I'll race you to half-term

Barely have we recovered from the long Christmas holiday and snow days

 but it is half-term, already.

Time for the cross-country race.

It's a tradition; and the accretion of years is such

 that even the Headmaster can't recall

why February

 is the traditional season

to don your shorts

and race around the frozen fields.

Double-click on the pictures

better to see the tiny racing figures

and the flock of sheep.

Do you suppose those sheep

look up from their munching

and wonder, idly,

what the fuss is about?

 Might they get the notion

to join in?

And now, we run around the lake

girls in green,

and boys in red.

Unlike the runners,

the bystanders are all bundled up.

Wellies, tweed, a hat and most of all

a dog

are de rigieur.

The perfect examplar

of English country style.

The last bit is all up-hill

and it separates

the sprinters from the stragglers.

You do get a boost from the crowd, though.

It's all over now . . .

except for the jelly doughnut, the hot chocolate

the warm bath

and two loads of sports kit in the wash.

No Impact Man

In January, our village in England launched a greening campaign.  These scarecrows popped up all over the place -- not to frighten the birds away, but rather to draw attention to the cause.  How many of us do have our head in the sand when it comes to climate change?
   
Our village chose eight actions to focus on, and it asked every household to adopt at least five.

• Boil only the amount of water you need.
• Turn off lights when you leave a room.
• Turn off taps when brushing teeth.
• Turn the thermostat down by 1 degree C.
• Walk or cycle if the journey is less than a mile.
• Turn off all inactive appliances and standbys.
• Change 3 light bulbs to low energy.
• Reduce each normal shower time by one minute.

Little things, really -- requiring some habit-change but no great (or even minor) deprivation.  Our household was already doing all of them, to some extent, although we could improve on shower time and turning off inactive appliances . . . and I still drop my daughter off at the bus-stop every morning.  (In this case, the emotional energy required to get her to walk more than a mile up-hill, with a heavy bag, and usually in the rain, isn't worth the CO2 savings.)

However.  Although cutting back on any waste is preferable to doing nothing at all, surely, these are still the sort of actions that Colin Beavan describes as "easy environmental half-measures" in his recent book No Impact Man.  Buying organic, recycling, using natural cleaning products, driving a hybrid:  these may slightly lessen our negative impact on the world, but they won't solve any of the big problems we face.

No Impact Man is an account of one family's attempt to live in New York City for a year with little to no environmental impact.   The book follows a roughly chronological timeline, which follows a sort of learning and living curve:  first, living in a way which creates no garbage; then eliminating carbon-producing forms of transportation; then eating only food which is produced within 250 miles of NYC; and finally, turning off the electricity altogether.  As he describes the family's adaptation, he also links each element -- diapers, for instance; or eating a piece of pizza -- to the larger cultural and economic climate. 

The book is not really a how-to guide, though.  Although Bevan does provide many specific examples for living a no-impact life, the book is really more of a philosophical treatise.  Bevan is more interested in considering what value, if any, there is to only a few individuals making this kind of radical lifestyle change.  He wants to discover both the negative and positive aspects of going off the grid -- not just the electrical grid, but an entire of way of life based on convenience and consumption.

Although it isn't exclusively an American problem, Beavan is keenly aware that consumerism is so embedded in the typically American way of life that it is pretty much its bedrock.  As he phrases it, "to be a good citizen is to be an aggressive consumer."  I remember noticing how much environmental issues got derailed last fall during the economic crisis.  We (as people, as a governmental bodies) are interested in the environment only to the point where it doesn't impact jobs or salaries.

Last week my husband was at an energy conference and the panel of speakers admitted that there was no way that the UK could meet their targets for reducing carbon.   We know we need to do it, but it really requires a total overhaul of the way we live now. Technology can only help to a certain extent;  meanwhile, resources (clean water, oil) continue to dwindle.  "Clean" coal; what a misnomer.  Energy security is one issue, but environmentally, coal is a disaster, wind power is exorbitantly expensive and nuclear energy has all sorts of attached hazards.

The BIG problem is that populations continue to grow; the second biggest problem is that people continue to want to maintain (or improve) their standard of living.  Also heard at this conference:  one expert said that each (first-world) person represents about 3 tons of carbon in usage/waste . . . unless you take into account the stuff that we all use, and then the figure is more like 12 tons.  Yes, China is burning up all kinds of natural resources at the moment -- and most of them are being used to create stuff to sell in countries like the UK and the United States.

