Things useful for bringing up children without a car

Here is the standard response when you tell someone that you don't own or run a car:

"But how do you do the shopping?"

Well, right now, with no children at home, there's so little shopping to do that it's almost never worth going shopping, least of all with a car. But with a family to feed, you'd certainly need to be able to source some supplies.

Here's how we do it/used to do it, and then some other suggestions.

1. Use the milkman for daily deliveries. In our case this means that we never have to go to the shops for milk, eggs, bottled water (not that we need that), orange juice, grapefruit juice. That deals with most of the heavy stuff. In the past we also used to have the milkman deliver a large sack of potatoes for the winter (or you can have smaller bags of potatoes more frequently).
2. Bake the bread at home, and have the bread flour delivered in a sack periodically by the local bakers.
3. Walk to the local butcher for meat, baker for yeast and walk or cycle to the market for fresh fruit and vegetables, fish, cheese. In Oxford we used to go to the local Asian shop for loose eggs and a few other things. At Christmas, fetch the turkey from the butcher using a trolley or cart, or a sledge if it's snowy.
   
4. Cycle to a local wholefood store, occasionally, or more often, depending, how far it is. That's for beans, rice, oatmeal, yeast extract, malt extract and other store cupboard stuff. In Oxford that was Uhuru. In Cambridge Daily Bread or Arjuna. In Norwich the Green Grocers.
   
5. Cycle to Newmarket Road or Cowley Road or wherever the nearest convenient small supermarket is, for the residue of basic needs. In our case this means once a week, to buy flour, butter, toilet rolls, yogurt, breakfast cereals, coffee. Go on a bike with a basket and a back carrier (take a bungie or two to fasten the toilet rolls and other sturdy items to the back carrier). If there's some special occasion and there's a lot to buy take a second person as the donkey, with another bike with a very large basket.
   
6. Grow some herbs in the garden.

Here are some other suggestions for how to make it even easier:

1. Order more things from the milkman: for instance, bread, yogurt, probiotics (yakult), potatoes in various sized bags, fizzy drinks, butter and so on can all be ordered as a regular or one off order. They also do organic vegetable boxes now.
2. Have a weekly organic fruit and vegetable box delivered from a local farm.
3. Grow vegetables and fruit in your garden or on an allotment.
4. Order from the supermarket online.

By my reckoning, this should mean that you only need to go two or three times a week with a small basket to the best local butcher, cheesemonger or fishmonger, and you'll eat like a king, never go hungry and never have to go very far, carry very much or buy any petrol.

Summer Holidays

This year we decided not to go anywhere far away that required air travel, so we took a few days in Wales. The trick is to set out in the expectation that it will be a gloomy wet week, cold and very windy, with cloud on the hills or even in the valleys. Then if you have even one brief sunny interval, or a momentary clear patch with good views from the top of a mountain, you come home thinking how fortunate you've been.

Strictly speaking a car would not have been necessary for the first part of our holiday, since the place we were staying would have arranged for us to be collected from the nearest station. But for the last day we had to go to Lampeter. Interestingly, we discovered from an old map in Aberystwyth museum (one of the places where we whiled away a few hours of a wet day) that the railway used to go to Lampeter, along with a great many other places, in days gone by. How vastly life would be improved now if that were still so!

In any case, taking a car enabled us to take wellies, walking boots, umbrellas, waterproof trousers and a mountain of books to read, all of which were very useful. At least, I took wellies, despite Robin's reluctance, and was very glad of them.

Apparently, according to CO2Balance.com, if we'd gone by train, the carbon emissions for a simple return journey from Cambridge to Morfa Mawddach and back, would have been 102 kg (51 kg per person). It seems to me odd that it's doubled if two of us travel, since the train would have run anyway even with just one of us... But I suppose you have to divide the total emissions of the train by the passengers it carries. That would make it a bigger total the fewer people were carried, not twice the amount when you carry twice as many people. Ho hum.

As it was we went by car, and according to Cloud Amber, the same simple return journey in the model of car that we hired and with two of us travelling, would typically have emitted 52.1 kg per person, a total of 104.2kg for the two of us. This is not much more than the emissions for the train journey, probably because the route by car is a bit shorter.

So I think in this case, I shall not list this particular journey as one of my guilty secrets, although doubtless we did a few extra miles by car on the little outings to wet and windy places during the holiday, which otherwise we would have had to do on foot (or maybe just not do them and read more books instead. Reading books seems to be a low carbon occupation, particularly if the books are second hand and there is enough daylight to read by).

Price of fuel protests

So we have three problems: (1) Petrol costs a lot; (2) The roads are congested because too many people are driving too many cars to too many places for no good reason; (3) there is a problem with carbon emissions and climate change which could be quite serious.

