The art of downshifting – finding freedom with the simple life

Art supplies are horribly expensive. I suspect that the manufacturers of paints, pencils, inks etc believe that all artists are secretly making shedloads of money and only look shabby and live in garrets because they’re, you know, artists.

Here’s what you do if you want to make lots of money. Buy an ordinary, cheap, plastic toolbox, stencil the word ‘ArtBin’ on the side and pretend that the compartments sized to take screwdrivers and chisels are actually designed for pencils and brushes. Now sell it for four times the price you paid. (I actually have an ArtBin, bought when I was younger, had more money and was even more stupid.)

Now here’s what you do if you want to save money – especially if you’re a printmaker. Head over to the New Directions in Printmaking blog where Nik Semenoff will tell you how to use everyday materials in your work. It’ll save you a fortune, compared to buying fancy-labelled ‘art’ supplies, and it will open your eyes to new techniques and possibilities.

Even if you’re not into printmaking, take a look anyway. It may give you a new perspective on what materials you might consider suitable for making art.

I was interviewing a woman today who, like many British here, is heading back to the UK, French life not having worked out, and I was struck by some of the things in France that she had found hard. Not having central heating. Having to manage with a wood burner. Not having mains sewage.

She hadn’t experienced this level of ‘deprivation’ since she was a child, she said, and she was taking it very badly.

It struck me then quite how bloody soft a lot of British people seem to have become.

In the ten years since we left the UK, the standard of living there has risen higher and higher. Ipods, Iphones, broadband, master bedrooms ensuite, three cars in the garage. Put the average Brit down on a desert island these days and they’d be wondering what all the wet, salty stuff lapping at their feet was.

Life here in rural France isn’t deprived, I feel, so much as more real than the UK. Certainly, we heat with wood, or if we’re lucky (as we are) we can run oil-fired central heating for a few hours a day. And dealing with wood takes time and effort. But what is the problem with this? Why do British people want to everything without any sort of effort?

There are few things more satisfying than gazing at a couple of cords of wood you’ve just stacked in the barn, ready for winter. Just looking at it warms you up. In burning log after log all winter, you become keenly aware of how much fuel you’re using and how to be efficient with it – lighting the stove later on slightly warm days to make up for lighting it earlier on cold ones.

But the modern westerner wants to buy clothes, not learn to make them. Buy food, not learn to grow it. Click switches for heat and light, without wondering for one moment how it gets there and what it’s costing the environment.

The worst offender is probably sewage – the modern attitude to which is not so very far from those people in Brueghel’s paintings, hanging their arses out of the upstairs window. The attitude that if “I can’t see it, it must be gone…” Well, it’s not gone – it’s just gone somewhere else. It has turned into someone else’s problem. When you own a septic tank, your effluent is your problem.

I wonder if, with peak oil and the energy crisis, global warming and whatnot, we in the west are going to have to rein back our standard of living a notch or two and whether that might not be a very good thing. It will entail a new modus vivendi, probably one where we don’t get whatever we want, whenever we want it all the fucking time, as if we were spoiled children.

Take heating, for instance. Heating is a luxury, and the modern practice of heating all the rooms in the house, all the time, irrespective of whether or not you use them, is something that is frankly unsustainable. We need to focus instead on space heating, on wearing the right clothing and better insulation for housing. If Brits insulated their houses to Scandanavian standards, they would instantly cut their fuel bills by 3o per cent, but with current heating costs so low, there is little incentive. There is no need to indulge ourselves into thinking we can prance around in t-shirts in the middle of winter.

Currently, it is winter in Normandy, as everywhere else, and our temperatures haven’t got above freezing for some days. There’s 4in of snow on the ground and – of course – everything has come to a grinding halt. But we are as prepared as we can be for this, with woodburners and Calor gas and candles and camping-gas lamps, enough dried beans and rice to last a month, thermal underwear and the willingness (in my case) to wear a balaclava in bed until the spring because the bedroom temperature is 5 degrees.

I am not an Eskimo – I like to be warm and comfortable. But warmth and comfort are not ALL there is to life, and a life of endless warmth and comfort is not good for anyone, or for the planet either.

It’s not a new idea, but it’s one that needs reviving. Instead of going shopping when you feel like some new clothes, music or DVDs, why not ask your friends if they’ve got anything to give away?

