BBC | Autumn Watch

What we spend on our pets?

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 11:12:11 +0000

I am not a doggy person but I now have a dog - thanks to my son Tony aged 12 whose pester power stretched to a six year war of attrition. He won.

So now we have William a golden Labrador. I'm deeply in love with him of course. My resistance lasted for only 12 hours or so, until I came down the first morning and was greeted by his full body wag. It's irresistible and my reaction was a bit like that scene in the Snow Queen when the cruel child's heart begins to melt.

William has opened the door to a whole new world of expense - vets bills, insurance, accessories, toys and treats. I decided to take a look at the pet industry for You and Yours and wasn't surprised to find that it's worth more than £4 billion pounds a year. To put that into context, we spend more on our pets in the UK than we do on bakery - cakes, bread, biscuits that sort of thing.

The industry is having a good recession: sales growing slowly but steadily in value year on year. We're shifting from wet to dry pet food for convenience and in the downturn moving to cheaper brands. One area of surprise growth though is pet treats - up five percent this year on last year with 150 new products introduced in the UK alone.

It seems that treating our pets with small things - doggie chocolate drops, chews and toys - is boosting our morale and buoying up the industry. The treats are healthy - the chocolate drops are made with carob because human-type chocolate is poisonous to dogs. Other treats include dental chews.

It seems the demographic is going the pet's way. We are having our children later now and many couples get a pet first instead, we have fewer children and treat our animals like one of the family, more of us live alone and rely for company on pets.

In the industry they talk about the 'humanisation of pets'. You'll notice it everywhere once you start to look - with Christmas toys, stockings, even advent calendars for dogs and cats. I've discussed it with William and he's in favour of being treated like a human some of the time. He'd like to sit in a chair but just don't ask him to swap his meaty bone for a doggie dental chew.

Winifred Robinson presents You and Yours on BBC Radio 4

Howard Schultz

Mon, 16 May 2011 09:43:37 +0000

Howard Schultz - the man who built Starbucks from a single Seattle coffee shop to an international chain - has been on a brief tour of the UK. He's promoting his new book, 'Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without losing Its Soul'.You and Yours were offered the chance to interview him and we jumped at it.

'Onward' is a brisk 300 plus pages beginning with the story of how Howard Schultz, a boy from a poor background, wanted to build the kind of company his father never had a chance to work in. He is proud that Starbucks in the States offers health insurance to all its employees, even those who work part time. He describes how his father, who never earned more than $20,000 a year all his life, was sacked one winter after falling on ice and breaking his hip. The family was destitute. He was inspired to set up Starbucks to recreate the experience of drinking coffee in bars in Italy where people meet and socialise and the staff are friends. He quickly moves on to his main subject, how in 2008 - after eight years away from the helm - he re-took control of the company, convinced that it was losing its romance and magic in a relentless drive for growth.

What to ask? As a journalist interviewing Howard Schultz, you have to be aware that millions of people love Starbucks and wouldn't buy their coffee anywhere else. But because of the rapid expansion of the company - the very thing he returned to curtail - Starbucks to some is as insidious and the McDonalds Golden Arches, ubiquitous, uniform, unwanted. A couple of years ago on You and Yours we featured cases where the company had opened on small high streets, applied for planning permission retrospectively and met with sustained resistance from local people.

I really enjoyed the book. It provides - for a business outsider - a fascinating analysis of how a company can appear on paper to be doing everything right, increasing share price and growing profits and sales, and yet at the same time be undermining the very thing that made it a success; in Howard Schultz's terms, the romance of a custom-built coffee shop.

What I found hard to swallow though was the almost religious fervour with which Howard Schultz describes his work. The book is on sale in Starbucks branches with proceeds going to charity, so please have a read and let me know what you think. I decided to rib him gently about it (or so I thought) careful to point out that his lack of any trace of irony is probably what makes him a multi millionaire while I am not. I asked him to read what for me was a particularly schmaltzy bit, a collapsed into laughter as he finished reading it and it observed that the tone felt 'un-British' to me. I had eight emails telling me off for being so rude. I replied to them all in person. Tone is a very hard thing to judge in these encounters. I don't always get it right...The book is on sale in Starbucks branches with proceeds going to charity, so please have a read, have a listen and let me know what you think.

