Low-Tech Sunday

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 out that wheels are also technology, and that if we were really going technology-free, we would be out in the garden, naked, and eating only raw food.  The child was astonished, as, to her, ‘technology’ meant electronic games.

So I don’t intend to go technology-free (after two million years of hominids evolving to eat cooked food, I don’t think going back to a raw-food diet would even be healthy for the species we are now).  However, it’s certainly possible to go to limited use of electricity. 

Plenty of people live off-grid.  My friend Doom Metal Singer buys a bottle of cooking gas periodically, and has solar panels for electricity so that she can listen to the radio and use her computer, but heats her caravan with a stove burning a mixture of scrap wood and household rubbish (which doubles as a convenient way to clean rubbish off cans before taking them to be recycled), doesn’t have a fridge, and washes as much of her laundry as possible by hand.

At any rate, PDB11 and I decided to have an experimental low-technology day last Sunday, on which we would agree not to use electricity unnecessarily.  The first question, of course, was what constitutes ‘unnecessary’.  ‘What about boiling the kettle?’ PDB11 asked, knowing my addiction to tea.  ‘Do you think you’ll be able to cope with the double whammy of going to church and lack of caffeine?’

Well, I’m taking some time out from going to church, as my mental health is fairly erratic at the moment and I think I need some time to get my head straight.  But, as I said, if I was going to church, I didn’t think one or two cups of tea after the service from the thermos of hot water someone had brought along would be excessive – and for this week, if I wasn’t, having one caffeine-less day might be good for me.  We decided we would need to be flexible, and see how it went.  In practice, the day went something like this:

5.20 Get woken up by the dawn twilight pouring through the window.  Give PDB11 a hug.  Discuss whether unnecessary use of electricity includes putting the bedside light on to read by.  In the meantime, go down to the kitchen to snack on a banana, as I’m supposed to eat something before taking my anticonvulsants.  No cups of tea or hot chocolate this morning, as agreed.  Come back upstairs to swallow my tablets with a sip of cold water.

5.30 By now, it is possible to read by the light from the window.  We spend an hour reading essays from The Climate Book about the effects of air pollution on poor communities in the USA, rising sea levels on islanders in the West Indies, and droughts driving farmers in El Salvador to migrate north to the USA in search of work.  With the pressures on the world today, our low-tech day – even if we decide to have one low-tech day every week – must have an infinitesimal impact compared to the need to invest in renewable energy.  But even so, if it teaches us to practise restraint, it’s a start.

6.25 Go down to kitchen to get my breakfast, while PDB11 has a wash in as much warm water as is available without having switched the water heater on.  Walk into kitchen, switch the light on out of habit, and switch it off immediately.  It isn’t as if the kitchen is very dark, after all.

For breakfast, I normally weigh out 100g of cereal, 150g soya milk and 100g soya yogurt.  But I’m not using the electric scales today, and it doesn’t seem worth getting out the traditional balance scales just for this.  The wheat biscuits box says that two biscuits weigh 36g, so I take the last two in the box, and add four spoonfuls of muesli, and an appropriate-sized dollop of yogurt.  For once, I allow myself the luxury of real milk, as we’ve got some left over from making a cheesy pasta bake for lunch yesterday, so there’s no point in wasting it.  We’re trying to cut down on meat and dairy, but from time to time, when we want a cheesy meal for a change, soya milk can’t be expected to cook like cows’ milk, while most vegan ‘cheese’ in the supermarkets is almost pure coconut oil and useless as the protein component of the main meal of the day.

Breakfast is much quicker when I’m not checking my emails, reading online fanfiction or browsing Quora.  I could read the newspapers while I eat, but after The Climate Book, I feel I’ve had enough reality for this early in the morning.

7.08 PDB11 emerges from the bathroom, admitting that he had used the light over the mirror when shaving, but no other electric lights.  ‘Also, the shaver imp is hungry, and I don’t know how long it can go without feeding,’ he adds.  (As fans of humorous fantasy novels like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels and Harry Turtledove’s The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, we have a running joke that our electrical appliances such as phones are powered by imps.)