Here in the depths of the French countryside, retail therapy isn’t really an option. Instead, when the acquisitive itch gets too strong, we get together and share.

Everyone we know has something they no longer need or want – something that is perfectly functional and too good to throw away, but is currently just gathering dust.

The idea of swap parties is catching on among trendy young women in the UK, I understand. But we’ve been doing it for years.

In France, they call it a bourse. It means ‘purse’ (in the British sense – ‘pocketbook’ to Americans), but the word is also used in the context of ‘exchange’ or ‘market’. The Bourse is the French stock exchange, and there are frequent ‘bourse des plantes’ or ‘bourse des vêtements’ events, which range from small, one-off markets to the equivalent of bring-and-buy sales.

In our case, bourses are even more casual affairs. We invite a bunch of friends to the house. Everyone brings stuff that’s cluttering their houses. It’s all laid out on tables and the floor and people help themselves. No money changes hands: it’s not about making cash.

Being friends – and being, mostly, British – we’re all terribly polite about it. There’s never any argument about who gets what. Most of the bourses take place during a Girls’ Night In, when all the wives and girlfriends get together to eat chocolate, drink and scream (at least, that’s what it sounds like from my hiding place in the office). Trish has described just such an evening here. It seems they spend half their time picking clothes for each other.

It’s perfect whichever way you look at it. You get something new. You get to rid yourself of some clutter. Objects get recycled in the best possible way – by simply extending their useful lives. And you get a good evening with friends into the bargain.

We had one of those real downshifting days yesterday, when I realised that all the fun we had was for free. OK, I lie – there was some diesel involved – but so there must be if you’re going to go anywhere.

We headed for a gorge in a local forest. The forest we’ve visited thousands of times but the gorge is new to us. A hundred times we must have driven right by it without knowing it was there.

And what a discovery. We slithered down the slope practically on our backsides and found a path along a river, then wandered along it for half an hour or so, under trees and over rivulets until we came to an old chapel. Here there were picnic benches (God bless the French…), and since it was by now lunchtime we unpacked our sandwiches, washed our hands in bottled water and set to with gusto.

In the old days, we’d probably have eaten at a restaurant, where you can drop 40 euros without looking. But doing it this old-fashioned way was still excellent – tuna mexicana in one sandwich, peanut butter and jelly in another and my home-made lavender and thyme biscuits to follow.

A bit of a rest, then back along the way we came, taking the longer, shallower route up the hillside and back to the car. Then we drove round to the other side of the forest and took a different track back to the chapel.

This time we found a wide cycle route through a pine forest heady with essential oils, underplanted with wild solidago. We snacked on wild bilberries as we went, while the dog nearly struck lucky with a partridge (it got away). All around us there was nothing but the sound of water and birds and the heady almond scent of meadowsweet.

Then, quite tired, after a total of three hours or so walking we headed home to re-runs of Morse and a ratatouille I’d put in the slow cooker (another item that is unbelievably useful).

It was only later that it dawned on me that we hadn’t spend a cent. I’d taken my purse with me and it had been nothing but ballast. The food was stuff we already had in and we hadn’t even stopped for a beer at a local cafe as we used to do.

I admit to a faint twinge of longing as we passed the Manoir de Lys restaurant on the way back, but quickly shook myself out of it by remembering that not even when we had money did we ever eat there and besides, we were hardly dressed for it in our walking shoes and back-packs.

It just goes to show that we have got into the habit of not spending anything when we go out, and that the day is just as enjoyable as it ever was.

And instead of the point of going out being to visit, say, a local restaurant, it is now to get to a beauty spot and walk our legs off, so the bonus is that we feel fitter too.

I was thinking the other day about wabi-sabi, which is a Japanese philosophy I follow, and it made me think of my parents’ house and what a lesson it was to me in interior design. For all the wrong reasons.

The house was a council property, built in 1947 and designed by some enlightened architect, who got the entire housing estate right.

I didn’t know how lucky I was, growing up in that house. It wasn’t large, but it was designed in a spacious way. It was brick-built, with solid internal walls. There were big casement windows everywhere that opened out fully. There was crosslight. There were French windows in the living room, giving out onto large gardens and – in our case – woodland right down one side, as we were the last house in a cul-de-sac.