Winifred Robinson presents You and Yours on BBC Radio 4

Winifred meets online clothes retailer Johnnie Boden

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 11:17:09 +0000

When it comes to influential British design, Johnnie Boden ranks alongside the late Laura Ashley - both began by scribbling ideas for a few items at the kitchen table, both have left scarcely a middle class home untouched by their tastes. Vintage floral prints, once very Laura Ashley, are now very Johnnie B.

The You and Yours team bid to interview Johnnie Boden months ago and then finally a week ago, a date with Johnnie was fixed to meet at Boden HQ in West London, 9am sharp. We were warned he had only a brief window of 20 minutes and if we missed it, that would be that.

It's easy to mock Boden and people often do usually because of the daft little jokes that crop up all over the catalogues, sometimes in the labels on the clothes as well as online. Models in the catalogues provide answers to whimsical questions including 'What gets your knickers in a twist?' and 'What's the biggest fib you've ever told?' The front cover of the new spring offering is entitled '696 new reasons to be gruntled'. The company headquarters, a giant hangar of a place endeavours to continue the spirit of fun. It sports a picture of a Jack Russell in sunglasses and a big sign: 'Boden: ugly building beautiful clothes'.

We arrived 30 minutes early. The PR Josie took us to wait in a room where the new collection was displayed. She told us she's always worked in fashion and couldn't resist showing the items off; there were silky shift dresses in muted colours, some of the more obvious Boden signature bright vintage-style prints, and bold necklaces, with huge silver baubles suspended on silken, coffee-colours strings.

The man himself walked out to greet us as we emerged from the lift. Johnnie Boden is tall and slim but not skinny, with ruffed up auburn hair and an even-featured, open, pleasant face. He's posh - Eton and Oxford - and very friendly and polite if a little shy - there's quite a bit of looking down to start with. When the interview began, he hunched over the microphone to answer my questions and began with his eyes shut like someone who is thinking really hard. I stopped after about two minutes to check if he was comfortable and he assured me he was, just concentrating 'because I sometimes put my foot in it, make remarks that journalists seize on, and get myself into all sorts of bother'.

There's no point recapping the full interview here, you can listen online. It's an astonishing story of how someone with no fashion training or experience decided to start designing and selling clothes by mail order and ended up dressing Middle England. Boden has now moved into the USA and Germany. France will be next. His range for women, men, children, young teenagers and most recently, expectant mums, seems to go down a storm everywhere he tries. 'We spend a lot of time planning for failure, each time we try something new,' he told me, 'but it just hasn't happened yet'.

Just one more confidence to impart; it may have compromised impartiality but I wore a Boden frock - a green number printed with purple and pink roses that my husband bought for me for Christmas. It was my personal charm offensive. He didn't mention it until the interview was done and then as he left us muttered, eyes lowered, not at all flirtatious but just like the wholesome family man of the Boden catalogue dream: 'You look great by the way'.

Reader, I liked him. As the kids say today: 'What's not to like?'

Winifred Robinson presents You and Yours on BBC Radio 4

Benjamin Zephaniah visits You and Yours

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 14:06:51 +0000

Sometimes on You and Yours, we have what we describe in our planning meetings as a 'pop up guest'. That's someone we think you might want to hear more from than a single item.

On Wednesday, the poet Benjamin Zephaniah was our 'pop-up guest'. Because he's a writer, he works from home and punctuates his day with Radio 4. I know he's tuned in at noon because he called the programme once, when he was told to leave an all night Sainsbury's because 'they didn't allow men in on their own'. That was a few years ago but when we were talking about a children's books programme as a You and Yours in the run up to Christmas I wondered if he'd like to come on.

As I said on Wednesday Benjamin Zephaniah has been called 'the reigning king of children's poetry' he's also writing a successful series of novels for teenagers. One of the novels, 'Refugee Boy' is being discussed soon on Book Club on Radio 4.

So I contacted his agent, who gave me an email address and Benjamin agreed to join us.

I've known who he is for a long time but I have to confess I hadn't read a single word he's written until last year when I went to a Christmas concert in Oxford to raise funds for MacMillan the cancer charity and heard an actress read his 'Turkeys' poem.

I thought it was wonderful and through that poem I've started reading more and more of his work, from the witty, delightful, children's poems to the blazing brilliance of 'Naked'. If you love poetry and you haven't read Benjamin Zephaniah yet, then I think you are missing out.