I was thinking about all of this last weekend when I went to IKEA to buy my daughter an inexpensive desk.  Have you been to an IKEA recently?  It's an enormous warehouse filled to the brim with overwhelming amounts of "affordable" stuff -- much of it made in China.  As I was checking out, I couldn't help but notice two rather ironic signs.  One of the signs proudly proclaimed that IKEA was a plastic-bag free space; the other encouraged IKEA shoppers to take public transporation, instead of cars, to the store.  At the moment, the IKEA experience seemed to encompass everything that was wrong with our current way of life.  The truth is, even if I could have taken a train to IKEA -- and we don't have a line that runs that way -- it would have cost more than the desk to make that journey.  Also, when you are going to a store to buy things like sofas and desks, the train is really not ideal.  Not using a plastic bag?  Well, I take my reusable bags everywhere, but really, that adds up to a small band-aid when it comes to overall waste.

I couldn't help but laugh when I saw the load of recyclables sitting by this "scarecrow" made out of recycled material.  It's better to recycle than to not recycle, but the real problem -- as Beavan points out -- is that we make so much trash.

One of the interesting things about No Impact Man is that gives Beavan the chance to discover what aspects of modern life really are necessary for a good quality of life.  Clean water, for instance; but also a washing machine.  A television or a bread machine?  Not so much.  Beavan does acknowledge that any environmental measure that causes true deprivation or pain is unlikely to adopted by any but the most ascetic few.  Living without electricity is not going to appeal to many of us.

It seems really unlikely that our governments are going to solve this problem for us.  The recent Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen was not notable for its cooperative success. The measures adopted by my village aren't going to fix the environmental problems either -- but that is not to say that they aren't worth doing.  Thinking about climate change can make a person feel despondent; the problems are just so huge.  Ultimately, No Impact Man is really a book about what it feels like to take personal responsibility for a seemingly insurmountable problem.  It was definitely food for thought.

And by the way . . . of all of those energy-saving measures, the most meaningful is to turn down the thermostat.  It saves more CO2 than everything else combined.

Click icon for more book review blogs @Barrie Summy

Good night January

Goodnight January

goodnight to the old decade
goodnight resolutions made

goodnight gloomy winter skies
goodnight soup and shortcrust pies

goodnight after-Christmas bills
goodnight slipping down the hill

goodnight forecasts always bleak
goodnight birthdays every week

goodnight school-runs in the dark
goodnight snowmen in the park

goodnight frozen garden hose
goodnight flu and stuffed-up nose

goodnight black and shades of gray
good morning to the longer days!

Mother/Daughter Blog Camp

I took my daughter to Blog Camp . . . and she (I) created a monster!

Now I "get" blogging, she said.

I want to go to EVERY Blog Camp, she said.

If you want to take a peek at our artistic/social exploits, look here.

Contextualizing

three different views

of the same fields,
the same horses,

in one week

Context is everything; context is all.

Is it the weather, the landscape, or both?  It's both, of course.

Today was my first "normal" day since December 13th.  But how do I define normal?

Normal is taking the kids to school, no snow on the roads, the morning at Jane Austen House, the afternoon at home tutoring, several loads of wash to do, gnocchi with tomato sauce for dinner, lots of emails to catch up with, a new book to begin, a blog to write.

The Christmas holidays, followed by the snow holidays, were threatening to permanently pre-empt my notions of normal life.  Can you still call it "normal" if it stops being your default context?  A week of Christmas snow is magical; a week of playing-hooky-from-real-life snow is fun; after that, it stops being a novelty and starts being tiresome.

My youngest daughter had precisely one day in school before I whisked her off to Copenhagen for a birthday (her 12th) Blog Camp.  For three days, 10 of us talked (and talked), and drank tea, and sewed, and art-journaled.  It was too intense to be normal.  Even though the sky was gray and the wind was bitter, there was a warm golden glow that can't be entirely explained by those Scandinavian wood-burning fires.

For the first time in years, I have a circle of friends who are younger than I am.  Isn't age one of the strangest, most bizarrely contextual states of mind and being?  During the Christmas holidays, I watched an Elvis retrospective and re-discovered that he was only 42 when he died.   How did  42 get to be such a shockingly young age to die?  When I was a child he seemed plenty old -- and so washed-up.  Although I'm fairly relaxed about being 43 (and one week old), I still can't help but think:  I am now older than Elvis.

We are expecting heavy snow tonight.  My oldest daughter has her Physics GCSE tomorrow.  If necessary, we will put on our ski clothes and walk miles through the snow to school.  It's getting to be our new normal.

Resolution #2

My name is Bee, and I am a Luddite.

Yes, it's true.  I have been using a mobile phone that I dislike for nearly four years, merely because I cannot bear to learn how to use a new one.  My husband had to cajole me into using an Ipod.  I still don't know how to program the timing system on our boiler.  Frankly, I'm amazed that I ever figured out how to set up a blog.

