Bye Buy

In our final Transition Themes slot we're cross-posting a story from (Transition) Lewes that is dear to our low-carbon hearts in Norwich. The reduction of acquiring and throwing away 'Stuff' is a main focus both within the Transition Circles and Carbon Conversations. Here Adrienne Campbell describes a radical shared project that has already inspired 33 local people to join in . . .

A few years ago a group of friends in San Francisco formed The Compact. Their quest was to buy nothing new for a year. Inspired by them, some of us here are inviting others to join us in A Year of Buying Nothing New. Our plan is to limit our shopping during 2012 to essential consumable items such as food, drink, vital health items and certain necessary things we can’t fix, get second hand or do without.

So yesterday I bought some stamps at the post office but packed my parcels in old cardboard as I’ll not be buying brown paper this year for packaging. Nor will I buy a food dryer I’ve been coveting or a new pair of sandals this summer; the old ones will do. Perhaps for me the challenge will be not to buy newspapers or new books. But maybe not: there is so much you can get for free.

Call me a domestic extremist, but this kind of exploration excites me. It feels good, and like an appropriate response to our broken civilization. We all now know that our level of consumption is fast eating up our non-renewable resources, including minerals, topsoil and water. Making new things uses fossil fuels that have become so scarce that we’re turning to even dirtier means such as tar sands and fracking. And the waste creates toxic landscapes and, worst of all, CO2 which threatens runaway climate change in our time.

The Story of Stuff is a lovely little film that explains all this quite simply and why buying less – much less – is necessary. It’s pretty obvious now that our leaders, our corporations and our media are not going to encourage this behaviour – it’s almost unpatriotic to not help our economy grow. But in this time where we’re having to choose between economic growth and life on earth, I know where I’ll be placing my vote.

Perhaps the most persuasive reason to live with less stuff is that we’re heading in that direction anyway. It may be better to ride the crest of a wave of change than be sucked under it. Adrienne Campbell

Original post from 100 Monkeys.

Easter - I just don't buy it

Amidst our flurry of bank holiday activities it is easy to forget the true meaning of the spring break. The more religious amongst you will know that at this time of year we remember and celebrate the first time Dawn French dressed as the Easter bunny.

This is the origin of the eating of large amounts of chocolate so we may become more 'Dawn-like'. Strict observers like myself however see it as an all year round activity and not just for one day.
This brings me on to lent. I decided that from pancake day to Easter day I would not buy anything. This included new and secondhand goods, entertainment, meals out and cafes. I read the book 'not buying it- my year without shopping' for inspiration. This mainly made me feel a bit lightweight as I only did it for forty days and she didn't buy any processed food but never-the-less it was worth doing.

So here is the story of my forty days without buying stuff. Can I just point out that I realize that this is a privilege. Many people around the world do not have this choice and have no money or anything to buy.

Stuff
As soon as I decided not to buy anything I became overwhelmed with a desire for shoes. Not just any shoes but a red mary-jane-would-look-great-and-I-cant-live without-them shoes. In the end I could bear it no longer and had to go and see if they were still there. But like a second date they seem to have become less sexy in the interim. I wondered why I had desired them so much. I didn't buy them and in fact I managed not to buy any 'stuff' for the whole of lent.

Entertainment
I fed the guinea pigs by hand and trained them to sit on my lap










I sat in the haymarket and watched street entertainment

Birthday presents
After I had committed to not buying anything I then realized that April is birthday month. Mum got some gloves I knitted. I used a pattern off the Internet and some wool I already had.

My friend Kate got a teapot that I owned but I knew she would like.

Socializing and business meetings
This was a difficult one. If someone wants to go for a coffee or a drink what do you do? One person asked me for a drink. I didnt know what kind of 'drink' to be honest so it was a useful delaying tactic to explain my lent situation. I then got invited round for a meal instead. So I am still none the wiser as to whether I am on a date but am now at the persons house! It made me realize that cafes and pubs are quite useful neutral territory.

An admirer of my art projects had acquired some funding for an exhibition and wanted to meet me. I invited him to my house but at the last minute he changed it to a pub. I sat there with a glass of water looking like I was on a detox!

Bank holiday weekends
So how do you pass the time with family if you are not shopping?

Well our family decided to empty the shed, so while they sweltered in the heat I sat on the computer and got rid of our garden chairs on freegle.

I also aquired some retro cooking gear and a stone with a hole in the top which I will use as a vase when I have figured out how to stop it rolling over.

