Hayboxes and houses

Whether you grew up in Texas or Tasmania, Manitoba or Macedonia, you were probably raised in a modernised Western culture like me, with electricity and motorcars and other modern infrastructure. If so, you probably grew up blithely spending massive quantities of energy to do the simplest of tasks.

Instead of boiling water by lighting a fire and putting a kettle on the stove, for example, we might blow up the oldest mountains in the world to mine the remains of forests older than dinosaurs, set those old forests on fire to boil water, and then use the steam to turn turbines to send electricity through miles of cable to an outlet on your wall to power a kettle to boil water. The details might change depending on where you are, but most of us live this way – and so does my family, to an extent. It’s not easy to live any other way these days; one must deliberately and daily choose, on abstract grounds, a life of greater inconvenience, and slowly learn a different set of skills.  

We do this, of course, because we have so much energy at our disposal – the equivalent of 300 slaves by one common estimate, making each of us richer than medieval kings. Of course, we can’t keep doing this forever – there were only so many ancient forests to burn, and doing so has played with the knobs and dials of the world’s weather control panel. Thus, most discussions of the future focus on producing enough energy to meet our escalating needs -- escalating because each generation grows up with more comfort and convenience, and because there are more of us. 

The same is true in our personal lives; most of us fantasize about making more money, not about spending less, even though it amounts to the same thing, and even though your current spending might not be making you happy. Adverts and articles tout new and more fuel-efficient cars, not buying fewer or older cars and driving them more slowly.  A major magazine a few years back showed their concern for the future with an “eco-issue;” I showed mine by refusing to buy the magazine. Most discussions of energy, similarly, ignore the central and salient factor of how much we don't need.

Take, for example, the old technique of hay-box cooking, done by people here a few generations ago and by the British during the lean times of the Second World War. A hay box is just what it says, a box lined with hay or some other insulating material that will keep heated food hot and cooking for hours. Manufactured hay-boxes were built in the early part of the 20^th century, and stores used to sell elegant and decorated models, but to make one at home all you need is a box – or in my case, two smaller boxes, one flipped upside-down and placed over the other – with blankets stuffed around the sides.

To use this method I started by making a few litres of lentil soup with vegetables from our garden, and brought it to a rolling boil. On the stove I would have to cook it for an hour or more until the lentils were soft, but here I only needed to bring it to the boil, take the pot off the stove and place it in the hay-box. I surrounded the pot with blankets in lieu of dry hay – people here make hay while the sun shines, so there hasn’t been much of either in Ireland this year – covered it over with more blankets, and went to bed. In the morning I took the cool pot of soup out of the box and found it had cooked perfectly, after using a fraction of the fuel.

Another example of using what you have comes in an even more unassuming package, the tea cozie. The Irish are among the most prolific tea-drinkers on Earth, and a “cuppa” is the standard greeting offered to family, friends and just passers-by. Boiling tea cools quickly, and if you like your tea strong – sitting in the pot a while – or want a second cup, you want to conserve the heat. The tea-cozie solves that by insulating the pot like the hay-box insulates tomorrow’s dinner, keeping it hot longer. A thermos does the same thing for a drink on the go.

The same logic applies to our houses; most of us in the modern world live in homes far larger than we need, and if many people heat their entire homes in winter while wearing summer clothes indoors. The UK-based Building Research Establishment reports that British homes in 1970 had an average temperature of 12 degrees in winter – 55 degrees – and I’m betting that in poorer and more traditional Ireland it was colder still. Yet people got by; they were more psychologically accustomed to colder temperatures, , they gathered in rooms together and allowed their body heat to raise the temperature, they remained physically active, they wore heavy clothes indoors, and they heated certain central rooms and let unused rooms provide insulation

As Kris De Decker notes in Low-Tech Magazine, “the reduction in energy use for space heating thanks to more efficient homes was less than 20 per cent from 1993 to 2005. Lowering the thermostat by 2° C (or 4°F) would thus result in energy reduction comparable to that. Turning down the thermostat from 22° to 18° C would initiate an energy savings of at least 35 per cent.”

DeDecker notes that insulating the body itself is the most efficient option, as there is so much less space to cover. Using American “clo” units, where one clo equals the thermal insulation required to keep one person comfortable at 21 degrees centigrade, he notes that briefs provide 0.05 clo, light socks 0.10 clo, a heavy shirt with long sleeves .25 clo, a sweater .30 clo, and long pants .30.

