Preparedness for when

[Deleted User]

mardatha wrote: »

Oh my god that's it then. Bring on Armageddon- I WILL SURVIVE!!!!

By singing Gloria Gaynor songs?

thriftwizard

jk0 wrote: »

Did anyone see this on BBC news website? Crikey. Building an outside toilet & ripping out your indoor one sounds a little mad to me.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35734889

Hmm - I find myself quite drawn to her lifestyle! Admittedly I'm old enough to remember outside loos - though we did have inside ones as well - but ours was a long-drop two-holer.

I wouldn't want to live like that with 7 people in the house - I'd never stop washing/starching/ironing/mending - but there are a number things I actually prefer to do the old-fashioned way, many of them kitchen-related; I've bought, owned & given away any number of posh kitchen gadgets & gone back to my ancient hand-whisks, sieves, wooden spoons, sharp knives & knife & scissor sharpeners, because I like to feel when things are "right" if you know what I mean. I prefer to make bread by hand, although again, I do own & use a bread machine when I'm pushed for time. My little Spong bridge mincer does a much better job than any of my food processors ever did, and it's easier to wash up!

I make a lot of my gifts & items for sale on an old treadled sewing machine, though I do also own & use a very modern "professional" computerised machine with hundreds of stitches & alphabets. I don't expect that to still be around in ten years, though, but the treadle will still be going strong in another hundred! If I had to choose between them, I wouldn't hesitate; the treadle wins every time.

But people like the 1939 lady are my best customers, and there are more of them out there than you'd think, although they're not all so hard-core; most do at least own a modern fridge, mostly because very few houses still have their larders. And 1930s/40s/50 decor doesn't have to be brown; they did a lot of pink & green as well, and also painted furniture when it got tatty. Like the 1970s orange-&-brown, when there was also lots of blue-&-green about, the stuff that got less use has survived, but everybody's favourite bits are long gone.

[Deleted User]

If everything goes haywire when the national grid can't cope with demand any more we might all have to go back and live like 1939. I expect we'd get used to it in the long run but it would be very trying while we adapted. Humans are very resilient though and lots of us would make a good life despite or perhaps because of the loss of modern customs and conveniences. It must have been liveable or none of us would be here now having the conversation would we?

COOLTRIKERCHICK

Haven't caught up yet, been busy for a day or two..

Don't know what the conversation is about the old ty Bach ( little room in welsh aka outside bog lol)

But we have 2 at the smallholding ( dates back to at least 1818 still trying to research back further)

So do I need to reinstate them lol

Karmacat

CTC, that looks amazing! I don't know what you could reinstate them *as*, but it would be brilliant

GreyQueen

CTC, they would have probably been bucket privies - a plank with a hole and a lid, some torn up newspapers on a nail and that was it.

I spent my earliest years in a cottage with the same set up, in the 1960s. By that time, we'd advanced enough in the hinterlands of this county to have a night soil wagon visit to collect the slops once a week. A decade prior, you dug a deep hole in the garden and chucked the bucket contents in.

Could you look at setting up your ty bach(s) as composting toilets?

thriftwizard

A decade prior, you dug a deep hole in the garden and chucked the bucket contents in.

And grew rhubarb - very good rhubarb - on top of the hole!

[Deleted User]

We stayed on an eco campsite where they had compost loos and when the pit was full they dug another one, moved the loo over that and planted a tree in the first one. They had some extremely healthy looking trees wherever that was done and they'd been open for a few years, I guess waste not want not applies to human waste too?

ivyleaf

When I was a child (50s-early 60s) my Nan lived in a house with an earth closet across the road in the orchard. It was a wooden building that was a potting shed in one half and a loo in the other.

She had potties under the beds (TP's "gazunders"!) in case of need during the night. She had only a cold tap, in the scullery, and we washed our hair in rainwater from the butt

ETA I can't remember what sort of lighting there was downstairs, but the bedroom lighting was candlelight.

GreyQueen

In the tied cottages where Mum grew up, the privvy was a portable shed able to be lifted by a couple of people to be situated over a freshly dug hole and the old hole filled in. Mum is in her early seventies by the way, all this isn't ancient history.

And there were the gazunders. She still has one (in the loft!) in case both the WCs stop working.

My childhood home's plumbing was limited to one cold tap in the kitchen. Mum's immediate home prior to marriage hadn't even got that; the water had to be pumped up in the dairy and carried to the cottage. It was wired (very basically) for electricity. She's often marvelled that she didn't think it was at all odd to have no running water/ sanitation but to have electricity.:rotfl:

Grandma always would wash her hair in the soft water from the water butt, as opposed to the pumped water. Fishing drowned gnats out of your barnet isn't something most modern folk have encountered.

And yes, those country veggie gardens were wondrously fertile places, the same bit of soil having been in cultivation for 400 odd years. Hell, in some villages I know, many of the houses on the main drag are 600 + years old and predated the chimney as a concept - when the attics are investigated, you can see the soot-stained roof beams from back when they had a central heath in the open hall-house below.