a lot of research. So I knew that the tagalong bike I wanted had to fit onto the pannier rack at the back of the adult bike, not onto the seat-post (the people I really listen to in cycling, none of them recommend that latter sort of fixing tagalong as it compromises the stability of the adult bike). The problem was that the only tagalong that did this was the Burley Piccolo which had gone out of production and second hand ones were fetching silly money on eBay.

The fabulous Islabikes used to do a trailer bike (I use the term tagalong and trailer bike interchangeably, they are the same thing), but I rang and spoke to Isla herself who told me that although she would probably do them again, there was a problem with sourcing one of the components and for the moment, she wasn’t making any new ones. A visit to eBay showed me that her trailer bikes were also exchanging hands for about the price of what they’d cost new.

So I was stuck. Then I rang Brixton Cycles and spoke to the fabulous Barnaby who has always been super  helpful and straight down the line honest with what he recommends, even if he doesn’t sell it. And he told me about Roland add-a-bikes which fix onto the back rack and are sold by Bikes and Trailers.

I think it was Sean I spoke to and the service was excellent.

So I got one and it is brilliant. I can’t comment too much on the stability because of course, my Nihola is a trike. But it comes with its own pannier back rack (so if you already have one, you’ll have to take it off) and the actual bike slots into the back quite easily. You can take it off if you do the school run and leave it there and then re-fix it when you pick up in the afternoon.

I umm-ed and ahh-ed about getting one with gears (it comes in 3 or 7 gear versions), or not. In the end I decided not to to keep the cost down. The one extra I did get (retrospectively, but wish I’d got it before) was the kick (two-legged) stand. It’s really useful if you regularly taken the trailer bike off and it has to stand on its own, because it can’t stand on its own otherwise…I hesitated because it’s not cheap at £34 but some things are just really useful and you have to bite the bullet.

If you were to transfer this bike from one adult bike to the other regularly, then you’d really need to also get the extra back rack. You can’t use the Add a Bike without it.

Just to add to this: I spoke to Isla last week to ascertain what was happening with her trailer bike, before I wrote this blog post. She told me she had no immediate plans to re-introduce it but it’s something she would think about doing in the future. She did however tell me that the Burley Piccolo is going back into production. I’ll keep you posted.

In the  meantime, we cycle to school now looking like a giant cycle crocodile. My youngest in the front in the Nihola box, me on the Nihola and my eldest on the back. The Nihola box allows me space for one more child and lots of shopping…who needs the gym.

One important point to add (thanks Claire), it’s not relevant for me with all the passenger space, but you can still use this tagalong and fit a child seat on the back of the adult bike. If you look at the Bikes and Trailers website you can see.

Stylus pens for iPad and iPhone

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Stylus pens for use with iPhone and iPad.  Incredibly, they work.

Years ago, when electronic organisers first started making an appearance, you could get stylus pens to write on said appliances with. I always thought they were a bit wankerish. I mean, if I want to write with a pen, I’ll write with a pen.

I’ve got an iPhone and an iPad. My children regularly use the iPad (I don’t let them near my iPhone). I’m really not one of those people freaked by the thought of children and technology; but then, I’m a total technophile. I know how to control my technology and I’m not afraid of screens, and my children use them as part of a very balanced life.

But then, I got sent some sort of iPad magazine recently and in it were various ads for iPad/iPhone pens (I’m sure they work on other tablets/smart screens, but I don’t know, we’re an Apple household). This piqued my interest, since I thought they’d be really good for some apps on the iPad and  my partner has got really bad tendonitis from using his iPhone. So I reappraised my thoughts on stylus pens.

(Just to really smother myself in smugness, let me tell you that I taught myself to use my left hand – not naturally my dominant hand – to use my mouse ‘n’ stuff some years ago when I got such bad RSI I couldn’t turn the pages of a magazine. As I was a fashion editor at the time, not being able to turn the pages of a magazine was a really Big Bad Thing.)

