Today I packed our lounge’s LCD TV and all the AV equipment into the car ready to deliver tonight to my sister in Bristol. This will mean we have zero ability to receive a terrestrial television signal so we can cancel the TV licence.

We’re getting rid of the telly for a number of reasons the main ones being:

• We don’t use it. We’re mostly reading, talking or listening to the radio if we’ve the time to be hanging out in the lounge;
• There’s no temptation to allow the kids to watch it. Our boy has a bit of an addiction and can get really cranky after even half an hour of usage so this way he knows there’s no possibility of getting a fix;
• What it represents. It’s a symbol of mass consumption and, frankly, we’re embarrassed to own it;
• Space. It’s huge (40″) and we’re likely to be living in a small house soon;
• Power. It is power hungry;
• Asset value. Whilst it is still worth something we thought release that cash back into our pockets;

It might take a few days to get used to not having it anymore but I can’t see it being a big deal. Should there be something that we really want to watch there’s always the laptop and iPlayer.

I recently posted that our ambient home electricity usage was obscenely high at ~ 900 W with nothing being ‘used’. Well for #earthday I’m very pleased to find that I’ve managed to make my initial < 300 Watt target and as I write this the CC meter showing around 280W usage.

How did I do this?

• Got rid of my power hungry Dell XPS desktop and took it to work. This also allowed me to sell my work Mac pro for a tidy sum. I now use my laptop at home.
• Freecycled an always-on home development server leaving just our one file server
• Put all of the lounge AV devices onto a single extension lead and religiously switch that off at the wall every night
  • Actually soon after I did this I decided to get rid of it all completely so we’re soon to have no telly at all now but this is primarily a lifestyle choice rather than being driven my energy usage concerns.
• became really anal about turning off all the lights when not needed. Those little halogen down-lighters are the worst culprits

It wasn’t very hard at all.

Next is to remove the file server and replace it with something like a NSLU-2 and see if I can disable some of the halogen down-lighters (we rent so I can’t change the fittings).

I’ve decided to learn to ride a horse as I suspect it will be a good means of transport in the future when petrol is too expensive for Ms Average to afford to run a car.

I thought it would be good to accompany our young daughter but at six, she has decided she is too scared of being on a (tiny) pony and will try again next year. It’s not a nasty skill to learn – as soon as I’d clambered up onto poor 20 year old Verdi’s back we set off on a woodland hack through masses of wild garlic and alongside a pretty little babbling brook. It was a strange sensation having to trust that the animal would not slip into the stream and topple me off but we made it back to the riding school in one piece and then began to learn how to trot. A very way to spend a Saturday lunchtime in the spring sunshine.

Last night we watched by far the most positive video we’ve seen on energy decline called How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. It describes how Cuba survived a sudden huge reduction in available oil when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990. 

It’s really well produced, I urge you to watch it.

Spoiler: Permaculture to the rescue!

Dear old Bealers sourced and bought a beautiful spinning wheel for my christmas present, hid it in his office for weeks and even managed to somehow stop our chatty office cleaner from spilling the beans to me whenever I bumped into her in the village or when she helped us move house. On Christmas day I was presented with an enormous box which contained not only the wheel itself but a huge bag of Jacob sheep fleece and the necessary additional equipment needed to get spinning fleece into yarn (combs, extra bobbins and a ‘niddy noddy’).

For a few months it has been a pretty ornament in the porch until I recently attended a wonderful one-day ‘learn how to spin’ course at the very cool ‘Spinning Weal‘ shop in Clevedon, Somerset (the website has a very good online store for wool, yarns, dyes and quilting things it also has a calendar of forthcoming courses and events).

It was a fascinating day. I discovered that spinning is a rewarding, meditative passtime which seems to bring one back in touch with an activity which must have been essential to  many of our ancestors. For the duration of the course I was learning to spin with some really interesting women and our course tutor Sarah had loads of insight into the history of spinning.

By the end of the day I had been taught not only how to spin yarn but also how to ply it with another yarn and then to make a ball of something which could actually be knitted into fabric. We were also shown how to blend dyed yarns with one another and how to make different textures of yarns.

Since coming back from the course I have been keen to do more spinning but I have not been able to make the time as we don’t sit down to eat until 8.30ish. Perhaps it is the sort of activity I will have more time for when the nights are long and the fire is lit.