On You and Yours when we talk about books we look at the way the market works. So we had two discussions with Benjamin in mind - one on children's poetry which is out of fashion with publishers, the other on pop-up and novelty books. These novelty books sell well as Christmas gifts but prices are rising because of higher production costs and changes in the rules about VAT.

If Benjamin is the king of children's poetry, Lucy Cousins the creator of Maisy Mouse will always be the queen of pop-ups for me. I love that chunky little mouse, with the big knickers, so robust and so beautifully drawn. Again, I emailed her agent and she said yes.

So there was just one more element we needed - some children of course.

Once a while ago, we talked about children's books on the programme without asking a child to contribute a review. Always when a programme is over, you realise there are things you could have done better, but that felt like such a glaring omission, we vowed never to do it again. Step forward the children of Betty Layward Primary in east London.

We took to the school, 'Maisy's Show', a new pop up edition of Peter Pan published by Templar, another Christmas book 'Father Christmas All About Me By Me' and a new collection of children's poems compiled by Michael Rosen.

How did I choose them? The poetry collection was recommended by The Poetry Book Society but the other choices were more personal: my son Tony who is 11 spotted the Peter Pan when we were out Christmas shopping and he'd chosen it as a present for his cousin.

The Father Christmas Book came via a friend who is a freelance PR. I saw her in the summer when she happened to have had a proof copy of it and I thought it was extraordinary. It had an old fashioned silver sixpence stuck in for a pudding, and a Christmas letter from a soldier at the Front. And at £24.99 it's expensive for a children's book and illustrated perfectly the rising production costs and retail prices.

I went to the school on Tuesday morning with the programme's producer Steven Williams who later edited these interviews back at the office while I wrote the scripts. The children were delighted with the books and they loved the poetry. The revelation was Father Christmas which I thought was too densely packed with text for children of primary school age and was probably more of a grown-ups posh coffee table book. The five year olds loved it and quite literally couldn't put it down - I think because of the sheer quality of the illustrations.

What did we do with these review copies? We left them with the school of course......

Winifred Robinson presents You and Yours on BBC Radio 4

'Optimise Your Kerbside Logistics'?

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 14:23:11 +0000

What does it mean to 'optimise your kerbside logistics'? The question was emailed by Stephen as Thursday's programme was on air and I read it out at the end, promising to explain in the blog - so here goes.

The phrase was used by Samantha Harding from the Campaign to Protect Rural England. The CPRE had published a report extolling the gains to be made from a money-back-on-the-bottle system for soft drinks containers - bottles and cans. It had a lot of publicity and the Prime Minister David Cameron promised during Prime Minister's Questions to look into it. For those of you too young to remember money-back-on-the-bottle used to be standard practice from the 1950s to the 1980s. You paid an extra few pence on top of the price of your drink, as a deposit on the container and claimed a refund when you took the container back. Children used to collect the bottles for pocket money and according to your emails in some parts of the world where they currently operate, lots of people leave their bottles and cans out for others to collect as a way of donating to the poor.

The Campaign for the Protection of Rural England calculates that introducing a new version of this idea would cost £84m (a one off cost) but would save local authorities £160m every year because there'd be less litter to pick up AND THEN CAME THE PHRASE 'and because they could re-optimise their kerbside logistics'.

Now clearly, this is jargon and means nothing to most of us. So I telephoned the CPRE after the programme and spoke to Jack Neill-Hall. For the record this is what happens when local authorities 're-optimise their kerbside logistics'. "If you're not collecting bottles and cans you need fewer trucks and collections, and you can make your collection more efficient by concentrating on other recyclable goods, things like plastic food trays and yoghurt pots which have a very poor recycling rate."

So there's your answer Stephen. Maybe it would have been better if Samantha Harding had said that in the first place? Or perhaps I should have pressed for an explanation on-air.

Winifred Robinson presents You and Yours on BBC Radio 4

A Front Row in History

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 15:38:13 +0000

I don't know who was first to say it - perhaps you do - but work in journalism provides you with a front row in history.
I certainly had some experience of that, reporting for newspapers, radio and television. I've covered riots in Birmingham and London, the Omagh bombing, the trial of the boys who killed James Bulger.

This kind of work can be fascinating of course, also deeply disturbing. Sometimes though you wonder if it isn't better to spend a working life shaping events, rather than observing and recording them - front row or not. You can also feel like you know a bit about a lot of subjects but not an awful lot about anything very much. That's not to say the work isn't interesting - of course it is.