Someone wearing the ensemble described above would feel comfortable in a home heated to 21 degrees Centigrade – the level assumed for the modern USA by the standards company ASHRAE -- but in just a t-shirt would need 24 degrees. With long underwear they would only need the house to be heated to 17 degrees to feel the same comfort, which DeDecker reckons saves 50 to 70 per cent on heating costs compared to the t-shirt.

All of these are things we could change quickly in theory, but realistically, they will take time to grow used to – I hail from a hotter climate and am used to blasts of central heating in winter, and shifting away from that was slow and sometimes uncomfortable. In this, as in so many other areas, though, it helps to take the first steps in a different direction and keep going, and then one day you look behind you and realise how far you’ve travelled, and how little you needed after all. 

Fallen

In the countryside here, Halloween was the day to remember the dead, as the days grew dark again and the land grew gray and stark. It always felt appropriate to me, then, that it was so close to Remembrance Day -- Veterans Day in the USA -- when we remember the fallen. I also like that this day does not signify the triumphant nationalism I saw in my own country, but mourning for a tragedy.

Such rituals are not popular in our culture anymore. In the strange culture of the energy window, death is no longer the constant presence it was for our ancestors, so we have hidden it as we once hid sex, but behind veils less attractive than courtship. This age of inhuman speed and unlimited promise has removed our sense of passage, the sense that our uncommon lives are flowing to their common destination. Millions of us who grew up in this age, I think, will find themselves at the end, their busyness for nothing, wondering what happened to their lives, and unprepared for what happens next.

Forest road

The Girl knows that, only a brief time ago - in the thousands of years -- the whole world looked like the Serengeti does today, with massive animals everywhere and ancient trees. She knows that a short time ago islands near us had Giant Swans, that my native Missouri had sloths the size of elephants, and that the islands here once saw the Great Auk and the Irish elk.

She knows that almost all the great animals are gone now, killed by humans. She knows the Oldest Story, Gilgamesh, begins with the felling of the great trees, and that's why Gilgamesh's land is now a desert. She knows that there are only a few fragments of this World Gone By still alive, places where the soil has not been harvested away and the landscape has not been scoured. She knows we have to protect them from our own kind. 

"But there are so few of them left," she said the other night, "What happens if they go too?"

It will be sad for us, because we won't get to see them anymore, I said. But it won't be the end for the Creation; it has been remade many times before. We are part of its story, not the other way around. Our job is to become the heroes of the story.

Too Much Magic

Almost eight years ago I interviewed author James Howard Kunstler for a magazine cover story, and the publisher didn’t want to run it; I had just written my own cover story on the peak and decline of the world’s oil supply six months earlier, and they didn’t want to go over the same ground again. I fought for and won the cover story, though, for I wanted to publicise issues like peak oil, climate change and other crises, yet struggled to concisely express the way they could build upon one another to undermine the basic life-support systems of modern society.

And then I read Kunstler’s book, with its haunting title: The Long Emergency.  

At the time, issues like peak oil were mainly relegated to arcane web sites that also featured alien abductions and September 11 conspiracies. Climate change was slightly better-known but still marginal in the USA. The rare writers who discussed these issues treated them in isolation, without considering how multiple crises would hit an indebted and unhealthy society from many directions at once. Finally, everyone tended to think of the result as a sudden apocalypse, and not something long.

Kunstler brought these issues together, and as close to the mainstream as they have ever come; only his cumudgeonly wit and avuncular charm could bring them to late-night chat shows and national radio networks. The very phrase “long emergency” has become a handy expression in preparedness circles, like “black swan” or “perfect storm,” even by those who don't know its origin.

Of course, mainstream culture has never been very receptive to such messages; images of “the future” usually come with the same flying cars and domed cities that have remained ten or twenty years away since the 1800s. The myth of progress has been deeply imprinted on us, and colours our view of history, culture, evolution, and any number of other fields. Mainstream culture remains invested in the belief that we are getting better, faster, and stronger every day, and that this trend will be endless, beneficial and inevitable.

My friends who are Christian traditionalists, social progressives, or libertarian conservatives have their own variations on the theme, but none have abandoned it. Some imagine progress to be a 20,000 Dow, others gay marriage and still others quantum computers, but everyone wants us to move further forward, whichever direction they imagine that to be. Any course change is assumed to be derailing our social and technological evolution, a call to get “back on track” and continue the transformation we saw in the 20^th century. The Long Emergency has something to displease everyone.

