Let's talk about insulation! (part 2 - windows)

This follows on from last week's post on roof spaces. Insulating your loft, as discussed last week, doesn't have to be expensive, and is very cost-effective, paying for itself quite quickly in reduced heating bills.

Double glazing is a different matter - it isn't cheap! But it is effective, it increases comfort, reduces energy bills and carbon emissions, reduces noise from outside (when the widows are closed), and increases the value and saleability of your house.

I had planned to do both walls and windows this week, but this windows section is quite long enough, I think - walls to follow next week!

Double glazing, as well as adding an insulating layer to the glass, usually adds an excellent seal to all opening windows, cutting down draughts and heat loss. I say 'usually' becasue it does depend a little on the type of widows you have. Casement windows, that hinge open, get fitted with a rubber pressure-seal that eliminates draughts completely. However, if you have double glazed sash windows installed, you get the insulating effect of the double glass layer, but you don't get an airtight seal.

There are various materials from which double-glazed windows and doors are made. The most frequently seen is UPVC - the white plastic that you see everywhere. Some companies fit wood-framed units, and there are many choices to suit both financial and aesthetic considerations. The more beautiful styles are also - of course - the more expensive. Additionally, if you live in a conservation area, or in a listed building, there will be restrictions on what you are permitted to do - make sure to check with your local authority planning department before doing anything. You don't want to spend a lot of money on expensive double-glazing only to be told you have to take it all out again!

There is a portal, giving access to a vast array of information on double glazing options, at http://www.double-glazing.info/

If you're considering having double glazing fitted, make sure you get several companies to quote and show you what they would do. We got three quotes - a leading national large company, a regional medium-sized company, and a local sole-trader. The quotes - for doing the same work (windows, front door, sliding patio doors, fascia, bargeboards, gutters and cladding) were, respectively £20K, £15K and £10K (these are prices as they were 10 years ago).















The £20K quote was, we thought, excessive. The regional company didn't really want the work, it transpired. They did most of their business renovating whole streets at a time of council-owned properties. The didn't want to do one or two houses. So we went with the sole trader. This meant the work took longer - the age-old problem in the building trade of your contractor vanishing part way through the job to do a piece of work for someone else! So we lived with the scaffolding for rather a long time.

Another thing to bear in mind is that the sales/costing methods the companies use mean that the price per window tends to drop, the more windows you have done. I live in a terraced house, and the construction of the whole row is done in pairs of houses - so that the guttering downpipes occur every two houses, the cladding was run across two houses at a time, etc. So my neighbours and I - whose houses form such a pair - had the work done together. We benefitted from reduced scaffolding costs, and greater window discount.

The downside was that this also prolonged the work. If they'd been doing my house alone, they would have done front and back, and then finished. The point of doing two houses together was to reduce their costs - and hence ours - so they put one huge run of scaffolding across the two houses. They did both houses at the front, then the did my neighour's gable end (they're the end of terrace), then they did across the back of both houses. So it was quite a long stretch of being surrounded by scaffolding.

The other thing to be aware of is that scaffolding isn't kind to your garden. If you have flower beds or shrubbery areas up close to the house, they will suffer. You might like to plan the timing of the work so that you can cut back, or temporarily dig up, vulnerable plants. Equipment will be dumped all over your garden surface - lawn, gravel, or whatever - and booted feet will be tramping around. If you have a lawn, it will suffer . . . but fear not, it will recover.

The question of cat flaps! You can have them fitted, but better in an opaque panel than straight into the glass.

If your double glazing is well installed, it should be trouble-free, but small glitches can occur in anything - a lock might need replacing, for instance, or your fitted letter-box might break with constant use. Unless it's a major installation fault, be aware that your installers won't be interested in minor repairs - they're already onto other installation jobs, which is where they make their money. But there is now a secondary industry of firms doing minor repairs to double glazing (and sometimes even major repairs to older installations). You'll find them in your Yellow Pages, or Thompsons Local Directory, or you can Google 'double glazing repairs' and the name of your town.

There is another option, which is secondary glazing. I'm not going to write at any length about it, because I have no direct experience. It tends to be cheaper, can be visually less appealing and less conventient, but can be thermally efficient if it's done properly.


There are several different ways of creating secondary glazing. Some are fully openable, and give you access to existing window latches.