Stuff

My daughters joke "Daddy, what do you love most in the world - apart from us?"

They know the answer. It's my iPod - that little square of metal and plastic that holds my music and connects me to the virtual world. In a weird way they're right - I do love that little gadget. I take it everywhere with me, I feel panicky if I think I've lost it. I've had it so long, I don't know what I'd do without it.

That worries me - that feels like addiction. Am I addicted to stuff?

One of the challenges I feel when talking to people about peak oil and climate change is that they're both a bit intangible to people. Peak Oil? "There's still petrol in the pump when I want to fill up the car. The media talks about "millions of barrels a day" - surely that's going to last for years?" As for climate change, I was heartily sick of people saying to me "so much for this climate change eh? Ha ha ha" when temperatures plummeted last winter. Like it or not, there are many, many people out there who just don't see it as a real issue. And I can't take them somewhere and say "look, there it is, now do you believe me?"

But "stuff" - yep, it's there, we can see it, we can touch it. My God, there's a lot of it out there, and we're all addicted to it. We've had stuff like never before. I took a walk one lunchtime last week. I popped into St Peter Mancroft, the church opposite the Forum in the centre of the city. There were a couple of people there, enjoying the quiet and coolness of the air. I then went to Chapelfield shopping centre, and the contrast couldn't have been more extreme. The place was rammed; full of people shopping, window-shopping or just wandering around. You'd never have thought there was a recession on, from the number of full shopping bags people were carrying around. It felt very much like the sacred space of a modern consumer religion.

So what's the big deal? Who cares - surely it's great that we can buy whatever we want, whenever we want it? Where's the problem in that? Stuff's a really tricky one, as I'm very conscious that I'm not immune to the lure of it all. I like shiny stuff and gadgets as much as the next man. But I'm going to go out on a limb here and talk about why I think there is a problem, and why it is that stuff is so central to the Transition story.

Stuff uses valuable resources, and on our crowded planet in the 21st Century, much of those resources come from countries where the people are disenfranchised, or where labour practices are well below the standards we set for our own country. I don't think we should accept that other people should have to live in poverty or work in a sweatshop or an unsafe mine or factory just so that we can have the latest thing for the least amount of money possible. And that's before we say anything about the terrible environmental degradation caused by the untrammelled extraction of minerals and the chemical run off from factories. So called "free trade", globalisation and the intense competition between multinational companies have driven prices of consumer goods down to levels unimaginable even when I was a child, and I think it's unacceptable that one part of the world has so much when the rest has so little. OK, that might sound a bit, I don't know, liberal, a bit hippy-ish, a bit socialist even. But actually, I think it's more about fairness than anything else. I don't want people to live in virtual slavery or the planet to be destroyed to keep me in the consumer lifestyle I've become accustomed to.

Our consumer economy has also created a culture of longing, of desire for the latest and most ephemeral of goods, and a culture of unhappiness when I have less than someone else. Someone told me yesterday that the average family replaces their TV every year. Every year? Why? I don't recall such a quantum leap in telly quality every year that would render last year's box obsolete. When kids get mugged for their smartphones, and shiny celebrity culture promotes "Celebrity Diet" products (google it if you like, I don't want to "sponsor" a link to the site!) that just doesn't seem healthy to me.

And finally, and most obviously, stuff creates waste. Mountains of the stuff. A lot of it goes to landfill, a lot gets recycled, some goes to incinerators. Some of it goes to developing countries where the toxic heavy metals and plastics enter the food and water systems. I could go on, but Kerry is going to talk about waste tomorrow so I go there.

So, for all these reasons, and a host of others, stuff is a key transition issue. If we really want to transition to a low carbon society we need to tackle both our desire for stuff, and the ubiquity of it. Across the UK, transition groups including Transition Norwich are looking at ways to reduce the dependence on stuff, to increase our ability to share, to reuse, recycle and make new out of old. Norwich Transition Circles and Carbon Conversations have been talking about reducing our use of stuff as part of personal carbon reduction. In Bungay, the Sustainable Bungay team run Give and Take days, and this success is mirrored across the Transition Network. At the recent Spring Scheming in Norwich, we talked about a scheme where common tools (drills, lawnmowers and the like) could be held in a pool as a community sharing scheme.

And finally, if you want to see a great and succinct overview of our society's use and abuse of stuff, see the wonderful Story of Stuff videos. It's no accident that the link to this website is a permanent feature of our blog under the "links we like" section to the right of these posts.

Picture: Book from the girls' book box! Don't ask...

