Frugal Food: Feeding a Family of Four – well – on £60 a week

T S Eliot may have been a brilliant poet but he didn’t know diddly squat about family budgets or late-stage capitalism and the hardships even relatively ‘comfortably off’ people suffer as they claw their way through debt-laden January. No, April isn’t the cruellest month, January is. It’s long, dark and hideously beset by money worries.

Feeding a family of four, tricky at the best of times – so and so doesn’t like mushrooms, not Spag Bol AGAIN, mum – becomes supremely challenging at this time of year. Forget running billion-dollar global companies, creating works of art or formulating political policies, the job of feeding a family of four, nutritiously and deliciously is the real tough job in January.

So, with just 60 quid to last me the week, here is my list of evening meal recipes which should provide enough protein, vegetables and – dare I say it – variety – for a fairly fussy family of four.

The recipes are based around some simple ideas: pasta, potatoes, onions, eggs, leeks, cabbage are all pretty cheap basics. Treats are a must and include my popular peanut butter flapjack, which provides delicious and filling ballast. Simply stir in two large tablespoons of unsalted crunchy peanut butter to the syrup and butter mix until a well-mixed smooth pale brown colour, then stir into the oats as usual. Chocolate brownies and home made apple cake are also welcome extras. We do not like to wear hair shirts in our family. I have also cheated – just once – in using leftover Christmas ham in one of the dishes.

Monday: Kedgeree: £8.00 (rice £2.00; kipper fillets £4.00; eggs: £1.00; store cupboard extras: £1.00)

Tuesday: Home made meatballs, mash and braised cabbage: £9.00 (minced beef: £4.00; potatoes: £2.00; cabbage: £1.00; store cupboard extras: £2.00)

Wednesday: Leek and Potato soup with cheesy garlic croutons: £5.00 (leeks: £2.00; potatoes: £1.00; cheese: £1.00; store cupboard extras: £1.00)

Thursday: Stuffed baked potatoes: £5.00 (potatoes: £2.00; cheese: £2.00; leftover Christmas ham; store cupboard extras: £1.00)

Friday: Pasta Carbonara: £9.00 (pasta: £1.00; cheese: £2.00; bacon bits: £2.00; eggs: £1.00; cream: £1.00; peas: £1.00)

Saturday: Potato, onion and red pepper omelette: £5.00 (eggs: £2.00; potatoes: £1.00; red pepper: £1.00; cheese: £1.00)

Sunday: Roast chicken, roast potatoes, parsnips, greens: £11.00 (free range chicken: £6.00; potatoes and parsnips: £3.00; greens: £1.00; store cupboard extras: £1.00)

Save the carcase, of course, for stock for next week’s soup.

Treats: peanut butter flapjacks: £2.50; home made chocolate brownies: £2.50; apple cake: £3.00

Total: £60.00

Store cupboard extras include: curry powder (for the kedgeree), glass of red wine (in the braised cabbage); dried fruit and nuts, butter, cooking oil, garlic, dried herbs, cocoa powder, onions, flour, stock and seasonings.

Inspirational Up-cycling Project Offers Second Time Around to Furniture and People

Dave Lucas is sanding down an old pine church pew, painted, in rather poor eighties taste, with brash golden swirls. Dave is bringing the piece back to its beautiful original pale nutty wood ingrained with darker brown knots and whorls. “When it’s done, I might paint it, or just leave it natural and give it a coat of wax,” he says, gazing with pride at his workmanship. Dave, in his late fifties, has suffered from learning difficulties all his life and although he was well cared for at his local authority day service in Banbury, he found the routine of swimming trips, cooking sessions and arts and crafts “not very interesting”.

Then a miracle happened. One of his care workers, Nathan Wallis, found a discarded small cupboard, missing its door, during a clearout of the centre’s greenhouse. Having trained as a joiner-cabinet maker, Nathan, with the help of some of the centre’s users, fashioned a door for it using an old wooden chopping board. “One of the other members of staff saw it, and said ‘that’s lovely’ and promptly bought it,” says Nathan. “It was then that I realised we could turn the craft activities into something both rewarding and useful,” he says.

Some of the furniture on sale at Second Time Around’s shop

Now, the day centre users are working flat out on up-cycling old battered furniture: sanding, scrubbing, painting and waxing; fixing shaky legs and refreshing cabinet doors with mirrors or chicken wire. The look is shabby chic – with the emphasis on chic – the wood painted an elegant French grey or pale wheat colour, or simply left natural. From selling the odd piece to relatives or other care workers, the project has moved on to taking commissions from pub restaurants to private clients who want a much loved piece rescued and restored.

