Telling Research

RNIB launches personal shopping service for the blind

Oooh, the research I did last year with the Hub social design consultants in Manchester made it to the daily mail!

What to wear for interviews with blind people?

(extract)....When we begin to talk I realise that Julia’s blindness has given me a cloak of anonymity. The interview has been arranged by a third party (the RNIB) and we have never spoken and she knows nothing about me other than my name. She can hear my voice and what it might convey (female, regional/class accent, and some approximation of age) but she cannot see my skin colour, my age, my marital status, my style of clothes or indeed anything else an imaginative person might construe from my appearance. I quite enjoy my newfound invisibility but I sense that it is unfair. I want, as Goffman says, to achieve a ‘working consensus’ so that we can have a meaningful conversation on an equal footing.  For Goffman, a working consensus is achieved not when both parties can be completely candid, as this is rare and fraught with the risk of faux pas, but instead arises when each participant: “Conveys a view of the situation which he feels the others will be able to find at least temporarily acceptable.” Knowing so little about me, Julia is socially disadvantaged; she is inexpert at editing her conversation to be in tune with how she perceives me, the interviewer. Should I give her more information, to match the knowledge I have gained from seeing her? I am unsure what to say or what information to give, perhaps I should tell her what I am wearing, but I decide this would seem odd, so I give little away.

My construction of the interview starts when I get dressed in the morning. I am unusually conscious of my clothing for these particular interviews because although my general purpose at the initial meeting is to get to know the women, I will also be asking some questions about shopping and clothes. Aware that my outfit relates to the topic in hand, but will not be seen, I decide to dress as I would for any other in-home interview. My standard winter interview outfit is a dark blue A line denim skirt, good quality leather boots, a V necked sweater and a corduroy coat. I disapprove of wearing denim jeans to interviews. For me, jeans are not professional enough when meeting someone for the first time in an interview situation. Informality is desirable, but the actual wearing of jeans for me exudes an artificial chumminess which I prefer to avoid. Nonetheless, denim has many advantages, its chameleon like qualities for blending in in different situations, and the material itself which moulds onto the body without being clingy. As Miller and Woodward state in their Manifesto for a Study of Denim:

“the profundity of denim lies in the way it manages to be simultaneously our single most global garment and the most personal garment we possess” (Miller and Woodward, 2007)

A well cut denim skirt is my sartorial solution, denim but not jeans, smart, respectful, informal, intimate.  I wear light make up as usual, though I am somewhat relieved my face will not be scrutinised in any detail.

Selecting my clothes in this way is part of the identity project of my working life. In this sense they are signs, a presentation of myself as the ‘approachable professional’. But they are also who I am, real objects I think with, use and live with, and not superficial at all. The fact that my outfit will not be seen by those I am interviewing adds a new way of thinking about the interview.  I become compulsive in my thinking. I could turn up in a clown-suit and conduct the entire interview that way, she wouldn’t know. The fact I wear what I always do highlights the habitual groove ‘the interview’ has become for me, the seasoned interviewer, well honed in the art of extracting information and stories, yet also my choice of clothes and the fact they differ little from interview to interview speaks of my interview ideals; authenticity and egalitarian exchange.

Anthropology and sustainability

Sustainability raises uncomfortable questions about altruism for anthropologists. Notions of altruism are difficult for all disciplines and especially a culturally relative anthropology. Environmentalism quickly gets into a debate about what is fair, what is enough and what is too much; what is a ‘want’ and what is a ‘need’? Debates around what is fair, what is necessary and what is a luxury takes place in households in the UK everyday, sometimes for reasons of cost, but also for moral reasons. The development of practice theory in anthropology has been influential in showing the importance of households in making decisions, a key part of how people work towards sustainable living. The negotiation of household consumption is part of the daily practice of establishing social relations, identity and power. Power imbalances have also characterised international environmental summits as political leaders point out the difference in the nature of “survival emissions” from the South, and “luxury emissions” from the North. Anthropologists have traditionally argued such categorisation as well as against any universal definition of standards of living yet environmentalism would seem to necessitate a widespread agreement about how to slow consumption and lower expectations.

