Staying Home

          We have given up on the trip to Finland. Having previously decided to eschew unnecessary flights, we had planned to travel via campervan, two ferries and several European border crossings but, under the present covid-19 restrictions, this would be too complex, hazardous and tiresome to be either safe or enjoyable. Besides, there is still the question of whether the resulting carbon emissions would be acceptable.

          Staying put is fine. Apart from the vexation of having to endure a dysfunctional government, the UK is a great place to be. It has a deep well of culture to draw upon and the weather has been warm. Too warm, of late, resulting in thunderstorms and the appearance of pesky fruit flies. Actually, I suspect the flies were attracted by the melon that had sat in the fruit bowl a little too long and developed a soggy bottom as a consequence. Anyway, I disposed of the melon, put the remaining fruit in muslin bags and covered the bowl with a tea towel gaily printed with a colourful fruit motif. But the flies are persistent and I later found a few of them had returned to sit hopefully on top of the tea towel. It may have been the print that attracted them, but I suspect it was more likely the scent of ripening bananas underneath. Actually, I have been feeling bad about bananas for a while now. Partial as I am to the ubiquitous, oft-ridiculed yellow delights, there is no denying that they have a have a massive carbon footprint and, like Peruvian asparagus, ought to be shunned.

          Of course, I know that the logical conclusion of this argument is hard to swallow – that many foods and goods would become either unavailable or more expensive – yet progress towards a sustainable global economy must be made or else we are doomed. A decision to buy no bananas until the true cost of them is reckoned would, therefore, be a step in the right direction. Act now for, to quote Anne Frank, it is “wonderful… that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world”. I harbour the hope that lockdown has brought the idea of a sustainable world economy into focus – there is much discussion about a green revolution to drive recovery and control the extractive industries – but the first signs are not encouraging. The ‘non-essential’ shops opened this week and long queues formed outside Primark stores, the flagship of cheap, disposable fashion. Either customers don’t care about sustainability or they are just keen to shop, especially as some of them, paradoxically, have healthier bank balances as a result of lockdown.

          Yet Britons were not always so insatiably acquisitive. That all began with the imposition of Christianity, with its dismissal of ‘natural’ spirituality. It is a curious fact that, when the Romans left Britain after almost 500 years, their “civilising” effect on the locals fizzled out. The native Celts and the incoming Anglo-Saxons shunned the towns and grand villas that the Romans left behind preferring, instead, their own traditional lifestyles and beliefs. Professor Brian Bates puts this down to the innate spirituality of those peoples and their pagan belief in the forces of nature, which kept them committed to the forests, rivers and other features of the landscape. Mother Earth was their connection to creation, not the Johnny-come-lately Jesus Christ. They did not put value on hard-edged stone buildings with central heating and alien decorations; nor the military roads that ran so disrespectfully straight through the ancient landscape, offending the spirits of the place.

          Traces of that early British idyll remain – if you look for them – deeply rooted in our cultural relics. A revival of those values would be worth adding back into the mix of a new and sustainable approach to living. And it would add a unique touch of piquancy to staycationing.