Oh yes, I'm the great campaigner

I noted with interest last week that Big Brother is alive and watchful in Newcastle. University students are having their bins monitored to see what recyclable/compostable items they have thrown away. “It’s a bit like having your conscience sat on your shoulder niggling away at you.  And on top of that you know that other people are also judging you,” was the apparently contented opinion of Anja Thieme, one of the research students leading the project, nicknamed BinCamC.  Perhaps the students have never read Orwell's  Nineteen Eighty-Four; perhaps, having grown up in an era of reality TV, they don’t see that the camera may be intrusive and potentially dangerous; perhaps they have decent local recycling facilities; perhaps things have changed since I was a student and they all have cars.

The Big Brother aspect should be generating debate, but for now my subject is cars, or, as usual, the lack of them. For, at least where I live, it is well-nigh impossible to recycle much without a car. We have limited kerbside recycling, we can pay extra for garden recycling and to have bulky items picked up, and the rest - Tetrapaks, cardboard, many plastics, foil, batteries, books, clothes, shoes - must be taken to recycling points. Food waste cannot be recycled, at least not in my road, though small bins of old food are collected in an adjoining road.

 

I can do some of this. Foil is not too bulky, batteries go to a  local shop, I can take clothes, books and shoes to a charity shop from time to time, as long as I don’t want to take too many. But it is hard to carry large loads of cardboard or Tetrapaks on the bus along with anything else I might need to take into town, and the only place I know that recycles plastic fruit containers etc would involve taking two buses, which is quite an effort just to be green about a few pots.

As I am not the only person in the area who does not drive a car, I cannot be the only person with this problem. In fact, about 26% of the population does not drive cars, so I suspect that these people have similar problems, unless of course, their local council has been kind enough to provide decent recycling facilities where they live. They do it in a neighbouring borough, so  WHY NOT WHERE I LIVE?

Rather than moan, I have taken to writing letters to councillors to ask them to remedy the situation. I have also become the great campaigner for a train and bus system that tie up rather than the current system, whereby the bus from the stop by the local train station leave sas the train pulls in. OK, all I have done so far is written a letter, but it is a start. Similarly I have written to complain about the failure of one of Britain’s many rail companies (too many to remember which now, bloomin’ privatisation) to tell us about engineering work when they sent us our travel itinerary for a trip to Birmingham and back a week ago. We wouldn’t have minded so much if the ‘replacement bus service’ had tied up with the connecting train. Instead, we dawdled into Wokingham ten minutes after our train had left, and guess what, the trains run once an hour on a Saturday evening as those who can’t afford/choose not/have other good reasons not to run a car are not expected to venture far on a Saturday evening. Why should they? They fall outside the norm and therefore must be punished.

There seemed little to do on a Saturday evening in Wokingham for a family with three children. In fact we ended up in the Budrum Kebab House by the station, where the food was not great but the friendly service made up for it. And at least we had food, which is more than the commuters had last Thursday when they were stuck for around four hours on trains between Waterloo and Woking. When E, who was on one of the trains (the one with a diabetic passenger in need of insulin, and a woman who was eight months pregnant) finally arrived at our home station there were no buses and too few taxis for the crowds of commuters. He ended up walking the half hour home.

The message - life is not designed for those without cars. I shall have to complain to Big Brother about it.

Up on a hill, as the day dissolves

A short update as I want to recapture something of this evening before I forget it. The memory has already been somewhat distorted by the stresses of family life (including argument with Ted over missing Sellotape).

I went to work today, something I rarely do on a Friday, particularly at half-term, but if we are ever to become car addicts again, or even afford train tickets or new shoes for all the walking, I need to accept jobs whenever and wherever possible. Plus, E was back from a work trip to the Peruvian rainforest (I kid you not) and at home resting and/or looking after the children, the two being mutually exclusive.

I worked much later than usual, in part, I realised later, because I needed to regain a sense of a self other than the mother who has been looking after the children on her own this half-term. I have no idea how single parents do this long-term, particularly if they work. And, having yet to perfect my grasp of timetables, I missed the once-an-hour bus home (why would anyone need a bus in the evening more than once an hour? After all, the impoverished failures who use the buses shouldn't want to go out or go home after 6pm). So I decided to walk through the park.

Our town is lucky in having a huge park attached to it. It's apparently a medieval deer park that climbs the hill going north from the town, and there are 320 acres of it. Crossing it diagonally from the town centre takes you up to our bit of town. We may live on the wrong side of the tracks but those who live in the south of the town don't get to walk home through an area of such beauty.


In the past I had reserved walks in the park for family outings, sledging in the winter, blackberrying, watching the nearby air show without having to pay, and trudging through the snow to work when the weather has made the roads impassable to cars. This was the first time I had walked through it alone on a summer evening. The air was warm, there was a lively breeze, the light was subtle (particularly through my sunglasses; I tried my ordinary ones too, but sometimes a filter is better and, after all, mama always told me not to look into the eyes of the sun), and all around me were trees, grasses, birds, insects and no doubt hordes of small mammals and shy deer. There was the sound of cars in the background, and I had a close shave with two cyclists as I entered the park, but these did nothing to detract from the experience.

