Temple Cloud

Probably like most people, I get a lot of emails asking me to sign petitions.  Petitions to make electric vehicles more affordable , ban petrol-powered leaf-blowers , stop housing asylum seekers on barges , speak out against children being executed in Saudi Arabia , free ethnic minorities from forced labour in China , provide safe and legal migration routes to stop people-traffickers , and many more. Sometimes I sign these.   Sometimes I know I should, but I’m too lazy.   Sometimes I think, ‘I’d need to know more about the issue before I could decide whether this is a good idea,’ or, ‘I know they mean well, but this petition is so ambiguously worded that people might use it to justify all sorts of things that aren’t reasonable.’   Sometimes, I simply don’t care enough about the issue.   For example, I’m not worried about whether someone thinks it’s sexist for a supermarket to label the tampons aisle ‘feminine hygiene’, compared with the fact that in many countries, teenagers are mi

A few years ago, I read a Diary column in a newspaper in which the journalist described having what she called ‘old-fashioned evenings’ with her small daughter, where they didn’t use electricity.   She described how difficult she found it to enter into the spirit of imaginative play with a five-year-old, without television to keep her entertained. I remember feeling sceptical that keeping up with a five-year-old’s imagination would be the hardest part of doing without electricity.  Surely, particularly in winter (when that column was published), lighting and keeping warm would be the challenges?  Not to mention cooking, and preventing chilled or frozen food from spoiling. Friends of mine took the even more radical-sounding step of introducing what they call ‘technology-free days’ to curb their children’s fixation on television and computer games.  I remember having an argument with one of the children, who had said, ‘Fine, I’ll just go out on my roller blades, then,’ when I pointed