I found in Kunstler a kindred spirit, and reading his books as I rocked my baby daughter to sleep, I wondered how much of the Long Emergency we would see before she was grown. I wrote in one early article that I doubted she would be hunting elk through an abandoned city, or that she would be flying a jetpack to work, or any of the other science-fiction scenarios that form the pillars of our mental architecture. I leaned towards Kunstler’s vision of economic crashes, escalating weather crises, wildly unpredictable fuel prices, agricultural failures, riots and violent revolutions – and so far, he’s been on the money. 

It’s strange to realise how much of our recent social landscape – Hurricane Katrina, the actual oil production peak, the economic crash – were still in the future when he was writing. He even hit the jackpot with some of his wilder claims – a return of open-ocean piracy, for example, or World Made By Hand’s posited “Mexican flu.”

The worst that can be said for Too Much Magic, James Howard Kunstler’s long-awaited follow-up, is that it delivers a reshuffled anagram of everything he has said in numerous books, articles, blogs, speeches, podcasts and interviews. The unconverted probably will not read it, and it’s not the best starting point anyway.

Kunstler seems aware of this, so Too Much Magic is, if anything, an even grumpier jeremiad than his previous works, as though directed more to the choir. He waxes thoughtful about the deeper cultural sickness evident in ghetto fashions and Disneyland’s landscape. He enjoys flaying his longtime nemeses – Ray Kurzweil and Amory Lovins – and takes special aim at utopian futures, the "magic" of the title.

He brings his usual adjectival pile-ups, like “hyper-patriotic pugnacious militarism.” He delivers his trademark bon mots, as when referring to Ronald Reagan’s “aw-shucks boobery,” or the belief that “the planet is a bonbon with a creamy nougat centre.” The chapter pages reveal his own interests, for he devotes far more pages to the shenanigans of stock market brokers as he does to the potentially greater disasters from climate change. Like so many others, he can be too eagerly dire at times, implying years for social changes that would probably take decades.

Such criticisms, of course, come from one who has followed his work for eight years; someone coming to these issues for the first time would probably see it very differently. My interview with Kunstler eight years ago baffled some readers, who felt indignant at even the notion of returning to a more baseline society. The few people who responded favourably tended to treat Kunstler as an apocalypse nut, associating him with 2012-style New Age prophecies.

Kunstler was and remains a prophet, but not in the modern sense of a guru with mystical visions. Old Testament prophets were the doomers of their day, warning of disaster if – there was always a conditional – the people did not mend their ways. They were not popular with the king’s yes-men, the mainstream media of the time; Ahab said of Micaiah, for example, that “I hate him, for he never prophesies anything favourable about me, but only disaster.”  Someone had to have listened, though, for Jeremiah’s words have spread through the world, and Ahab’s yes-men have been forgotten. 

Dew on strawberries

Taken in our greenhouse yesterday morning.

The Long Emergency

Seven years ago, author James Howard Kunstler's book The Long Emergency predicted that a combination of peak oil, climate change and an economic crash would disrupt the fundamental systems that hold our society together. The book put the language of collapse into talk shows and mainstream news artices, and inspired pockets of activists, homesteaders, planners and preppers across the world.

Its key insight, perhaps, was in the adjective of its poetic title, the understanding that we will not face the apocalyptic flash of disaster films, but a gradual transformation punctuated by many small crises. The year before The Long Emergency, I had written my first magazine cover story about the issue, and I sought out Kunstler for an interview, delighted to find a kindred spirit.

He was at his grumpiest, and we would not agree in every way, but I appreciated his insights. Now that he is releasing the follow-up book, Too Much Magic, I thought it was a good time to re-post the interview. This originally appeared in Pulse magazine, February 2005.

************* 

 James Howard Kunstler is America’s version of an Old Testament prophet, a stinging social critic who warns of dark days ahead if we do not change the way we live.

The former journalist emerged as a trenchant observer of modern life with his 1994 book The Geography of Nowhere, which traces the past and future of suburban sprawl. He followed this up with 1998’s Home from Nowhere, which offered solutions to the problem of sprawl, and 2002’s The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, a broad look at what makes cities thrive or decay.

His latest book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, describes what may happen when the flood of cheap oil, which has sustained our society for a hundred years, begins to peter out—as experts predict it will in the coming decade.

