June 2,
I can feel smug about this month’s green challenge. My carbon footprint as regards flying is the size of a mouse’s and a particularly small-pawed one at that. You see, both my husband, Tim, and I detest flying and only do it when there is no other way we can get to where we want to go….

The only time I’ve flown over the last five years is to Nice in the South of France with my sister, Serena. Being a neurotic flyer, I’ve found the only way to travel is with a confident blasé traveler to whom flying is pretty much the same as going on a bus, only the views are nicer. While I’m clinging to the arm rests and memorizing the emergency procedures, she hardly seems to even register the fact we’re taking off – more interested in what drinks are on the menu or what special offers there are on the duty free list. Meanwhile, whenever I fly with Tim (last time was 14 years ago), we wind each other up and end up not flying for another 14 years…

My daughter treats us both with open exasperation. While her friends jet off to all sorts of far flung pleasure spots, we generally pack our bags and go off to exotic Devon or Dorset. And British holidays, nice though they are, sometimes just don’t cut it for an urban 13-year-old keen to explore the world.

However, the compensation for not traveling further afield is that we have got to know far more about the variety and beauty of the British countryside. Three years ago we discovered the Landmark Trust, a wonderful organization which buys historic properties, renovates them with infinite care and rents them out to people like us. Over the last three summers, we’ve spent a week in an Elizabethan gatehouse in Dorset, a Jacobean gatehouse, again in Dorset and this summer a Georgian townhouse in Devon. Staying in places like this is a real privilege – they are furnished with furniture from the period and even have libraries of poetry books from local poets. No TVs or washing machines though which made it, initially at least, a hard sell for both Vicky and I.

As for traveling further afield, why not consider traveling by train? There are few places in Europe which are further than a day’s travel away. We’ve been to Berlin, Prague, Sicily, Gibraltar all by train. There are few more exciting things than turning up at the Gard d’Austerlitz in Paris at about 8 o’clock in the evening, after dining well at a Parisian brasserie, and finding your (OK, I warn you tiny!) sleeping compartment as the train pulls out through the Paris suburbs. The dining cars, particularly on the Spanish trains are superb. Steak freshly cooked on a griddle on the overnight train to Barcelona as the fields of northern France thundered by was one of our best experiences.

Thanks, Paul for your comments. The British Gas ASA ruling was fascinating. Just another example of a company jumping on the green bandwagon and using it as a marketing opportunity.
Actually, I'm increasingly finding this whole issue of offsetting rather upsetting. I heard a report on Radio Four about a farmer in, I think, Sri Lanka who had decided to stop growing rice and instead plant trees for an offset scheme . But, he had bought his trees from an unreliable supplier and, two years into the scheme his trees were covered in leaf blight and were useless. He was faced with having to dig them up and start again.
But there was worse. The offset scheme only paid up if the trees were healthy and this farmer was facing desperate times -- no crop and no income.
A sad individual case but you do begin to wonder whether all these farmers in desperately poor parts of the world being persuaded to give up their crops to solve Western consciences is a good idea. I know the reasons for the world food shortages are complex but surely persuading farmers not to farm food when the world needs it is hard to justify?

“So, how about changing to a green energy supplier?” I asked my husband, Tim, over dinner a couple of weeks ago.

“I’ll change to anything if it saves us money,” he said. “Actually, I’ve just changed our gas and electricity supplier from EDF to British Gas. I put all our details into uswitch.com and British Gas’s Internet tariff came out cheapest for us.”

So, although it’s enticing to think of green energy suppliers investing in wind farms and hydroelectric farms, it was up to me to justify a switch on financial grounds. I guessed green energy would work out a bit more expensive for us. But by how much would it increase our bill? I was keen to find out.

A call to British Gas told me that, with our new deal, the first kilowatt hour we use per day costs 18 pence and after that, the charge is 8p.

The green energy company Ecotricity, as our May issue article explains, match the price charged by a customer’s regional supplier. That means, if you haven’t switched power suppliers since deregulation, your bill would remain the same if you changed to them. For me, the London tariff is 16.98p for the first 900 kilowatt hours per year and 10.35p after that.

So what would the price implication be for our annual electricity usage? Armed with our last four electricity bills, helpfully providing our average daily usage for each quarter, and a calculator, and after a great deal of head-scratching and sighing, I worked out that our annual electricity cost, based on last year’s usage, with British Gas’s Internet tariff is £331.31. If we swapped to Ecotricity’s New Energy Tariff that bill would swell to £498.87.

Increasing our electricity costs by 50% would be quite a hit to our family’s finances. I went back to British Gas and asked about their green tariff to see if that would be any cheaper.

For the first 125kwh per quarter, the charge is 23.8p. Any subsequent usage is charged at 11.2 pence. This works out at an annual £550.87, even higher than Ecotricity.

When I presented these figures to Tim, over dinner again, the response was immediate. “Dream on!” he said. “That’s 32 bottles of wine”, he added holding up his glass of red wine. “Or eight pairs of children’s shoes,” I added slightly more practically.

For the moment, therefore, we’ll be staying with our British Gas Internet tariff.

The good thing about taking part in the Green Challenge is that it has made me question my everyday habits in all sorts of small ways.

Every day, for example, I go along the corridor at least four or five times a day and help myself to a cup of tea from our office drinks machine. Out pops a plastic cup which, after downing the tea, I put, upside down, in a plastic tower bin in the drinks area. What, I wondered, happened to them all? Our facilities manager assured me that we do recycle them via a company called save-a-cup.co.uk. Every week they come and collect a big pile of our discarded cups and turn them into things like key rings, rulers, pencils and paper clips.

But how much better it would be to follow some of my other colleagues example and use a reusable china cup and avoid the need to recycle at all. That lunchtime, I took myself off to Paperchase, bought a very fetching stripey china mug for £4.50. Not only does the tea taste much nicer in china but, because the tea cools more quickly, I also burn my tongue less frequently. So being green really can be good for you!

Something similar happened with shopping bags. Noting Marks & Spencer’s announcement of their intention to start charging for carrier bags, I started to question the numerous amounts of food carrier bags I amassed every week. Then there was a BBC report on the Pacific island of Midway now virtually surrounded by a sea of plastic. That did it. I had been given two smart black and white cloth carrier bags when I bought coloured card to make my Christmas cards from the Cass Art shop near the Angel in Islington. For three months, they had sat neatly folded and unused in our kitchen. Now, I’ve started using them regularly for my lunchtime food shopping trips to Waitrose (although, before a colleague reminds me that they spotted me laden with plastic carriers this week, I do still forget them sometimes!) With nice thick handles, they cut into my hands far less than razor-handled plastic bags. Another benefit to turning green!