THE Prepping thread - a new beginning :)

pineapple

moneyistooshorttomention wrote: »

So - hence a lot of the work done on my house has been paid for by cheque without them complaining/refusing then

I think the reason cheques are not popular here is the lack of banks!
I would have to do a 50 mile round trip to get to a branch of my bank.

grunnie

pineapple wrote: »

I think the reason cheques are not popular here is the lack of banks!
I would have to do a 50 mile round trip to get to a branch of my bank.

Same here. Was in a bank today the first time in about a year. Have been tidying out my food store and listing what I have in stock.

pineapple

In the current discussions on climate change there has been talk about phasing out of fossil fuels. I know it's selfish of me but am I the only one to be concerned for my little multifuel stove?
A lot of people round here have no access to gas and have stoves or open fires or oil. Could we at the least be seeing massive price hikes for our fuel - especially solid fuel?

grunnie

pineapple wrote: »

In the current discussions on climate change there has been talk about phasing out of fossil fuels. I know it's selfish of me but am I the only one to be concerned for my little multifuel stove?
A lot of people round here have no access to gas and have stoves or open fires or oil. Could we at the least be seeing massive price hikes for our fuel - especially solid fuel?

It has been really windy here and lots of trees down. Chopped up that keeps my son's woodburner going all winter. Free just the energy used.

[Deleted User]

Interesting findings about Global Warming on the news today, I don't see how sceptics can still be in denial about it if all the extremes of weather happening now can be directly attributed to it. The USA are going to be so seriously out of step with the whole of the rest of the planet if they continue to deny it's happening. It's very worrysome if the prediction that we need to make radical changes to our lifestyle unitedly across the whole world if we're to stop the effects from being out of control as early as 2030, just 12 little years, has truth at its heart and I have no reason to doubt that it has. It's gone from being something to be aware of to being something I have to help fix NOW, in my lifetime and certainly in the lifetimes of my children and their children, I'm partly responsible for the mess so it's up to me to be part of the fixing! each and every one of us has a part to play in the fixing, no one is exempt!

thriftwizard

Pineapple, if yours is multi-fuel, it will burn wood & similar renewable fuels - pellets, condensed bark briquettes, etc. Oil & coal are the two main fossil fuels, but gas is a by-product of these, and those are what we need to cut down on sharpish. To be honest I think governments & businesses the world over are far too stuck in the "business as usual, growth at all costs" paradigm to make any honest attempts to phase them out, but we simply have to if we want a planet that's still hospitable to us, and most of the plants & animals we know, in the near future. I'll be called a Cassandra, and not for the first time, but every time the scientists get ignored or shouted down, the eventual days of reckoning grow closer.

What we can do is rebuild communities that are walkable, so that you don't have to drive to reach the things you really need - like banks! But more importantly, food shops, doctors, schools etc. Heating could be organised communally, and is elsewhere in Europe, though usually in places where there's underground heat or other energy sources easily available - vulcanism, hydro-electric, that kind of thing - but that's a massive project; perhaps we could start with the new-build estates springing up everywhere & build in ground-source heating? We could also invest in decent public transport systems, but unless we can drop the idea that someone should be making massive profits out of it without putting in any investment, I doubt that we will!

I would foresee big oil price rises as our leaders attempt to make "market forces" do the job that needs doing so they can escape the blame, but also, and possibly more importantly, because the planet's not making any more oil and the rate of oil discovery has fallen far behind the rate at which we're using it up. So it's time to start thinking how we could manage without it on an individual/community level, which is actually a pretty big job, but not impossible; it's what the Transition movement is all about. It's tempting to panic & stick your head under the pillow when you realise just how oil seems to be inextricably bound into so many aspects of our lives, but if you get thinking instead, it's do-able.

pineapple

thriftwizard wrote: »

What we can do is rebuild communities that are walkable, so that you don't have to drive to reach the things you really need - like banks! But more importantly, food shops, doctors, schools etc.

A nice idea but never going to happen in my part of the world where everything is so spread out. I live in a village but we have no shops or pub or bus service even. There is one school a couple of miles away but many kids have to be bussed to Hawes around 40 minutes drive away. The nearest A & E is over 20 miles. It could take decades to set up sustainable communities and reverse the decline of many rural areas and where internet shopping has taken it's toll.
I agree something has to be done but not holding my breath that they won't just stuff us financially.

GreyQueen

I'm very happy to live in a city with a 'walkscore' above the 90% mark, but it wasn't always this way.


I was born in a small village twenty miles away. Actually, calling X a village is over-egging the pudding somewhat. It has a church (congregation even back in the 1950s was Grandma, mum-as-a-child and the vicar). There was a tiny post office/general store and a telephone kiosk, the estate office and a dozen or so estate workers cottages, one of which my family rented for £1 per week.


