An email from my wife was read out on Radio 4’s You & Yours yesterday. It was about the best way to stop wasting water. Mrs. G pointed out that our modern habit of washing our face and hands and brushing our teeth with the taps on and the plug out means that each of us squanders gallons of water every day. Her message was a simple but no doubt extremely effective one: use a plug!
I’ll admit to being an offender: I never fill the basin with water, never use the plug, and always have the taps running (I tend to treat them as a sort of semi-permanent water-feature). My excuse is that I grew up in Norway, where shortage of water was not exactly a pressing problem (ditto electricity, fir trees and snow). But as I left there fifty years ago, the excuse might just be wearing a bit thin by now.
From this moment on, darling, I am a reformed man! (Unfortunately, she knows only too well what a weak-willed wretch I am.)
One of the many English traits I admire – which I hope decades of increasing prosperity haven’t entirely bred out of younger generations – is the love of making the best of a bad situation. A while back, a neighbour knocked on our door at about seven in the evening to tell us that the electricity company had warned him that there was to be a very localized power cut in our part of West London. It was due to start in twenty minutes and might last up to five hours. While I grumbled, my wife, eyes glittering with excitement, and hardly able to stop grinning, exploded into action: candles, matches, torches and rugs were mustered (it was mid-winter), water was boiled, tea-pots and thermoses filled, food prepared, board games were retrieved from cupboards… the lot.
But it never happened. The house-lights, the TV, and the street-lights remained stubbornly on. My wife’s disappointment was so palpable that I even began checking that neighbouring streets hadn’t been plunged into darkness, which would at least have reignited the hope that we were to enjoy the same fate.
As my wife began packing away all the stuff she’d so rapidly and efficiently assembled, I munched a sandwich, sipped tea from the thermos, and understood, I think for the first time, why London had so resourcefully and cheerfully survived the horrors of the Blitz – because the English basically enjoy it when the chips are down!
This innate national trait may also partly account for the Banking Crisis: decades of increasing prosperity had provided insufficient opportunities to overcome unexpected hardship. Well, there are plenty of opportunities now – and it strikes me that there’s far less moaning going on than during the good times. And people have begun to save money so enthusiastically that it’s threatening the recovery. The love of a challenge may also account for the Nation’s lunatic propensity for voting Labour whenever things seem to tootling along nicely.
No matter what they say, I have become convinced that the English aren’t actually that keen on things tootling along nicely. (This may also account for the relish with which they often organise get-togethers which it ‘s guaranteed that absolutely no one will enjoy.)
Thank God there’ll be a potentially horrendous heat-wave to overcome next week.
I now realize it’s no accident that my wife’s favourite bathroom reading is a book by Ray Mears on how to survive in the wild!
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