But what if you want to find conversations with multiple labels? For example you are interested only in messages labelled ‘Sales region 2′ and ‘Quarter 3 2010′.

Instead of going into ‘Show search options’ simply type your search into the search box at the top of the Gmail screen thus:

label:sales-region-2 label:quarter-3-2010

and click Search Mail. This will return a list of conversations containing both labels. Note that the label names are case insensitive, but you must replace spaces with a hyphen.

What if you are interested in messages with either label? Then you would use:

label:sales-region-2 OR label:quarter-3-2010

The OR operator must be uppercase. Alternatively you can use the pipe operator ‘|’ (shift+backslash on your keyboard) like this:

label:sales-region-2 | label:quarter-3-2010

You are probably three steps ahead of me here, and wondering about other compound searches. In fact you can choose from a long list of “query words” to build up a very specific search. In Gmail see Help articles › Using advanced search for the (almost) endless possibilities!

Now everything in the supermarket has its ‘organic’ alternative. Still more expensive, but within range of those people who are not on a tight budget and are keen to save the planet whilst eating healthy food.

But who defines what is organic and what is not? Shoppers who assume it means food grown without pesticides or fertilizers need to do a bit of checking if they are not to be misled.

Here’s an example: Morrison’s Organic Corn Flakes. On the box it says

Organic standards prohibit the use of genetically modified ingredients and seek to avoid routine use of artificial pesticides and fertilizers.

Such weasely phraseology would make a home-flipping MP blush.

Whatever length of cook time was initially chosen, I invariably run out of patience and grab my coffee before the beep.

So, how feasible would it be to run a closed pipeline loop from the Sahara desert to Europe and back? Filled not with gas, but water. Imagine hundreds of kilometres of pipe laid out in the baking desert sun. Circulated water could take the heat collected there and deliver it to colder northern countries.

It would be a simple system with low maintenance costs and zero emissions, offering a perpetual revenue stream for African countries.

The road has been renamed Royce Street and, although it isn’t closed to the public, there are men in reflective vests discouraging motorists from slowing down to see what is going on. A coach full of extras is parked nearby, together with catering vans, and a dozen other vehicles. There is an awful lot of standing around!

Here’s what I did. First, I used kitchen towel to pull off as much chewing gum as I could without spreading it further. At once the task seemed both achievable and yet more daunting. A reasonable amount came off, but what was left just looked so perfectly stuck on.

Next I put some ice cubes in the corner of a carrier bag and rubbed them over the surface of the gum. The bag kept the carpet dry, whilst the ice hardened the gum so that I could pry little pieces off the tufts of carpet using a blunt knife. Quite a lot remained however, despite a good 40 minutes’ painstaking attention to a few square centimetres of carpet. It would always stick out like a sore thumb, I thought.

Then I got out the steam wallpaper stripper, which sits in the cellar unused from one year to the next. If you aren’t familiar with them, a steam stripper is a portable electic water boiler with a rubber hose leading to a flat plate which you hold against the wall. The steam quickly penetrates the wallpaper and releases the paste so that you can scrape the old paper off.

I filled it with hot water, plugged the unit in and waited for it to boil. I removed the plate attachment which you normally hold against the wallpaper, and held up the rubber hose to let the condensing steam run back into the unit. Once the hose got nice and hot, it stopped spluttering and the steam coming out was a nice thin, hot and relatively dry jet.

I played it over the area and the gum softened to a minty goo. Using more kitchen towel, I pulled off most of it. Ouch! The carpet was quite hot. All the carpet tufts became separate and the pile was actually restored to its ‘as new’ height.

Finally, I made a strong solution of washing-up liquid and cleaned the newly restored patch of carpet with a sponge. A few dabs using the sponge dampened with clean water completed the task. I suppose I need to say that this method might not be suitable for all carpets, so use this information entirely at your own risk.

Here in the UK, there isn’t (yet) a shortage. But rice could completely disappear from supermarket shelves. Don’t believe me? It’s already happened with macaroni.

Before privatisation, the meters were read separately. After privatisation, the meters are read separately (by another company!). Nothing physically changed. All the cables and pipes are the same. Having different companies selling us energy is just an accounting construct to introduce competition. I understand that.

But what good has this change really done? The energy suppliers spend plenty of money on adverts and sponsorship. They pay door-to-door canvassers to call at inconvenient times. They each have head offices full of staff doing jobs which never existed before. Who ultimately pays for all these overheads? Consumers. Plus, my supplier isn’t even British any more.

It would be OK if this competition brought the assumed benefits. Downward pressure on prices through consumer choice should force competing companies to become more efficient. But there isn’t true competition in the domestic energy market. We don’t switch suppliers, even though we can. That’s because tariff comparison is not for the faint-hearted, and the process of actually changing suppliers is slow and bureaucratic. Plus you may find (as I did) that your new supplier hikes their rates soon after you join them.

Life’s just too short to fiddle about with energy suppliers. Gas and electricity come into my house unseen. Money is taken from my bank for what I use. That should be it. Anything more involving is a hassle I can do without.

You will need the accessories too, of course. A stand, and the adaptor bit that goes in the downpipe to collect all that precious water for your plants. So you can end up spending a bit of money and consuming a few kilos of plastic – but for what?

Well, by collecting rainwater, you ease the burden on our drinking water system, and the quality is better for your plants, too. Except that it’s acid rain you are collecting. (Remember acid rain? We were all fretting about it before global warming.) If you have a water meter, then your investment will save you a few pennies I suppose. But I imagine that the drinking water argument is what persuades a lot of people to eschew a hose pipe in favour of the old watering can.

I must admit, it seems wasteful to take drinking water and sprinkle it on the roses. There is an environmental cost in building and maintaining reservoirs, water treatment works and the network of pipes to every home. So collecting your own water looks like an environmentally responsible decision. Except there is all that plastic of course. What is the environmental impact of the factories churning out all these water butts, and the lorries delivering them around the country? And what is the end-of-life impact? Not forgetting the fact that the water collection and distribution network is there anyway. Gardeners are just using a small fraction of the total throughput.

What is often the most persuasive argument for water butts is the media pictures of depleted reservoirs in summer time. With stocks down, how can you justify taking precious water supplies for your lawn? Well actually, if you have a water butt that’s exactly what you are doing anyway.

As every schoolboy knows, the rain which falls on your roof eventually makes its way into water reservoirs, does it not? This natural, perpetual cycle is interrupted when you install your own private reservoir, holding back precious litres which used to flow through drains and rivers, eventually to the sea and thence via evaporation up into the sky to fall as rain. No wonder the reservoirs look so empty in summertime nowadays. It’s all those water butts.