The end of oil will mean more than the loss of gasoline, which would be devastating enough in a suburban society built entirely around the automobile. It will also mean the end to the plastics of which so many of our surroundings are made, and a shortage of the food we now grow with oil-based fertilizer. Articles about the end of oil are now trickling into the mainstream, but Kunstler, more than anyone, considers the geopolitical ripples that an oil shortage would create.

What happens if the last oil is owned by the brutal dictatorships of the Middle East? How will China, with 20 per cent of the world’s population and skyrocketing oil needs, react when others have the oil they need? How will rural America, with its recent resurgence of violent and apocalyptic beliefs, react to a crisis? Schools, corporations, cities—nothing, he believes, will stay the same in the Long Emergency to come.

KALLER: How did you come to focus on peak oil?

KUNSTLER: It was a natural outgrowth of my investigations into the fiasco of suburbia. Also, as a young newspaper reporter 30-odd years ago, I was very impressed by the effects of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. I was convinced it was a “preview of coming attractions,” and indeed it was—in the sense that the embargo occurred precisely because U.S. production had peaked and pricing power had shifted from America to OPEC.

These things were barely understood even by the experts back then, but they resolved over the decades, and by the mid-1990s it was pretty clear that we were approaching a similar global production peak, and that it would change everything. We are now heading into the event.

KALLER: Why has this issue been so universally ignored?

KUNSTLER: … The American public has been poorly prepared for this period I call The Long Emergency, when we will be compelled to change the way we live and do things.

The dirty secret of the U.S. economy for a couple of decades now is that it is mostly driven by the creation of suburban sprawl and all its accessories and furnishings—the subdivisions, the highway strips, the big box stores, the fried food shacks, et cetera. Subtract that, and the financial/real estate activity associated with it, and there isn’t a whole lot left in the economy besides open-heart surgery.

Our political and business leaders can’t come to grips with the unhappy reality of this. They can’t militate against the very car-dependency and oil addiction that our so-called economy depends on.

I’ll go further to state that I don’t even regard George W. Bush and other establishment figures as necessarily “evil,” but they have been very misguided, and the final result will be a pretty sobering period of hardship for the United States.

KALLER: You strongly criticize the American suburbs, which you say cannot continue once oil becomes precious. But I wonder if the suburbanites might not be in a good position—close enough to neighbours for mutual support, but with room to grow their own food.

KUNSTLER: Suburbia represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It is theoretically true that suburbanites might grow some vegetables on what are now their lawns, but they are not going to raise beef cattle or winter wheat on them. Anyway, the liabilities of suburbia are so extreme otherwise that I think it will fail as a human habitat. Its failure will entail the evaporation of trillions of dollars in hallucinated wealth, as well as a lot of social disorder and political mischief.

KALLER: I was surprised at how much of our food is grown with oil. How will that change affect us?

KUNSTLER: We’re eating oil. There’s no question that we’re going to have to grow more food locally with more human labor, and probably with working animals, too. But there are a lot of questions about how that will reorganize itself.

For instance, the subdivision practices of the past 50 years have been very destructive to the rural landscape—to our ability to reorganize land back into farms. Also, we can’t predict what the social relations will be between the greater number of people who will have to work in agriculture when oil and gas are scarcer and the people who own the land. In other times and places, this has been a recipe for unrest and even revolution.

 KALLER: Some people have dismissed the idea of an energy crunch, saying that we will come up with something like fusion. On the other hand, I’m not sure I want to see what a fusion-powered chainsaw can do. If we could continue our lifestyle through some other means, do you think we should? What would be your ideal scenario?

KUNSTLER: We’re not going to continue our lifestyle by other means. Forget it. No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run the interstate highway system, Walt Disney World and Archer Daniels Midland. We’re going to have to downscale, rescale and resize all our activities, and live more locally, whether we like it or not.

We have acquired two very pernicious habits of thinking in recent decades. One I call the “Jiminy Cricket syndrome,” the idea that when you wish upon a star your dreams come true. That’s what the Spielberg movies and Nike commercials tell us. Guess what: it’s a childish delusion.

The second mental obstruction we’ve taken on is the “Las Vegas-ization of the American Mind,” namely the idea that it’s possible to get something for nothing. This one-two combo of delusions defeats all honest and earnest efforts to really do something about the predicament we face.