With the help of Oxfordshire County Council, the project has moved to a larger premises on the outskirts of Banbury, a hive of bustling activity as the craftspeople keep up with demand for the fashionable pale, distressed woodwork they specialise in. For Dave, the project has transformed his life. Every morning he is collected from his day centre to spend hours lovingly coaxing tired old pieces, bound for the bonfire or landfill, back to life. “It’s so much more worthwhile than what I was doing before,” he says. “I really look forward to coming here.” His patience and thoroughness, his care to follow the grain of the wood and move rhythmically on from coarse-grade to ever finer sand papers means even a complex spiralled jardinière emerges palely glowing from its ugly coats of dark lacquer.

It’s not entirely clear whether it is the furniture, or the people who restore it, who are getting their ‘Second Time Around’ – the project’s name – either way, there are plenty of second chances on offer here.

Even the volunteers are getting them. One volunteer, young John Tysoe, was all set for a career in the Royal Marines when he suffered a damaging bleed on his brain while out running, aged just 21. The damage left the otherwise fit and active young man unable to find a proper job, so he worked as a painter and decorator until his mother heard about the charity and he offered to volunteer a day a week. “I was always interested in antiques and old furniture,” he says. “I look at pieces made more than a hundred years ago and wonder what their story might be – who ate at that table, who sat on that chair. We have enormous fun here, we laugh, talk and keep each other company.”

The tools too, mostly donated from shed and garage clearouts are also enjoying a renaissance. “Because of the difficulties our users face, we only use hand tools as we don’t want anyone’s finger getting chopped off,” says Nathan. “Likewise the paints are all water-based so we don’t require white spirit to clean the brushes. A bottle of white spirit might look like a bottle of water to someone here. The result is, every piece is hand-crafted and uses natural paints and waxes.”

Although Oxfordshire County Council pays the supervisory care workers’ wages, the project needs to wash its face financially, which means it must clear £18,000 a year or more to pay for rent on the workshop and other costs. “We get a lot of donated paint, and wood off-cuts from a local sawmill but we need to keep selling our furniture so we can keep going. There are many more potential users of the project, but at the moment our places are full up,” says Nathan.

 

For more details visit https://www.facebook.com/pages/Second-Time-Around/375683522486881

Home-made multi-surface cleaners

Cheaper than Mr Muscle and Better for the Fish too

Lemon, rosemary, lavender, bicarb: natural cleaners

The only downside of summer sunshine is that it cruelly exposes the slothful habits of winter: grimy work surfaces, dubious sticky patches inside food cupboards and hastily wiped hob tops. I have had a go at home-made furniture polishes and stain removers, however, the Holy Grail of domestic hygiene, the multi-surface spray cleaner, has, until now, eluded me. Shop-bought spray cleaners aren’t cheap – or certainly not as cheap as they should be considering they are mostly water. At a price range of £2.50 –  £4.50 per 350ml unit, depending on what brand you buy, these kitchen cupboard regulars are pound for pound more expensive than a bottle of decent Pinot Grigio. In addition, some of the synthetic fragrances are pretty revolting. So I tried making my own. Most recipes take just a few minutes. All worked out at less than £1 per bottle. Each recipe makes enough to fill a standard size 350 ml spray pump bottle (I keep used ones in my kitchen but if you need to you can buy from garden centres or kitchen equipment stores).

Recipe One: Lemon and lavender:

Lemon and bicarb are classic cleaning partners, the acid of the lemon and the alkali of the bicarb producing vigorous fizzing. Lavender essential oil not only smells divine but is a natural bactericide. Squeeze the juice of three lemons into a mixing jug and add three teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda. When the fizzing dies down, add one drop of washing up liquid, three drops of lavender essential oil and enough water to top the bottle (around one part lemon mixture to two parts water). Stir well and use immediately.

Verdict: A sublime natural scent of lemons and lavender made this spray a real joy to use. I made it in around three minutes at a cost of about 97 pence. It works well for wiping down lightly soiled work surfaces and dining tables but not heavy duty enough for tea and wine stains.

