Why it doesn’t “pay” to go green.

When should the average 21st Century Wife invest in energy-saving technology?

It’s a timely question, what with last month’s Energy Saving Week (did anyone notice that?) and the enormous THUD made by the Stern Report as it hit the news (700 pages! I hope that gets distributed on CD-ROM) . . . . Still, it was nice to have a world-renowned economist calculating the financial cost of global warming. Seeing pound signs attached to the implications of rising temperatures and sea levels was welcome (it put things in a language most of us understand) but also depressing (we really do need to do something about climate change).

By coincidence, the cost of energy efficiency is also a timely question for the Darnbrough family. Having just moved house, we had thought that now would be good time to invest in green energy.

We have the added incentive of having inherited an LPG-based central heating system. If there is a more expensive way of heating your home, I’d be interested to hear of it. It might be schadenfreude, but it would be nice to know that there are people out there whose heating bills will be higher than ours.

We’ve done – or are in the process of doing – most of the obvious things with regard to being eco-friendly:

• we don’t fill our kettle right up every time we boil it
• we try to remember to turn lights off when we leave a room
• we don’t run the tap while we are cleaning our teeth
• we try not to leave any electrical products on standby
• I rush round the house closing curtains at dusk
• we have started buying energy-saving light bulbs.

More importantly, we have had someone round to survey the house with regard to getting cavity wall insulation sorted and improving our loft insulation . . .

With all those bases covered, the next obvious step for the eco-friendly 21st Century Wife has to be renewable energy. “We could get our hot water for free,” I told Mr Darnbrough; who is sympathetic to the idea but sceptical about the economics. He did, however, agree to talk to a representative of an “approved” solar thermal energy company. I sent off the coupon which had appeared with the post soon after we’d moved in and settled back to wait for a few months. In a disconcertingly short space of time, they contacted us and the visit was arranged.

Our salesman arrived just before 8pm. By the time he left at 10.30pm, we knew a lot more about solar thermal energy and what it could and could not do for us. Sadly for him, we were also convinced that however attractive and eco-friendly solar thermal energy undoubtedly is, we couldn’t justify spending eight thousand pounds – including a special offer 20% discount for becoming a customer reference installation – on something that won’t pay for itself for at least eight years.

It’s a tricky problem. Mr Darnbrough and I would like to be more environmentally friendly but we don’t have that kind of money to throw around. You’d have to be pretty certain that you were going to live in a house for a good 10 years to justify that kind of investment: especially when there are carpets and floors to be replaced, artex to be removed, en suite bathrooms to be installed and double glazing to upgrade (eventually).

And then of course, there’s the worry that with all the interest in alternative energy, the technology is bound to improve and the costs are only going to come down. You have to ask yourself, why invest thousands now in a solution that will probably be outdated in a year or two? It’s all very well being a pioneer, but they do tend to be the people who get the arrows in their backs.

Cavity wall insulation on the other hand, will cost us around £300. It may not be pretty, and it’s probably made from some non-environmentally friendly oil-based product, but it will cut our energy bills now and leave us with the cash to do some of the other things that we have planned.

Unlike Mr Stern’s report, which made what was generally agreed to be a convincing case for spending now to save billions later, Mr Darnbrough was even sceptical about the figures provided by our salesman for average annual heating costs. Obviously, we don’t yet know how much it will cost to heat this house, but compared with our heating bills for the last one, the average national cost for heating and hot water which he quoted to us, seemed rather high. I choose to interpret this as implying that we must already be fairly economical in our energy usage.

Mr Darnbrough’s back of envelope calculations also indicated that the payback period for us to invest in solar thermal would be around ten years – we don’t even know if we will still be in the house in ten years time! Businesses expect to write down the costs of capital investment in three or four years – unless they are in the atomic energy sector or heavy industry, why should a householder be any different?

It’s a sobering thought that even though we would like to “go green”, we can’t make the numbers stack up. It’s all very well for the green web sites to tell you that replacing your old refrigerator with an energy efficient one will save you £45 a year off your annual energy bill, but you’ll have to pay out several hundred pounds upfront first. Unless you are about to change your ‘fridge anyway, most people simply can’t justify that.