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Getting doctors to ease up in conversation

I've recently been interviewing doctors and once you've got over the mental hurdle - I'm not really at the doctor's and I'm not sick - it's been fascinating. There are of course whole research companies devoted to interviewing doctors and I'd never really been attracted to it. In the research business doctors seem to have a bit of a reputation as cagey know-alls with out of control egos. I have come across a few egos but there's nothing wrong with a little bit of ego in the right context and for the most part I've found doctors to be imaginative and likeable.

The main problem seems to be getting the conversation out of  robotic exchange in which the doctor aims to give the 'correct' professional answer. Usually this entails a recital of NICE guidelines or similar and not a muse on 'doctor as person' perspective that I'm really looking for. My conclusion has been that doctors are imaginative people but the challenge is getting them to use that imagination in conversation with a pesky researcher such as myself.

Usually in a one to one interview I expend much energy putting people at their ease and helping them understand the research process. This is all about redressing the power balance which at the beginning of a qualitative interview is typically all with the researcher. This is all unnecessary with doctors who believe themselves to be in control. They feel they are being consulted as experts and the interview set up can echoe the patient consultation experience itself. They are quick to control the conversation and second guess what you are trying to find out. I'm all for power to the respondent but none of this really accesses the creative part of the brain. I want witch doctor mode, not medic undergraduate trying to pass their viva.

Getting round this is difficult but I think creating an 'off the record' environment, interviewing in conjunction with nurses and observation in unexpected settings might help yield more lateral results.

Why were the polls wrong?

We now have results from every constituency but Thirsk and Malton, where the election was delayed because of the death of a candidate. The final results in Great Britain are CON 37%, LAB 30%, LDEM 24%, Others 10%. Seats are Conservatives 306, Labour 258, Liberal Democrats 57, Others 28. The MORI/NOP exit poll, despite initial scepticism when it showed the almost total disappearence of the Lib Dem surge, turned out to be pretty much spot on. However, this means the final polls tended to call the Lib Dems wrongly.

via ukpollingreport.co.uk

An analysis from UK polling report

What to call 'people' in research?

I was prompted to write this post after participating in an analysis session where some of the people who had taken part in the research were referred to as ‘ethnos’. Whilst I’m all for ethnography, it’s hard not to smile when people are referred to as ‘ethnos’. No offense Matt+John as I love your research but I’m not mad keen on the term ‘ethnos’.

But it does open up that old dilemma about what to call people in qualitative research. Quant is simpler. People are percentages, standard variables or ‘outliers’. In qualitative research they are just people, but that sounds far too ordinary in an industry which values its own creative intelligence rather more than the down to earth chumminess which is part and parcel of the qualitative process.

When I started work in a qualitative agency mainly involved in advertising and branding work, reports were generally written referring to people as ‘respondents’. The word ‘respondents’ works when people are responding to storyboards or branding concepts. I feel it is often how focus groups attendees like to see themselves (as sort of powerful guinea pigs). However it is rather passive and doesn’t really work when people are co-creating policy solutions or describing oral histories.

People are called different things at different times and by different people in a project. All fieldwork companies call people ‘respondents’ (almost as annoying as their habit of encapsulating everything as ‘market research’). During the analysis phase of a project people are often referred to by researchers by their actual names – though I am sometimes uncomfortable with this for confidentiality reasons. I had a colleague once who always wrote reports calling people ‘consumers’ – even for social research clients.

A common loophole in this dilemma and one I use myself is to term people on a project by project basis. A recent report I wrote looking at people in war torn countries made extensive use of the term ‘civilians’. Though cumbersome, the term ‘children and young people’ is common enough in research reports. For social research there is always the catch all term ‘service-user’.

Opinion Leader has a habit or referring to people as ‘participants’. Emotionally this is my favourite term because of its inclusive tone. It matches the atmosphere of some of the larger events they convene. I sometimes extend this to ‘research participant’ as I feel it gives people a stake in the process without implying they are involved in the analysis or report writing process, which generally they are not.

I quite often fall back on the term ‘interviewee’. It’s bog standard. It’s not pretty. But it’s true.

Pink or Blue? The rights and wrongs of finding out the gender of your unborn child

Did anything surprise you this week? Something did me. I was chatting to a pre-school mum pregnant with her second child. Her first child is a girl. In the now routine exchange (“when are you due?”, “do you know what you are having”) etc. she told me that on finding out the gender of her unborn child (a boy) she had been so disappointed she had actually wept in front of the ultra-sonographer. Now that surprised me. Mainly because I imagined that most people would be pleased to have one of each and to harbour such a passionate desire for two girls seemed to me, well, both odd and greedy.