Back to Basics

In the beginning there were the issues of climate change and peak oil and how these affected different parts of our lives, from the energy we use and the products and food we consume, to the waste we produce and the way we get around. Then the economic downturn was added to the list of issues and Transition Norwich got creative and developed many amazing projects. We have come so far and achieved so much, but to fully appreciate this we thought we should look back and remind ourselves of where we started.

So this week on the blog we will be revisiting the issues we are facing and having a sneaky peek at what solutions Transition Norwich and other initiatives have found.

Photos: bikes and wind turbines (Sam White), alcohol and preserves and Sri Lankan vegetables

mad as a hatter?

For sometime now I have been studying the idea of creating a hat that is completely made in Norfolk. A Norfolk beanie perhaps. Something that is not merely an experimental piece of wearable art but a viable, affordable and marketable hat.

Finding the wool.
Norfolk is not known for its sheep. Although there are some but it is rarely made into wool on any industral level and there are no spinning factories in East Anglia. There are two places that sell alapca wool alpacas of norfolk and Adzu although I find the wool a bit fluffy and one of them bit me during my research and they are quite ugly (maybe that's why he bit me, he can read my mind). For colour I have used charity shop and left over wool from other projects and the recent closing down of the textile centre in St Benedicts street.

The design.
I spent some time studying local fishermans designs and fairisle patterns before coming up with the windpump pattern as above. The only problem is that most people see a person (dont ask me what the third leg is!) or a white diamond and it takes ages to make. then I came up with the idea of a helmet design but the sides rolled up and made you look like a milkmaid! Lastly I changed the design so it would be like a trapper hat and could fold up in warmer weather.

Costing
A fleece sells for about £1.50 which is more than the cost of hiring a shearer. The black sheep shop in Aylsham sells British wool at £3.30 for 100g which would make one hat. It takes about 4 hours to make one. So you could sell it at £25 and feel like you had earned a wage. In fact I have sold one for this price. Of course knitting can be done in front of the TV. Not anything too complicated or visual. Lark Rise to Candleford would be the kind of thing. Not You've Been Framed or you will miss all the drunk people at weddings and the feeling of superiority from knowing the you have never danced stupidly at a family event or fallen backwards into a paddling pool while playing swingball or been bitten by an animal that you were researching for wool, oh actually those things may have happened.....

Riches-to-Rags - Our Fashionable Stories of Stuff

I confess. I was once a fashionista. I worked for Vogue and Harpers and Queen and Elle, I observed catwalks, I styled shoots and interviewed designers in swanky restaurants – Jasper and Issey and John – and when the Japanese were In wouldn’t have been see dead in the capital cities of the world without a black turban and black lipstick. No one saw my hair for a year.

“You’re wearing your coat inside out,” said my friend Alexander in Rome. "I can see the hook”.
"It’s a fashion detail," I said. "It means this jacket is by Jean Paul Gaultier."

It was the most expensive beautiful thing I owned, a moody tangerine cotton frock coat with gold buttons (well this was the 80s!). Alexander, who was studying for the priesthood, laughed. He didn’t know anything about Jean Paul Gaultier. But he knew the work of a clever devil when he saw one.

Sometimes l think about the clothes I used to own and it shocks me that I remember my wardrobe more intimately, more joyfully than I remember my friends of that time. The question I ask myself now is: is this because we were damned, fallen angels trapped in the colourful lures of the material world, or is it because our relationship with matter, with the fabric of the earth, has never been truly celebrated or understood? Or is it that our letting go of Stuff, our powerdown, has become the most urgent and most interesting story of our times?

When I joined Transition Norwich the very first conversation I had was about fashion. It was with Helen. We were sitting at the Arts, Culture and Well Being table at the Unleashing, discussing the lecture on Peak Oil by Ben Brangwyn, and she asked me:

“What are we going to do about last’s year trousers?”
“We’re going to have to wear them and not worry about them,” I replied.

The truth was I had given up worrying about this year’s Look a long time ago, when I had chucked my job as a fashion editor and gone travelling in search of Life without a Hemline instead.

I now wore thrift store clothes and darned my own socks. My coat was worn. I hadn’t visited a dry cleaner for a decade. It was a different time. In 1998 I had tried on a hand-knit in Gap and felt the sweat-shop labour of children and had shuddered. Conscience and the consequences of the fashion business had pricked my consumer bubble.