Recipe Two: Vinegar, rosemary and tea tree oil:

Put a sprig of rosemary into a saucepan and add about 150 ml of white wine vinegar. Bring to the boil, remove from heat and leave to steep until the vinegar is cool. Add three teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda, one drop of washing up liquid and about three drops of tea tree oil. Stir and pour into spray bottle.

Verdict: This both smells, and behaves in, a more businesslike manner. The astringent properties of the rosemary and antiseptic and anti-bacterial properties of the tea tree oil mean that this packs a powerful cleaning punch. The tea tree oil has a clean, camphorous scent and masks the vinegar.  The spray was more effective than the lavender and lemon mixture at removing cooking stains from my white melamine work surface. It even made short work of the build-up of grease and over-boiled coffee residue on the gas hob. Use cheap supermarket white wine vinegar and it comes out at around 87 pence.

Recipe Three: Vinegar, borax substitute and rose geranium oil.

Borax, a mineral compound, has been used for centuries as a cleaning agent. However it is an irritant and was recently listed as a ‘Substance of Very High Concern’ on the European Union’s list of restricted chemicals. Borax substitute is chemically similar to the mineral, but less of an irritant and is a compound of sodium bicarbonate and sodium carbonate. Essentially it is a more powerful version of bicarbonate of soda. I bought mine from Summer Naturals (www.summernaturals.co.uk) at £3.09 for 1 kg, which will last me about ten years. Rose geranium oil is a natural deodorant as well as being slightly astringent and antiseptic but you can choose whichever essential oil you like best. Sweet orange oil works well here too. Mix two heaped teaspoons of borax substitute with about 100 ml of white wine vinegar in a jug large enough to contain the quite fierce fizzing that ensues. Add one drop of washing up liquid, the essential oil of your choice and top up with warm water.

Verdict: The most powerful of the three spray cleaners, and I used it successfully all over the house, including the bathrooms. It is also the cheapest, costing less that about 60 pence to make, but you do need to order the borax substitute in advance.

All three are cheap, effective natural substitutes to shop-bought spray cleaners and if you keep the spray bottles, you will also save on plastic over the years. No more Mr Muscle.

 

 

The Cafes where you get a fix

It’s a scene straight out of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock: heat is shimmering off the hot pebbles on the beach; young and old showing off their knees as they paddle in the sparkling green sea. In the cool of Saint George’s church, Kemp Town, just uphill from the crowded Front, groups of people are sitting at bright blue and white gingham-clad tables, frowns of concentration wrinkling their foreheads.

At one table piled with ribbons, skeins of wool and material remnants, two women are crocheting, delicate leaf patterns falling from their hooked implements. At another a jolly group of four are mending toys and repairing rips in cardigans. At a third, a man is soldering the back of a circuit board while in the background a pianist tinkles out a mixture of jazz and flamenco melodies.

Victoria Jackson shows a customer how to mend her leather bag

Welcome to Brighton Repair Café, where instead of drinking lattes, “customers” learn how to fix old and broken household items so they can be saved and re-used rather than thrown away. Part of a growing movement begun in the Netherlands, Repair Cafes are run by volunteers who pass on their skills for free, to try to help people get more out of their possessions. Today, Brighton mum Anastasia Mainwaring is learning how to crochet so she can patch up an old and much loved jumper. “I haven’t been able to wear it for six months because in places it has worn gossamer-thin,” she says. “I’m learning how to create fern-shaped leaves which I can then sew onto the worn patches and wear my favourite jumper again.”

Another “customer” Dan Hadley, a third year student at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, is learning how to solder so he can mend his computer speakers. “I did Design and Technology at school but didn’t learn anything really practical,” says Dan. “I know what the problem is, the part where the jack connects to the electrical wire is broken. I want to learn to repair it rather than just chuck it out.”

The Brighton Repair Café was founded by Masters Graduate Victoria Jackson and is one of twelve similar groups now operating across the country, from Chesterfield in the north, to Brighton and Bristol in the south. The ethos is simple: volunteer repairers with skills ranging from darning, to bicycle mechanics to carpentry and electrical work give their time for a few hours once a month. Repairees drop in, learn a new skill and give a small donation in return. The money is spent on tools and materials such as darning mushrooms and thread, but mostly on the huge variety of screw driver heads required to mend electrical appliances.