 

Others are fixed - one downside of these is is that you can't open those windows if you want to. So you might find yourself putting the secondary glazing up for the winter and taking it down for the summer . . . this might be a real disincentive!





If you Google 'secondary glazing' you'll find lots of information. Also, the BBC's climate change action website has some information on DIY secondary glazing.

Once you've got your warm, snug double-glazed (or secondary-glazed) doors and windows, there is one more thing you can do. In cold weather, you will notice that the area near the windows is still colder than the centre of the room - it's still a large area of glass, and there's still some temperature loss. Putting thermal linings in your curtains makes a huge difference, especially as the coldest weather is almost always at night.

You can buy thermal lining fabric, or you can buy ready-made thermal linings with header tape. You just gather them in the normal way, and hook them to the backs of your existing curtains. In the winter they keep heat in and noise out. In the summer, if you draw the curtains during the day, they keep heat out and keep the room cool.

I have a west-facing sitting-room and bedroom, and I leave the curtains closed during the day in the summer, while I'm out at work. When I come home, the sitting room isn't like an oven, and the bedroom remains cool enough to sleep in comfort. The linings are also 'blackout' so that early morning light through the curtains is reduced in summer, aiding a good night's sleep.

Walls to follow next week.

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If you want to post a comment, and are having technical difficulties, you can email your comment to me at Good.Lives@woodbrooke.org.uk and I can post it for you.

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Let's talk about insulation! (part 1 - roof spaces)

I've been thinking for some time that I should do a post about insulation, and the cold weather over Christmas and New Year has prompted me finally to do it! When I posted last February about my solar electricity panels, and the previous November about my solar hot water panels, I didn't write then about insulation because I thought the panels were more interesting to people; that insulation was a deeply boring topic; and in any case everyone knew all about it already.

On the third reason there, I have been proved to be wrong. I've been really surpised by the number of people who've been reading this blog, or who have talked to me about these issues in other contexts, who have wanted advice on insulation!

It really does matter, and it really does make a difference - over a period of about 18 months, prior to having my solar hot water panels installed, I had my old windows replaced with double-glazing; had my cavity walls insulated, increased my loft insulation to about 12" (14-15cm), and put thermal linings in my curtains. This resulted in my gas bills being halved, and that was without turning down the thermostat.

Of all of these, the most cost-effective is loft insulation - it doesn't have to be expensive, and it has a huge effect. There are lots of products available now, some more expensive than others.

Black Mountain sheep's wool

At the expensive end of the range there's sheep's wool - effective, breathable, moisture-controlling, eco-friendly, supports sheep farmers. You can find out more here.

Wool with polyester

There are other products that blend sheep's wool with recycled polyester, making less expensive and a bit easier to handle. All these products come in rolls.

Warmcel pellets

Another 'natural' insulation product is Warmcel, which is made from fireproofed, shredded recycled paper - this comes as loose pellets. It is claimed that this has a 'negative carbon footprint' - that the embodied carbon stored in the product is more than the carbon used to manufacture and transport it.

You can also buy 'non-itch eco-fibre' made of recycled plastic bottles - this, too, comes in rolls.

The not-especially-eco, most usual and inexpensive material, is glass fibre in rolls. This is horrible stuff to handle - prickly and itchy, and you need to wear protective clothing and a mouth/nose mask.

You can also - a bit more expensive - buy it with each roll inside a huge plastic bag. This makes it much easier and more pleasant to handle, and it has one side of the plastic bag made of a heat-reflective material to add to the insulating effect.

All these products are easily available, because the big DIY chains, like BandQ, now stock them. And they're reasonably priced now, because they're subsidised - a partnership with British Gas means that BG subsidises the products that BandQ sells, and gets carbon-credits (actually renewables obligation payments) for doing so. [Blogger seems not to like me trying to type an ampersand - hence the slightly weird way of writing BandQ!]

Fill between the joists first

Each product comes with a recommended thickness to install for that particular product, taking into account its specific thermal properties. Typically, you put narrower rolls in first to fill the spaces between the joists,

then cover in the other direction

and then add wider rolls which you lay over the top, at right-angles to the joists.
If you're laying Warmcel, or some other pelleted material, such as rockwool, again you fill between the joists first, and then on top to the required thickness. (Rockwool is that grey/fluffy/fibrous material that you used to get in old-fashioned Jiffy-Bags, before they started putting bubblewrap layers in them instead.)