This week we’re going to be writing about that wake up call that millions of us are experiencing as we connect with the planet, with our fellow human beings, and the decisions we are making to turn our materialistic world around. What it takes on the inside to shift that fierce possessive love of things to loving the earth and its peoples in relationship. As the Spring collections are starting up in Paris, Milan, New York and London and Norwich (once the weaving capital of Britain) is having its first fashion week the Low Carbon Life crew are going to look at clothes in Transition, waking up to the facts behind the textile industry, celebrating charity shop style, making our own hats, mending our shoes, our own stories of stuff.

The picture is a photograph of a wild cotton plant in Arizona, one of the most lovely bushes in the world. Because our consumer story, like the story of Sleeping Beauty, starts with a needle and cotton. With the very first industrial machine, designed in the North of England in 1764, the Spinning Jenny. If you follow the thread you find out who is in charge of the wheel . . .

Photos: cover and inside picture of last century's trousers from Vogue's Modern Style; desert cotton flowers by CDC.

6. Eliminate the concept of

The picture is of my two recycling bins. Both of them were last emptied when I moved into my present house on 28 June 2008. The left one contains things that South Norfolk presently recycles. What you don't see is the ~30 glass bottles I have taken to the bottle bank over that time, because they don't get collected here. And you also don't see much paper, which I use to start my woodburner (the ash goes to fertilise my plants and the charcoal also goes into the soil as a long-lived carbon store and it's also said to act as a slow release nutrient absorber). The right one contains my hopefulls. I think ~90% of this could be recycled now, and I'd be quite happy to separate them into different types of plastic if I could then go and deliver them to my local recycling centre. I'm hoping that this will become possible before it becomes too difficult to stuff more into this bin.


One of the people who has been thinking about how to do this, and in particular how to design our manufacturing so that it becomes the technosphere, the way that the collective of ecosystems make up the biosphere, is William McDonough.
He and his company formulated the Hannover principles in 1991 (see the title of this blog post). He's a designer and though he does not claim an affiliation with permaculture, when he talks of Thomas Jefferson and the American constitution saying "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", I had the same discovery moment as he mentions at 25:51 when I realised that's the same as permaculture ethics: Earthcare, fair shares and people care. The American constitution. There's hope yet.

Here's a small taster of what he has to say: "... and you can't say that it's not part of your plan that these things are going to happen, because it's part of your de facto plan. It's the thing that is happening because you have no plan". I'd like to invite everybody for some Alchemy 3 soup (don't worry, I didn't actually get any pumpkins out of the Alchemy 1 and 2 box, so the connection is more a matter of intention than of actual nutrient cycling, and closing the cycle is not compulsory either) at 7, watching William McDonough's talk (to the Bioneer conference in 2000) at 8 (people who can't make it for dinner welcome), followed by discussion. If you're interested, fill in the doodle.

Doodle Power: scribbling your way into awareness

As this is my first ever post I will start with a brief introduction. I have just graduated from UEA studying environmental science and alongside my studies I am an active member of TN, involved in everything from carbon conversations groups to organising the reskilling sessions - more on them in the future I am sure.

But today I would like to talk to you about doodling.

It all started in May with a monthly challenge in the Otesha project newsletter (more about this on Sunday). They took their inspiration from this committed consumer's plan for cutting down (http://www.obsessiveconsumption.typepad.com/) and challenged everyone to draw everything that they bought for a month - everything from rent to bills to food shopping to underwear - draw it all!

Now being in the middle of exam revision this seemed like a brilliant opportunity for procrastination! So I decided to take up the challenge. These are some photos of my doodlings. I managed to keep it up for the whole month (and I'm still doing it) and it was a bit of revelation. Not only did it give me an excuse to unleash my creative side on a regular basis it was also very powerful to actually see on the page in front of me everything that I had bought. I am tempted to make excuses about the amount of snacks and alcohol on there being down to exam stress - which they are! - and all the bicycle equipment this month being necessary for my epic adventure this summer (update on Sunday), but I've realised that this isn't really the point! I can justify my consumption anyway I want, but until I can look at my doodles of a month's purchases and not feel slightly disturbed by what is on there I can't fool myself into believing that I'm happy with it and don't want to change it.

There are some drawbacks. I felt a bit like cheating to ignore all of the things that I 'consumed' but didnt pay money for, whether exchanged or given to me etc - but including those starts to get complicated so it is a useful beginning. And it can be quite challenging to work out how to draw some things, but I like a challenge.