I hadn’t been planning to use the electric razor anyway today.  As far as I’m concerned, unnecessary use of electricity is the same whether we’re using a battery-powered device or recharging it from the mains.  I had wondered about shaving under my arms with a disposable razor – but after all, part of the reason we use the electric razor is to avoid the wastefulness of buying disposable razors.  I can go without shaving under my arms for one day (and I never bother shaving anything else, such as legs), but people will notice if PDB11 turns up at church with an obviously stubbly chin.

Similarly, I haven’t turned my phone on (so am using PDB11’s bedside clock to check what time it is).  However, PDB11 needs to turn his on to pick up any emails from the vicar.  As the church organist, he frequently gets last-minute messages from the vicar, any time up until Sunday morning, changing the list of hymns he needs to play at the morning service.

7.25 Get washed and dressed.  Remember not to weigh myself on bathroom scales.  I don’t especially need a bath today – a quick scrub at the washbasin with a flannel is fine.  However, I wonder whether cutting my hair short, so that I don’t use up so much hot water in washing and rinsing it, would save more energy than today’s effort.

8.00 Read while PDB11 does music practice.  I’m reading Happy by Fearne Cotton, which I had picked up from the Bookcrossing zone in Ashwick and Oakhill Village Hall.  This is a self-help book on overcoming depression, with various writing challenges, so I spend most of the hour scribbling in my journal.  I am currently reading the section on social media, which challenges me to go a whole hour without looking at my phone.  I’m aiming to go without my phone all day!

9.00 Notice that it’s a nice day for a walk.  Even if I’m taking time out from actually attending church until I get my mental stability back on track, I could always walk part of the way to church with PDB11, then go off for a walk on my own.  Today’s service is at Ashwick (we are currently a parish of three churches, though we may soon be merging with more), so I could always start along the route to Ashwick and then continue to Binegar, to walk the grass maze in the field adjoining the church.  The flower seeds I tried planting in the maze earlier in the year don’t seem to have germinated, but the last time I looked, there were enough wildflowers about the meadow to keep a fair assortment of bees and butterflies fed.

Change into trousers and walking shoes, then realise PDB11 has already left.  Outside of emergencies, I don’t want to use electricity to phone or text him to suggest a change in plan. I also don’t want to alarm him by going out for a walk on my own without telling him, in case he comes home, finds the place deserted, and wonders where I am.  I decide to stay put after all.

Have a sandwich – is the absence of tea making me snack more?  Fill up the bird feeders in the garden, and write ‘bird seed’ on the kitchen blackboard, as we have nearly run out.  Wonder whether ‘bird seed’ is what the plants in Magritte’s paintings and sculptures were grown from?  Those bird-plants are probably a common sight in gardens in the Cetagandan Empire.

10.00 Decided to practise meditation: no guided visualisations on a CD, no recordings of music and flowing water to hallucinate images to, but just me being conscious of my body and my breathing.  Also conscious of a wasp buzzing frantically around the room until I open a window to let it out.  After all, what’s the point in meditating to become a more compassionate person in general if I can’t be compassionate to the wasp trying to get out?

11.00 Fall asleep, as my body notices that this morning hasn’t contained any caffeine.

12.30 Wake up, say hello to PDB11, and have lunch: the remains of yesterday’s cheesy pasta bake, cold, with cold baked beans (for PDB11) and a raw carrot (for me).  Also have a glass of orange juice.  I’m mostly trying to avoid drinking too much fruit juice, as it is very sugary, but I’m not eating as many vegetables today as I probably usually would (yesterday, for comparison, I warmed up a can of beans and cooked carrots and cabbage to go with the pasta bake), so I ought to get at least some vitamins in.  I’m also probably not drinking enough fluids; cold food doesn’t seem to demand a glass of water to cool my mouth, and I haven’t been taking regular drinks throughout the morning, as plain water isn’t very exciting.  At least the juice ensures that I’m drinking something.