I distantly remember another occasion when I was about 13 and had been suddenly aware of the beauty of a what had until then been an unlovely sight to me - a school playing field. I know my response then was one of unself-conscious awe (we were much less grown-up as teenagers in those days) and prayer. This evening I began to feel the spiritual awe but then the self-consciousness of being an uptight adult kicked in. It seems almost impossible simply to let go and relax into the here and now, to accept beauty as something transcendental, to turn towards God. I could do so for just a moment before everything else crowded back in, but I wonder, if we can manage it for even a few seconds, perhaps we inch a tiny bit closer to peace on earth.

Mind you, all that grass did make me sneeze.

The drugs don't work, they only make it worse

My name is Prom Queen and it is exactly 12 weeks and two days since I last owned a working car. I am not a Thatcherite failure but a woman tackling an addiction.

I am serious. This is not a joke or a cheap shot at addicts. Like the majority of adults I had become addicted to the car. I thought I could not manage without it. It cost me a lot of money and it was doing me no good. True, it was helpful to get me to work and back, the kids to clubs and back, and the whole family away (and back) for weekends and holidays, but there were definite health drawbacks.

OK, my and the majority of other adults’ addiction to driving is not as destructive to us and our families and friends as heroin, crack or alcohol, say, even though vehicles may be as life-threatening as drugs if the following statistics are to be believed:

There are about 9,000 deaths from alcohol a year in the UK (other estimates put it at 40,000 though it depends what you count as alcohol-related), 114,000 people die from tobacco-related disease, and drugs kill something in the region of 3,000 people which is roughly the same number as are killed in traffic accidents. So smoking is a lot more dangerous than drinking, drug-taking or getting into a car. Of course this begs the question of why tobacco is legal, even why alcohol is legal and other drugs are not, but that’s for another time. As it is, it would seem that cars are not beneficial to health and safety. Amazing Britain allows them really.

But this isn’t the main thing I am thinking about. Yes, when I get in a car I am at risk, and if I walk rather than drive I am healthier (as long as I’m not knocked down by car, that is). But give your average adult a car and they will use it excessively, embracing new hobbies and ‘just popping to the shops’, because they can. I've read that the average person in the UK spends 90 minutes a day travelling, most of it by car, while those without cars spend less time (87 minutes) even though they can't whizz places at great speed.

Take my good friend A ( who picks me and my children up when we get stuck so I am hugely grateful and hope she doesn’t kick the car habit). She emailed me to say: “So far this morning I have taken R (elder son) to cricket then R (younger son) to football, dashed to Sainsbury's then home to unpack to football to cricket then into town! If I had no car I would had done internet shopping and read a book.”

Exactly. Since I have had no car I have rushed around less. Is that a good thing? It means that our wings have been a little clipped. Timetables must be studied, journeys have to be planned, and sometimes abandoned. Last Tuesday, for example, I should have been going to the theatre to review a play as part of my job, but, because my lift fell through, I stayed at home and someone else saw what was apparently an entertaining whodunit. It was a shame but I watched TV with the children instead which was good for our relationship, and I didn’t have to write the review.  I have not been able to drive other people around and this, selfishly, continues to be a huge relief (and has meant that those regular passengers have had to become more self-reliant so that is probably good. Yes Ted, you are 14 and have legs, school is a mile away - walk!). And we all hark on about the ‘good old days’ when life was simpler. Give up the car and life can be simpler if you choose that it should be, as long as you can get to the places you really need to reach.

There remain some problems - mainly Monday and Tuesday nights when Ted and Lexy have drama classes, and those days when I must take some of our eccentrically large number of cats to the vet. If we ever need an emergency trip to a doctor with one of the children, we will take a taxi but I can’t bring myself to do this simply to escort three solid toms (aka ‘The Brothers’) to the vet for routine immunisations. Instead, Boris’s Dad helped with the vet run today and has promised to come back next week if I can capture the one tom who savaged me with his claws before leaping on top of a neighbour’s garage from where he watched me with a mix of caution and disdain. Drama remains a challenge and I am hugely grateful to A for doing more dashing around and rescuing Lexy last week.

So should I clip the children’s wings further and tell them they have to stop drama? That would seem wrong. The classes are fun. Lexy and Ted are enthusiastic about them and seem to benefit from them. Why should they be penalised for our decision not to have a car? And let's face it, the Younger and Elder Rs would not be able to do their cricket, football and other sports (see below) without the use of a car and would probably interrupt their mother's reading!

We don’t yet have the money for a new car, but we probably have the credit so we could buy one. People with neither money nor credit must make do with feet, bikes and public transport. They probably don’t start attending drama classes in the first place unless there is somewhere within easy reach. I watched a TV programme in which the head of an inner-city primary school and the head of one of the top state junior schools in the country swapped places. One day, the inner-city head was talking to a charming little boy from the high-performing junior school. He told her that he went to drama classes outside school. The head was taken aback. That wasn’t an opportunity her regular children had. Her own school was nowhere near as successful as the one she was visiting.

High-achievement at school is closely linked to opportunity and parental support. The former, and to an extent the latter, is closely linked to economics. That should not be the case. But while society is addicted to cars and while there is no meaningful investment in public transport, nor in providing decent local classes and facilities, it is hard to see how that will change.

PS A’s dashing around is paying off. Congratulations to the elder R for winning the Waterlooville Junior Open. You worked hard and are clearly talented. But without your mum or dad’s car you would not have got so good at golf.