Downstairs, a front door flanked by a frosted glass window that flooded the hallway with light led to stairs to the upper floor and a corridor to the kitchen, and a built-in rack for coats. The kitchen was a masterpiece of design – a coal-burning stove in one corner, raised on a stone dais; a big ceramic Butler sink with teak drainers; a huge north-facing larder with real stone shelves for keeping milk and butter cool (this was in the days before many people had refrigerators).

A door led to a rear corridor and thence to a room that most people used for storage or as a workroom (later, with increasing prosperity, for freezers etc, and later still my father made his wine in here). In front of it was the coal-hole (we still ran on coal then – several tons of it a year), and a cubbyhole for the bins. There was also an outside loo, so you didn’t have to stomp upstairs in your wellies. This section had stable doors, though most people closed it off with full doors for greater security.

The living room, like the whole ground floor, was tiled in terracotta and black tiles, laid in a square pattern, and the deep windowsills were terrazzo. All the doors were panelled oak.

Upstairs, two large bedrooms overlooked the street, with a small back bedroom and a bathroom (cast-iron bathtub) overlooking the garden, all with large casement windows. A massive cupboard for storage was built-in at the top of the stairs, and another, with slatted shelves, was built in as an airing cupboard over the hot water tank in the bathroom. Alcoves in every bedroom were big enough to take wardrobes or to build in closets.

Add the huge attic, and you can see how much space there was in this small house – a workshop, storage for bikes, two toilets. But of course, my parents, being aspirational like most people, proceeded to clutter it up.

The first thing I remember them doing was ripping out the Butler sink. Who could have told them then that these ‘stone’ sinks would one day be so desirable, along with the sturdy brass taps they loathed? In went the shallow stainless steel sink with built-in drainers so beloved of the 1960s (I assume the teak ones went in the fire…). In place of the old wooden worktop, they installed a yellow laminate work surface – laminate being the fresh new thing. Because they’d turned the kitchen around, you now couldn’t reach the windows to open them.

The larder, designed to keep food cold, became home instead to the spindryer (no tumble-dryers in those days) and storage for mountains of crockery, which was always glacial (they did, at least, keep bread in here, where it wouldn’t spoil). Meanwhile, they built a cupboard above the fridge, in the alcove opposite, and kept the canned food and baked goods here, where they suffered from the warmth rising from the heat exchanger.

The kitchen was designed to eat in, near the small coal stove, but instead, my mum and dad set up a huge oak dining table in front of the French windows in the living room, blocking both light and access to the garden. I barely saw those windows open twice a year (in fact, for most of my life they were painted shut). In every place, in every room they placed huge, unwieldy pieces of furniture that you had to squeeze around, and the outside loo was usually home to a lawnmower and completely unusable.

The tile floors, of course, to them were a sign of poverty, so in the living room they laid wall-to-wall carpet. But they couldn’t afford a good wool carpet, so it was an acrylic carpet of unimaginable awfulness – a cream background with a screaming floral pattern.  Nor did it actually meet the wall at one side, so they shoved in another bit of carpet that didn’t match. Later, they would replace this carpet with one even more vomit-inducing, in shades of green and orange. In the hallway, the carpet that covered the tiles was protected in turn with a plastic runner that transformed the corridor into a slipway – lethal on a wet day. In the kitchen, the ceramic tile was covered with floral lino, and then with vinyl tiles in blue and black.

The green and orange carpet in the living room which they laid in the 70s matched the new wallpaper, which was a design of huge green circles in vertical rows – as big as a dinner plate – and, naturally, in wash-down vinyl, as if a house was something that has to be steam-cleaned every five minutes to keep it hygienic. This replaced the simple whitewash with which the house had been supplied and you can imagine the effect of all these enormous patterns crowding in on one another.

Meanwhile, the windowsills became home to pot plants by the dozen, blocking the light and shedding leaves everywhere and making the windows impossible to open. Conforming to the social norms, the three-piece suite (which they retained even when there were only two of them in the house) took up almost the entire floor space.

While downstairs was cluttered beyond belief, especially after my parents began to collect antiques in the late 70s, the upstairs remained almost hostile in its bleakness. Freezing cold for much of the year (no central heating in those days), it did have carpets (though no underlay, as they couldn’t afford it), but my parents never had more than a bare lightbulb handing from the ceiling in their bedroom. I don’t even remember a bedside lamp, though I’m guessing my mum must have had one. Upstairs was not somewhere you hung around – I used to put my clothes in front of the living room fire for the next day, so they’d be warm enough to get into.