It is true that once you come up to that point where you need to replace your fridge (or your central heating boiler), you might be prepared to pay a small premium for the warm, fuzzy feeling that being “eco-friendly” will undoubtedly give you. But how many people will part with eight grand to get that glow? The reference customer we spoke to from our solar thermal company, said that he thought his system might pay for itself in 14 years. That’s a long time to wait before you can boast about your minimal hot water bills at dinner parties . . .

Its true that I lie awake at night sometimes and worry about the future of the planet and the kind of world we are making for our children but when it comes to balancing the medium term benefits of spending eight thousand pounds on solar thermal hot water heating versus the immediate benefits of widening the driveway and getting rid of the textured wallpaper, I’m afraid I know where our money will go.

So, unless the Government starts making it a lot more attractive to invest in environmentally friendly devices – either with better incentives or with financial penalties – it is going to be hard to make significant progress on reducing the Darnbrough’s carbon footprint.

Getting back to solar thermal energy: I did briefly try the “security of supply” argument on Mr Darnbrough to see if that had any impact. He gave me one of those incredulous looks that men reserve for women who’ve just announced that they don’t have enough pairs of shoes, or anything to wear . . . (which I don’t) and said that if terrorists started disrupting the UK’s energy supplies to that extent, he thought that we’d have more pressing things to worry about.

So I’ve started reading up about biofuels (the Chilterns is one of the most densely wooded areas in the country) and making yet more plans for the veg patch. At least we’ll have something to eat, even if we won’t have any hot water . . .

Relevant websites:
http://www.est.org.uk/
http://www.tvec.org.uk/

Learning to love lunch:
The tale of school dinners at Stoke Row Primary School.

Steve McTegart, Headmaster of Stoke Row Primary School, used to actively discourage parents from letting their children eat school dinners. Now he is telling everyone how wonderful the food is.

The turnaround is down to the combined efforts of the school, Ann Gass, one of its Governors, and Paul Clerehugh, chef/proprietor of one of the village pub/restaurants, the widely acclaimed The Crooked Billet.

“When I first came here in January 2003, I was appalled by the school lunches,” says Steve McTegart. “It was also clear that the children and parents weren’t keen on them either.” In those bad old days, Stoke Row School used to serve just 40 school dinners a week.

In spite of months spent negotiating with County Facilities Management, the arm of Oxfordshire County Council which used to provide Stoke Row School with its lunches, the school felt that it had got nowhere. Steve, his staff and the School’s Governors, felt that they had no choice but to start looking at alternative options.

With two children already at the school, Parent Governor, Ann Gass, was aware of the poor quality of the lunches being provided and had stopped her children eating them. The food was dried up and congealed and often there wasn’t enough of it to feed the few children prepared to try.

When Ann did finally persuade someone from the suppliers to visit the school and see what they were providing, the response came back that the food was fine. “Apparently it ‘ticked all the right boxes’”, she recalls. The problem was that it didn’t tick the most important box of all - it was practically inedible.

That was when she decided to go and speak to The Crooked Billet’s Paul Clerehugh. “When Paul said, ‘Yes, I can do that’,” recalls Ann, “I almost fell off my chair. I was really, really excited.”

As a result of that conversation, the school now serves up to 70 meals a day - in a school with 87 children. The project has been more successful than anyone involved could have believed possible.

“What we are giving the children now is a proper ‘dining experience’,” says Steve. Whereas before, the children ate off plastic trays similar to those used in prisons, the school has invested in proper crockery and cutlery and the children now sit in mixed age groups and eat a wide variety of foods, many of which they have never experienced at home. While chips and sausages are still favourites, cheesey polenta and oriental vegetables, for example, have been unexpected successes.

Not all meals go down equally well: one child excuses himself from eating anything that looks too suspicious by explaining “I’m vegetarian to that.” On the whole however, new foods are cautiously welcomed and a strategy of placing children who actively like a dish near those who need convincing has been a success.