Anyway I bought one that had good reviews from Amazon and weren’t too expensive: some are really dear. The one I bought is the Universal Capacitive Stylus Pen and it cost £5.99 for two. I wouldn’t really pay more than that: no need as you’re bound to lose it. Plus it may stop working in a few weeks: I’ll report back.

Thus far it’s really good. Great if you suffer from fat finger syndrome on the iPhone, but really comes into its own on the iPad for some of the apps that involve writing and drawing. Much more intuitive than using a finger. I don’t think I’d take it out with me but for around the house/on the iPad it really helps keep your hands in a more natural position that that swipe thing you have to do. Of course I’m NOT A DOCTOR and its use may lead to even worse injuries. But I trust the Daily Mail will keep us informed of those.

There is a lead that you plug into the headphone socket to keep it safe, but you have to unplug it to use it.

The Tangle Teezer

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Probably loads of you have already heard of this. It was a ‘Dragon’s Den’ reject a few years ago. But I hadn’t heard of it, or seen one, or noticed them hanging there in haircare aisle. One of the juniors at my hairdressers used one on my head two weeks ago and I said “what’s that?”

And what it was was a Tangle Teezer or a hairbrush that looks like a dog/horse’s grooming brush (I actually think the addition of a strap around the back of it would be no bad thing).

They come in three permutations. This one which is the original, and you can pick them up from £9 to about £13 depending on where you shop and what colour you go for (I actually choose black but I got this flourescent pink, that’s Amazon for you). Purple glitter, for example, costs the most as it’s ‘limited edition’. There’s a child’s version which is round and comes in a flower pot and then there’s a mini version. I think this is the best – read easiest to use.

Anyway, children love it – it sails through dry or wet hair with ease and every one fought to use my daughter’s at swimming (because of its design, it’s really easy to clean so that didn’t freak me out like it normally would). The the point of it is that it’s a tangle destroyer that works without pulling the hair. I love it, it’s kinda massaging. You can’t style with it, it’s really for just combing knots out. Not 100% sure how it’d cope with really thick hair, it struggled with the thicker bits of mine.

You might be able to see here that the ‘teeth’ are in two lengths – that’s apparently the secret of its success. And they’re bendy.

Anyway, you can buy them on line or in Boots/just about anywhere.

E-cloth-mop

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If you are not the sort of person to do their own cleaning, then perhaps skip this post. For it is about mops.

I do have a cleaner. Her name is Rute and she is Portuguese. And even though Portuguese (or Porkinese as my child calls it) is very different from Italian, we converse splendidly. Partly through the international language of Rant.

Anyway, despite me having a cleaner, I still do my own cleaning at times, largely because I think it’s really important to be able to deal with your own dirt.

If you didn’t know this, Italians have a thing about cleaning. Spesh southern Italians. My family in the south are all certifiably insane and wash the kitchen from top to bottom after lunch.

Every day.

I’m not like this. But I do like a bit of Scanda-style which means wooden floors, and wooden floors show up dirt far more than carpets. Dust-bunnies kinda get sucked into carpets. Anyway, this is a fucking mop for Christ’s sake so I won’t go on too much. But it – the E-cloth mop – is fab.

Why it’s good:

  • It’s so simple and it looks good in that pared down way (look: design is important, even in mops)
  • You get interchangeable ‘heads’ which are rectangles of fabric. There are three, a white fluffy one for simply ‘sweeping’, a blue one for washing and a blue striped one for tough stains.
  • They attach via a Velcro-type strip, super easy.
  • They zzzzzp off for washing – bung them in the machine at 60C.
  • Also zzzp it off for dunking in the washing water and wring it really dry before putting it back on for cleaning another bit of floor – because the cloth is so wrung out you can use it on engineered floors (well, I do).
  • It’s a step up from the ‘straccio’ over a broom head that we use in Italy.

That’s it. If you need a mop, this is the one to get.