It pains me now to think how different the house might have been if my parents had been able to accept what it was instead of fighting it. To have a few simple, plain – perhaps country – things rather than aspiring to middle-class tastes that they could only fall short of. If, basically, the interior had been more wabi-sabi.

Imagine it with those simple, tiled floors in place, and a few scattered rugs, with rough-plastered walls, with bleached floorboards upstairs and an iron bedstead (instead of my 70s divan with its plastic-covered headboard). With the storage used properly and all the remaining spaces left empty.

The truth was, the house had a wonderful Vermeer-like simplicity about it that my parents just couldn’t recognise (and nor, as a child, of course, could I). I’ve seen it since in Lutyen’s houses and Tudor houses and in farmhouses all over this region of France, houses with an enormous comfort and quietude about them – settings for the fabric of life.

The key elements are that everything is well-made and fit for its purpose, and our house fitted that bill. It used good and honest materials that needed to make no apologies for themselves – brick and stone, terrazzo and tile, wood and glass. There was masses of storage and room to build in more. Above all, it had the two most crucial components any house requires – space and light. But my parents squandered it like many people, by stuffing their home with clutter that they spent their lives cleaning and manoevring around and insuring and repairing. In later years, it was more museum than house and it felt to me as if the house owned them rather than the other way around.

The house is now in other people’s hands. I haven’t seen it in decades and I only hope that it is faring better under new ownership. But Britain being what it is, I’d bet you a tenner that it still has fitted carpets…

I got a fun press release from Lifesworth this morning.

Apparently, in the UK at least, you’re ‘worth’ the most at the age of 46.

They’re talking in terms of personal possessions, of course, not your real worth (don’t get me started…). The average mid-life Brit apparently owns about £40k’s worth of goods and chattels – more than you ever have in your life before or afterwards. Interestingly, though, that same average Brit also believes their personal possessions amount to about £28k and underinsures them accordingly.

This, of course, is Lifesworth’s objective – to get you to up your insurance premiums, but I must confess the idea of being ‘worth’ £40k made me laugh out loud. I doubt I am ‘worth’ half this now, and it’s very definitely by design.

Over the years, I’ve come to the belief that people are at their most free and creative when they’re not burdened by possessions. Sure, it’s great to own things, but once you’ve got them, you have to worry about them. Clean them, dust them, store them, take care of them, insure them. Is this really a good idea? Better to have plates you can afford to break, clothes you can afford to ruin without there being any heartache involved. Then you don’t have to work so hard to support a lifestyle. Maybe you can just have a life instead.

The DH and I, some 10 years ago, were forcibly relieved of much of our burden of possessions by a burglary. After the initial relief that no-one was hurt (the house was empty at the time), came the absolute fury about what had been taken – our wedding presents to each other, the Victorian writing box my parents gave me when I was 16, Steve’s favourite watch, the World War II marching compass I’d bought him in six instalments, his entire collection of aviation memorabilia, my late father’s clock. There were also our computers, all of our coats, the throws off the sofas, the curtain tie-backs – a strange assortment of finds. It was Christmas, and they had gone shopping in our house.

A wealthy friend patted me on the head and said: “Trish, they’re only things,” which only incensed me more because a: his parents subbed his lifestyle and he’d never had to work, and b: many of them were things that I had bought and paid for, worked many hours at a job I hated in order to own. They were MINE, for God’s sake.

And then I thought again. Why exactly was I working all these awful hours in horrible jobs just in order to buy stuff? None of it was necessary stuff – it was pretty, it was nice to have, but it wasn’t the roof over my head, it wasn’t food on the table. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t make a difference. Sure, it’s nice to be surrounded by pretty things, but it’s not necessary to fulfilment.

Some of the items had sentimental value, but this too is an imaginary construct. I didn’t drop dead for the loss of any of them. And the truth may be something else, too. Every time I looked at that clock I remembered that my mother wouldn’t give it to me when dad died but had made me pay £200 for it. Whenever I looked at the writing box, I was chastened by the split it had picked up when I placed it too close to a radiator. Steve had bought his favourite watch the same day as a near-identical one for his ex-wife, which coloured my view of it somewhat.

A couple of years went by and although we sometimes winced when we thought of what had been taken, we found we didn’t need to replace much, other than the work computers. When we did buy, we hit on a strategy of buying only things we could use, not things that were purely ornamental. And gradually, gradually, we began to divest.