It's harder to do this yourself, as the easiest method is with blowing equipment (which is how they do cavity walls - more on that next week).

Rockwool being blown into a loft

Either of these methods will effectively insulate your loft, but won't give you storage space or anywhere you can walk on it - if you tread on the insulation, you'll end up falling through the plaster-board in the same old way!

Space Boards
being placed across joists

If you want storage/walking space, first you fill in between all the joists as above. Then, you decide how much area you want to be able to walk on or store things on, and you cover this with a double layer (you need two thicknesses to get enough insulation) of Space Boards or similar. And then you cover the rest, that you don't want to walk on, with rolls as above. You can walk, and place objects, directly on the Space Board, but it's a foam material and will eventually compress and its edges will crumble. You can be very finicky and cover the whole lot with screwed-down hardboard - which is what the manufacturers recommend.

Shelving standing on
wooden planks to spread load

What I've done is just lay planks (old shelving, in fact) where I want to stand anything heavy, to distribute the weight; and then I covered all the walking surfaces with offcuts of old carpet to prevent abrasion of the foam. If you already have part of your loft boarded , then you can put the space boards straight on top of the existing planking - and then cover the foam as needed, as above.

Reflective surface showing;
small tear shows material inside

In my own loft, I've used 'space blankets' (glass fibre in plastic bags) between the joists, and in the areas where I don't walk. All the space high enough to walk in is boarded over, and that's covered with Space Boards.

surface of Space Boards



Side view of Space Boards

And don't forget to insulate your loft hatch! An area of thin wood can lose a lot of heat into the loft space. Here you see a piece of block foam (actually sold as insulation for underneath concrete floors) - it has a heat-reflective surface on one side, and I've taped all the edges with duct tape, so they don't crumble with repeated use.



You can find out more at the Energy Saving Trust.

I'll write about walls, windows, etc next week.

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If you want to post a comment, and are having technical difficulties, you can email your comment to me at Good.Lives@woodbrooke.org.uk  and I can post it for you.

If you are reader from outside the UK, please remember to post your comment in English - I won't post anything if I don't know what it says!

What happens to 10:10 now we're in 2011?

The 10:10 Campaign was one of the features of 2010, for people interested in sustainability issues, particularly climate change.

10:10 was founded by Franny Armstrong, director of the film about climate change, The Age of Stupid. Two things influenced her: a Guardian article by George Monbiot, laying out the kind of policies we’d need to cut the UK’s emissions very quickly, none of which sounded impossible to her; and the Climate Safety report (from the Public Interest Research Centre) that had identified a 10% cut in the developed world's emissions by the end of 2010 as the kind of target we should be aiming for, to maximise our chances of avoiding a climate catastrophe.

10% in 2010 seemed to Franny to be a far more tangible aim than the far-off targets – such as 80% by 2050 – that policymakers tend to talk about. It's easy for politicians, who know they won't be in office for that long, to talk about grand gestures like that; doing something that actually works is a different matter.

Franny and the Age of Stupid team gathered for a brainstorming session; everyone loved the 10:10 concept as it was simple, catchy, meaningful and something that everyone could get involved in – from businesses and hospitals to schools and families. Within weeks, the 10:10 idea had caught one. Local authorities, individual, celebrities, faith leaders, economists, universities – all wanted to be part of it.

10:10 was formally launched on 1 September 2009, when it took over Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (and the whole of The Guardian's G2 supplement). Within 72 hours more than 10,000 individuals, businesses, schools and organisations had signed up. Politicians very quickly saw that they had better be seen to be supporting it. At the time, I wrote to my MP (Conservative), asking him to support it, and asking him what he was doing to cut his own carbon emissions by 10%. I got a politician's answer from him - yes, it's a good thing; yes, we're glad lot's of people are signing up; yes, we in the government support it . . . but completely ignoring my question to him about what he was personally doing!

By the spring of 2010, similar campaigns in other countries were taking off, and the campaign name and website changed from 10:10 to 10:10 Global, with the UK organisation being 10:10 UK.

Later in the year, the campaign was given a boost by a day of action on 10 October - 10:10:10.

