One Bucket at a Time

Happy New Year!  Are you making any resolutions?

Of the various challenges I set myself last year, I seem to have been successful in keeping one: getting back into voluntary work.  I have now been working at the Oakleaf Café for over a year, and at the Sue Ryder shop for ten months.  In both cases, there were times when I got stressed or close to a meltdown and felt like storming off, and had to take time off until I’d calmed down – but I came back.  So I do seem to be getting marginally better at controlling my temper and keeping a sense of proportion.

On balance, it seems to be more helpful to have general aspirations than specific rules.  This afternoon, PDB11 and I have been discussing what we hope to do in the next year, and jotting down intentions like ‘Go for walks more,’ ‘Hoping to go on European holiday by public transport – practise language skills,’ ‘Be more sociable,’ and so on.  Making rules like ‘At least one all-day walk per week,’ ‘At least four hours studying French and four hours studying German per week,’ would just make us feel depressed when we didn’t complete a task on the list.

Sometimes, setting a challenge for a shorter time than a year is more manageable.  For example, this year PDB11 and I managed to go part-time vegan (allowing one day off per week) for Lent and Advent, which was frustrating at times but doable.  Trying to have one low-energy day per week throughout the year was harder to keep up: it was bearable (apart from the absence of tea or hot chocolate) in warm, light days in early August, but had started to get depressing by October.

However, some of the changes we made this year weren’t what we had planned.  For example, I hadn’t especially intended to hang out bird-feeders in our garden – really, do we need them when we live next to a nature reserve?  But when, in June, I house-sat a couple of times for my parents in Southampton, where my duties included topping up their numerous bird-feeders, I decided that it was probably worth feeding our local birds rather more consistently than just throwing a few crumbs out of the window.  So I bought a couple of bird-feeders – and considering how fast they became popular with the birds, there was evidently a market for them.

I had been intending for years to dig a pond for frogs and newts to breed in, like the one my friend Doom Metal Singer has behind her caravan. 

I hadn’t set a specific date, but this year, I finally got around to doing it, in the one bed of open soil behind our house.  I don’t know yet whether amphibians will approve; apart from insect larvae, the only animal I have seen there so far was a beautiful bronze-gold slow-worm who had fallen in and was desperately trying to climb out.  I rescued him, and put a branch in for any other distressed animals to climb up.

We had decided some time ago that we ought to use the car less and do food shopping on foot or by bus where possible, with a rucksack to transport groceries home.  However, this became more of a challenge when we decided that we also ought to try to shop where possible at farmers’ markets and independent grocers, greengrocers and farm shops, rather than always at Tesco.  Ethical Consumer Magazine’s  survey of supermarkets gave one of the lowest marks to Tesco, and among the highest to Christine’s Sustainable Supermarket in Bradford-on-Avon, which is a lovely town and well worth a visit anyway.  

At the time when we first read this and decided to give Bradford a try, it wasn’t difficult to call in on when we were going (by car) to see a therapist in Bath once a fortnight.  After we decided we couldn’t afford to continue with therapy, and that our mental health seemed to be coming along as well with or without it, getting to Bradford became a journey in itself.  By car, it isn’t too bad.  By bus, it means leaving at 8am to take the 8.30 bus to Bath and the 9.55 bus to arrive in Bradford on Avon by 10.30, allowing about an hour and a quarter to go around the farmers’ market, Christine’s, and Bloomfield’s the greengrocer, before catching the 11.47 bus back to Bath and the 1pm bus to Oakhill, arriving home around 2.30.

I hope this doesn’t sound like virtue signalling.  I realise that most people can’t afford to shop at anywhere other than big chains of supermarkets like Tesco (and, as the rise in the use of food banks shows, plenty of hard-working people can’t afford to buy food at all).  We’re lucky to have both the money to shop at independent shops that specialise in Fair Trade, environmentally friendly and ethically sourced goods, and the time to be able to take a day out to go food shopping.  (The four hours of sitting on or waiting for buses are a golden opportunity for catching up on reading.)  But, since we do have these advantages, it seems a shame not to use them.  And walking home down Ash Lane with a rucksack containing 20 kilos of food is one way of preparing to go on a backpacking holiday!

However, what became more apparent than ever this year is that climate change is reaching more of a crisis than at any time since the last Ice Age – 2023 was the hottest year since records began, and 2024 is looking set to be even worse – and that our government isn’t taking it nearly seriously enough.  October this year was the first time that PDB11 and I had gone on an Extinction Rebellion march, in protest at the opening up of the oil and gas field at Rosebank, of which Wikipedia warns:

 

The emissions from burning the oil and gas in the Rosebank would be equal to the combined annual CO₂ emissions of the 28 lowest-income countries in the world. This one field would produce as much pollution as 700 million people do in a year.

 

The march, in Bath, felt more like a festive day out celebrating a carnival than serious civil disobedience. 

After all, we kept to the areas where we could be seen by plenty of residents in the parks or the shopping streets, but weren’t disrupting much traffic. 

It was good to meet some of the different campaigning organisations who were working together, and to listen to protest songs by Bayou Tapestry, ‘Arguably the finest Cajun band in the whole of Bishopston.’

However, by the end of the day, PDB11 was remarking that he wished he was doing something more practical to avert climate change.  Since then, he has been emerging from retirement to look around and apply for jobs using his engineering skills to find sustainable solutions.

That’s fine – but what about me?  A Classical Civilisation graduate and unsuccessful care worker, I don’t have much skill in useful fields like engineering, though I could volunteer my services to plant more trees, or go out litter-picking.

However, one change which I have made this year is one which most people – anyone who has a water-butt, really – could make.

Hard as it is to imagine as we listen to the rain and hail drumming on the roof, parts of Britain, particularly southern England, are in danger of running out of water - or, specifically, of available, clean, drinkable water.  We all know about hosepipe bans in times of drought, but this isn’t just an intermittent, seasonal problem.  We use more water annually than we get coming in as rain, and the reservoirs and pipes that we store and transport it in are leaking.

In rainy weather, the drainage system struggles to cope with the double load of both waste water – from flushing lavatories, and from washing-machines, sinks and bathtubs – and rainwater running down the drain.  So, if we’re in danger of running out of water, why exactly are we using carefully filtered, sterilised drinking-water just to flush away our wastes?

When PDB11 and I discussed this, he commented that we ought to rig up some sort of system to reuse rainwater and ‘grey water’ (water that has been used for, for example, washing ourselves, our clothes or our plates) for flushing.  I could see his point – but this would take time and money to organise.  In the meantime, rain was already overflowing out of the water-butt in the garden and down the drain.

So – in the short term, the low-tech solution was the easiest.  Find a bucket, take it down to the garden and fill at the water-butt, carry it up to the bathroom, tip in as much as is necessary, and save the rest of the bucket-load until needed.  Simple, quick, and a way of getting additional exercise in carrying a moderate weight upstairs.

In the coming year, I might find more solutions like this that seem obvious in retrospect.  Do you have any tips on avoiding waste?