I can’t remember now what went first, but every year that goes by, we have sloughed off more of our belongings, and every year we feel better for it. We’ve got rid of clothes, books we’ll never read again, ripped all our CDs into I-Tunes and chucked the discs, put item after item of furniture into the local depot vente. The house feels bigger, emptier, more spacious. There is less cleaning to do, less maneouvring around things. Both our lives and our souls free freer for it, and I hope, in time, to get to a stage where nothing I own has ANY monetary value at all.

I wonder where this would put me on the Lifesworth scale? Probably a complete loser. But I frankly I have no truck with a society where a person’s worth is calculated by what they own and not by what they contribute. If the latter was calculated, where on this scale would the average lawyer, PR executive or stockbroker be? A damn sight further down than the lowly-paid nurse or cleaner or ambulance driver.

If you want to calculate your worth on Lifesworth, click here (only relevant to UK residents).

Average age and value of possessions in the UK
20 - £24,548
30 - £34,823
40 - £40,125
50 - £40,454
60 - £35,810
70 - £26,192

A few years back I used to enjoy a very guilty pleasure from watching a TV programme called Escape to the Country.

It was just another one of those estate agency programmes that litter the UK networks (Big Strong Boys, Place in the Sun, Big Strong Boys In The Sun, you know the kind of thing…). Each day, an aspiring couple, tired of the city, would decide to move to the country and task an estate agent with finding the right thing. Three or four properties would be chosen, and the people would view two of them. Brits being Brits, of course – a bunch of whingeing Poms – they’d never like any of them.

One thing that always struck me, though, was the repeatedly expressed opinion (by the women) that moving to the countryside would entail less housework because ‘it’s so much cleaner’.

Hah bloody hah I’d think. Cleaner my backside. You’ll learn, missy.

The countryside is filthy compared with the city. Spiders, spider webs, flies, fly shit, chestnut pollen, poplar fluff, willow seeds, stone dust, barley chaff, arsenic bugs, dead leaves, dust, mud. I wonder which bit of the countryside these women are planning to move to that’s magically cleaner than town. They’re in for a nasty shock.

I know because it was a shock to me. I was thinking about it again this weekend, as I scoured and scrubbed the kitchen and living room (penance for my taking all Saturday off to drive around the region, having a girly good time while the DH was working).

It starts in spring, when the house fills up with pollen and seeds – hazelnut, followed by poplar, followed by willow, which carpets the courtyard (and our ground floor) in white bunnies (called “kittens” in French). Then comes the chestnut pollen, which smells exactly like semen, in case you didn’t know – hence the local name ‘spunk trees’.

Meanwhile, in the gravel courtyard, up comes whatever my farmer neighbour Patrick planted last year, seeded into every crack. Every other year it’s wheat, but we’ve had maize, barley, rye and oats as well. Oats are particularly persistent, being a very natural sort of cereal and if I don’t get them all out, by late summer I’ve lost the path to the woodshed.

In an old stone house like this, the stone constantly sheds. Nobody told me that, did they? This house is ‘granite doux’, and doux (soft) it certainly is. It has to be constantly vacuumed to keep the dust at bay, and the rough, uneven surface provides a lovely home for spiders.

Spiders, of course, are just a way of life. We have to pretend different to visitors, but there are big crawly ones hiding in every crack, and overnight some of them will spin webs across a doorway or over a mirror. I get rid of them with a big brush that looks like a giant loo brush – the best thing ever invented, but you can never stay on top of them. “A happy home has spider’s webs,” say the French, so I’m happy to go with that. They’re at their worst in summer.

I don’t kill them though – being a bit of a Buddhist – so I catch them in a big plastic jar with a lid and put them outside (my job, since the DH is scared witless of them). After all, spiders kill flies, which are much more of a problem. They start as soon as the weather warms up, coming out to feed on the ivy, and by mid-summer most of us here have fly papers (cat-friendly, of course) in every room, buzzing frantically with dying insects. I also have a bead curtain at the doorway. It is pretty useless, but I can’t bear fly screens. We only put these up once the mozzies start in late summer, and only then out of dire necessity.

