Where is this going

These last few weeks have been a bit hard! Some days it feels like I am going backwards rather than forwards. Don't get me wrong, I am still trying, but the realities of life sometimes catch up with you even when you have the best intentions in the world.

I have had to higher the thermostat for the hot water, I realised I was probably pushing things a bit too far when my two year old son uttered the word 'cold' when he got put in the bath. Poor little man!

I have also had to give up on walking to the weekly ballet class. It caused so much stress and frustration, because we literally had to walk straight from school to the leisure centre at a reasonably fast speed, and after a whole day at school this was just too much for a 5-year old. It always ended in tears and didn't really make for a good family experience. With changing the clocks it would now also be dark when walking home, which wouldn't exactly help matters. So we have started taking the car. This way my daughter has time to sit down for 10 minutes and have a snack between school and ballet. Now she is not completely exhausted, we don't have any tears and altogether we have a nicer afternoon.

The thing is that I have been extraordinarily busy lately and that isn't helpful for the green agenda. Generally I find that the green options require a slightly higher level of planning and often a little more time. If you want to avoid excess food in the fridge you need to plan out meals very carefully. If you want to cut down on processed food it might take a bit longer to cook the dinner. If you want to walk rather than take the car you need extra time. When you are really busy that becomes difficult. Tonight we ended up with fishfingers for dinner, something we haven't had for a long time, but I simply hadn't had time to think about the meals and do the shopping in advance.

What should I do? My situation isn't exactly unique, most families are probably facing the same issue. I am still full of intentions, I am still motivated, but I am not superhuman and I can only do so many things in a day. Obviously we are still more green now than 3 months ago, because we have learnt a lot in this period and that is not going to change - but how do you fit in green priorities when life gets really busy??!

I haven't figured out the answer yet. Maybe I need to go on a meditation course or read a self help book? No, probably not - that would just take up even more of my time! Maybe I should give the project a rest for a bit and just be happy with the progress made so far? But that wasn't really the point, I still want to do this and I still have improvements to implement. Maybe I will just carry on the best I can and take heart from the fact that other people actually care about this as well.


Recently I have had people telling me that not only do they follow my project, but it has encouraged them make one or two changes in their own lifes. I think that is great. Not because I think I can be the saviour of the world, but because it makes me feel like I am not being stupid. I am not wasting my time, I am basically doing stuff that most people find sensible enough to copy.

On a similar scale my best friend in Denmark just send me an early birthday present: a climate cooking book. This book has just been published in Denmark (probably a date specifically chosen to coincide with preparations for the climate summit in Copenhagen in December...) and besides from recipes it has information about all sorts of climate change related stuff. It made my day to get this book. Not just because presents are nice, but also because it is lovely to get support for the project, and then of course it seems to have interesting information in it. So to finish this entry off here are a couple of things I have come across in the book so far:


-Boiling water in the the kettle before putting it in the pot can save energy, but only if you have an electric hob, no real saving is made if the hob is gas.

- Excess packaging is actually not the biggest issue on the waste front in relation to climate change, wasted meat and dairy products are far more serious

-Locally produced food are not only better because less transport is involved, but they have a higher content of vitamins etc, because they get to ripen naturally.

Interesting stuff. So many things to consider, when you are trying to do what is right...