If I cannot intuitively sort out how to use a piece of machinery/technology, I just give up.  Yes, I know that I could read the manual . . . but when confronted with a manual I become impatient, frustrated and semi-illiterate.  It drives my tech-savvy husband crazy.

At the moment, my comfort level (pre-Industrial Revolution) is being severely threatened.  My generous, generous husband surprised me with a BIG camera -- just as I had begun to master my little point-and-shoot Lumix.  Elizabeth told me that her husband refers to these hulky pieces of machinery as toasters.  (If only they were as easy to use as toasters.)

Along with the camera, I got a thick manual.  And an even thicker Nikon D-90 for Dummies book.

My second resolution for 2010 will be to break a lifetime's (bad) habit and actually read these manuals. 

I'm going to learn how to use this big camera; and not just on the P mode (that's programmed auto for the lay-people out there).

I just figured out how to download my first set of Nikon pictures.  Well, it's a start.

Resolution #1

After the frenzied month of Christmas prep, I do love the voluptuously lazy days between Christmas and New Year's.  My family, all of us owls by constitution, revert to the inclinations not possible in the regular workaday world.  By that I mean that we stay up until 2 and sleep 'til 10.  I think that it is the only time of year that I feel truly rested.

This year's post-Christmas week has been lazier than usual, mostly because we didn't host our annual New Year's Eve sleepover party.  Instead, we've watched lots of movies, read lots of books and completed several fiendishly difficult puzzles.  This little island of contemplative sloth has given me plenty of time to consider all of the changes of the past decade . . . and to consider the year ahead.  I'm not a great one for making new year's resolutions -- well, I do make them, just not with much conviction -- but this year I've decided to make three doable goals and really try to stick to them.

You might infer, from the above picture, that one goal might be to clear off my bedside table.  (Of course, being tidier and better organized is a perennial goal, but I'm trying for something more original this year.)  My first resolution, then, is to keep a reading journal. 

Every year, for as long as I can remember, I have vowed to read with more purpose and direction -- and to take notes.  Perhaps it is just the perpetual student in me, or perhaps it has something to do with my leaning inclination to someday finish my PhD, but I feel that too many of the wonderful things that I read just wash over me.  My memory is so terribly sketchy; it needs filling out a bit.

These bedside table piles I make are one kind of record, but ultimately, they get dismantled.  Since I (mostly) put the books that I've actually read back on the bookshelf, my bedside table is a bit of a halfway home.  It tends to represent what I've just finished, or only partially completed . . . or what I intend to read someday.  Like geological records, my book piles read top-down.  You can tell, from the top entries, what I've been doing this past week.  You can also tell, from the bottom of the pile, about my ambitions -- and what I haven't gotten around to yet.

Vintage Conan Doyle:  The Adventures and Memories of Sherlock Holmes

Before the turkey leftovers had been vanquished, we were at the cinema -- to see the new Sherlock Holmes.  Top hats off to Guy Ritchie, Jude Law and especially Robert Downey Jr!  I thought this was a terrifically stylish and entertaining film.  Although it had never occurred to me to read one of the Conan Doyle stories, I was so taken with Downey's charismatic performance that it made me want to compare it to the original creation.  When the author mentions Sherlock Holmes's "bohemian soul" and cocaine habit, it did make me think that Sherlock Holmeses in the past have played him too staid Victorian.  I borrowed this book from the son of one of our friends, and although I enjoyed it, I will probably give it back without finishing it.  A few of the stories were enough to get the flavor.

The Jane Austen Book Club, Karen Joy Fowler

My youngest daughter and I watched this film the other night, and it inspired me to revisit the book -- which I remembered enjoying the first time I read it.  (I enjoyed it the second time, too.)  If I see a movie of a book, I have to then read the book so I can do a comparison.  Strangely enough, though, I don't really mind it when the movie changes details in the book . . . unless it is a bad movie.  Some would say that any movie that changes details from the book is, automatically, a bad movie.  Two of the characters in the movie meet, while seeing a filmed version of Mansfield Park, and discuss this very issue.

Keats, Andrew Motion

I was so taken with Jane Campion's Bright Star -- which describes Keats' relationship with Fanny Brawne.  Apparently, this biography of Keats inspired and informed her film.   I thought that Sigmund might buy this for me for Christmas, but he didn't, so I bought it for myself yesterday.  I can't wait to read it; a visit to Keats House in Hampstead (and the subsequent blog post) will no doubt follow.