With the flies, comes fly shit – something I’d never encountered before moving to France. Little brown or black dots of velcro-like persistence that coat all your windows, along with every cup, plate or pan you leave out on show. I quickly learned, in our open-plan kitchen, to wash utensils before every use. And after the flies come the wasps, attracted by our calva pear orchard and as insistent as they are dumb. The only things worse are the hornets, the sight of which has me running for cover. With these beasts, I am not going to argue.

Then there’s the pets. Who doesn’t love the little darlings? But with six cats and a big-pawed mud magnet of a spaniel, no surface stays print-free for long, as the cats leap up with fur wet from the grass onto the sideboard and coffee table, and every two weeks there’s a faint brown line right round the sofa where the dog’s rubbed himself dry. Thank heavens for removable covers on all the furniture, and pale grey paint on the woodwork (believe me, it hides a multitude of sins). From spring right through to winter the critters tread either dust or mud into the house in kilos, and you can’t teach them to wipe their feet.

There’s also the question of hair, and if anyone’s allergic to cats, they’d better never come in this house. Yesterday, after a period of neglect while I painted the bedroom, etc, I swept up a small dead animal’s worth of fur from the living room floor. I like sweeping, which is quite contemplative, but I also can’t afford to keep filling hoover bags, so it’s a necessity as well as a choice. A damp rag is the best thing for getting fur off close covers, if anyone’s interested.

Autumn, of course, means the house is full of leaves. Surrounded by orchard and woodland as we are, hundreds of kilos of leaves are shed around the house every year and a fair proportion has to make its way indoors, along with the odd rotting apple brought in by mutley as a toy.

Then, come winter, there’s just as much muck in the house, only it’s a different colour. As anyone with a woodburner will tell you, your house is covered with a fine layer of ash the whole time you use it, along with soot that drops out of the chimney and coats everything around the stove. Ours is peculiarly crystalline and gritty, which is just as well, as we usually get a bird or two down there each season, and you can brush it off a kestrel or an owl relatively well. But it renders housework like the Forth Bridge. I can write my name in the dust an hour after cleaning and whenever it rains, great rivulets of soot and rust pour down the back of the register plate over my freshly painted stonework, which gets whitewashed every summer.

So now you know, country lovers. There’s a reason we country dwellers all have hard floors and no curtains. And in this house at least, we have two rules: never start cleaning, and whatever you do, never look up.

An old tyre protects a self-seeded sapling

Many of the trees in our garden are self-seeded saplings we’ve allowed to grow. We reckon we’ve added as many as 250 trees this way, some of which are now very large.

The problem comes when a seedling appears in areas of grass that we normally mow. If the grass grows too long before the first cut of the year, there’s a danger we won’t see the seedling and it gets cut down. We’ve tried to avoid this by marking seedlings with sticks. But even then, because we don’t have the time to trim around each seedling, and given that it’s difficult to mow very close, the seedling still gets swamped by a clump of grass.

Over the years, we’ve made very effective use of what the French call ‘toile de paillage’ (literally, straw cloth) – permeable plastic sheeting that suppresses growth while allowing water to penetrate. But it’s expensive. And when used in areas that we mow, there’s always a danger of clipping the plastic sheet, winding up with long threads wrapped around the drive shaft of the mower blades. This can cause a surprising amount of damage to the mower.

The plastic sheeting also needs to be held down by something. You can buy expensive spikes for this purpose – we used to have some plastic ones, but they’re all broken now. And with our rock-infested land, they rarely work well.

We’ve tried using rocks – we have plenty of those – or even faced granite stones from the long-demolished buildings that once stood on our land. But hitting them with the mower is no fun either.

One alternative is old carpet, if it consists only of natural fibres. This doesn’t need pinning down, but it presents the same mowing dangers as the plastic, so we use it only in areas well away from those we mow.

This year, we’re taking a recycling approach. I cut circles of the permeable plastic from an old sheet of the stuff we had lying around. These are held down by old tyres. These are easily seen – and thus avoided – when mowing. And if the mower does hit them, it’ll simply nudge them out of the way.

They’re not permanent features around the saplings: they’re needed only until the young trees are high enough to be clear of the grass.

As an alternative to the plastic sheet, we may also try using actual straw inside the tyres – we have an endless supply of this as we have friends who need to dispose of it when they muck-out their donkey enclosures.

End result: free trees that will grow faster because of this (free) protection.

I was truly heartened to read a story in the Telegraph about women’s co-operative Amazon Nails, which specialises in environmentally friendly housing, being commissioned to build Britain’s first straw council houses.

