Introducing Joe & Matt Senior

Not that long ago, we were brainstorming with our design-guru Adam about a small range of protective covers to accompany our bags - for laptops, cameras and iPads.

Whereas I can't draw for toffee, Adam was quick off the mark with some initial sketches, and a protective collection was born. One main challenge though. To support our organic canvas fabrics, what material to use for the padding?

Around the same time, we were brainstorming (it was starting to hurt) further up the road in Borrowdale Valley, with Joe from Yew Tree Farm. We already use his Herdwick wool as insulation in our cooler products (Les and Derek), but 2,500 Herdwicks deliver significantly more wool than we can use in our cooler bags alone. What else can we use the wool for?

Three months later, and we've just launched our first protective cover - Joe the iPad Cover. The perfect analogue solution for a digital icon. Hopefully the start of many more protective covers to come and a new use for Joe's wool.


Our iPad cover features a protective flap, closed with a leather tab, and an open pocket on the back e.g. for headphones, mobile and Moleskine notebook.


We've launched Joe the iPad Cover exclusively with Selfridges on Oxford Street, London, and here on homeofmillican.com.

Vera has hand-made the first 100 iPad covers in Cumbria and as ever has done a remarkable job getting this turned around in very little time. A star in the making, but more about that later ...

And then there is Matt. We already had a Matt Moleskine Cover, now we have a Matt Senior.


Made from the same English, oakbark-tanned bridle leather as our other leather goods, the new Matt (Large) fits the larger 13x21cm Moleskine notebooks.

Apparently you are either a 9x14, or a 13x21 Moleskine fan, so this one was a no-brainer.


Joe and Matt happen to be excellent gifts for the festive season ahead ...

The Good Life

I might have been a child of the 70s, but according to Nicky I certainly missed out on a few essentials, growing up on the other side of the North Sea:

Swap Shop
A Jubbly
Space Hoppers
The Double Deckers
Chopper bikes
Wagon Wheels

Photo courtesy of Tetra Pack International

And The Good Life, when Felicity Kendal was clad in mud-splattered, home-made dungarees, rather than the sparkly ballgowns in her current role in Strictly.

Photo courtesy of the BBC

So I was quite chuffed to find out I can at least recapture some of my apparently lost youth with The Good Life Revisited, currently on BBC2 with Giles Coren and Sue Perkins.

OK, her wig is a bit dodgy (surely it's a wig?) and Giles's comments about his "Little Boy Blue" act being sexy were a bit cheesy. But it's been fun to follow their antics, as they attempt self-sufficiency out of their semi-detached back garden.

Photo courtesy of the BBC

Unlike Sue and Giles, we don't have any goats, chickens or pigs and don't wash our hair with goats pee - but we do have a veg plot under the window of "The Shed" (our new out-in-the-garden office), so can identify with some of their trials and tribulations of getting down in the dirt.


Nicky's more into the green finger stuff than I am, though I love the view of a well-stocked plot and I have contributed on the odd occasion by peeing on the compost (supposed to help the worms do the business).

In this week's episode, Sue & Giles entered an allotment competition, with the offerings of underdeveloped micro-vegetables and an aubergine which could blow away in the wind.

It can be a real challenge providing food from-allotment-to-table, when we're so used to popping down to the local supermarket where fruit and veg from all corners of the world are competing for shelf-space. There's something really satisfying though about a plate full of stuff that's grown just outside our back door, even if it is knobbly, odd-shaped and still a bit gritty.

There's certainly a move for us all to start using our land more productively - especially from our own little kingdoms, ie our back garden.

Monty Don is pushing hard as Head of the Soil Association, inspiring the old "Dig for Victory" ethos. Allotments are seeing a real surge in new kids (many from the 70s) coming on board, and John Seymour's self-sufficiency bible "The Fat of the Land" (the inspiration for the original Good Life series) is making a real come back.


Some of this may be necessity, some may be our desire to know more about where our food comes from. And some of this will be about the fact there's something very real, earthy and basic about providing for yourself and the ones close to you.

We may not all be up for downing a buffalo, or catching a salmon with our bare hands like our ancestors used to, but I bet we could all have a go at carrots or spuds as a starter for ten?

The Story of Electronics

When our washing machine and fridge both broke down within a week, it got me thinking about how dependent we are on these white boxes that occupy our homes. I also started wondering what happens to the white box when it dies and needs to move onto pastures new.

So, Annie Leonard’s email certainly struck a chord, when it popped in my mailbox this week, announcing the release of her second “Story of Stuff” movie, The Story of Electronics.

Annie is a great campaigner for highlighting just how much stuff us folk in the west consume and throw away every year. Her award winning first movie “The Story of Stuff” hit the world at speed and is still used in schools and colleges to highlight just what’s really happening to all the stuff we buy, enjoy and then chuck away.


Her new movie hits hard at the “design to dump” philosophy of many in the electronics industry, where products are often designed not to last, with a new more updated version ready to replace it within a few years, sometimes only months. With the pre-Christmas surge in electronics buying fast approaching, Annie’s calling us all to watch the movie and spread the word.


Making all these electronic devices takes an enormous environmental and public health toll: mining the metals trashes communities from Congo to Indonesia; assembling them uses huge amounts of water and energy and exposes workers to a host of toxic chemicals; and getting rid of them when we're on to the next, newer, better model creates mountains of e-waste.

The good news is that while the production, consumption and disposal of short-lived, toxics laden electronics are a really big problem, the solution is pretty simple: Make 'em Safe, Make 'em Last, and Take 'em Back.

A solution that needs to spread across all areas of life I reckon.

It's not a new concern or idea either, as the enormous WEEE sculpture at the inspiring Eden Project in Cornwall. Made entirely from scrap electronics, WEEE Man has been highlighting the plight of the amount of electronics ending up in landfill ever since 2005.


Photo courtesy of Ben Sutherland

But its an issue that isn't going away. In fact, Annie states in an interview in the Huffington Post that in the US alone, 400 million pieces of electrical gear are thrown away every year. That's a lot of WEEE Men.

We've replaced our fridge with a recycled SMEG we found at our local auction, and we've found an affordable A* rated washing machine from local white stuff man Sherrif. He also happens to recycle our old ones.

One small step, but it counts.