I was back in that cottage last year (changes hands for over a third of a million these days, but it does have plumbing now ). The post office/ shop couldn't keep going after the end of resale price maintenance, the church has a congregation of 6-8 and the estate office is still there.The estate farm (owned by a financial conglomerate, as it was 60 years ago) employs almost no one, the work is being done by contractors. The big house where some of my people skivvied and butled was demolished before WW2.



My familiy lived in villages because we were small-scale farmers/ smallholders/ farm labourers. Once those things ceased to be true, we moved, over the generations, to market towns and cities, following the work. When the current generation of our oldies passes, old local families like ours will be represented in the village churchyards and living nowhere nearby.


If a person is living in a village, and they are not employed in rural trades, my thought is always to wonder why are they there? For many people, it is a percieved quality of life issue, a social phenomenon I dub 'ruralitis' - a predominantly urbanised population fantasing about country ways.


Villages are very inefficient ways of living, and village life for the past half century or more has been based on the private car giving villagers something of the quality of life enjoyed by townies and city folk.


Modern village dwellers do not want to live like villagers lived back in the day, when the highlight of the week was the bus into the nearest market town for a couple of hours of shopping, or a couple of pints in a very unquaint pub, and the occasional whist drive or jumble sale to add to the drama. Not would they want to shop in a small store, with beggar-all choice, or have all their children jumbled together in one tiddly classroom, ages mixed, getting a very rudimentary education.


If you live in villages now, you are likely to have a far higher carbon footprint than a city dweller like me, to be at greater risk of dying in a medical emergency (the so-called golden hour being eroded by the time it takes paramedics to reach you), at greater risk of crime, since many places are 30+ minutes drive away from a police presence, which the criminals know very well.


Post the oil age, unless there is a dramatic overhaul of land ownership, we will not be living quaintly in villages and cutting the hay with a horse-drawn reaper-binder. Some of us may become part of roving labour gangs, who travel the country bringing in the harvests and staying in dormitories, to return to town life when not needed for a few months.


I'd say to anyone thinking about living rurally, think again, Jane. Or accept that your once-expensive rural home is going to be worth a lot less than you paid for it when we're post oil and no one can afford to live in the sticks.:(

maryb

I knew quite a few people who thought moving to the deep remote country would be good for the children. It's quite a common fantasy among overworked parents. I thought they were barking, frankly. No pavements or street lights and speeding cars means they have no freedom to go anywhere on their own even if there are friends living nearby. Which there probably aren't because school is so far away. Unless you are into horses and have the income to support that, the children often end up getting less exercise than in town where they can walk or get the bus to places as soon as they are old enough for a bit of independence. So someone, usually Mum, has to chauffeur them everywhere until the family ends up having to buy extra cars as soon as the children reach driving age. And then they fly the nest for university and don't end up moving back to the same area because there are no jobs so you are rattling around the old family home. A lot of people find the dream has nothing to do with reality. But once you sell up in town and move out it's hard to get back without losing a packet. And if one parent ends up staying away during the work week that is not good for family stability

I knew all that in my rational mind but it didn't stop me fantasising about Agas though, after a bad day at work

GreyQueen

Very true, maryb.


My immediate family followed Dad's work into a market town when I was almost six. Mum rejoined the workforce when we were a little older, finding work on the industrial estate 5 minutes away from our house. Even the last years in the countryside involved Dad commuting all over on a motorbike to get to different building sites - there were no job opportunities for Mum and we badly needed the extra income she brought in.



Re moving-for-the-sake-of-the-children -what some parents don't understand is that most drugs are freely available to their youngsters in the sticks, usually down on the 'rec or in the bus stop.


Plus, the countryside is not a giant playground, it is mostly worked by big bits of dangerous equipment, and there isn't right-to-roam across woods and fields. My market-town childhood had me with free range access to several miles of forestry commission land, plus commons and parks. Although I hardly bothered with parks, as I preferred to be running wild in the shaggier bits of nature. No change there, then!



Today, I walked from home to library (7 minutes one way), went into one small supermarket that I passed on the return journey, biked on an errand to a pal's (a 5 minute detour off my 15 minute home-allotment bike commute) and biked back from the allotment via another small supermarket. Zero petroleum byproducts were burned moving myself around.


Tomorrow I will walk to work (5 mins away). If I need my GP, their practice is 5 mins walk from home, and the region's major hospital is on the edge of my city - there's a good chance of my surviving a heart attack or a stroke.


Also, persons known to me have died in road traffic accidents on the commute from their village homes to their town/ city employments. In each of those cases, they had moved out of the town/ city for a 'better quality of life' knowing they'd have to commute 48 weeks of the year.:(