Volunteer electrician Mattia Cobianchi, who for his day job is an acoustic engineer, says that more than three quarters of the time it takes to mend a piece of electrical equipment is spent on opening it up. “Mass production of appliances has brought down quality meaning they break more easily, but the sealed unit process which relies on using lots of glue and specialised screw heads actually makes them harder to repair. Some basic items like toasters, which we get in all the time, have up to six or seven different types of screw in their structure and you need a really specialised tool kit to open them up. Consumers are almost encouraged to throw things away rather than try and mend them.”

Miriam and Mattia with the repaired lamp

As well as shoddy and hard-to-repair appliances, we seem to have lost skills such as darning and minor electrical work that a few generations earlier were part and parcel of education. One young couple Miriam and Juan Carlos Garcia have brought in a new bedside lamp. The problem, identified by Mattia in a matter of minutes, is a blown fuse. “I was quite surprised it was so easy to mend,” says Miriam. “It’s such a simple thing but I was never taught how to check and replace a blown fuse.”

Another customer Irenka Motyka has made do and mended all her life, and has brought a ripped cardigan for the companionship rather than the need to learn a skill. “My parents fled Poland in the Second World War and for the first five years of my life I lived in a refugee camp in Oxfordshire,” she says. “We had nothing, so everything was patched and mended. It’s nice people want to learn these skills again.”

As for me, I learned “Swiss darning”, a way of strengthening knitwear before it gives way, to repair my jumpers. Also, thanks to design lecturer Sam Jarman who helps out with a range of practical repairs, I fixed my beloved but battered stove-top coffee machine whose rubber seal had disintegrated. It’s now good for another ten years.

For details of your nearest Repair café, and how to start one visit www.repaircafe.org

 

 

From the sixteenth century to the twenty first century: how a couple time-travelled in their new eco home

Jane and Ian McClintock are unlikely time travellers. Living close to the land in rural Suffolk, Jane is an artist and writer who finds inspiration in nature and Ian, a farmer and keen bird watcher has always, as Jane puts it, “trod lightly on the planet, keeps clothes until they fall off him and is more interested in the nesting habits of swifts than modern technology”.

But this year they moved more than 500 years through time, from a listed Sixteenth Century farmhouse, to a Twenty First Century ‘passivhaus’-designed home. It has been quite a big adventure, resulting in a radical change in the way they live, move and dress, inside their home.

Anyone who has lived in a cold, old house knows the routine. It’s getting late and you need to go to bed. Sitting in the living room, with the wood-burner or fire throwing out warmth and light, you know there are metaphorical acres of arctic tundra to cross before reaching the relative safety of the duvet where your shivering, at least, helps warm the bed. This is how Jane and Ian lived until December last year.

“The old farmhouse is very beautiful, but very cold,” says Jane. “During the winter our heating bills were massive, but the house was still cold. Slippers, chilblains, jumpers and seeing your breath indoors were all part and parcel of the winter months. Occasionally frost would build up inside the windows.”

With retirement and mature years approaching, Jane and Ian embarked on a project to build their own home that would both shield them from the cold and also reduce their use of fossil fuels. The bold, cedar-clad new house, that sits beside, and echoes, the timber and corrugated iron outbuildings of the old farmhouse has changed their understanding of the concept of ‘home’.

“It’s like being on holiday all year round,” says Jane, who specialises in ceramics and print-making. “The weather outside seems far away, we feel protected by the house. During the winter, rather than huddling in one warm room, not wanting to move, we can move around the house, barefoot, whenever we like. It’s very liberating. It’s also very comforting to know that no matter how warm we keep the house in the winter, we’re not going to face shattering bills in the spring.”

As well as benefiting from high tech building techniques such as an airtight ‘skin’ and external solar ‘blinds’ to prevent over-heating, the house is designed to help and attract wildlife. The ‘green’ roof is sewn with different varieties of sedum, which flower at different times, extending the pollen-collecting period for bees and other insects; swift, swallow and house martin boxes are built into the structure and rainwater is collected for re-use.

Architect Meredith Bowles of Mole Architects (www.molearchitects.co.uk) says the solid, square design of the house takes inspiration from village rectories that typically stand on the edge of villages. The strong flat-roofed design means it does not sit higher than the older buildings on the site. “The third floor bedroom ‘pops’ up out of the roofline and looks rather like a bird-watchers’ hide, which is appropriate for Ian.” Meredith says it was no more difficult to build such a well-insulated house as it is to build a conventional one. “There is nothing about this house that is technologically difficult. Builders all over Europe are putting up houses that reach these standards and its rubbish to claim, as our volume builders do, that it’s hard to achieve these levels of efficiency. It’s actually incredibly easy.”