“No child is made to eat the food,” explains Ann Gass, “They are given the opportunity to try and the best incentive to try something different is when one of the child’s own peers is saying to them: ‘This is really nice.’” In addition, the teaching staff often eat with the children, acting as role models for good manners and providing further encouragement for the more timid gourmets.

For Paul Clerehugh of the Crooked Billet, the responsibility of educating the taste buds of the next generation has been hugely rewarding: though not without its problems. From his perspective, the ball started rolling when Ann Gass called on him in early 2005 to ask him to come and see the children’s lunches and give his comments.

“When I got there,” says Paul, “there were six children eating their lunch and the food was really poor.” He took one look at the food and thought: “There’s no way I would feed my daughters that rubbish.”

It was an emotional response, recalls Paul: “I don’t know if that’s the way Ann planned it but that’s the way it worked.” Before he knew it, he was knee deep in the paperwork required to allow him to proceed.

There has been so much bureaucracy involved that Paul has had to hire a consultant to help ensure that The Crooked Billet meets all its obligations. “We have been in business in Stoke Row for sixteen years, and we meet or exceed all of the environmental health regulations,” he says, “but this process reduced some of my staff to tears.”

An indication of the size of the problem is the fact that each ingredient used in a meal has to be analysed in a laboratory before it can be fed to the children. Paul has deliberately kept ingredients as close to nature as possible, but at one point he says, officials were asking him to have the carrots he was proposing to use sent for analysis. He points out that this is the reason that many school meal providers use so much tinned food. By doing so, the responsibility for providing the sourcing information is passed on to the manufacturers.

The Crooked Billet managed to win the argument about the absurdity of sending carrots for analysis, but it still has to provide information on the sort of carrot, the sort of pan it is cooked in and the water used to cook it – imagine having to do that before you could feed your family. . . .

What has made the Stoke Row School project worthwhile for Paul (whose children don’t actually live in the School’s catchment area), is going up to the school to see the children having their lunch. “I’ve taken my chefs to see the children eating and looking so happy. It’s so motivating for us,” he says. It’s an experience that is guaranteed to provoke tears of a different kind.

This piece was originally published in The Oxford Times earlier this year http://www.theoxfordtimes.net/limitededition/

Does kinesiology work?

It’s an interesting question and one to which I am able to provide an answer on the basis of personal experience.

We decided to try kinesiology earlier this year, having noticed that a friend of ours who was already ridiculously fit and active had suddenly become even more so. . . .

It turns out that she’d been to see a kinesiologist who had tested her for food intolerances.

We sniggered when she explained that she’d had to lie down on a couch and raise her leg in the air while the kinesiologist placed a sample of food (in a container) on her stomach and then tried to push her leg down. The trouble was, we could see for ourselves that she was quite literally glowing with health. She’d had to give up eating chicken, corn, tomatoes, mushrooms, apricots, milk, butter, cheese, tea, coffee, beans, vodka and white wine. After several re-tests, she has been able to re-introduce most of these items.

She has suffered from bad migraines all her adult life. Since she went to see the kinesiologist, she has not had a single one. She also reported that she was no longer suffering from the stomach problems which had been making her life miserable.

Well, Mr Darnbrough has had problems with eczema on his face that no conventional medicine seems to have been able to deal with, and over the last few years has also suffered from what have been delicately referred to as “tummy upsets”. It looked as if it might be worth sending him along to see what the kinesiologist had to suggest.

So as not to be left out, I decided to see what she had to say about my recurrent problems with an itchy mouth, a runny nose and my permanent lack of energy (which I generally put down to the fact that I have two young children).

After a certain amount of cajoling and threats, Mr Darnbrough made his appointment. He came out with a list of foods to avoid that was almost literally as long as his leg. The crucial things were yeast, all dairy products, caffeine and anything with cane sugar in it. This ruled out at a stroke: beer, wine (except champagne or cava because they have been fermented twice); chocolate; marmite; most cakes and sweets and most breads and cereals. He was also advised not to use anything with perfume in it and to buy a filter for our water which would remove the chlorine. She also recommended that he take probiotics in capsule form.

