Eco living is not going to suit everybody. Solar-powered heating, hypocaust style, is not for the cosy comfort seekers. What it gives, free (after the instalation costs are met) is a damp-free, virtually maintenance-free, environment. Turn up at the ecohouse on a blustery, grey November day after a week of similar weather and the house will have consumed what sunshine there has been and kept it indoors. But it isn't enough for our soft, centrally-heated selves.
I arrived with the bags of food, ahead of the breakfasting, newspaper reading, coffee drinking, well, I could manage a boiled egg to go with this toast, brigade down in the village. Anoraked-up everything was lovely as I lit the fire in the kitchen, swept up a fat and disgusting spider and threw it out to face its fate over the terracing, put on large pans of water to boil, and checked where the olives had been stored to make sure it had been thoroughly swept after the last round (we don't want trampled in olives on the treated floors do we). But when I sat down to well - have a sit down - I wondered if I would have liked to wake up and find wrap and slippers at these temperatures. Certainly there wasn't an icicles on the inside of the windows scenario (there had better not be with triple glazing and whatever gas lies between the sheets of glass), we could have made up the perfectly dry beds with perfectly dry linen and taken up residence forthwith. There was none of the get you by the throat icy grasp that used to greet us in the house in the village when we arrived for Easter and the building had been closed since the previous summer; it didn't matter how big the fires, how loaded the stoves, it was always days before a single intake of breath didn't chill the lungs. There were wooden frames with metal containers full of hot coals slung within them which had to be placed inside every bed for hours before people dared to slip between the sheets warmly clad in night clothes - not a phrase for nightie, but a full outfit, in brushed cotton with night undies under, and woolly, large socks. Mr HG used, as a child, to be sewn into a fresh vest after his bath. Anyway,
If we have to live the good life after meltdown it's going to be at lower temperatures than we enjoy. We need more clothes, all the time, and life has to be lived with zip, with energy, with keeping warm by keeping up effort and busyness around the house. I've been there before and just keeping clean and warm and healthy takes up a lot of effort. All those granny-level admonitions are probably true as well - draughts, taking off wet things, no bare feet.....
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Yes, it felt like I was sewn into the heavy, thick, hand spun and hand-knitted wool (from the sheep at our farm), prickly (fresh only in the sense of freshly washed and ironed) vest after my bath. No need to sew one in, it was so tight fitting, also because it did not grow as one did.
The vest - la maglia pesante - was a symbol of parental authority. Day after day it became increasingly barable and eventually comfortable, until the following week when it was changed, over a skin made more delicate by the warm bath...
Taking it off, changing into a cotton vest before the season allowed, was an act of rebellion. Refusal to wear la maglia pesante was the ultimate emancipation. Sigh.
You could be on a flight from Rome to here with a rest stop and be nicely thawed by the time you touched down. You could have the sand between your toes in a couple of days,you could be feasting on oysters and prawns and complaining about eating hot pork and turkey in the middle of summer, you could be dancing on a deck overlooking a beach,you could be watching the sun set with a cool long island ice tea, which by the way has no tea in it. We can sew you up in a cabana for a midday nap. - x AA
MERRY XMAS x AA
And to you all, AA I usually put the Christms card on Angels so do keep a look out.
I'm turning over the idea of spending Christmas at the ecohouse but am I too lazy to set it up? And will the snow on all the mountains I can see from the windows here come down as far as the ecohouse hills? And will that make it more or less a good idea? But Christmas trees and blazing fires and total silence and snowy woods are only a week's work away. So I might.
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