So it's always satisfying when we can tell an expert something he or she didn't already know. We did this on Wednesday with a report on a shortage of spare parts for cars. Professor Garel Rhys of Cardiff Business School, an expert on the industry, told us that the You and Yours team had provided the first examples he's heard of people in the UK left waiting for car parts for weeks and months. He said the Ford Motor Company in the USA had predicted this would happen at the time of the emergency bail out of its rivals General Motors and Chrysler in 2008/9. Prof. Rhys explained how car makers have contracted out the parts business to small, specialist companies. Sometimes a handful of workers can be supplying parts for tens of thousands of cars. On top of that, car companies are basing themselves on the Japanese who attribute their success to systems that strip out waste. As a result, they carry not stock by operate a 'just in time' approach instead, ordering the part you need from a supplier, only as you need it, and not a moment before. What's happened is that although the big car makers have ridden out the recession which saw sales fall by 30% worldwide their suppliers had a tougher time of it with 300 companies going to the wall. Although this is a small proportion of the 17,000 worldwide, it matters a lot when the missing link in the supply chain makes the bit you need.

We heard about it from our listeners - Ryan Weaves and Rosie Sedgwick who'd been left waiting months for parts. Several more of you emailed while the item was on air. According to Prof. Rhys, the manufacturers have no choice but to find other suppliers and this can take investment and time. So people are being left waiting.

Perhaps we created a footnote in the history of the automotive industry with Prof. Rhys in the front row. It's good to turn the tables from time to time.

Winifred Robinson presents You and Yours on BBC Radio 4

You & Yours is on BBC Radio 4 at 1200 weekdays. Listen to today's episode on the Radio 4 web site.

Food Labelling and NHS Complaints System

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:20:31 +0000

We often ask for emails when we're on air. This came for me today from Richard. 'You said you don't have time to read labels - if you don't have time to think about what you're eating you deserve to DIE'. Sadly it was only sent at 12.52 and handed to me when I'd come off air, or I'd have read it out.

Richard is - I'd guess - not a Buddhist but clearly someone who cares a lot about food labelling. He was referring to something I said in a question to Julian Hunt from the Food and Drink Federation.

I'd suggested no one has time to read detailed food labelling giving guideline daily amounts and that traffic lights on the front of packs, giving red, amber or green signals for fat, salt and sugar content were easier for consumers to understand. We were talking about it because the European Parliament was voting on which system should be adopted. It's been a long drawn out wrangle between the Food Standards Agency, the government department set up to protect public health in relation to food and a large section of the industry. The FSA favours traffic lights but many of the big supermarkets and the manufacturers don't. Might it be that some food producers think a red traffic light would put you off buying the stuff? 'Not a bit of it!' they've been chorusing on You and Yours as this dispute has rumbled on for years.

In our office when the subject comes up, the team seems pretty split between those of us - including me - who find this fascinating and like to discuss whether a red traffic light on the front might put us off slipping that jumbo pack of pork pies into the trolley and others - including the editor Andrew Smith - who slip into a deep coma of boredom each time labelling is mentioned.

The European Parliament vote will settle things eventually - food producers will have to comply with whatever system they decide in about three years time.

I also asked for emails today on the subject of the system for handling complaints in the NHS in England. This is another subject with a long history. In April 2004 the Healthcare Commission was set up and among its responsibilities took on the task of sorting out the more complex complaints from patients which could not be resolved at a local level. A huge back log quickly built up and officials from the Commission came on to You and Yours and accused local hospitals and trusts of forwarding complaints that they could easily have dealt with themselves. One example cited was a letter from someone angry that they have been given a penalty for failing to display a parking ticket when they'd had to rush a patient to hospital. A year ago, when the Healthcare Commission was abolished the job of dealing with complaints was passed back to the local level.

We asked whether this system is working any better for patients and heard from Vanessa Bourne head of research at the Patients' Association and Frances Blunden, a senior policy manager at the NHS Confederation. We also illustrated some of the problems with the case of is Wilf Gerrard from Wigan. His wife Marjorie died in October 2006 from peritonitis. Mr Gerrard had complained to his Primary Care Trust - Ashton, Leigh and Wigan - because he felt she's been given inadequate treatment. Four years on he felt his complaint had still not been answered. We read out on air some of your experiences - including one email from a mother who'd taken a child to hospital with glass in a foot. A doctor had ordered an X-ray but failed to find the glass. The mother had pulled it out later at home. When she'd telephoned the next day there was prompt action. The consultant sacked the doctor because this was the third such complaint.

