Well, the CATE Celebrity Challenge letter hasn't been printed in any newspapers yet. But in the meantime we are ruthlessly targeting some celebrities via other avenues, as they say in business. More news soon.

I'd like to remind everyone, if you haven't already done it, to sign up to www.thenag.net. You get sent an email every month to prompt you to do something small for the environment. This month I got told to buy a hamper of locally grown fruit from a website which The Nag recommends. It arrived this morning and I'm looking forward to getting stuck into some produce that wasn't grown thousands of miles away. I've been making an effort to choose locally sourced fruit, veg, wine and so on, but The Nag's gentle elbow-tugging is priceless. Sign up, it's really easy.

Now for some plastic-bag-related news. My sisters, who are 16, have decided to make and market fashionable canvas bags as part of a school project which is like one of those Young Enterprise things. Their business is called Globe and they are head-to-head with another company of 16-year-olds. Naturally, I want to give them every possible unfair advantage so I have agreed to do a sort of environmentally-based gig at their school in a couple of weeks.

This will be my first chance to try out some of the material from the Al Gore lecture course, possibly. It is a frightening proposition to attempt this at all, but doing it in front of teenage girls, whom I've been afraid of since I was a teenage boy, is a challenge indeed. Nonetheless the planet demands it. I will let you know what happens.

In the meantime I would like CATE members to suggest slogans for canvas bags which my sisters could sell. Indeed, you may even like to commission your own bag with personalised slogan (they will be about four quid probably). So far they have slogans like 'plastic is pointless, canvas is cool' and pictures of a happy-looking planet and so on, but can we raise the bar? Please post any suggestions here and I will set them to work on CATE-inspired bags like poorly-paid teenagers working for GAP. But with the opposite moral position hopefully.

Also, if you have been walking rather than taking a car for the CATEWALK, I want to do an inventory of exactly how many non-carbon miles we've chalked up so far, so please post your tally on the original CATEWALK blog (to be found somewhere below). Then Miriam will post a counter on the website, like the one in Children In Need showing how much money they've got, and we'll know how close we are to one of the greatest offsetting feats in history.

Thank you in advance for your walking/bag design ideas/knowledge of celebs who might take part in challenges/etc. 

MW

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