The McClintocks are unsentimental about leaving the historic, five-hundred year old farmhouse that has been in Jane’s family, in the Suffolk village of Palgrave, for generations. “Although it is very beautiful, it wasn’t a wrench leaving the old house at all,” says Jane. “Our basic need for warmth over-rides our aesthetic sense. Anyway the new house is very beautiful, with strong, simple lines and while it may not yet have the ‘character’ that a 500-year-old house has, Ian and I are the characters now.”

The only slight misgiving Jane had when she first moved in, was operating the ‘kit’ that comes with an eco house, with it solar thermal and pv panels, air source heat pump and ventilation system. “The way I altered the temperature in our old house was to throw another couple of logs on the fire,” she says. “This is a lot more complicated, and a little bit scary. But so far it’s working fine.”picture shows another Mole Architects project, their famous ‘Balancing Barn’

The fifty year mattress

Back in 1968, when Mary Hopkins’ nostalgic hit ‘Those were the Days’ was topping the singles chart, Mary Fletcher bought a mattress. Forty-five years later, she still sleeps on it, “the most divinely comfortable mattress I have ever slept on”.  Apart from being beautifully restful, the mattress should be good for another forty five years and more, during which time it will have saved at least 10 conventional mattresses from having been made, discarded and sent to rot in landfill.

This is the story of Mary Fletcher’s mattress, its birth from English ‘long staple’ wool in an Italian bed-maker’s workshop, its journey, in 1980, across a snow-shrouded Europe, and its continued, generous giving of delicious sleep well into its fifth decade. This is also the story of how crazy it is that as a nation we send  millions of mattresses – 144,000 tonnes worth, including 84,500 tonnes of perfectly re-usable steel – each year to landfill.

A former Foreign Office shorthand typist and translator, Mary went to work in Milan in 1968, sleeping on a camp bed and sitting in a deck chair until “my darling mother sent me money to buy a proper bed”.

The bed Mary Fletcher bought was made by Senor Oldani, a Milanese bed-maker and upholsterer. He made beds the Italian way, and the way we used to make mattresses in England before the introduction of short-lived internally-sprung mattresses. Mary’s bed has an “indestructible” steel  spring base, topped with a mattress stuffed with silky, long-haired sheep’s wool, typically found in English lowland breeds such as Dorset Horn, Cotswold and  Border Leicester. “Because it is made of wool, it is brilliantly cool even in 35 degree centigrade nights, and wonderfully warm in really cold winters. It is also just the right firmness. I have a difficult back and it is the only mattress I can comfortably sleep on,” says Mary, 84, now retired and living in the gentle folds of rural Oxfordshire.

The beauty of the mattress is that when it needs a wash, the wool can be pulled out, stuffed, in batches, into pillow cases, put through the washing machine and after drying, carded back into fluffy pile before being returned to the mattress cover. “Every few years, it needs to be re-carded, as the wool slowly compacts,” says Mary. “In Italy, during the summer the mattress man, ‘il cardatore’ tours Italian homes, pulls out the wool from their mattresses, re-cards it, adds some more, as the process reduces the stuffing a bit, re-buttons and then sews the mattress cover back up again.” Mary submitted her mattress to this process four times while she was in Milan.

“I left Milan in 1980 and couldn’t bear to leave my mattress in Italy, so with my brother’s help and a large van, we drove it through the snowy Alps until it arrived here in Oxfordshire.” The problem now of course for Mary was would anyone in England be able to continue the regular process of re-carding the wool?

“I found an upholsterer in Whitney who had an old carding machine he used for traditional horsehair mattresses, but ironically he had no access to English long staple wool, so over the next thirty years my mattress got thinner and thinner.”

Almost despairing that she would be able to continue sleeping on her emaciating mattress, Mary found Rhiannon Rowley of Abaca Organic, who makes wool mattresses in the west of Wales, from organic British wool. “It was a bit trial and error, because although I have re-stuffed wool and horsehair mattresses, I had never done an all-wool one before,” says Rhiannon. “The tricky bit is to get it even and not lumpy. You have to do it by hand,  layer by layer, working with the wool, not against it, you can’t just stuff it in. Wool has a mind of its own.”