Does it seriously seem to be worthwhile trying to solve these problems by increasing the production of oil so as to bring the price down? Indeed, when you think about it, is item number one one of the problems? Or is it rather the solution to the other two things, which really are problems?

Carbon offsetting again

I spent last weekend at the Joint Session (a major UK philosophical conference with about 250 delegates). It was hosted at a rather unpleasant campus which seemed to bear an uncanny resemblance to the surface of the moon—or particularly the moon as it would look if covered in a maze of rectangular concrete buildings—, on the edge of Bristol, currently known as UWE, though in days gone by it was called Bristol Poly. It's not a place I am keen to see again in my lifetime. As a colleague pointed out, if they'd done the abbreviation properly the University of the West of England would be known as University of the WOE.

We weren't originally supposed to be at the University of WOE, but at the real University of Bristol, which might have been better aesthetically, and certainly would have landed us in a more desirable urban environment (as it was, the only things within walking distance were Hewlett Packard's works and, I gather, some examples of the edge of the city retail park with its B&Q and so on). But thanks to Bristol University and its building programme, the conference had been relocated at rather short notice.

But the point of this post is not the place we were in, but the process of getting there. This is what they said on the conference information:

Directions to the UWE Frenchay Campus are available at www.uwe.ac.uk/maps/frenchay_directions.shtml. Note that the nearest train station is Bristol Parkway rather than Bristol Temple Meads.

The Philosophy Department at the University of Bristol operates a carbon off-set scheme. Any delegates wishing to minimize the environmental impact of their conference travel are requested to contact Finn Spicer: finn.spicer@bristol.ac.uk

Now when unpacked as a guide to how to get to Bristol this seems to me to say the following:

We assume that you will typically be coming by car. You'll need directions for how to get there which can be found on the web site mentioned. Some people prefer to come by train, but we don't specially recommend that. Bristol Parkway is nearer than Bristol Temple Meads, but it's not really very near and not really very convenient. We don't see much difference in environmental impact between coming by car and coming by train, and since we now run a carbon offsetting scheme, there's really no need to use the train or to worry at all about the impact of driving, as long as you're prepared to pay a few pence for someone else to do the tiresome bit of being green on your behalf, so you might as well drive, use the free parking on campus and just send us a bit of money to salve your conscience (if you have any: we're proud that we do have a conscience as you can see).

Now it seems to me that what they should have said is the following:

Although there is free parking on campus, we strongly urge you to consider travelling by train rather than by car. Bristol Parkway, with high speed trains from London, Didcot and South Wales, is only a five minute bus ride from campus and there are plenty of taxis to be had. Train travel accounts for far fewer carbon emissions than road travel, and your train journey will assist the Bristol University Philosophy Department's attempt to become carbon neutral in all its activities. Contributions to the carbon offsetting scheme can be made by contacting ... but such contributions should not be regarded as a substitute for a low carbon lifestyle.

I hope one would say something like that even if train travel were quite a lot more difficult than it was in this case.

The cost of a car

Today someone on Radio Norfolk estimated that the cost of running a car (which she'd just decided to give up) was £3,000 a year. This was for an old, nothing special, second hand car in which depreciation is not too dramatic.

I rather suspect it must actually be a lot more than that.

What does it mean to be green?

It means feeling a certain smug satisfaction, nay glee, at the 'misfortune' of the poor motorists who filled up with "go-slow" fuel at various supermarket service stations in the UK this week...

Things calculated to make a cyclist angry

Speed Humps

Example: the new work on the Avenues in Norwich.

Where there used to be a bicycle lane there is now no bicycle lane, but rather a series of terrible humps and a 20 mph speed limit, which is a volatile combination that causes the motor traffic to be a serious nuisance to bicycles, and bikes to be a serious hazard to motors.

Here, for instance, in the space of three minutes are some of the consequences.


1 The humps are placed such that a car must squeeze in close to the left to get a wheel either side of the hump. As a bike approaches a hump, the car behind must hang back to wait until after the bike has gone past.




2 If the motor vehicle chooses not to hang back and wait, it may pass the cycle at the hump by travelling on the wrong side of the road. However, since it is limited to 20 mph it will need to spend some considerable time on the other side.



3. If there is traffic coming in the opposite direction, overtaking on the right is not an option. The motor vehicle must stay behind.








4 However, 20 mph is not sufficient speed to pass a sequnce of cyclists between humps. If the cycles are travelling at 10 or 12 mph and the motor vehicle is travelling at 20 mph it will not have time to pass even one cyclist, let alone several, before coinciding with a cyclist at the next hump.

In order to get past, then, the motor vehicle is obliged to move out to the right hand side of the road and accelerate as fast as possible, rush past the cyclists on the wrong side of the road, and then swerve urgently into the extreme left, cutting in in front of a cyclist, so as to have its wheels square on either side of the left hump.