I have heard (though it could easily be an urban myth) that hospitals serving areas with large immigrant populations refuse to reveal gender for fear of increasing terminations of female babies. I think I am safe in saying that the vast majority of people, from all backgrounds, are not going to terminate pregnancies for this reason. Therefore, offering parents a pre-emptive glimpse of their baby’s gender presents itself as merely a harmless treat– handy for name decisions and room decorating purposes.  But is it really so harmless?

On the positive side, knowing the gender of the child in advance personalises the baby and facilitates the bonding process pre birth. Many parents name their baby whilst they are in the womb - a delight for parents-to-be though it can make that birth announcement a little anti-climactic for the rest of us.

The downside of finding out the gender of the baby in advance is that it genders children far sooner than is necessary or perhaps desirable. Yes it’s true the Victorians were sexist but if you look at very old photos of children in that era they appear to have treated infants with wonderful equality – in dress at least (all in white frills). There is something rather grim about the rigid modern day segregation of the girls and boys clothes sections in baby shops.

When the ultra-sonographer makes that all important announcement of pink or blue, in a way the ownership of the gender passes from the child to the parent.  Newborn babies don’t have much, but what they used to have, which they don’t have now, is the ability to surprise their parents with their gender at birth. In my experience this is the most common reason parents give for wanting to know the gender of their baby is to avoid any disappointment at the moment of birth – particularly for second and third babies. But suppressing your curiosity and developing the habit of allowing your child to surprise and sometimes disappoint you is probably a better preparation for parenthood than getting the room the right colour. 

Push or Precious?

I have just finished reading the novel Push by Sapphire, recently made into a film called Precious after the main character and narrator.. She is an obese teenager being abused at home. Should you read the book or see the film? Definitely read the book. Although the film offers the opportunity to see Mariah Carey without her make up on, the story is about the transformative power of literacy - so read! There are many extraordinary things about the book that the film can't capture. It is written in a mispelt slang which makes you feel like you are in Harlem as well as giving an insight into how illiteracy might sound and feel (Down Syndrome is Down Sinder). There are poems, pictures, lists - even an alternative ABC (Q is for Queen Latifah). The final chapter is written as if by Precious' classmates who have equally traumatic and uplifting stories to tell. Push is also a better, though less obvious title than Precious. It is a reference to the fact that Precious has given birth twice and also her teacher's encouragements to 'push' herself. The author has no surname, leaving you to speculate about who she is and what her background is. I will hope to see the film as well though - to see a fat person in a star role is kind of a novelty in itself..

Wistful weather

OK, it's Christmas coming up. All those images of robins on snowmen and Father Christmas on a reindeer pulled sleigh are deluding my three year old that it always snows in winter here. Heavily. Mmmm, not so. Perhaps I am still living with the disappointment of this realisation myself and that's secretly why I am concerned about climate change. The weather has never quite lived up to my childhood expectations. What about skating on the Thames? What hot summer days messing about in boats? In fact, perhaps our hideous household carbon footprint is a national conspiracy to change climate back to the good old days of hot summers, freezing winters and all the proper rituals inbetween. Sadly I know that climate change actually means climate chaos and it will make us even more nostalgic for children's storybook seasonality. Behold a generation of confused children arriving somewhere near you circa 2050. 

Squeaky clean: getting to grips with green cleaning

I’ve had a problem with cleaning for some time.  That is the ethics of it, not the actual doing of it, though admittedly that can sometimes be a challenge as well.  I remember some time ago having a conversation with a colleague about the ethics of employing a cleaner.  She employed a cleaner but had gone through a company where she was sure that the cleaners were paid decently and had proper employment rights and protection.  I was really impressed.  Such a thought had never crossed my mind.  I had only thought whether I could afford it or not and had come to the conclusion that I couldn’t.  But her words resonated and when I got a pay rise and got a cleaner, I went through a company where I paid a bit more but I thought the cleaners were getting a reasonable deal.

But the cleaners were rubbish.  Well, they weren’t entirely rubbish, I always liked coming home after they had been, but I had all those inevitable thoughts about how I knew they weren’t spending as long in the house as they said they were and I could do a better job myself and all those other clichés.  I felt like a right uppity housewife.