The no perfume edict entailed buying organic shower gel, shampoo and conditioner from a specialist supplier and also led to us switching over totally to Ecover products. I baulked at changing the dishwasher tablets however, because Ecover don’t do a combined salt, powder and rinse aid tablet and we had just been to Costco and purchased enough Finish 3-in-1 tablets to last out a small siege.

Two weeks after Mr Darnbrough’s visit, I also went and lay on the couch with my leg in the air. I emerged three quarters of an hour later, with a confirmed diagnosis of candida (which I had begun to suspect) and the prospect of at least a month without: dairy products, yeast, beef, soya, lentils and chick peas, citrus fruits, chilis, coriander, sugar of any kind, balsamic (or any other) vinegar, ham or bacon, caffeinated tea or coffee, almonds . . . I was also advised to take probiotics, and an anti candida tablet called Caprylic Acid.

Our kinesiologist furnished us with a list of alternatives to the banned products and we duly switched to Village Bakery Campagne and Rossisky bread (made using only naturally occurring yeasts), ryvita, St Helen’s goat’s milk and yoghurt (very acceptable), Pure organic spread (much, much nicer than most margarines/spreads) and found Village Bakery seed bars to cope with those sweet-toothed moments that seem to happen every so often.

Since we were allowed to drink gin and vodka, we rootled around in the understairs cupboard and found various useful bottles, which were clutched thankfully and their contents consumed in combination with apple and mango juice (it’s not the same as a G&T). We also investigated Rooibosch tea. Somewhat to my surprise, I found that if you don’t try to pretend that it is real tea (and so put milk in it), it’s actually very nice. In particular, the Rooibosch Earl Grey and Cinnamon teas from a company called Dragonfly. I also started sweetening things that needed sweetening with honey.

As you can imagine, none of this has been exactly cheap. Consultations were £50 for the initial session and £25 thereafter. Goat’s milk is £1.19 a litre, the yoghurt about £1.99 for a large pot. Buying all our bread instead of making most of it, is also more expensive and supplements such as the probiotics, caprylic acid and vitamins made a noticeable dent in the monthly budget. In addition, since it has pushed us into looking more closely at what we eat, the organic content of our weekly shopping basket has risen – and so too has the cost.

Aside from the financial aspects, the effects of all this label-watching have been two-fold. On the “negative” side, I am spending more time preparing and cooking food, since we can’t rely on the processed tomato sauces (sugar gets in everywhere) and so on which had so obligingly crept into our diet. On the positive side, it has made me more determined to push ahead with the Vegetable Patch Project (see below for an update)

And the results?

Well, after just over two months, it would be fair to say that they are mixed:

• Mr Darnbrough’s “tummy upsets” have practically disappeared – so long as he stays off caffeine - but his face is no better.
• My itchy mouth has gone but although the runny nose cleared up initially, it seems to be making a comeback at the moment. I’m hoping this is just a blip because I’ve spoken to so many people who have confirmed that avoiding diary has slashed their tissue budget.
• I think I probably do have more energy/don’t feel so totally exhausted by the end of the day.
• We have both lost weight: nearly half a stone in my case and around 10lbs in Mr Darnbrough’s.
• Although we have been told that we can re-introduce most of the proscribed foods we have decided to stay with the “no- yeast bread” and goat’s milk/yoghurt for the time being.

As far as our friend is concerned: nearly a year later, her migraines are still just a bad memory but her stomach problems have returned. She is currently trying “the diet” again but feels that there is probably an underlying problem that needs to be resolved through conventional medicine.

The conclusion I draw from this is that, for us, kinesiology has reinforced our awareness of the importance of reading labels carefully and avoiding highly processed foods. If it means that Mr Darnbrough never suffers from “tummy upsets” again, then giving up caffeine and cheese (except occasionally) will have been worth it. For my part, not having an itchy mouth and a permanently dripping nose would be a good outcome, but it’s probably too early to say whether I can look forward to either with certainty. I’m glad we went, but I’d have to say that it has only been partially successful.