Shakespeare, Bill Bryson

My husband read this a couple of months ago, and it got transferred from his bedside table to mine.  Not long after that, Sarah Laurence talked about it in a blog post and I resolved (again) to read it.  But it wasn't until I saw Shakespeare in Love a few days ago that I actually picked it up and started reading.  First of all, Shakespeare in Love:  I had forgotten how much I like this exuberant, delightful film.  Writers Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard do such a clever job of imagining how life might have shaped art.  Bryson's book focuses on what is knowable, as opposed to fancy or supposition, but it is also very entertaining.

The Pursuit of Laughter, Diana Mosley

I was in a Mitford phase all during November, and particularly enjoyed Anne de Courcy's biography of Diana Mosley.  One of my friends recently gave me this book of collected writings; it is the kind of book that you can easily dip in and out of, just like The Mitfords:  Letters Between Six Sisters.

Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh

This novel, which I only half-finished, is also from my recent Mitford phase.  Waugh dedicated the book to Diana Guinness (later Mosley) and her then husband, Bryan Guinness.  It was meant to be inspired by that whole Bright Young People scene in 1930s London, but frankly, I could find neither plot nor characterization in it.  Maybe they are in the second half of the book?

Someone at a Distance, Dorothy Whipple

I finished this book weeks ago; my only explanation for why it is still on my bedside table is the beauty of its cover.  I found its depiction of the dissolution of a marriage so moving.  On my recent trip to Persephone, I picked up another Whipple book -- The Priory.  I need to replace this one with that one.

The Wilder Shore of Love, Lesley Blanch

And now we are getting to the middle of the stack, where books get stuck for weeks and even months.  I found this biography of intrepid 19th century women at a second-hand book stall in Norfolk this summer.  I read the chapter about Jane Digby, and then I got distracted by something else.  I have a hunch that this one should go back on the bookshelf, as the time is not ripe for finishing it.

My Life in France, Julia Child

I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that I haven't read this one, as my mom sent it from Texas back at the end of the summer when the Julie and Julia film came out.  (Speaking of that, I was astounded to discover that none of my English friends were aware of Julia Child.  I kept saying that she was the Delia Smith of the United States, only even more iconic.)  This one will stay on the bedside table, and it's going in the queue -- but behind The Priory and Keats.

The Story of a Marriage, Andrew Sean Greer

A good (or bad, depending on how you look at it) example of my book greed.  I found it on one of Waterstone's 3 for 2 tables and a glance at the plot synopsis confirmed that it seemed like the kind of book I would like.  I haven't found out yet, though.

Becoming Queen, Kate Williams

There is a bit of trend in this list . . . and once again, I admit to being inspired by a film that I've seen.  I read this biography of Queen Victoria after seeing the film The Young Victoria.  Author Kate Williams also wrote a biography of Emma Hamilton's life, titled England's Mistress.  No film of that one, alas.

West From Home, Laura Ingalls Wilder

This is a collection of letters that Wilder wrote to her husband, back home in Missouri, when she was visiting their daughter Rose in San Francisco.  I didn't even realize that this small paperback was in my bedside stack until I started dismantling it.  Since it is a left-over from my LIW craze from last year, it indicates that my filing system got bogged down.  One of the few things that I recall from this book is the surprise that Almanzo called his wife "Bessie."  How could Laura be a Bessie?  There were probably other interesting things in the book, but I can't recall them . . . and that is why I need to keep a reading journal.

The Other Elizabeth Taylor, Nicola Beauman

I got this from Persephone a few months ago, and it represents a reading goal of mine for the next year:  to further acquaint myself with 20th century British female writers.  Not only this Elizabeth, but also Elizabeth Bowen and Elizabeth Jane Howard.  And Rosamund Lehman.  And Barbara Pym.  I read in such a scatter-shot way, as is evident from this list.  It will be interesting to discover whether or not I can stick with a theme or time period.

The Children's Book, A.S. Byatt

I started this worthy tome, this Booker short-lister, a few months ago -- but I wasn't ready for the reading marathon that it required.  It has to sit at the bottom of the stack, because of its substantial size, but its  jewel-like cover is wonderful adornment for any bedside table.  Dovegreyreader scribbles and Dick have both recommended it, and those votes are enough to make me want to tackle it.  Perhaps a trip to the V&A Museum first? 

The Bedside Book of the Garden, Dr. D.G. Hessayon

Oh goodness, a Christmas present from last year -- and now we are full-circle again.

Another book to dip in and out of, especially when the garden is covered with frost (as it is this morning), and gardening is more about dreaming than doing.

So, there we have it:  a marathon of linkage.  But isn't reading also about linkage?   And now, for a cup of tea and chapter of Keats.