Then swine flu came along and everyone is expected to be ten times more hygienic than they used to be.  The public information leaflet that has been delivered to everyone says in it that the germs which spread the virus can live on surfaces for some time.  For some time.  I know this to be true.  After we got the vomiting noro-virus (famous for wrecking cruises) a few Christmases ago we disinfected the whole house but our friends still got it when they came to stay for New Year.  So I have this fear about swine flu which raises my anxiety about cleaning even more.

So I decided to take matters into my own hands and sacked the cleaners.  The problem is that when you’re doing it yourself and it’s hard to find the time and when you do find the time the toddler is desperate to ‘help’ then it can all become something of a stressful experience.   The temptation to undergo a huge chemical onslaught in an attempt to get it all over and done with in a speedy flurry is overwhelming.  I bought Flash, I bought Mr Muscle, I even thought about buying Cillit Bang because the advertising is so god damn persuasive but fortunately I didn’t get round to it before I came to my senses.  I was putting some toxic combination of bleach and limescale remover on the shower floor and I could barely breathe when I raised my head to gasp at the open window and resolved to look into green cleaning.

I knew a little bit about green cleaning from Leo Hickman’s book A Life Stripped Bare and he was fairly positive about it.  It’s nice to think that when the bubbles go down the plughole they are not going to be changing the gender of fishes somewhere further down the line.  But I guess I’d never got into it because scrubbing with baking soda and lemon juice sounded like hard work and when you’ve got two preschool children and a job, hard work in the home sounds like a bad idea.  However, it was partly worry about the impact nasty chemicals were having on the children that was making me dissatisfied with commercial products in the first place.  So I bought Angela Greer’s book Natural Stain Removal (£4.99) and did some of the witchy concoctions in it.  I don’t think I’ve enjoyed brewing anything so much since making ‘perfume’ for my mother out of dead rose petals and water as a child.  So I’d recommend you do it.  Transforming an essentially boring and statusless chore into a chemical education has been a real joy.  Here are my ten pearls of wisdom about green cleaning.

1. Give your nasty commercial products to a pal.  This is marginally better for the environment than throwing them out if they’re going to be using them anyway.  Then buy some greening clean basics (baking soda, vinegar, lemon juice, borax and eucalyptus oil) and get mixing.
2. Invest in a proper cleaning caddy rather than having everything in a jumble under the sink.  If you are organised you’ll use fewer products.  I’d recommend the sleek John Lewis version.
3. Use a solution of borax, hot water and tea tree oil to disinfect rubbish bins (with all those swine flu tissues in...) and other surfaces.
4. Use salt, borax and baking soda (add a little water to make a paste) to clean the oven.  It’s a little messy but smells considerably better than commercial versions and does work.
5. Once you’ve cleaned your bath with baking soda and vinegar, polish it off with eucalyptus oil (particularly good on darker baths).  It will look so sparkly and tempting you’ll feel like you’re staying in a hotel.
6. Keep a bottle of soda water to hand to fizz away carpet stains (such as tea) as soon as they happen.
7. Leave fabrics to dry outside.  Sunlight is a natural bleaching agent and the air will deodorise them.
8. Clean windows with a mixture of hot water and white vinegar then wipe with newspaper  – a classic and it works.
9. Wash wooden floors with peppermint tea.  The dust will come away and the floor will look and smell fresh.
10. Scrub away soap residue on shower doors with a mixture of salt and lemon juice.

I was thoroughly pleased with the results.  I no longer feel like I’ve got to evacuate the children from the house just to clean the bathroom and cleaning feels like less of a chore.  Admittedly, there are a few downsides to the project.  There is a risk that your house will smell like a chip shop because vinegar (a mild disinfectant) is an ingredient in a lot of green cleaning recipes.  But I’ve found the smell doesn’t last long and a lot of the essential oils Angela uses in the recipes smell marvellous!  The book claims that you can save money but in my own case this has been marginal because I’ve developed a bit of an essential oil habit – a small bottle can be as much as a fiver, though they do last a long time.  Other than that there is nothing bad to say about green cleaning.  Perhaps the best endorsement of all is that my house is clean.  Not obsessively so, but come round, run your finger along the mantelpiece, it’s clean I promise you!  Clean and as sparklingly clear as my conscience.