I have found this process of drawing everything I buy actually helps me to change my consumption as well making me aware of it (it is truly a wonderous thing!), as it makes me reflect on every purchase that I have made and whether I would go about it differently next time. So having extolled its virtues I now challenge you to try drawing all that you spend money on for a month and see what you discover - drawing ability irrelevant as you don't have to show it to anyone!

The results of the Otesha challenge can be perused here (http://blog.otesha.org.uk/238/money/you-buy-it-you-draw-it.html)

The art of mending

On Friday we had the first meeting of the Hethersett Circle and we were talking about how we could promote skills exchange at a local level. This reminded me of a photo that my daughter recently sent me of herself using a 1930s lawnmower that was once owned by her grandfather. Tamsin has recently bought a small cottage and the old lawnmower was ideal for her tiny lawn but first it needed an overhaul. My retired neighbour likes to tinker with lawnmowers, so he offered to do the job but disaster struck when a bearing broke as he was dismantling the machine. The bearing was an Imperial size and I first thought that this was going to be the end of the lawnmower. However a quick google revealed that Simply Bearings had one in stock and a replacement arrived in next day’s post. A bit of improvisation provided the tools needed to press the new bearing onto the shaft.

So the power of the Internet combined with some old Imperial spanners and assorted bits of metal from my own and my neighbour’s sheds got an eighty year old machine back in working order. The wooden handles have been triple varnished and the machine painted and it now looks very much at home in the garden of an old cottage. There is no reason why it should not go on to serve another three generations.

I think that cheap foreign labour and increased health and safety regulation have combined to make it very difficult to mend our own appliances. Instead we throw away things that are still 90% functional and then have to work harder to buy new ones. Freegle has a steady stream of CD players and ink jet printers that have minor faults but cost more to repair than new ones. (RecyclePC will refurbish old PCs).

I look forward to sharing practical skills and tools with people in the village so that more people can mend their own things.

Biosphere in transition. 3. Affluence

I would define affluence as the material part of quality of life. As I said yesterday, if the whole world lived like we in the UK do, we would need 3.2 planets. And while yesterday I talked about living our present lifestyle with 2 billion people on our one planet, today I would like to talk about living on less affluence. Our personal impact can be divided into four roughly equal parts: food, stuff, direct energy and transport. For each category I would like to give a rough idea of what it would take to reduce one’s impact to half the national average. While this isn’t quite enough with the current population, it’s what we agreed to do in TN2 in one year starting last July, so I think this is a good basis for getting started. For food, one way of achieving this is to eat only organic, local and seasonal food. This has now become very straightforward to do, by signing up for the TN community supported agriculture. Another way is to halve the amount of food you throw away and reduce animal based food by 2/3. For stuff (a.k.a. embodied energy) I really can’t be of much help, other than to note that buying as much as half the national average must be really exhausting. For direct energy, the easiest first step is to sign up for green electricity, and to lower the thermostat to 17 °C (this was the UK average in the 1970s (or maybe it was the 60s)). I’m not sure whether this would be enough. If you want to do more switch to heating with wood. For transport the solution is to stop flying and replace half of your driving by cycling or walking, or stop flying and replace 2/3 of your driving by train travel. Sounds doable? Join TN2.

* The brown dot in the lower right sustainable high quality blue square is Cuba.

how does transition feel? - a bit like a snowy day

Because of the snow, we cannot rely on cars so it makes us change how we behave. Its like an experiment in transition life. No-one expects you to drive so its easier to say no to commitments that involve a car.

I always think if you compare transition to environmentalism its like selling religion by talking about love and forgiveness instead of hell and damnation. So with transition instead of ' the end of the world is nigh!' you have 'look how great transition feels?'

This picture shows how living the transition life could feel.
Today, nobody could get into work because of the snow so we read reports and accessed email from the home. Then we had breakfast in the Denmark Cafe then walked round the park with the dogs. After they were worn out we collected a free bone from the butchers and bought a jar of blackberry jam for £1. They fell asleep in front of the fire while we continued working. Then we went to Annas farm stores to collect more food for dinner.
' I could never live like that' i hear you say. And you are probably right as we have very flexible jobs and no children but only a few years ago we both worked full-time and spent all our spare time spending money and life seemed pointless and we never seemed to have enough stuff.
Now we can live in the moment which is very cheap!
that's the end of my weeks blog. I hope you enjoyed it.
love
helenofnorwich

Just 27 shopping days to Christmas!