In the days before email it could take a researcher days to find cases to illustrate items like this where a lot of personal suffering and distress lies at the heart of what can seem a dry discussion about systems in a huge organisation, the NHS. Now though you can send us your stories in seconds. I think all of our news programmes have benefitted hugely as a result. Other emails have given us cases we will investigate and follow up on later programmes.

Which brings me back to Richard and his email - people are much ruder in writing than they are in person in my experience and he'd included a phone number and so I called him up, as I often do when people email. 'Did he really think if I don't read the food labels I deserve to die?' Describing himself as a concerned vegetarian he said he was worried about all the processed food we eat and said that if we didn't eat so much of it, we wouldn't have to read so many labels.
He conceded that perhaps it might have been better to have written that rather than suggesting I deserve to die but we both agreed that wouldn't have caught my attention.
We had a good laugh about it. Like most Radio 4 listeners, in my experience, he was polite and well-informed with a real sense of owning the network. 'Sometimes,' he confided, 'I hear something and I have to rush upstairs to the computer'.

Which made me think, perhaps it isn't that email is ruder or more brutish. It just has a different grammar. Keep them coming. Thanks to the listener whose email comment was passed to me on Tuesday after I got the time check wrong. I apologised today and then did it again, straight afterwards. No one's bothered to email about that one yet. They must have given up.

Winifred Robinson presents You and Yours on BBC Radio 4

You & Yours is on BBC Radio 4 at 1200 weekdays. Listen to today's episode on the Radio 4 web site.

Mental health in the workplace

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 14:25:39 +0000

The day at You and Yours starts with an 8am meeting where ideas are chewed over. Sometimes we apply the 'Tell me something I didn't already know' test - does the item reveal anything much?
Recently we've been reflecting how the MIND campaign tries to persuade employers to offer better support for people with mental illness. I have seen the damage mental illness can do to career prospects through a close relative who has bipolar disorder. Her regular, sometimes long absences from work were tolerated by the Littlewoods organisation. It was a family firm started in Liverpool by John Moores and it always had high ethical standards, long before it was fashionable. When my relative took voluntary redundancy from the pools arm of the firm she never found another job.
Which brings me back to things I didn't know. I'd always thought that companies who supported people with mental illnesses - by allowing them time off to get better, altering shift patterns, perhaps moving them to different roles - were motivated by altruism. They may well be but what I learned from the You and Yours discussion featuring two employers - the NHS and a small retail co-operative in Somerset - was that supporting people who are mentally ill can save money. In the case of the co-op, three workers on long term sick leave through mental ill health were approached with a view to helping them back into their jobs. The employers hired a management specialist who worked with the GPs and offered counselling. Two came back to work pretty quickly and one decided that it was time to let the job go and resigned.The co-op save money in the end.

On the subject of saving money I also hadn't realised how savage the cuts and tax rises have been in Ireland. The reason we haven't read about public sector pay packets shrinking by a fifth - no really, a fifth - and state benefits for all those of working age cut by four per cent, is that the Irish have pretty much just got on with it. It's a window on what may lie ahead for us. It made me want to go to Ireland on holiday just to show solidarity.

Still on the subject of saving money - I am opening my garden for a day for charity this summer as part of the National Gardens Scheme.

I've done it twice before and I should say two things - it's not a grand garden at all and in small villages like ours standards are not that high. I've always loved Lynn Barber's typically acid advice on how to create a beautiful garden - 'Spread money thickly'. But this time - like everyone else - I don't feel I have that much to spread and I don't want to slam a lot of plants on a credit card. There are six weeks left and so it's starting to feel a bit like Ground Force in our house only without Alan Titchmarsh's calming influence. I could post some pictures of the problem areas and the good gardeners among you could suggest what might work?

Mind Blog
BBC Gardening

You & Yours is on BBC Radio 4 at 1200 weekdays. Listen to today's episode on the Radio 4 web site.

Winifred Robinson presents You and Yours on BBC Radio 4

Help! Wasps are eating my furniture... and a visit to Liverpool.

