Eco audit: country mouse

These days, it’s quite trendy to holiday in the country.  As countrified as you can.  Glamping.  Staying on eco farms.  All that sort of thing.

One of the great gifts my parents gave me was to take us somewhere in the country for our summer holidays.  Not quite off-grid, in modern parlance, but sometimes, that too, if there was a storm and a power cut.

If you have a family bolt hole to go to, that doesn’t cost you to use, then of course you use it.  Even if it’s several hundred miles from home, involving two or three ferries, and lugging most of your food with you.  Perhaps especially because of all that.

I’ve written before on holidays to Jura, and I will no doubt keep writing about it.  I have a theory that Jura ensnares the first in each generation in particular.  My dad has it; I have it.  His brothers, mine – they’ve been, they know it it, but they don’t seem to go as crazy for it.

Perhaps it’s that second child thing – more sociable, more gregarious, and more likely to notice that somewhere is wild and a bit remote. The oldest child, perhaps more influenced by parents, tends to pick up on their thing, not always that of their own generation.

Staying in a cottage (latterly one that is well equipped) isn’t roughing it.  I appreciate that.  We did have a go at camping as a family – a couple of goes, actually – but we used existing camping sites, and still felt it wasn’t quite us.

The more important issue, though, is going on holiday and not necessarily expecting all mod cons.  When we went to the original cottage on Jura, there was no TV.  The cottage was small, really one bedroom which I had to share with my brother, and the sitting room, which included the not very comfortable sofa bed where my parents slept.

So you were either all in one room – which of course happened as soon as there was lots of rain – or outside. Which was just as well, because the point of being somewhere so beautiful is that you really want to be outside.  (Except when the midges are out.)

Nowadays, it’s what people pay good money for – isolation.  They may well want to be somewhere where their phone doesn’t work; where there’s no internet access (and maybe also no squabbling over gaming privileges).

And what do you do in such places? You go for walks.  You get wet.  You come home again and eat your way through lots of cake.  You play board games.  You sulk when you lose. Your parents remember to leave the door unlocked again (at least partly to avoid seeming like the total incomer.)

You play at the beach as often as you can, building sand castles, attempting to dam the little burn that runs out across the beach and into the sea. You go out in the dinghy, and learn to row.  You learn to fish on a small line off the back of the boat – at night, if you’re really lucky (and if your mum has packed enough chocolate digestives).

You do I-Spy books and collect points for spotting seals, sea otters, different types of deer. You build driftwood boats out of whatever wood you find on the shore, and an old potato bag.  You make smaller boats out of reeds along the shore, and sail them off the jetty.

You do the grand day trip to the next island – and go for walks there.    You go to the bookshop and buy more books because you have already read all the books you’ve brought AND any extra books that have been sent in the obligatory parcel which has to be sent to you while you’re there.

When I think about it, it sounds remarkably like what I was trying to sum up in a recent post, on making your own entertainment.  And in some ways, in my childhood certainly, it probably wasn’t so different from day to day life anyway.

What I’ve noticed through so many of these posts is that when there’s not much money, it’s actually easier to be a bit more eco.  Time as a student reacquaints you with this, as can time as a parent.

But in the background, expectations move on.  Society demands that your holiday bolthole come with internet access.  That you still get a power shower.  And in some ways, I know why camping wasn’t the family thing – because when you finally get a holiday, you might just want a bit of comfort.

We are trying, for our part, to offer some of the same in our own family.  To go to Jura, and to another cottage, nearer to hand but still reasonably in the wilds.  Where the days spent at the beach are still the highlights, where jigsaw puzzles get a bit more attention, and where you wake up the wee one to show them the night sky without pollution.

The environment is there.  We just have to slow down enough to remember it.  And, on holiday, we might just manage it.