Decide not to wash up after lunch.  In general, I ought to wash up every day – saving up utensils and doing them all in one go may save on hot water, but it attracts flies.  But we can probably get away with leaving it for today.

13.15 Play Scrabble.  We usually have the light on while playing (the living-room has windows at each end, but not in the middle where the coffee-table is), but there’s enough light to play by without difficulty.

14.13 PDB11 is feeling sleepy after the Scrabble game.  I feel fairly lethargic myself – perhaps because of the lack of caffeine, or perhaps because I know that I really ought to take advantage of the daylight by making a card for a friend’s birthday, and right now I don’t feel like doing anything that I ‘should’ be doing.  I go up to the spare room to rest, so that PDB11 can use our bedroom.  That way, if I turn out not to be sleepy, I can come downstairs without disturbing him. 

Think I’ll read a little before trying to sleep.  My friend whose birthday is coming up has a troublesome Cane Corso dog, and as he likes watching The Dog Whisperer, I’ve bought him some of Cesar Millan’s books.  So I might as well take the opportunity to read one before passing it on.

17.00 Have finished reading Cesar’s Way, and am ready to start work on that greetings card.  Choose a fairly simple design of a boat on a lake with mountains in the background, as I can’t be bothered with anything with a complex pattern of rainbow-coloured stripes right now.

18.45 I have finished making a picture for a card – I’ll get around to actually writing a message in it tomorrow.  In the meantime, I’d like to do something together with PDB11.  The light is going in the living-room, but maybe we could go up to our bedroom and read together there?

PDB11, however, just feels depressed and unenthusiastic.  I know we’ve both been dealing with depression for a long time, but ask whether today’s change to routine triggered this particular bout of depression.  Partly, PDB11 says.  He had been frustrated at not only not being able to use his computer, but also not being able to do music practice because I was (at least theoretically) trying to sleep.  (I ought to have let him know when I realised that I wasn’t in the mood for more sleep and was just going to read.) 

It doesn’t help that the novel we have been intermittently reading together in the evenings, The Fire Sermon, another of the novels we picked up at the Ashwick and Oakhill Village Hall  during an Oakleaf Community Café session, is a dark postapocalyptic fantasy which we are actually finding harder going than The Climate Book.  I suggest that we might read something much lighter – maybe even a children’s book like My Evil Twin Is a Supervillain, another of the books we picked up from the BookCrossing zone?  Nothing raises any enthusiasm.  After all, PDB11 has been reading pretty much all day apart from going to church, and isn’t in the mood to do any more.  We spend a long time cuddling and trying to talk through our problems.

19.55 PDB11 gets up to do some music practice, in the hope that this might lift his mood.  I feel quite willing to stay upstairs and read until it grows dark, so start getting ready for bed.  Downstairs, I can hear PDB11 playing some of the songs he has written, and improvising a bit with what sounds as though it could be the start of some new ones.

20.00 PDB11 reappears in the bedroom.  ‘You probably heard it not working,’ he announces.  Still, he has cheered up enough to select a book he wouldn’t mind as a bedtime story, Mort, one of the few Terry Pratchett books that we hadn’t read together yet.

21.00 Settle down to sleep, as it’s starting to get a bit dark to read.  I don’t sleep particularly well, as I have a headache, though don’t know whether this is lack of caffeine or lack of water.  Next time we try this, I’ll try to make sure I drink at least two litres of water to replace the tea I’m not drinking, after which I should have a better idea.

So will there be a next time?  Definitely!  As PDB11 says, since the smart meter isn’t co-operating, we need to take a reading on the normal electricity meter each evening to find out how much energy a day like this actually saves.  And what we have found is that we can cope with a day like this.

Obviously, this isn’t likely to be more than a one-day-a-week exercise.  After all, we will still need to cook, heat water and so on sometimes, even if we don’t do these every day.  And when the days turn shorter and colder, the definition of ‘unnecessary’ energy use even on the low-tech days will change.  It’s going to be interesting to see how this continues.