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:31:56 +0000

I spent last weekend in Liverpool staying at my Dad's with my son Tony who is ten. I grew up in the city and I have Dad and five sisters still living there and so for me, the pull back to Merseyside is strong. If you've never been or haven't been for a while, I can't recommend it strongly enough. As Stephen Bayley explains in his book about the city published this week 'Liverpool has an almost overwhelming physical presence, not all of it good. Brooding, slovenly, magnificent, romantic, miserable, tatty, funny, proud, heroic, shameless, tragic, exciting in turns, it's a city that demands a response.'
How Liverpool returned from the dead - Stephen Bayley - Times Online.

We made the trip to Liverpool this weekend for two reasons - I had tickets for the Lord Mayor's Charity Dinner and Tony wanted to go back to the Maritime Museum at the Albert Dock. He's really interested in the Titanic and the last time we were there, it looked as though a whole new Titanic wing was under construction, so he was determined to see the results.

The dinner was in the Town Hall which is a magnificent neoclassical palace. The hall way floor is decorated with hand-painted tiles, featuring the city's coat of arms. There's a great Flemish craved wooden fireplace, and a grand staircase with a huge portrait of the Queen by the Liverpool artist Sir Edward Halliday at the top. The city's silver collection is displayed in great cabinets on either side and above a dome of blue and gold rises thirty feet. Around the inside, the city's motto inscribed in Latin reads: 'Deus Nobis Haec Otia Fecit' which translates 'God has Bestowed These Blessings Upon Us' and the date 1748.

The Mayor's bash was great fun. Despite the setting there was nothing stuffy about it - a school choir, a good meal, a Frank Sinatra-tribute crooner and a disco. Liverpool doesn't do stiff or formal in my experience and that's one of the characteristics I love most.

The next day we went to the Maritime Museum. There was me, Tony, and his cousins Lily aged 8 and Carmel 21. Carmel is a history graduate from Liverpool John Moore's University and so she's always keen to go to a museum. Tony was a bit disappointed with Titanic - not because it isn't good, just that there didn't seem to be any new exhibits. We'd probably misunderstood last time - they were only upgrading the sets. So we went downstairs to the International Slavery Museum. The exhibition charts the growth of the city through the wealth gleaned from slavery, displaying the fine tableware of the merchant princes alongside the shackles and implements of torture used to create the terror that kept those enslaved under the yoke. I confess we didn't enter the room that simulates the environment of the slave ships' holds where hundreds were crammed together, lying chained on pallets and many died on voyage. Two images stay with me: the fine portrait of a slave merchant, perhaps in his sixties, looks out from the canvas with a watery gaze. There is a distinct feeling of unease, his fingers clasped nervously before him. In the next cabinet there is an old bill of sale for an auction in the city, the lots include slaves with brief descriptions, such as 'good in the kitchen'; the youngest soul being offered that day was a boy aged one. I was reminded of the grandeur of the Town Hall and its date 1748 - so all that great edifice, dome and all, was built on this suffering, so much for the blessings God has bestowed.

After that we went up in the Liverpool Eye. I hate heights and I held on tightly to the seat my palms sweaty with anxiety. You had to laugh at the safety warnings - 'Don't Prise Open the Doors', 'Don't Dangle Your Feet Out' etc - as if!

Monday was back at work on an investigation I suggested. People sometimes ask if I am allowed to come up with ideas for You and Yours. I am and I do. Daily programmes use up a lot of items so suggestions are welcome, especially yours of course email us here. This week's grew from a personal trauma - wasps eating my garden furniture. It's bad enough when they buzz down and eat your lunch but in our garden summer starts with the little stripy blighters first dining on the dining table before they come back later in the summer to sample what's on it.

We got in touch with an expert Dr Stephen Martin from the University of Sheffield's Department of Animal and Plant Sciences. You can listen to that interview here. It seems I'm not alone, 'They do that,' he explained (or as they say in my home town 'Day do dat doh don't day?'). In early summer the queen wasps chew off tiny bits of wood, fly away with it and use it to make a nest about the size of a golf ball. She'll settle down in it and lay her eggs. Once these worker wasps have hatched, they go off chewing wood and extend the nest until it becomes quite large. Only in late summer when the queen dies and the colony collapses do the wasps start eating your picnic. It's because at that point they are no longer getting a daily fix of nectar.