I had some interesting conversations with people who thought that 10% was all they had to do - they'd done their bit and now they could relax. There was dismay when I pointed out that what we need to do is 10% per year - year on year on year . . . 'But that's hard!' they protested. Indeed it is. The first 10% is the easy bit. The next 10% is harder, and progressively more so after that. Also hard is not lapsing. If one of your first 10% actions was, for instance, to stop buying pre-packaged ready-processed food, and cook properly, from scratch, from raw ingredients . . . then the moment you're tired, stressed, or pressed for time, it's all too easy to slip back . . .

The first 10% can usually be done by adjusting things that don't really have to make much difference to our way of life. If you do all the home insulation (see posts coming next week and the week after), then you can cut your emissions with no change of behaviour. Putting out the recycling, for the local authority kerbside collection, requries only a small change in behaviour. Changing our cooking and eating habits is a bit harder. Changing our travel and transport behaviour may be really difficult, depending on where we live.

In the UK about 27% of the nation's carbon emissions come from our housing stock (heating, lighting, etc); about 20% come from the whole food production and distribution system (this includes the food we eat, the food we waste, the packaging, storage and transportation); about 20% come from all transport emissions (including food transport emissions already mentioned). Of these transport emissions, about 0.4 - so about 8% of the grand total of emissions - come from private cars. These figures are a  few years old, so at a rough guess it's probably about 10% by now.

If you'd like to know more about your food footprint, you can calculate your food emissions.

The sum of the personal decisions we all take every day are estimated to account for about 40% of the total UK carbon emissions.

After food, housing, recycling and transport, our steps to our next 10% start to intrude further into personal behaviour. Recycling is all very well, but it's better not to create the waste in the first place - some people call this 'precycling'. A good way of reducing food miles is to grow your own veg; another way of reducing food-related carbon emissions is to eat less meat - or none at all. Beyond these, all our purchasing decisions are up for grabs - buy less, buy local; but mostly, buy less, of everything! And for what you do buy, use the LOAF principles (local, organic, fair-trade, animal-friendly).

But back to the specifics of the 10:10 campaign: Patrick Barkham had a feature in The Guardian at the end of December, reflecting on his personal 10:10 vow to buy no new clothes in 2010. For him this was a big deal! He writes:

I made a dramatic and almost total reduction in my consumption of new clothes in 2010. More importantly, I weaned myself off that shallow, short-lived buzz I once got from clothes shopping.

This last sentence is the important one - this is what will make new behaviours 'stick'. He also points to the significance of publicly visible accountability - because all his friends knew about his clothes pledge, they kept him up to the mark. He says that his more private pledges slipped much more badly - no-one could see. This is why this post follows on well from my previous one, at the end of last year, which was catching up with Lizz's year of eco-challenge. Lizz was working on the tougher challenges anyway, having already done most of the easy things in her life - and doing it all in public has kept her to her pledges.

So we all need help to make our intentions real and long-lasting. The 10:10 campaign continues into 2011 and beyond. They're starting up a new website called my10:10, to help people track their carbon emissions and compare themselves with their friends. They are testing it at the moment - if you'd like to be part of the testing and development, email them at my1010@1010uk.org. They're also soliciting new campaigning and policy ideas - email them at ideas@1010uk.org. And they need donations to keep going - you can donate at 1010uk.org/donate.

And most important of all, of course - make your own plans for your next 10% reduction in 2011, and tell all your friends, so they help you to keep it real!

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If you want to post a comment, and are having technical difficulties, you can email your comment to me at Good.Lives@woodbrooke.org.uk and I can post it for you.

If you are reader from outside the UK, please remember to post your comment in English - I won't post anything if I don't know what it says!

Catching up with Lizz again

It's been a while since I caught up with Lizz's year of eco-challenge. If you're new to this blog site and have no idea what this is, you can read the first posting (which explains the whole thing) and the second, third and fourth posts to catch up.

Her adventures for August and September are now up on her section of the Faith and Climate Change website. For August the challenge was "Wear or use something I have made everyday."

Lizz is a great maker-of-things, practises many handicrafts, and loves discovering new skills to try out and make use of. She writes:

"Although I’ve done metalwork and woodwork in the past, made soap from scratch, learnt about how to make shoes, woven baskets and made several rugs and cushions what I mostly do now is make clothes."