KALLER: I know evangelicals who live in the countryside but don’t have an environmental perspective, and environmentalists with lots of theoretical knowledge but who live in city apartments. I can’t help but think of what they could do if they learned from each other. What groups do you think are best prepared for the Long Emergency, and what alliances could we see in the coming years?

KUNSTLER: Look, my friends are political “progressives” who drive their SUVs to the peace rallies. I think the entire U.S. public is poorly prepared. The Amish alone have a head start on where we are headed, but their way also includes a lot of religious baggage. Frankly, I think the answer is that the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers and we will be living in a very turbulent society.

KALLER: People I talk to often think in either/or terms, either commuting 40 miles from a McMansion or being Amish. But I’m sure a lot of people would like to ease into a different world as much as possible. What are some basic things we—mostly city-dwellers—need to start doing to prepare for the Long Emergency?

KUNSTLER: What we’re facing is a sharp discontinuity, not a smooth transition. That’s why I call this period the Long Emergency. People don’t necessarily get what they want or what they expect. In my opinion, the big cities are going to become very disorderly places—anyway many of America’s big cities are already in an advanced state of contraction—Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia … the list is very long.

New York and Chicago are overburdened with mega-structures and skyscrapers. They will probably not be usable in a scarce energy economy. These cities will contract and the process will be painful. Phoenix will dry up and blow away. In Las Vegas, the excitement will be over. The action is going to shift to the smaller towns and cities, the places proximate to viable agriculture.

KALLER: Most of the people I know who are interested in the energy crunch are also against the government’s invasion of Iraq —but you seem to think that, in purely Machiavellian terms, Bush’s invasion was a smart move. What do you think we should do in the Middle East?

KUNSTLER: I didn’t say it was a smart move … I said it’s what we did. Yeah, all my friends were against the Iraq invasion and nothing has stopped them from commuting sixty miles a day or driving Ford Expeditions to the farmers’ market.

I view the Iraq invasion strictly for what it was: a clumsy attempt to stabilize the region of the world where two-thirds of the remaining oil is, and to incidentally modify and influence the behavior of Iraq’s two troublesome neighbors, Iran and Saudi Arabia. There’s a lady who lives near me with a sign in her yard that says “War is Not The Answer” and two SUVs parked in the driveway. What sanctimonious crap. I want to grab her by the collar and yell, “Guess what, war is the answer as long as you want to live this way. Get used to it.”

 KALLER: What are the biggest signs of hope you see right now?

 KUNSTLER: There’s some idea that if you don’t leave the public with “hope,” with the chance of a happy ending, that you have failed in your task as a journalist. This is also fallacious. And childish. This is not a Bruce Willis movie, this is America in the 20th century, stuck with the consequences of its behaviour.

People will either adapt or perish in the Long Emergency. We’ve already made a whole lot of bad choices, collectively, including our decision to build a drive-in, easy-motoring utopia. Let’s not continue to make bad choices, okay? Let’s not mount a stupid and futile campaign to prop up the fading “entitlements” of suburbia. Let’s prepare to downscale and live locally. Let’s rebuild the U.S. passenger railroad system—that’s something we already know how to do, and it is a symptom of our obdurate cluelessness and lack of seriousness that we refuse to do it.

 Life is tragic. History doesn’t care if we fail as a civilization. Others have gone before us. We have to take responsibility for what we are facing and quit expecting to be rescued by wishes, dreams, and miracles.

Corrected times for talks

Correction on the talk at Macalester Friday the 13th of July - it's at 6 pm. Here is the information again:

I've been writing less lately because I've been preparing a trip to the USA, my first one in three years, and posting will be light for the next several weeks during our trip.

I'll be visiting family in Missouri in early July, and have been invited to speak to Occupy St. Louis at 7 pm on July 4, at Legacy Books & Cafe, off Delmar & Union in the city.

Then The Girl and I journey to Minnesota to see old friends, and I will be giving a lecture at Macalester College two nights in a row -- Friday, July 13 at 6 pm, and Saturday, July 14 at 7 pm.

The lectures, held in the Weyerhauser Boardroom, will be on "O'Sterity: How the Irish thrived in desperate times." The talks will focus on the problems we face in the coming decades -- peak oil, climate change and economic collapse, all summed up as the "Long Emergency" -- and how we can deal with them using the skills and knowledge of traditional cultures.