Below

In case anyone is interested, the Marcos and the onions are already coming up nicely and the peas have started to show themselves too. Encouraged by this, I have now also planted a row of broad beans. This still leaves about two thirds of the plot to fill but we’ve decided to cover the ground with tarpaulin to kill off the weeds and go into planning mode for the rest of the winter.

The Alpha Daddies

Mr Darnbrough is off on his travels. Between now and Christmas, he will be mostly away from home – including stints in Nigeria and South Africa.

I realize that not having Daddy around is nothing new for a great many families but it is going to be quite a change for us. Having spent the greater part of the last six years working from home, Daddy is an integral part of his children’s lives (and mine). I know women who would go berserk if their husbands were around all day. I know of women with pre-school children who are not allowed to make any noise in the house when their husbands work from home. All I can say is, I love having him here. It’s worked incredibly well for us and we are going to miss him (and all the help and support he gives us) lots.

In spite of what you hear, mothers are not the only parents who want to be around to see their children grow up. A lot of men want that too. While the media spotlight tends to be focused on the conflicting pressures faced by women struggling to combine – or choose between - motherhood and a career, a growing number of men have quietly decided that there is a way to have their cake and eat it. I’ve nicknamed them the Alpha Daddies.

There are a growing number of well qualified professional men with young families who have rejected a conventional career in order to play more of a part in their children’s lives. Like other Alpha Daddies I have spoken to (and there are half a dozen in our immediate vicinity), he believes that he has gained on all fronts as a result of his decision.

Like many ambitious young men, Mr Darnbrough saw his career progressing towards a top management post: in his case, in the telecoms industry. It was not until we had children that he began to question the benefits of the long hours, the traveling, the late nights and the weekend working. “It was part of the life,” he says, “You did it to ‘get on’". But once our second child was born, he began to question why he was doing this. He realised that to have the good salary and the job title that went with it meant sacrificing his time with his children at the altar of his career.”

Instead of a future spent gloriously scaling the corporate heights, what he saw was years of working fifty to sixty hour weeks. “It is true that we would have had a better standard of living, but by the time I’d ‘made it’ and could afford to relax, the children would be grown up and gone. Suddenly it didn’t seem like such a great deal.”

As a self-employed business consultant, Mr Darnbrough is his own boss AND he gets to be around while his children are growing up. His hours are (mostly) flexible enough to fit in with the children’s routine and he still gets to enjoy some of the good things in life. He has had to accept that he will never be the MD of a Times Top 100 company, “but at least I will know my children and they will know me.”

Alpha Daddies have re-defined what success means to them and their families. These men want to be there to enjoy their children’s early years. They have thought through the various alternative ways of achieving this goal and concluded that they are in work for what makes them happy and fulfilled and that achieving this objective is not the same as reaching the “top” of their professions.

Alpha Daddies still want the material things in life: they like nice cars and comfortable lifestyles and going on holiday and playing with electronic gadgets. They still want to feel “successful” in terms of the values of the rest of their career-minded peers. Alpha Daddies, to recast a phrase that used to be very popular in parenting theory about fifteen years ago, have decided that when it comes to work and renumeration, there is such a thing as being “good enough”.

Like other Alpha Daddies, Mr Darnbrough admits to moments of doubt about his decision to go independent. These tend to come after a visit to a friend who has a bigger house or a nicer car, or who has just come back from yet another holiday. But these friends invariably work in London, leave home before seven o’clock in the morning and are often not back before their children have gone to bed. So far, his doubts have always been squashed by the experience of traveling into London for a client meeting. “All I need,” he laughs, “is one journey into London at peak time . . . standing in a crowded train for half an hour . . . .then I think, ‘I know why I don’t do this’”.