In order to check out what it might mean to use something she's made, every day, she looks round her flat and lits the things she can see that she's made herself:

Wooden picture frame, Copper pot with a fitted lid, Firepoker, Hammer, Candlestick, Soap, Soapdish, Bookcase, Several quilts, Wooden picture portfolio, Felt slippers, Large wooden spoon, A few bags, Curtains, Tablecloths, Scritchy pads for washing up (made from the little nylon string bags that fruit and veg come in), A few bits of jewellery (including a fabulous necklace made from mother of pearl buttons), Lots of clothes.

She enjoys walking round Birmingham's Rag Market, looking at the wealth of fabrics available there, and discovers that Clothkits has relaunched (if you remember Clothkits from its previous incarnation, you know how old you are!).

When she looks back at how well she achieved her challenge during the month, she lists:
Week 1: I use the curtain in the bathroom every day! This week I have worn the groovy new cardigan, a pinafore I made a few years ago from free fabric, 3 different skirts, some trousers, and a scarf. I also used my home-made hammer to break open a money bank to pay for an archaeology dig I’m going on.
Week 2: The cardigan again, plus another I made last year; a skirt I made a while ago (from a sari) and I made a shirt; another pair of trousers, a headscarf and a headband; the fabulous necklace and the bag I made from a pair of jeans.
Week 3: Clothkits skirt worn this week and am now making a shirt to go with it; the shirt made last week, and a long waistcoat I knitted a few years ago.
Week 4: This week I’m in Uzbekhistan! So I’ve taken all kinds of home made skirts and two shirts and two long scarves I’ve made. I’m using a shoulder bag I’ve made, and a purse-belt and a slightly weird hat with a huge brim that I made a few years ago.

Reflecting on what she learnt from the month, Lizz writes:

"It was a challenge but it was nice too. Each time I wore something or used something I made I felt this nice sense of achieving something. When I was camping at the start of the summer I had time to cut things out and pin them together – then when I was back at home I had time to sew them with the machine. When I was on holiday at the end of the month several people commented on my nice/interesting clothes and accessories! Sweet."

You can read the whole of her August post.

For September, Lizz's challenge was: "Make all your cards and presents for Christmas, birthdays, Eid or whatever as well as for the year ahead and give something away every day!"

So this is more in the handicrafts area - make all of them - so no buying of cards or presents! I know from experience that Lizz is a great giver of presents, so this is no small challenge. I also know from experience that making things to deadlines (like people's birthdays) is a real downer on the enjoyment of the creative process. Lizz writes: Looking back at how she met the challenges during the month, Lizz reflects:

For my Dad – rather than do a big present I usually do some kind of stocking of smaller things. For his 80th birthday a few years ago rather than get a present we did something together each month – to the theatre or the cinema or to the footie [for non-UK readers, that means football!] or to an exhibition or festival. It was great! A whole collection of memories and good times spent together.
For my friends – well counting up I usually give things to about 16 people for Christmas, Eid, Yule, or Hanukkah, and to about 20 people or so throughout the year for birthdays. Actually what often happens is that it goes in cycles – one year everyone got scarves, another year it was hats, some years its soaps and scritchy things, some years it’s food . . . What shall I make this year?

Week 1: For Dad I am making him first of all a new Christmas stocking as the one he currently uses has been on the go for about 25 years and though it is fine I think he might like one that is slightly easier to get things out of!
For my friends I’ve started a hot water bottle cover, a pair of socks, a cushion cover and some fun soap strings. Most of these took next to no time – except the socks – I’ve got as far as turning a heel on the first one. I’ve also decided to make some fingerless mittens for one or two people – someone gave me some very nice wool which will make a lovely pair!
And what have I given away? This week I have given away a DVD, three books, a skirt to a charity shop, a shirt to friend of mine who has coveted it for ages, and some knitting needles. That wasn’t so hard!

