I have been taught this week a rule about bank holidays:   It may be nice out before or afterwards, but it will rain on the bank holiday.   However, you will go Have Fun anyway, and Organized Fun at that.

For my first Bank Holiday experience, we went to Low Sizergh Barn.  Low Sizergh is a 250 acre dairy farm with a little shop full of goodies made locally.  Vegetables are delivered via wheelbarrow from the fields next door.  I nibbled on gingerbread and brought home cheese made here by a cow I pet that morning.  I thought it was cool to learn that the farming is organic and done by Growing Well, a group that helps people with past mental health issues get back into the workforce through farming.  

Despite the rain, we took a nice walk on the farm trail and enjoyed the bluebells and wild garlic.   We even found some orchids, if that’s not a testament to the cloudy, rainy climate here.  I happen to very much enjoy anything that involves being outside in the mud, so I really had a good time.

I am continually astounded at how much easier it is to live green here.  The availability of locally grown and organic produce is much better than where I come from, and the price difference is nothing like the gouging that goes on for such things in the states, where I can easily expect to pay 5x the price for something organic.  When I see farms here, I see animals grazing on hillsides.   In the states, those animals live in corporate barns, locked into tiny stalls and hooked up to machines for their entire life.  Think of it this way:  We actually have a designation of “free range” for meat in the US… because it’s so rare people brag about it.   

When Earth Day came and went, I sat down for a while for a laugh and calculated my carbon footprint between Chicago and again here, Oop North.  It’s something I’ve never done before but with all the differences in my lifestyle here, I got curious.  In neither place would I say I especially go out of my way to save the planet… I just try to do right whenever it’s not horribly inconvenient, in a fairly average way.   But still, the mere fact of coming here reduced my carbon footprint from 17 tonnes to 7, which really amazed me.

To start with, my hometown in the states doesn’t even offer a recycling program.  If you throw it out, it goes to the landfill, always.  Foil, glass, cans, etc.  All of it.  Then you figure in that we love convenience foods:  Single serve microwave goodness that comes in plastic you can just throw away.  In the states, my mom and I would fill at least 2 big outdoor trash cans each week with garbage.   

Here, recycling was a top-down effort, and people didn’t have a choice about adopting it.  I had to learn how to recycle when I arrived in the UK, if you can believe that about someone like me in 2009.  I’m still never positive I’m doing it right but now that I see how much can be recycled, I am quite honestly ashamed to think how many things I’ve tossed over the years.  We tend to buy a lot less here, with a lot less packaging (bringing your own bag to the store is just normal here, not something trendy hippies do when they go to Whole Paycheck) and most of our trash gets recycled.  In the end, my husband and I figured out that we’re still working off the pack of 40 seven-gallon trash bags we bought in October.  We almost never throw things away.

Also, I don’t drive a car here, and I live in a much smaller house that’s easier to heat and maintain, in a climate that doesn’t require much heat to begin with.

I think Americans could learn a lot from the British as far as “Make do and mend.”