Plot taken? Sustainable housing and space

 

Aspirations for housing, it has to be said, are not particularly sustainable.  We don’t want to be overlooked.  A big house, somewhere in the country.  I recently did a project interviewing a wide range of members of the public about their ideal homes and it did seem to be the case that the more drastically remote people long to be, the more personal problems they tend to have experienced in their lives.  Crofts in remote Scotland seem a particularly strong desire amongst ex drug addicts or foster care leavers.  I’m not sure about the psychology of this but I do know that if everyone got what they wanted housewise, we’d need about a hundred planets to accommodate everyone.  It does seem to be one of the cruel ironies of modern life that the more apparently countrified a house is, the less likely it is to be sustainable in terms of land use or fuel consumption. 

If you frame the question in a different way, and say well, you can’t have your absolutely dream home, but you could improve things where you are, what would you change?

Parking, is the answer.  More parking.  There is nothing that makes me want to slit my wrists more than these conversations.

                “Any family worth their salt has three, four or five cars” was one memorable verbatim from a villager in rural Cambridgeshire complaining about low parking allocations for new build properties.

                “They should make people pave over their front gardens” was one woman’s thought from Croydon. 

One thing I have noticed however is that people are becoming more tolerant of smaller spaces.  Through my work interviewing people I’ve visited a lot of people in smallish homes and mostly people are refreshingly uncomplaining about it.  Children share rooms and families are more creative with how space is used.  Increasing numbers of people live in unconventional households of extended family members.  Yes, people do want more space, but once they are living in a small space, they just seem to stop noticing it.  I don’t think we are looking at Tokyo style living just yet, just that having a room entirely dedicated to the ironing may be a thing of the past for most families.

A recent report by CPRE argues that close proximity living does not have to mean urban high rises.  Cosy villages with walkable centres and a close knit community are about as sustainable as you can get, and there are scores of them up and down the country.  They argue that refurbishing existing properties and developing within communities should be prioritised above dispersed new build developments.  Certainly there is lots of evidence to suggest that people who know their neighbours and who walk more are happier and healthier than those who don’t.

It may be that the key to sustainable housing is less about the house itself and more about our attitudes to the communities they are situated in.  A couple of years ago I interviewed a man in Essex who had recently installed a wind turbine.  He had received 33 objections – before it was even built.  I visited him at his house, in the middle of a field, and I don’t think he even had 33 neighbours.  One suspects that these neighbours were not objecting so much for themselves, but because they were worried it would affect the price of their property.  Perhaps in a new climate where property is regarded more as somewhere to live rather than an asset with which to make money - sustainability initiatives such as shared facilities, energy efficiency and car-pools will receive greater support.  Living in sustainable communities will help us all sleep easy in our homes, no matter what size they are.

Is public opinion on climate change moving on?

 

What are the great British public actually doing to combat climate change?  Certainly public understanding of climate change, its causes and effects, has moved on enormously over the last ten years and more than ever in the last three.  The language itself has moved on.  The public used to talk about “rainforests” but now that term has been superseded by “global warming” and “climate change”.  I still feel that nothing has quite caught the public imagination as spectacularly as CFCs and the ozone layer did twenty years ago, but contemporary images of melting ice caps and rising sea levels come close.

There is a tendency to present the British public as car-loving, technology consuming couch potatoes, but personal actions to help the environment have moved on enormously.  Ten years ago the only personal action most people could think of which might help the environment was saving paper (“I always use both sides..”).  That has evolved into a wider concept of recycling and now includes a range of energy saving measures.  The fact that even apparently benign actions such as google searches have an impact on the environment is now more widely known and accepted.  People often want to know what they can do to do more.

However, in my work which involves interviewing people in their homes, I much more often come across accidental sustainable behaviours than deliberate ones.  People and families are full of contradictions. I recently met a retired couple who moved close to the airport so they could take advantage of dozens of cheap flights every year, yet lovingly grew their own vegetables and recycled everything.  When I do interviews with married couples there is often a lot of bantering about who undermines who in saving energy measures such as switching lights or the heating off.

I am a passionate believer in action on climate change myself, so during interviews I do have moments of hopelessness which have to be suppressed.  One recent conversation springs to mind.