Today I visited Primark for the first time, to find out what all the fuss is about. Every time I’m in the city centre I see lots and lots of people tottering around with two Primark bags along with whatever other stuff they have bought on their shopping spree. Why do they want all this stuff? How can they possibly afford it? More to the point for us in Transition, how can the planet sustain this shopping habit?

I found out pretty quickly why people want this stuff: because it is unbelievably cheap. For under a fiver you can get a fleece hoodie-style top; jeans at £6 – or £13 if you are feeling extravagant; windproof fleece-lined jackets at £10; wool blend chunky knit cardigans at £12.72; faux suede high heeled shoes at £9.

But look closer. This is the clothing equivalent of intensive farming. Marks for price: 10/10, so long as you don’t worry about counting the cost of producing things so cheaply. Marks for style: 6/10; I heard customers saying that they had seen this or that product picked out by style magazines. Marks for quality: 2/10, if I am being generous. These are not real clothes – they are simply fossil fuels reshaped to look like clothes. I read the label on the wool blend chunky knit cardie: how much wool? Just eleven per cent. The rest of the yarn was nylon and acrylic. Most of the things I inspected were 100% polyester. There is no indicator on the labels where these things are made and how they can be made so cheaply – there have been allegations in the media about child labour (feel free to sue me, Primark). Whatever the truth, the material and labour costs must be tiny.

Next door, at Wallis, things are marginally better. Prices are more sensible, although still unfeasibly cheap - £38 for a chunky knit cardie made from ‘luxury yarn’ (55% acrylic, 30% nylon, a mere 15% mohair) and at least the label is honest enough to tell me it’s made in China.

I’m horrified by what I see. My own clothes are expensive, but before you write me off in disgust, those clothes are made with integrity. They are made of natural fibres and produced in workshops that pay a fair price; I buy very few clothes and they last a long long time.

I’m reminded of something I read in Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful about how we are spending our capital (fossil fuels) as if it were interest (renewables). We’ve lost the understanding that most things are very expensive and have to be treated with respect.

If (when) China imposes realistic prices to offset all the carbon emissions created to feed our Primark habit, clothes and other products will become very expensive again. We’ll treat them with respect because we have saved up to buy them and we’ll keep them in active service for a long time. In short, we’ll go back to quality.

My closing pic, before handing over to who knows who as the next guest blogger, is at Riverside, taken from the new St Julian bridge (that’s a story for another day!). It’s the widest point in the river, where the Baltic barges direct from Russia could turn round. The warehouses, now converted into hotels and flats, held the most fabulous cargo from around the world – from China, from Istanbul, from Russia – in exchange for the equally fabulous products we made here in Norwich. How times have changed!

PS: What's on your shopping list for Christmas presents this year?

Pix: Primark in Norwich city centre today

Riverside in Norwich, today

Consumption and public space

I got made redundant last week. Only temporarily, I hope, but for a few months at least we’re going to be enjoying even more reduced circumstances than usual.

I’ve been surprised at the feelings this leaves me with regarding my role as a consumer and what is says about my place in society. Leaving the job centre on Thursday I walked along Gentleman’s Walk, looking at the shops and the coffee bars and all the people still filling the streets on their way to buy stuff. And I was aware that I’m not, for now at least, one of those people. Norwich has felt like “my city” for most of my life, but at that moment it felt like it belonged to those other people, not me.

Then last night I took the kids to a firework display in Long Stratton. There were some fireworks, but no bonfire (health and safety, presumably). But what there was lots of was stalls selling unnecessary plastic objects (hook a duck, get a prize). My three children were with me, and spent most of the evening hassling me for more money to buy more stuff. I hated every minute.

It seems to me I have three powerful reasons to try to consume less. One is that, especially now, we can’t really afford it. Another is that I want to help create a more resilient, low-carbon economy, and buying tat from China doesn’t help. And the third is that for a long time I’ve felt a distaste for it all: I really don’t enjoy either unnecessary plastic objects, nor unnecessary positional goods.

I’d rather be producing than consuming. There’s a pleasure to trying to do useful work in the world. There’s a pleasure, that I’m just beginning to discover, to being here at home (the picture is the view from my window as I write) raking leaves or gathering firewood or baking bread (when I get around to it).

But our public spaces are mostly about consuming. The centre of Norwich is a temple to that insatiable hunger for tat. The public celebrations of bonfire night – Samhain, the end of summer and the closing in of the nights – are now just about more tat. It seems to me that, if we’re going to make the move away from consumerism attractive, we’re going to have to give attention to creating new public spaces that celebrate community rather than consumption.