Eco Victory in the Face of $150 a Barrel

Never had I expected the ecohouse to come into its own in the heat of summer. Fuel expenditure sits in the February part of our minds, fired by lots of electric light and gas-fired boilers heating the radiators, cooking our dinners and keeping us clean.

Wrong, wrong, wrong when the cost of oil hits $150. All showers are taken now up the hill. Meals are cooked on tiny piles of glowing oak ash rather than lazily compiled on the gas stove in the big kitchen in the village house. Greens of all varieties are used from the kitchen garden but if it doesn't grow there, then only potatoes and cherries are making it through the greengrocer barrier. People who have swum sun-warmed lengths all day crawl up to the terrace, eat anything put in front of them (and then the table cloth, followed by the table), courteously help with the washing up (using the free, boiling hot water) and stagger off to bed. No lights, nothing - the days are longer than their energy, the nights end before their dreams. Then it's back into the showers to ease the pressure on the system, and head first into the pool, with breaks on the terrace reading bad novels and sinking litres of local, ice cold, white, child-bottled in the cellars - shadowed coolness -one tipsy afternoon.

The village house is shut, too much gas and electricity required. Florence slumbers shuttered against the midsummer heat and desperate visitors sizzling on the stones. Acqua minerale quality water seeps into the new garden planted, too successfully, to attract fauna (I didn't mean wild boars to come and dig up the irises, nor bambis to dead-head the roses before they even emerged from bud).

So the entire external energy input comes from me cooking the meals and everyone helping, and the anti-mosquito fornellini burning the beasts in their tiny, well-deserved, mosquito hell.

It's a bit quiet on the rest of the world's news front.