                “How do you get your clothes dry?”
                “Tumble drier”
                “But I notice you have a rotary drier outside”
                “Yeah, but I don’t use it because, um, you know, a bird might crap on it or something”

There was also the retired couple who claimed the reason they kept on two cars was to help pick up their grandson from school.  Initially I thought this fairly reasonable until I found out the grandson was a strapping lad in sixth form old enough to drive himself.  Couldn’t he get the bus or cycle, I wondered. The truth about behaviour is that most is just habit and below the level of conscious thought.   There is also quite a lot of buck-passing and spouting of excuses I have heard too many times before.  The most crushing excuse I always find is the “they can’t do anything anyway, people will never change”.

I also have moments of hopefulness.  The desire to create and nurture is strong.  I have stopped being surprised when I visit high rise council flats and find lovingly tended gardens on the balconies.  In fact I have come to the conclusion that they exist not in spite of high rise living but because of it. 

People long for community and explicitly say so.  Closer knit communities have less need to hop in the car several times a day and more opportunities to act together to improve their local space.  It’s true that British householders are fond of consumption but most people are fond of Britain too.  The Transition Town movement which aims to foster sustainable local communities is an experiment in environmental localism and dare I say, patriotism too. Complicated carbon calculation is beyond much of the population who want to experience something collectively rather than worry if they’ve got their recycling sorting right.  .  After scores of interviews with members of the public I have come to the conclusion that the right sorts of instincts and desires exist amongst people to live sustainably; we just need to find a society to match them.

Living on less

I have a deep seated fear of things running out.  Felt tip pens have an inbuilt horror for me.  I am disturbed by the onset of ageing tips, squeaky with dryness, even when they are still fresh and new.  As a child I even stopped using certain pens in an attempt to preserve their life and avoid their consignment to the rubbish bin. 

These days I like to justify my frugality on the basis of avoiding the embedded carbon involved in the manufacture, transport and disposal of any consumer item.  But the truth is more complicated than that.  At University I did not know terms like ‘embedded carbon’ and my paucity of material possessions had much more to do with genuine financial hardship, a generous mean streak and a haughty middle class disapproval of having too much. 

The sad fact is that these days I have many more possessions that I used to.  When I got married we had over four hundred pounds worth of spanking new, wedding list items delivered to our door by John Lewis in sturdy cardboard boxes.  When we last moved not everything would fit into the van that we had hired for the occasion.  I’ve gone from having no kettle to having had three in the last three years.  Sometimes I wonder, and worry, about what my own personal landfill site would look like. 

Some people are very good at taking care of their things, keeping them neat, clean and in good repair.  My sister is one of those people.  Nowadays my sister’s house is full of relics from our childhood that are still part of her life.  Her children colour with crayons that we ourselves were given as children.  Plastic picnic tubs from the 80s are used for leftovers or as plant stands.  Even the decorated pins on the pin board have not changed for over twenty years.  I have duplicates of many of these items, because of course as sisters we were given many of the same things.  But my things have been lost, broken or have somehow aged much faster than hers.  I hope the same will not be true of me. 

So many of the older rationing generation are better with their things than I am.  My Auntie melts left over bits of soap to make one big new soap.  Washing yoghurt pots and reusing bits of paper is second nature to people of my parents’ generation.  But whilst the babyboomers might have more respect for things they also seem to have more desire for them.  My parent-in-law’s favourite shop is Lidl where they can buy handy household gadgets at knock down prices.  But this dual ability for preservation and acquisition means that their house is full to bursting point with trinkets and consumer goods.

How can we become a more frugal nation?  I have great hopes for the generational backlash effect.  As the babyboomers have become bargain hunters against a backdrop of wartime austerity, might the younger generation shun overconsumption just to be different from their parents and grandparents?  It hasn’t happened yet so my imagination falls back on nanny-statism.  A tax on rubbish and a monthly waste collection?  I would almost relish the inevitable outcry like a haughty schoolmarm who knows she has the moral high ground.  What about ‘bring out yer dead days’ –a modern take on rag and bone men already in operation in some parts of the country.  I’d like to see good second hand stalls at tips and roving electrical consultants in charity shops to mend and make safe donated items.  Street ownership log posters which enable neighbours to source and borrow household items such as lawn-mowers, tools and other equipment could also reduce consumption.  But none of these things would reduce landfill by as much as we need.