5 The alternative is to drive on the right hand side of the road at break neck speed the whole length of the Avenues, hoping that nothing will come in the opposite direction.

It is, of course, also impossible for cyclists to overtake each other between the humps. In the three minutes I spent getting these photos I didn't catch one of the problems that ensue for the cyclist who needs to get past a slower moving cyclist. Maybe in another post...

Parking £3.20 all day

Parking £3.20 all day.

This is what it says on a large sign facing the railway just outside Norwich station.
It's obviously addressed to people travelling on the train. I assumed initially that this must be to allow commuters who catch the train from Norwich to see that they could park their car near the station for the day and then take the train (to London, say). It now occurs to me that it might be addressing those who commute into Norwich from Norfolk, Suffolk or wherever, suggesting that you could travel by car instead and here's a place to park that will be just as good as coming in by train.

I imagine some people whose train ticket costs more than £3.20 a day might be tempted to think they'd save some money that way. It's a sad situation that many people seem to judge their happiness and well-being by the immediate amount of money going in and out of their purses in obvious, measurable amounts.

One morning last week on Radio Norfolk there was another example of that. It was a discussion of the declining quality and increasing cost of the bus service. It's true that the service is declining and the ticket prices have risen sharply. That is at least partly due to the government cutting the grants that assist with provision of services to rural communities. Such is the government's commitment to the environment, and supporting efforts towards sustainable lifestyles.

But however much one laments the failure to subsidise country buses, here is a very stupid thought, uttered by one of the listeners who phoned in:

"The car park costs less than the bus fare so it's cheaper to drive in than to take the bus."

How many mistakes is this person making when she thinks like that?

Things useful for the task of bringing up children without a car

Besides the pram and the toddler seat, by the time the baby is about five months old you need a back rest for the pram (couldn't find a picture of one of these) and a baby harness.

The back rest for the pram is a kind of board with three pieces, which fold round and clip together to make a triangle. This goes in behind the baby when the baby is sitting up (but when the baby needs to sleep you take it out and flatten it and put it in the tray under the pram, or at the foot or whatever). My feeling is that there's something important in developmental terms about this hard back rest, because the baby sits up on a firm base and against a firm support and learns to exercise the lower back muscles to keep balance. This must be expecially good practice if the pram is in motion. Someone ought to do a study to see if children who ride in a real pram between six months and a year learn to walk earlier than those who slouch in a stroller.

I think maybe some prams have a back rest built in, which folds up or down.

And I believe the really old prams with the cavernous coach built body (like the one I myself occupied on my earliest outings) had a removable board in the middle of the base, so that when you removed the matterss and removed the loose board, the pram became two child seats facing each other, with space in the centre for the child's legs to drop down into the body of the pram.

The harness, of course, is for safety, once the child is capable of getting about in various ways by itself. You need one for the baby in the pram and one for the toddler on the toddler seat.

This picture, by the way, is not a picture of me but just a random picture I found on the web.


The toddler seat is also important for child development, not for physical co-ordination but for IQ. You have a conversation with the toddler as you push the pram.
(How very different from the lack of contact with a child in a forward facing pushchair!)

Things useful for the task of bringing up children without a car

First, a pram.

It should have large wheels, so as to be comfortable to push for long distances and not bumpy on rough pavements or difficult at kerbs. It should have decent springs. It should have a sizable basket below for carrying large quantities of shopping and other clobber.

A pram like this will also take a child seat for the toddler, so that two children can be transported, and all that shopping too.

Twenty years ago it was possible to take a pram like this in the luggage van of a proper loco-hauled train. I remember taking our pram on the train from Cambridge to London, on a visit to the grandparents, though I have a rather dim memory of how we got from Liverpool Street (or was it King's Cross?) to Dulwich.

I suppose it may still be possible. Is it permissible to put a pram in the cycle storage area of a train? I'm not sure.

My guilty secrets

There are some things I still do which I guess I shouldn't do. Here in no particular order are some of them.

(1) We still do a small amount of shopping at Tescos.

(2) I rather like drinking sparkling water at breakfast and after dinner, especially when I'm in a no-coffee phase. The water comes in plastic bottles.

(3) I occasionally go somewhere by plane, even when it's possible to go there by train.

(4) I sometimes drive to Wales and back just for fun.

(5) I have a bit of penchant for lychees (I bought some yesterday).

Probably there are others. I'll let you know when I have qualms about something else.

Now the question is, shall I try to justify and rationalise these weaknesses, so as to be able to live with them? Or shall I "offset them"? Or shall I try to get rid of them?

What does it mean to be green?

It means never having to scrape ice off the windscreen.

Bringing up children without a car

Two conversations yesterday evening prompt me to post on this theme.

