Here Comes 2010!

I like my comforts.

I love my cottage with its garden and its view of the mountains. I love my fire and I positively adore my central heating. I like nice food, nice clothes and nice shoes, my computer, my digital camera and my iPod. I haven’t yet succumbed to a Wii, but I’m quite sure I’ll love that, too, when I get around to it.

Emily, my faithful little campervan, is one of the best things ever to happen to me. Which means I also love my 1.6 diesel engine and have no intentions of going small and/or electric any time soon. And I do like jetting off to the sun, every now and again.

I like my comforts, but I don’t like the thought that they might be costing the earth. Okay, and I’ve worked my socks off over the years – and cleaned other people’s floors when necessary – to keep my house, and I work hard now. But I don’t like the thought that it might be a famer in India or a family in Africa who are really paying the price. I was always Robin Hood in my childhood fantasies, not the posh one in the corner yelling: ‘let them eat cake!’

Right; so I want to go green, but I want to keep my comfortable life. I’d always vaguely assumed the two were just not compatible, and that’s where I stopped dead in my tracks. And then I was introduced to the charity ‘The Big Green Idea’, who seemed to think it was perfectly possible, and had plenty of hints and tips to help me along my way.
Which means, really, I’ve no excuse.

So for 2010, my new year’s resolution is to go green quietly, in civilised and comfortable mannner. I will not decamp to a yurt or keep pigs in the garden. Hens, maybe: so long as I can keep their feet out of the geraniums and their beaks off the roses. But no pigs. Well, to be perfectly honest, having been a vegetarian for most of my life I wouldn’t exactly know what to do with them.

I will grow herbs and some fruit and veg, but my roses and my Australian bottle-bush are staying put. I haven’t nursed them through Welsh mountain winters just to dig them up now. And, besides, they’re pretty. I like looking at them. They make my garden a joy in summer and a great place for parties.

But this is the middle of winter. And this is my garden.

Gardening? I don’t think so.

In true comfort-lover’s style, I shall, for the moment, start inside. In the warm. With a nice cup of real coffee. (er - not fair trade. Oops! Next time) I shall plan my garden for when the snow finally melts, and I will start my first changes with food. Nice food. Delicious food. This year, I am determined not to do the usual January that-was-one-chocolate-truffle-too-many diet, so that my jeans stop being just that bit too tight. Instead, I’m going concentrate on buying local, avoiding supermarkets and making what I can from scratch (so long as it’s quick, easy and fun).

Instead of giving up on food, my new year’s resolution is to take up the tastiest, healthiest, most varied and exciting meals possible, for a little as possible and as ethically as possible.

This month, our rubbish is going to start being collected fortnightly. So what better time to ditch the plastic? The non-bottle plastic that no one seems to know how to recycle.

Right, so for me, that’s mostly hummus (I’m veggie, I eat mountains of the stuff. It’s the only way I can keep death-by-cheddar at bay) and yoghurt. I’ve made hummus before, so I just need to track down some chick peas and sesame seed paste. The yoghurt I need to think about. My mum used to make it in the 1960s and 70s, with dried milk in an electric thing with its own little pots. It tasted vile. So I need to find the yummiest, scrummiest, cheapest and simplest way of making yoghurt, or I’ll be back on the Greek-style before the month is out.

Time for that coffee and an hour or so in the company of Google, I believe.....