One suggestions is that once shipping containers have arrived in this country and been relieved of their contents they should be returned full of waste to countries such as China for sorting and recycling.  Whilst this seems the moral equivalent of allowing your dog to poo in a neighbour’s garden, it might actually improve people’s lives by giving them jobs and valuable raw materials.  International economic trends will have the greatest effect on our landfill sites.  Worthy, environmental campaigns will be made irrelevant by the current recession as a whole generation of people, perhaps for the first time, pause at the supermarket shelf to wonder if they really need it.  And as I solemnly replace the lids of my two year olds abandoned felt tip pens, my heart softly sings at the possibility that my austere habits may finally be in touch with the times.

Washable nappies - what did I save?

I have two sons, one 2 and a half, the other eight months.  The older one is toilet trained now but I used washable nappies for him as I am now doing for our second son.  I was curious to find out how much i had saved by using washable nappies and did the following calculations.  Please bear in mind that my aim was to record my actual behaviour and purchases, not some ideal fictitious scenario.  Please also forgive the amateur calculations.  They are very ‘back of a postcard’ and may contain errors but I think the general findings in the correct ball park if not absolutely accurate.

The questions i tried to answer were as follows...

How much did I spend on washables? (a)

How much would I have spent on disposables? (assuming son2 trains at 2 years 4months) (b)

How much have i actually spent on disposables? (as we use them at night and when on holiday) (c)

How much does a wash cost?

B - (A + C + D)

How much did I spend on washables?

10 kissaluv nappies = £70
15 motherease plus booster liners, buckets and nets £100 (i bought these half price off a friend)
another 5 motherease plus boosters £50
extra wraps, boosters and replacement nappies for those lost/damaged £40
4 new nappies and wraps for the new baby = £50
Liners =£ 2.75 per 100. Approx 2p per liner, used approx 5000 washables = £100

Spend = £410

Less nappy incentive schemes from Richmond and Cheshire council = £75

Total spend £335

I also intend to sell the newborn size nappies which were barely worn and use the money to fund a replacement of some of the more ragged looking motherease nappies.  This doesn’t affect the total spend.

How much would I have spent on disposables?

Number of changes per day varies quite a lot by age

0-6 months (183 days) – 7 changes per day (1281 nappies) @ 20p per nappy = £256

6 – 12 months (183 days) 6 changes per day (1098 nappies) @ 20p per nappy = £219.60

12 – 24 months (365) 5 changes per day (1825 nappies) @ 20p per nappy = £365

24 – 28 months  (120 days) 4 changes per day (480 nappies) @ 20p per nappy = £96

(assumes that son2 trains at 2 years 4 months like son1)

£936.8 per child £1873

No of nappies per child 4684 x 2 = 9368 nappies

How much do I actually spend on disposables?

Early days

I didn’t use washables until the third week with son1 and the third month with son2.

First two weeks for Son1 @ 7 changes a day @ 20p per nappy = £20

First two months (60 days) for son2 @ 7 changes a day @ 20p per nappy = £84

Holidays/ sick time

4 weeks (28 days) a year. Total nappy time for both children roughly 5 years.  Use of disposables 28 days x 5.  140 days @ 5 changes per child @ 20p each. £140

Night time (our first son, whilst trained, is still in disposables at night, I haven’t included this in the calculations.  Son1 was also changed more often at night than son2)

Son1  0-12 months x 2 nappies a night @ 20p = £146

12- 24 months @ 1 nappy per night = £73

24-28 (120 days) months  @ 1 nappy per night = £24

Son2  0-6 months x 2 nappies a night @ 20p = £73

6 - 24 months @ 1 nappy per night = £109

24-28 (120 days) months  @ 1 nappy per night = £24

£693 spent on disposables approx 3465 nappies

How much does a wash cost?

2.5 washes per week – 130 washes per year @ 30p per wash (fabric conditioner and electricity) = £39 per year. Total wash time = 4 years 8 months (240 weeks) - £180 (info from WEN)

How much did I spend on washables? (£335)

How much would I have spent on disposables? (assuming son2 trains at 2 years 4months) (£1873)

How much have i actually spent on disposables? (as we use them at night and when on holiday) (£693)

How much does a wash cost? (£180)

B - (A + C + D)

£1873 – (£335 + £693 + £180) =

£1873 - £1208 = £665 

Not driving

At 17 I refused to learn to drive.  I cannot remember a single other person in my class at school who took the same decision.  Even now people express surprise on learning that I can’t drive and a lot of people still ask when I am going to learn.  I will never learn, not now.  I thought at one stage I might give in, as everyone seemed to think I would.  I was even offered a car as part of a job once.  But I still never learned and now I am pleased and surprised by my own steadfastness. 