A while back, cycling to work up Recreation Road in Norwich, I encountered a kind of mayhem even more extreme than the usual mayhem caused by people bringing their children to school at Heigham Park First School. Recreation Road is a steep hill, bottom gear variety. On this particular occasion I was struggling up this hill on my bicycle, but was brought to a halt due to the car in front of me having to stop. That was because a car coming down the hill had pulled up to stop and unload children where there were already parked cars on both sides, entrances to drive ways and other complications, in such a way as to prevent anyone from moving up or down the hill.

Stopping a cyclist on a steep hill is not popular. They say that whenever a cyclist is forced to stop and start off again it takes as much additional energy as if the journey were 100 metres longer, but that's presumably if you have to restart on the flat; I suspect that restarting on an up hill slope is quite a lot more.

In this case it wasn't just a matter of starting again. There wasn't actually room for me to continue my journey on the road. In fact I had to get off, walk my bike up the pavement, and get on again beyond the obstruction.

As I went past the mother unloading her child from the car, I asked her, in a rhetorical kind of way, why she didn't bring her children to school on foot. It's always struck me (on the times when I make the mistake of riding past that school at that time of the day) that the ones being unloaded from cars look fat and unhappy, while the ones being walked to school are chatty and lively with a lovely hubbub of conversation with their accompanying adult.

The mother with the badly parked car didn't offer me a reason for why she didn't bring her children on foot. She just said "you've obviously never had children!" as though it was obvious that if you had children you had to be late, in a hurry, shove them in a car, drive to school, yank them out of the car, drag them in to the school door and rush back to move the car, because it's causing an obstruction. No time for goodbyes. No time for conversation. No time to talk to the other parents. Just dump them and run. This is what bringing up children is all about.

Well, perhaps it was a bad day. But if you don't have a car at all, a bad day never looks like that. It may look like something else, but it never looks like that.

"Actually," I said, "I had two children, and we never had a car." By this time I was on my bike and gone. "Never once," I thought, "did my children go to school by car." In fact, of course, they never went to ballet by car, they never went to music lesson by car, they never went to orchestra by car.

Was anyone the worse off for that? Well, our life was not the life of a taxi driver, which seems to be what the life of many parents is these days. And their life was, as far as one can make out, certainly not worse for it. Perhaps, dare I say it, better? Some thoughts on why in due course.

The best way to get to Oxford

What's the best way to drive from Cambridge to Oxford?

The simple answer is, don't even try. Just take the train.

But a Sunday morning between 7.30 and 9.30 is probably the best time to sample the route by car, and it is quite pleasant then. Probably preferable to the trains, since one should, in general, never try to go anywhere by train on a sunday morning.

It crossed my mind, as we drove across by way of Bedford and Woburn and Aylesbury and so on, that the roads at that time of day were quite empty, and that if everyone in the country were to do what we do and hire a car about three times a year, that's how the roads would be at the busiest times.

And wouldn't we all be a lot happier then?

And then it struck me, as we looked for a parking space in the narrow streets of East Oxford, that if we all lived like that, then only one house in 100 would have a car on any one day of the year (or maybe two in every 100 if they hired for two days each, three times a year), and that car would probably not be parked in front of their house, because they'd be using it. So there would be no difficulty in parking, because the streets would be entirely empty of parked cars.

They'd be full of children playing of course, as they used to be. But that would be a delight, not a problem.

It's odd, it seems to me, that such a simple way to happiness should be so far beyond our grasp.

101 things not to do with a car

Today I have a very smart car sitting in our parking space.
It's been there all day. I can't think of anything to do with it.

The same thing happened the last time we hired a car for the weekend.

I started the day by trying to think of something useful I could do with a car. I thought of going to the dump with some rubbish. But then the only rubbish I could think of was a broken deck chair in the garden, and really that could be broken up and put in the bin, if it really must be thrown away, but I feel someone might like the wood at least, for fire wood. So it wasn't worth driving to the dump just for that. I'd waste ages getting there for very little reward.

Then I thought I'd take my mother to the hospital to visit a friend who's ill. But then it seemed that said friend was coming out of hospital today, so a visit was not very sensible. And actually even with my mother it would actually be easier to go to the hospital by bus, given how difficult it is to park there, and how easy it is by bus.

Then I had to take my suit to the cleaners, but it's no good doing that by car. The Dry Cleaners is on Victoria Avenue. It would take longer to get there by car than by bike, and where would you park? It would be madness.

Then I had to take a cheque to the bank. Well you don't do that in a car.

Then I went to market to buy fruit and vegetables. You can't go there in a car (and why would you want to?)

While in town I also went to Sussex Street to get a card from SPCK.

Then I came home. And since then I've been getting on with stuff at home that needs doing. I haven't done anything with the car except take a photo of it.

So what is the use of a car? And why do people have them? Just to sit in the road, gently rusting and taking up space? I can't make out what the point is.