It took six hours to fill Mary’s mattress, with a combination of Mary’s original wool, and a top-up of Dorset Horn wool, which most closely matched Mary’s existing stuffing. Rhiannon was so impressed with the results that she now plans to make more all-wool mattresses herself. “Mattress retailers recommend you change your mattress every 7 – 10 years, which is a criminal waste of money and materials,” she says. “Although I can’t find any British sprung-base bed makers, there are lots of antique ones on the market people could use.”

Wool and sleep

Like all young mums, Pia Maguire has joy and love in abundance. What she could always do with more of is sleep: that delicious state of blissful unconsciousness that parents of babies and toddlers crave almost to obsession.

Pia’s beautiful daughters’ sleep patterns are further complicated by their suffering from eczema, resulting in broken nights and terrible discomfort. “Sometimes it has been so bad that the youngest, Maya, who is only five months old, would scream with the pain and irritation of it,” says Pia, who works part time in Human Resources. When Maya was two months old, Pia, increasingly sleep-deprived, and wanting to do something for her girls, investigated research on eczema and found reference to wool bedding improving sleep quality, particularly for people suffering from skin disorders.

“I ordered wool cot duvets, pillows and mattress toppers for the girls’ beds and the difference was immediately noticeable,” says Pia who lives with husband Ben and daughters Ava and Maya in north London. “Ben was at first a bit sceptical and wasn’t sure I was spending the money wisely, but he’s now a convert. After the girls’ sleep improved, we ordered wool bedding for ourselves, and we sleep better now too.

“What was also pleasing was that the wool came from British sheep, rather than from cotton from the far East or goose down from eastern Europe.  It’s also helping sheep farmers look after our countryside by making it worth their while to keep sheep. It made me feel proud in a way,” says Pia.

Anecdotal evidence such as Pia’s is always nice to hear, as the British wool industry, once the mainstay of our rural economy, is struggling to assert itself despite its impeccable eco-credentials.  Not only is British wool recyclable and local but sheep farmers do much to maintain our rural landscape.

However ongoing studies into wool and sleep at the University of Sydney in Australia, appear to confirm Pia’s experiences. Researchers at the University’s Faculty of Health Sciences conducted tests using polysomnography, which measures the amount of sleep, and the type of sleep people get using sensors. Eight healthy volunteers slept in and on wool, cotton and synthetic sleepwear and bedding at three different temperatures: hot (29 degrees C), neutral (22 degrees C) and cold (17 degrees C). The differences in sleep quality showed that sleeping in and on wool produced more deep sleep, and longer sleep with the difference at high temperatures most marked. Here, the average night’s sleep was 448 minutes (7 hours 28 minutes) with wool compared to 426 minutes (7 hours 6 minutes) with synthetic nightwear. Cotton performed better than synthetic, but worse than wool.

The research, which is due to be published later this year in a scientific journal, compliments previous research which shows benefits of sleeping on wool and sheepskin both for healthy people and for those with bed sores and skin problems. Scientists believe the wool bedding gives better sleep because it absorbs much of the sweat bodies produce in the night, keeping skin dry and comfortable. It also regulates body temperature, keeping sleepers warm in the winter and cool in the summer, a feature that is particularly helpful for babies, who have trouble regulating temperature.

Jo Dawson, of H Dawson Wool, a family wool buying business since 1888, says that slowly the British are re-discovering wool, for all sorts of uses including bedding, sleepwear as well as more unusual architectural and interiors applications. Designers have even made load bearing structures with wool, including staircases. “British lowland wool is particularly good for bedding because it is naturally bouncy and springs back into shape when depressed.” He says that for years wool bedding was only of minority interest because it was difficult to wash but now washable duvets, pillows and mattress toppers are available thanks to modern wool processing methods.

Certainly wool mattress toppers, which cost around £100 – £125 are kinder on the pocket than wool mattresses which can cost between £1,000 – £2,000.

Children’s sleep expert Andrea Grace says that wool blankets and sleepwear, once widely used, have in recent years gone out of fashion in preference to cotton. “I did however always put a fleece sheepskin at the bottom of my own children’s prams when they were babies, although my youngest is now 14,” she says. “It doesn’t surprise me that babies sleep better on wool bedding as the natural fibres are likely to help regulate temperature. I would however advise parents to check their babies aren’t allergic to lanolin first, if they are tempted to try wool.”