The other side of the coin, of course, is what it means for the children. There is abundant research to suggest that as well as having a loving and committed mother, the presence of a loving, involved father increases the chance of producing happy, well-balanced children, who then grow up to become successful adults. Could the children of Alpha Daddies have an even greater advantage? By simply being around more than most fathers, at least in their children’s early years, Mr Darnbrough and his fellow Alpha Daddies hope that they can only strengthen those odds: it would probably be unwise to expect anything more.

Bye Bye Boarding School?

Boarding schools have been in quiet decline for twenty years now. To my mind, that can only be a Good Thing.

In spite of Harry Potter and Hogwarts, the number of children in independent boarding schools in the UK is now down to 68,000. This gentle decline has every prospect of being accelerated by the impact on middle class parents of having to fork out for university tuition fees on top of paying for a private education. So far so good: after all, why does anyone want to send their children to boarding school?

Well, for those of you who want to, it seems that The Market is coming to the rescue. A few months ago, The Sunday Times Money Section focussed on the savings to be had from sending children to be educated at boarding schools in France, Ireland, Spain and even South Africa. It seems that if you choose the right place you could save up to £15,000 a year on fees and still get a “public school” education. What a bargain!

It is true that if you are considering private education for your children, there is a financial element involved, but please, hang on a moment. We are not talking about outsourcing a call centre or a manufacturing facility here. We are talking about your children.

There were four of us. Like many children with a father in the Armed Forces, we were sent to boarding school because moving every two years was severely disrupting our education. Between us, we went to three different boarding schools and all of us were bullied at some point.

One sister’s dormitory mates used to stick pins in her when she was in bed at night. Another’s “friends” used to steal her school books so that she would get into trouble for not doing her work. When staff did eventually acknowledge that there was a problem, the solution was to put her in a dormitory on her own. This isolated her still further and left the bullies in power in the dormitory. I was pretty lucky, I just got “sent to Coventry” regularly, which meant that people didn’t talk to me for a couple of days. I even did a little bullying of my own.

It’s not just the potential bullying from other children that should concern parents. It’s what happens if a member of staff decides that they don’t like your child’s face.

My eldest sister was placed in solitary confinement for two days by one Headmistress. She was accused (incorrectly) of breaking a bath plug chain. It took those two days to convince one of the sixth formers to call my parents and tell them what was happening. We were all terrified of the Headmistress and it appears that the staff were terrified too, because not one of them did anything to help.

We had a good relationship with our parents, but we still found it difficult to talk about what was going on in a way that enabled them to take it seriously. I don’t think we were quite sure what would happen if we did tell them. In addition, we knew that our parents were making big financial sacrifices for our sake. There was the feeling of being somehow at fault, as though we were the ones to blame for what was going on.

The Independent Schools Council, the body which claims to represent the bulk of independent schools in the UK, suggests that one reason parents may want to consider boarding school for their children is that it "avoids the trouble and expense of daily travel". Is it just me or does that sentence take your breath away too?

The ISC urges parents to dismiss the “reminiscences” of people like me. Boarding schools are different now, they say. Well, they might be . . . but are children? In a superbly revealing statement, it points out that most parents who send their children to boarding school choose one which is less than an hour’s journey away from home. . . You have to ask yourself: “if it’s so close, why send them away?”

What is wrong with allowing your children to go to school from home? Yes, they will be difficult and challenging at times, but they will be going through those difficult and challenging times with you. They (and you) will not have to rely on some housemaster or housemistress who is also responsible for the welfare of several dozen other pupils - some or all of whom may be going through crises of their own.

Once you send your child to boarding school, you may choose to maintain the illusion that your house is their “home” but they have effectively moved into a parallel universe into which you will get no more than an occasional glimpse. It can be hard enough to keep the lines of communication open between parents and children when they do live together: how much harder will it be if the bulk of their time is spent somewhere else entirely?

Let’s put that last statement into context. If your child goes to boarding school at the age of eight (which is not unusual) and then goes off to university, they will never live in your house again for more than two months at a time. Are you – and your child – happy for them to leave home that soon?

Useful website: http://www.isc.co.uk/