Whatever happened to cardboard boxes?

The 'cold snap' here in the UK doesn't improve any - lots of snow showers over the last week but the worst of it is the black ice on the roads and pavements. We are getting some really serious 'sub-zero' stuff during the nights too, it takes fifteen minutes to clear the windscreen before I can move off in the mornings. But the new house seems to be OK in this kind of prolonged freezing spell, I'm keeping the central heating on for just an hour during the night and again in the early morning and that seems sufficient to keep the place modestly warm.

Actually I more or less took the day off today, I had some good advice in that direction and I think it was a good move. But it wasn't a complete break. Some curtains that were on order came so this afternoon I headed into Preston to do some shopping for stuff that I no longer have - an ironing board, a clothes horse and a toaster. The price of stuff here just seems outrageous to me compared with Japan, you can't walk into any DIY store and get out without spending a hundred quid. I'd guess that hardware and paint is around 30% more expensive than back in leafy Chiba-ken. Living abroad your pension seems reasonable and then suddenly you realise that you would struggle to do much more than make ends meet and keep a cheap car on the road if you lived here full time and had to rely just on one income.

It is curious the things that have disappeared in the last few years since I moved north from Luton. On that move I scrounged loads of excellent cardboard boxes from Morrison's supermarket but now it seems that buckshee cardboard boxes are a thing of the past. Blame the politicians eh? I'm told that supermarkets had to stop putting them out for customer use because they were declared a Health and Safety risk! Just think what might happen if they ever caught fire in a store! As at least 30% of the goods on display must be equally flammable I don't see the logic of that one myself. And then there's the whole recycling target issue - that cardboard needs to be recycled to meet EU 'directives'. So now we have to use more oil to make plastic boxes to purchase instead of using old cardboard ones that we used to recycle down the tip.

A funny old world.