Too much comfort?
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.