Week 2: For my Dad – I’ve decanted some sloe gin into a nice bottle and made a nice label. I’ve also got some marmalade I made earlier in the year and done a cool label for that too. Maybe one of the things I give him will be a sort of mini-food hamper? That sounds quite nice. He likes jam and chutney and I have made both of those this year. This week I’ve finished sock one and started sock two. I’ve made the hottie [means hot-water bottle!] cover and finished the cushion and started a knitted bag to be decorated with mother of pearl buttons. I’ve also started a button necklace, a knitted christmas pudding cover (for a chocolate orange) some mini knitted christmas puddings to go over Ferrero Rocher chocolates, and three tea-cosies! Hmm this sounds like a slightly crazy knit fest!
One of the things I know is don’t give yourself impossible knitting (or other ‘make it’ deadlines), Stephanie Pearl Mcphee ‘the yarn harlot’ has some hilarious stories about knitting against deadlines and the ways in which promised jumpers became pullovers and long socks got shorter as the day of delivery got closer. Because of a Christmas deadline and a yarn supply crisis I once knitted a pullover in about 32 hours and I will never do that again. I also once knitted a single sock for a christmas present and gave the other one for a birthday present and managed to make virtue of my terrible knitting management through linking the gifts . . . I suppose I’m thinking about it a bit now because if I start now I’ve a couple of months until Christmas and although traditionally Quakers don’t make a big thing about Christmas there are friends I like to honour by doing something for them. It’s also starting to be birthday season!
And given away? A cloak, three more books, some blue and white china, two pairs of wellies, two scarves, two bags, a hat – so I’ve managed more than one thing a day this week. I don’t think anyone has spotted I’m giving things away more specifically than usual.

Week 3: This week I went to Paris for a few days and with two books in hand I went in search of lots of fabulous craft, artisan and arty places. I met some other women in a cafe (they are regulars there and I had read about them on line) who are big guerilla knitters (also called yarn bombing) – they knit covers for lamp-posts, buses, velibs (Paris's public bicycles), everything! I’d taken some wool to donate to their latest project (a cover for one of the bridges over the Seine) it was like a passport to a whole afternoon of friendship and we exchanged knitting tips and ideas til late in the day. The other book I took was a Frommer’s Guide Paris Free and Dirt Cheap; it is the business for a thrifty like me. This week I have finished sock two, the knitted bag, the Christmas pudding covers, one of the tea cosies, and the button necklace. I’ve started a small quilt picture – not sure who for yet and I’ve also had a moment of illumination about what to give a friend of mine for a birthday – hurrah.
And given away? The wool to the wild knitters, a piece of jewellery, some little things from Paris, another pair of wellies, another pair of knitting needles, a DVD, a CD, a mirror and a small stuffed toy.

Week 4: Whoopee this week is my birthday - several people have given me things which were made through some kind of recycling and one of my friends gave me knitting wool and a new book of patterns! How nice! I went to stay with some friends (one of whom had just had a birthday – socks, little mat with a puffin on it, and a little smellie). This week I finished everything I’d been knitting or sewing, or making or ‘creating’. I had a few days of feeling very smug and then realised I had managed to miss one of my friends birthdays – oooops. This is especially silly as I’d had an idea for it ages ago and even started it but it’s been sitting on my desk at work for weeks waiting for me to finish it. Drat.
And what did I give away? Birthday presents to my friend, a couple of hardback books to a local library, another DVD, some beads, a small bookcase (via Freegle), a dress, a saucepan, and a tray.

Reflecting on what she learnt during the month, Lizz writes:

Overall, what I learnt is that there is much to be said for planning ahead for presents, gifts and cards – I mean, it’s outrageous cards often cost £3, and a home made one is not only much cheaper but often carries far more meaning – even if you’re rubbish at art there are stickers and printing stamps these days which make the process much easier. Collages can be good, as can photos stuck onto card. In terms of gifts it used to be considered cheapskate to make things but not any more – now it’s very on trend and you can even work the whole 'knit in public' thing if you’ve got the nerve. I also learnt that a tiny bit of ribbon and wrapping makes the whole thing even better – I often use maps, newspaper or bits of inflight magazines to wrap presents and I keep bits of ribbon and scraps of silk in a special tin. I keep the best postcards, christmas cards and birthday cards from year to year and turn them into tags etc. Yes you might say this all takes time – but the alternative is work hard, earn money, buy mass produced see everywhere things and wrapping for them and give them away or work less, have more time, make amazing individual and one off things and wrapping paper and give them away! Or give things from which people can make things!

All this is only an extract - you can read the whole of Lizz's own post.

As I'm writing this in December (and you're reading it goodness-knows-when!) it's probably to late to make
this year's Christmas presents - unless it's an orgy of mince pies. But it's never too early to plan for next year!

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I'm taking a break now, over Christmas and New Year - see you again in January!

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If you want to post a comment, and are having technical difficulties, you can email your comment to me at Good.Lives@woodbrooke.org.uk  and I can post it for you.

If you are reader from outside the UK, please remember to post your comment in English - I won't post anything if I don't know what it says!

