I’ve been feeling alternately smug and despondent lately.
The smugness mainly came from watching my neighbours throw away perfectly usable items in the two big skips (two? we made do with one last year) that are always brought in this time of year. Had we had a little more storage space I would probably have scrounged some of it, but we don’t. Besides, most of it was “deconstructed” in order to make stacking more efficient, we watched, somewhat gobsmacked, as two grown men smashed a set of six pine dining room chairs which looked, though a little out of fashion, perfectly serviceable. I disposed of exactly two items myself. One (short) length of decking which became surplus when my father built a new set of steps for our veranda – as you’re not supposed to burn these due to unsafe emissions it had to be thrown out. The other was our old barbeque, whcih we paid all of 99 NOK for in 2005 and which has languished outside in the snow over the past three winters. The ventilation valve thing was actually not quite right to start with, that’s what you get for being a cheapskate, and it had now rusted into position which meant that when hubby tried to barbeque some sausages a few weekends ago it wouldn’t heat up sufficiently. I declared it dead and threw it out. I am now insisting we buy an “expensive one”, one that costs, oh, at least 300 NOK, and get/make a cover for it in order to protect it from the weather, at least over the winter. Where was I? Oh, yes, the smugness, then, originated in wathcing my neighbours throw away Good Stuff whereas we instead put an ad up at finn.no in the “free” section and were pleased to have people arrive and carry away our “junk” with big smiles on their faces. Very eco-friendly and bringing joy to mankind (well, a couple of people, anyway) into the bargain.
The desponancy came from realising this is a drop in the ocean and that we really need to do so much more, as well as persuading our neighbours to follow suit. I was checking the Times website for mayoral and other news the other day and found their list of “top 50 green blogs“, and things followed on from there and I read lots of sites on carbon neutrality and people installing solar panels and growing their own food. Which made me feel I was a long way off. Then I started reading Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine and that really got me down. Seriously? This head-in-the-sand strategy is looking quite good at the moment.
Well, every little helps. I have to go to Oslo for a course in mid-June, which was convenient, because I was planning to go to Oslo for the weekend following the course anyway (Alanis Morisette at Norwegian Wood, that’s why, also time to see Oslo and, more especially, Tone and Linda again) and now my employer is paying for the tickets which can’t be a Bad Thing. So I decided to take the train instead of going by airplane. I might have considered doing so in any case, but now I get the night train down Monday night with a sleeper compartment which means I can be bright and awake for the start of the course on Turesday. And I get the night train back on Sunday evening after the festival has ended and arrive bright and early in Trondheim just in time to go to work on Monday morning. The tickets, including sleeper, are twice what you’d normally manage to get plane tickets for this far in advance. And they’re all paid for by someone else. Nice.
Not so nice: Spending a week away from the lass – and the husband. A week is a long time. This week, for example, she learned to say “katt” (cat) and I finally realised her “kaddæ?” is probably Trøndersk (the local dialect, not mine, the husband’s though, as well as all her playmates’) and means “Ka e det?” (what is that?) – at least most of the time. If I go away for a week I’ll probably come back and find she’s learnt to recite Shakespeare. Or Kaptein Sabeltann. Oh, the horror.