On Keeping Warm and Solvent

Saturday saw me making an angry phone call from my bed - it was Saturday after all, and old habits like the lie in die hard (once you are through the getting up at five with sprog phase). Our energy supplier had notified us they were putting our direct debit up by 25% with nearly immediate notice. We were substantially in credit, and by their estimate only a rise  of 11% (11%!!) was actually needed to match the expected upturn in our energy usage over the winter. So I told them firmly the figure we were prepared to go to (after waiting 10 minutes on the phone with what amounted to aural torture every minute - if I had wanted to give them a reading wouldn't I have done so the first one or two times they asked?) and they were ok with that. Calculate £30 per month extra in their account earning interest x say 5,000,000 households and they would be earning about £500k per month from us all without doing anything much to deserve it.

That made us reassess our energy usage - all to the good - and go on a turning lights/TV/radio off campaign again. But more than that we are trying an experiment with reducing the time the heating is on (only marginally, losing about an hour a day) but using the wood-burner to boost the warmth of the house at breakfast time (and a fire is so comforting too) and for an hour or two beyond. The wood as other posts have explained is nearly free - a huge load of pine dried for the last two years cost £40 if memory serves, it will last the winter, and we have also cut and dried branches, boughs and now a major bit of next-door's ash tree that came through our shed roof when it fell. The fabric of the building is warmed by the burner, on the bottom floor of four so the chimney conveys some of the energy through the other three.

Piously it also makes me think of those who can't use such a strategy - no means, or strength etc. There are few things more miserable than being cold and damp. While we can continue with this we shall, provided it works. Money is not that tight, but I am. As the one in the house in the middle of the day it affects me most, and I'll happily work with my smoking hat on and even a cravat or scarf if needs be. Louche meets bloody silly.

The Fragility of Self-Reliance

For me self-sufficiency is a myth, as to play a full role in modern life - wear decent clothes, enjoy the benefits of any electronic device, use the most effective medicines etc - we rely on wider society. What many people mean by self-sufficiency is growing most of their own food, better expressed as self-reliance. We are happy to grow a small percentage of our own food: we have hens for eggs, and an allotment that provides a large proportion of our vegetables from say June to mid-October, plus beds in the garden for herbs and additional veg, especially salads. But we are far from self-reliant and certainly not self-sufficient.

The dangers of such a path have been emphasized this year by what has happened to our fruit harvest. The combination of a dry spring and horribly wet summer and early autumn, with frequent damaging winds, has left us with barely a fruit on our two cooking apple trees, nothing on the eater, nothing on the cherry, nothing on the pear. The cobnut bushes produced a less than exciting 100g of shelled fruit, made into pesto and long gone already. If we had chosen a true peasant existence we would be done for.