The joy of flash mobs (well, some of them!)

This may seem a strange topic for a blog about sustainability - but it reflects the orientation of the Good Lives project at Woodbrooke. We don't think that true sustainability consists of grim self-deprivation. Sure, we all have to live simpler lives, using less of the Earth's resources . . . but that can be joyful, fun, satisfying and creative. If we make ourselves miserable and boringly obsessive, our own inner resources will soon give out, others won't feel attracted to the kind of lifestyle we hope they will adopt, and we won't become beacons for a new and far, far better way of living.

What's a flash mob? The first one was created in 2003, in Manhattan, by someone called Bill Wasik:

The original idea was to create an email that would get forwarded around in some funny way, or that would get people to come to a show that would turn out to be something different or surprising. I eventually came up with a lazy idea, which was that the thing would just have one simple, in-your-face aspect to it--there wouldn't be any show, and that the email would be upfront about the fact that it was inviting people to do basically nothing at all . . . The idea was that the people themselves would become the show, and that just by responding to this random email, they would, in a sense, create something . . . I had conceived it specifically as a New York thing. People in New York are always looking for the next big thing. They come here because they want to take part in the arts community, they want to be with other people who are doing creative stuff, and they will come out to see a reading or a concert on the basis of word-of-mouth. Partly they want to find out what everybody else is so excited about, but partly they just want to be a part of the scene.

A flash mob (or flashmob), according to Wikipedia is:

a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual act for a brief time, then disperse.The term flash mob is generally applied only to gatherings organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails.The term is generally not applied to events organized by public relations firms, protests, and publicity stunts.

This last caveat is important, because such groups have tried to benefit from the buzz created by such events, and if you search for 'flash mobs' on YouTube many of the results that come up are this kind of commercial operation.

But there are 'real' ones that are quite different, and the whole art form (and I think it can really be that) has come a long way since the first deliberately pointless excercise.

There's a great clip of a group of adults and children dancing to to a Sound of Music track at Antwerp Central rail station; and one I really like is a performance in a cafe of the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's oratorio Messiah. Just recently, BBC4 TV has screened a documentary about someone creating a dance performance flash mob after he got interested in traditional English clog dancing. The whole programme (60 mins, including a history of clog dancing, how the flash mob was recruited and trained, etc) may not stay available online for ever, but there's a clip available that shows the actual flash mob peformance.

One of the characteristics of such pieces of performance art is that they very often start with just one person (I think that would take huge bravery!), who is then joined by others. And if you watch the film as it pans around the crowd, who aren't in the know, you see the faces switching from 'uh-oh, we've got a problem person here', to 'wow, look at this' - the transformation is complete when the watching crowd becomes a forest of mobile phones, as people try to capture an image of what's going on.

I find myself really moved by these big group artistic performances - they stir something emotionally, which is, I think, a signal that something important is going on here. And what triggered me to write about this is that I've just got home from Woodbrooke's annual weekend when we bring together as many as can come of our Associate Tutors. These are people who aren't on the staff at Woodbrooke, but have particular knowledge, skill or expertise, and who run courses for us from time to time - maybe once a year, or every couple of years; some people more often than that. We have an annual weekend of getting together for personal and professional development, swapping ideas, feeling part of the bigger team (as mostly we work alone on a course, or perhaps with one other person), and thinking about Woodbrooke's future programme.

This weekend we were looking at what kinds of areas of work we should be focussing on during 2012 (our 2011 programme was finalised long ago - we're already living in 2012 in our heads!). From the half dozen small groups who were coming up with ideas on Sunday morning there was a consistent thread of the sense of needing to 'build community' - within course groups at Woodbrooke, in our neighbourhoods, among local Quaker meetings, and so on.

We'll be looking more at this as we plan the detail of the future programme, and I think it's the aspect of 'community' that, for me, makes these public performances so moving. There has clearly been a strong (if temporary) sense of community created among the performers. And, just as important, watch the onlookers' faces in the video clips - the daily chore of the shopping, or the solitude (which might - for some - be loneliness or isolation) of the solitary drink in the cafe, or the stress of a large railway station, are all, quite suddenly, transformed. People stop, and watch, and smile, and talk to each other. For a moment, we glimpse a different possibility of 'community' in the ordinary spaces of our lives - and this is part of a 'good life'!

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