Now wasps may have tiny jaws but many wasps make light work of garden tables and chairs. Ours were covered in silvery trails where the surface had been chewed off. When I got them out of the shed this year the wasp damage had encouraged moss and mould to grow. They looked dreadful. I telephoned the manufacturers who sold me two separate treatments - a cleaner and sealant - don't they warned put teak oil anywhere near it because it will spoil your furniture. I know, lots of people use teak oil and swear by it. First though, I had to sand those bite marks off. It took hours, not least because the wasps seem particularly partial to the bits in between the slats of the chair backs. While the chairs were lined up waiting for the treatment, a big wasp landed on one of them and gnawed off a bit. The good news is that not a single one has been near them since.

I know, I'd like to say that I come up with the really learned ideas of high value and international importance but it wouldn't be true. I guess I won't be asked to stand in for Melvyn Bragg any time soon.

Winifred Robinson presents You and Yours on BBC Radio 4

You & Yours is on BBC Radio 4 at 1200 weekdays. Listen to today's episode on the Radio 4 web site.

Wasp picture by Omeuceu. Used under licence.

My day at You and Yours

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 14:14:45 +0000

The You and Yours day for me starts on the train journey in - I have a whole hour to read the paper - luxury! I buy my own of course - just in case you were wondering and don't choose the same one everyday. I always have a cup of tea too from the station café and take it with me on to the train.

I get in for the meeting at Broadcasting House in London at around eight. The team of six or so people working on the day's programme will have been in for an hour or more and have gone through the office set of newspapers. We look at the papers but we don't rely on them - lots of material comes directly from listeners in emails and calls. When I come in there is full programme already prepared, so it's a question of whether anything in the news should push out something we've already set up. Sometimes we apply the test of whether we all wanted to talk about it in the meeting. So yesterday we put in a piece about the quality of food served to small children in day nurseries. The Local Government Association had studied food served to toddlers in over 10 nurseries in England and Wales over a two year period. You can read their findings here.. They were concerned that children were being given too little food and too much fruit - so the sort of restricted diet that might benefit some adults but is insufficient to meet the needs of growing children.

This was one of those items that I felt could have been given a bit more time. I'lI tell you here about one of the things our guest June O'Sullivan wanted to talk about, but we didn't have time for - which just goes to show no matter how well we think we've planned the timings in our morning meeting... it doesn't always work out - that's live radio for you!

Jane runs a chain of nurseries in London called the London Early Years Foundation. She's developing the first 'National Standards for Early Years Chefs' - a qualification in children's catering. June thinks it's important for staff in nurseries to learn to cook the food they give their charges. She thought that would be more helpful than a set of guidelines or rules and advice imposed from the outside.

One of the great things about researching an item for You and Yours is that you get to watch good programmes you've missed. In preparation for our discussion on palm oil on Wednesday I caught up with Raphael Rowe's Panorama: Dying For a Biscuit.

You can still see it on the BBC iPlayer and I recommend that you do. Even for those of us who don't lose much sleep over the rainforests and the fate of orang-utans, it makes for disturbing viewing. More than half of the world's palm oil comes from the Indonesian island of Borneo. Raphael saw the process of ripping up and burning virgin rainforest there first hand. It's still going on regardless of the world protests and the promises from the Indonesian government.

It only seems to take a reporter to take a trip out of the UK to the developing world to find laws and solemn pledges being broken, whether they're about working conditions in clothes factories or palm oil grown on sites designated as 'protected' by world bodies.

Big companies these days all employ people whose job it is to trace where the materials they use originate- they have titles like 'sustainable agriculture director' - the job of a man called Jan Kees Vis from Unilever who came on to talk about palm oil.

Unilever uses palm oil in Flora margarine but since it's the cheapest vegetable oil in the world, it's an ingredient in an estimated half of all processed food. It's also used in soap, detergent and cosmetics and in biofuels.

To their credit Unilever agreed to put up a spokesman Mark Engel on Panorama and offered Jan Kees Vis to talk about palm oil on You and Yours. They are open about the fact that 85% of what they use is from 'unsustainable' sources. They don't - as Raphael Rowe pointed out - label products as containing 'palm oil' but rather 'vegetable oil'. If you listen again to You and Yours you'll hear why. So as a consumer, you can't really choose to reject it, unless you turn your back on most processed food.

Winifred Robinson presents You and Yours on BBC Radio 4

You & Yours is on BBC Radio 4 at 1200 weekdays. Listen to today's episode on the Radio 4 web site.
School dinner picture by Ishikawa Ken. Used under licence.