Ireland, I point out, makes a good example: when my wife was growing up here in the 1970s, it was poorer than many Third-World countries, and not everyone had electricity or indoor plumbing. Yet statistics show people were better-educated, safer, healthier and happier -- at least from survey responses -- than Americans today. If we can piece apart why, I argue, we can help Americans and other modern people thrive during difficult times.

I've also been invited to speak on Andy Driscoll's "Truth to Tell" radio programme at 9 a.m. on July 16. The programme can be heard in the Twin Cities area.

If you're interested in homesteading, traditional culture, distributism, or any of the other subjects we talk about here, feel free to come, or let your friends know.

Travelling

Living on an island, the Irish have always been a nation of travellers, and during the boom some of my co-workers flew to Majorca and Cyprus as frequently and casually as their parents travelled to Dublin. Now that money has become lean again, however, many are finding travel far too expensive to do frequently. 

My family never had any money, and never took holidays, so I never travelled growing up. I took one plane ride with my grandmother when I was seven, to Cleveland, as far as I ever travelled in the USA, and that’s all – I’d never seen another country. In adulthood, however, I tried to rectify that, eventually moving to Ireland. I’ve still never seen the East or West coast of the USA, but I have no particular desire to. What I have found, however, are several ways to travel cheaply. 

One of them is the business trip -- my job paid for me to go to London three times in the last year, and each time I stayed on extra days to see the sights. My employer had to pay for a return ticket anyway so it made no difference to them, and each time I got to see London for several days, I ticked more items off my “bucket list.”

If your job doesn’t send you abroad, however, some airlines offer standby tickets, which allow you to take a flight as soon as a passenger misses their flight. If you don’t work full-time, you might try being hired as a courier, to accompany a package to a destination, and see if a company will pay for most of your plane service. 

When you want to stay in another country, hostels are usually the best place to sleep. Most of them are as comfortable and clean as any hotel, but a hotel room might cost you a few hundred euros a night, while a hostel can cost you ten to fifty. They differ from conventional hotels in that they often do not offer single rooms, with the private showers, televisions and maids that most hotel-goers have come to expect. Instead, most hostels require visitors to sleep in rooms with several other people, but this is not as difficult as it might sound; most hostel guests respect the privacy and sleeping habits of others and, as they are spending the day working or having fun, use their rooms only for sleeping. 

Hostels also offer the chance to mingle with other guests in a way that hotels do not. Since most people in hostels use their rooms only for sleeping, and spend their time at the hostel sitting in common rooms, hostel guests have the opportunity to chat with others if they choose. Hostel guests also tend to be young and adventurous, often backpackers or other casual travellers, and come from all over the world. When I stay at a hostel, I soon have enjoyable conversations with people from Russia, Australia, Africa and many other parts of the world – all with stories to tell. 

You might think that seeing a foreign city would be expensive, and every city is different. In many cities, though, the most amazing sites are the statues, buildings, rivers, bridges and public parks, and those are almost always free. 

Many other great entertainments, however, are surprisingly inexpensive. Musical plays are in great demand right now, so their tickets run into the hundreds of euros, but amazing plays starring world-famous actors can have very cheap seats. I saw a play starring Keira Knightley and other well-known movie stars for about 30 euros, little more than a movie ticket with popcorn these days. 

Travelling around a strange city can often be part of the adventure, and while most cities charge more than they should for public transportation, most also offer the opportunity to pay one charge for a whole day or week. The London Underground, for example, charges the equivalent of 8.50 euros to ride all day, but that takes one anywhere in the city for half the price of a short taxi ride.  

Finally, eating in another city or country doesn’t have to be expensive either. We tend to pay more for food when we are hungry, intuitively enough, and take less time to enjoy the food. If you want to eat cheaply and enjoy your food as much as possible, therefore, buy cheap, healthy snacks at a grocery store. Snack on fennel or apples as you walk or ride from one attraction to the next, and keep yourself from getting too hungry and impulsively buying food, and you will truly be able to enjoy the restaurants you do visit. 

I was almost thirty years old before I got a passport, and while there's never much money to go around, I want to make sure I travel while it's as cheap as it is now. 

The neighbours

When The Girl was a toddler, she had an obsession with cows, and even before we built our house here, this was her favourite place to visit and wave to the cows in the distance.

When I mow the lawn, though, they are not so distant anymore, and the smell of mown grass makes them gather longingly and stare at our garden.

Don't even think about it, guys.