Only six have currently been commissioned, by North Kesteven County Council in Lincolnshire, but it’s hoped that many more will follow.

There are many sound reasons for building in straw. To start with, such houses cost far less than conventional buildings – £60,000 on average instead of £80,000. They are also less polluting, especially as they use less concrete. The houses are so well-insulated and energy-efficient that they save householders around 80 per cent on their heating bills (the planned houses will be connected to the gas grid for cooking only, and will be heated by woodburners in winter).

They also make use of a waste product – enough surplus straw is produced in the UK each year to build 250,000 homes, and God knows there is a profound need for social housing, which will probably increase rapidly as hundreds of thousands of people lose their homes in this recession.

My first encounter with straw bale housing was about a decade ago when our friends E and K built themselves a bale house to live in (above). They had been living in a 6ft caravan and E was now pregnant, so something had to give. Straw bale construction was in its infancy then and they build a load-bearing structure. Very few people do this now, as it means you’re very limited in the heights and widths of walls, doors and windows – instead, modern straw bale houss are usually timber-framed and you use bales as infill rather than bricks or breeze blocks.

Being a couple of feet thick, the insulation properties of the straw are truly amazing. We popped down from time to time while it was going up and it was astonishing to find how warm it was inside even when the openings weren’t glazed, it was winter, and there was no heating. Once E&K took occupation and fired up their tiny woodburner cooker, they lived with their big window open for much of the year round, to let OUT the heat. The walls, both inside and out, were lime-plastered – a wonderful finish that gradually turns (chemically speaking) back into rock over time. Like most straw bale houseowners, they left a ‘truth hole’ (right) to show that the house really is made of straw.

I have my secret fantasies about having a house built (too much watching of Grand Designs on telly) and it definitely involves straw for areas such as utility rooms and porches. Straw, lime plaster, lots of energy-efficient double glazing, exposed timbers, terrazzo flooring. Oh la, all a pipe dream really, unless my architect friend M decides to make one for me out of the kindness of his heart.

Still, a girl can dream…

The DH and I were having another one of those discussions over the weekend – how to reduce our bills and at the same time go more eco-friendly.

We are all for being green, as I’m sure most people are, but the primary push is probably going to be forced on all of us. For instance, we stopped using our tumble dryer a year ago in order to reduce our electricity bill, and for the same reason, we now wash up by hand rather than using the dishwasher. (In any case, it broke, and the part was a fortune, and we can’t afford a new machine.) So back we are (or rather, the DH is) washing up with a bowl and soapy water. It is not so bad, really, and at least enables us to use our nice raku dinnerware, which was too delicate for the machine.

A bunch of us girlfriends also wanted to try soap nuts, so we split a 20-euro bag between four of us (giving each of us enough nuts for six months). The verdict so far is pretty positive – the soap nuts seem to get your clothes as clean as old-style washing powders or liquids, and leave no residue in your clothes to irritate sensitive skin. The only drawback is that the clothes don’t smell fresh. They don’t smell dirty either, of course, they just don’t smell at all. Perhaps this is something we’ll all get used to – you can put a few drops of essential oil in the dispenser if you want, but I don’t like to do it too often because we have a septic tank.

Another thing that’s on our minds is lighting, because the old-style incandescent lightbulbs are being phased out now, and that will mean switching over to energy-saving bulbs, like it or not. Which is fine, even though they’re three times the price, because they last virtually forever and they use, say, 11 watts of electricity instead of 60, which will mean a massive reduction in consumption. But in our case, it also remains replacing all our light fittings, because our current ones won’t take eco-friendly bulbs.

We have a dimmer switch for the main lights, and that’s a no-no for energy-saving bulbs, so it will have to come out. This house is also French but the people who restored it from a ruin were British and they brought over British fixtures with them – crucially, these take bayonet-fitting bulbs. Try getting those in France. It’s hard enough to get incandescent ones, but in long-life, it’s virtually impossible. So every British light fitting in the house will have to come out and be replaced with a French one – that’s 14 fittings.

Oh la. It can’t be helped. It is what we call the Montcocher effect – we try to do the simplest thing, like put up a shelf, and it entails some massive palaver with drills and rawlplugs and special screws and I know not what. But once again, when it’s done, it will be done, and I’m sure we’ll be glad of it.