Where I grew up in affluent rural Cheshire, driving was considered essential in order to gain any kind of independence and freedom.  Parents regarded teaching their children to drive as one of their final duties.  It was perhaps one they approached with more enthusiasm than the others because it made them feel like experts and it released them from the taxiing role they had played for so long.  So integral was driving to the idea of freedom that one of my friends intended to steal the family Volvo as soon as he passed his test and drive it to Russia, where he had a female pen pal, and then return it by boat once he was firmly ensconced.  My Dad offered me lessons but I never took a lesson, I never took the test and I found my freedom in other ways.

I had a number of reasons for not learning to drive but environmental concern was the main one.  Even a child can see how the car makes neighbours strangers to one another, causes noise and danger and stifles nature with great long ribbons of grey tarmac.  The smell and the smoke coming out of car exhausts made my childish but not wholly inaccurate mind worry about the end of the world.

My family was also a reason for me not to drive.  Although Dad offered to teach me and pay for some lessons I did not really feel like taking him up on the offer.  I had had enough of Dad’s amateur mathematics tutoring to put me off the idea of him ever teaching me anything again.  When I heard about how much lessons cost I thought it seemed like an incredible waste of money.  In fact my penny pinching streak has played more of a part in many of my environmental decisions than I might care to admit.

The final straw was watching my elder sister go through the process of learning.  The tortuousness of her lessons with Dad and the battles she fought once she had passed it, mainly over when she could have the car, what for, and whether she could drive it out of the narrow garage by herself.  My sister has unknowingly fought and won many battles on my behalf.  The one for which I am most grateful is not having to wear an ‘A’ line skirt to school because S fought furiously, and finally successfully, against it for herself to the point where our mother didn’t even try to make me wear one.  But the battles over her learning to drive were so awful and were so close to the point of us leaving home that I decided not to even enter the fray.

On having made the decision not to drive, I watched my contemporaries, one by one, learn and take the test.  Amongst my peers there was a huge amount of rivalry over who could pass first and with the fewest number of lessons.  Gradually I began to sit as a passenger in my friends’ cars, a habit of freeloading that continues to this day.  One of the good things about never learning to drive is that I am blissfully unaware of how good or bad particular drivers are so I am never able to fear for my life, even when there is cause to. 

One thing I did become painfully aware of is how being behind the wheel turned my friends into people I did not know.  Whilst Mr Toad was amusing and loveable in his glee over his ‘poop-pooping’ motor car, my friends were loutish and frightening.  Even my gentlest friend M can swear like a Tourettes sufferer behind the wheel.  Not only that they became terrific motoring bores.  My sister, like me, married a man she had met and got to know as a young teenager.  As 17 years old this was the most thrilling and romantic time in their relationship yet what seemed to animate them more than anything else was in-car conversations about three point turns and other such mysteries. 

The sixth form common room was full of similar conversations.  One girl seemed genuinely traumatised that she had failed her test for the third time after driving through a large puddle.  Despite living through all these tedious technical conversations my lack of knowledge about cars and motoring is so complete that it is actually a little debilitating in adult life.  My mother, who is partially deaf, often adopts a safely neutral expression when pretending to have heard something that she hasn’t.  I use the same tactic when people use motorways and junction numbers to describe geographic locations.  I have no idea where any of the ‘M’s’ are no matter how often they might be mentioned in everyday life.  I have no idea how much cars cost.  No even roughly.  There seem to be a bewildering number of car brands and makers on the market and I can’t tell the difference between any of them.  I couldn’t tell you the make or indeed the colour of any of my friends cars, even if they’ve been driving the same car for years, and I certainly couldn’t locate the car in a car park, even if I’ve got out of it five minutes before.  I don’t know what the clutch is or the difference between a handbrake and a footbrake and the only reason I know what a gear is is because bikes have them too.  The only thing I know about cars is that if someone has got one I think them less of a person for it which makes me unhappily superior to the rest of the population.

The best thing that not driving gave me was cycling, a habit initiated by my cycling proficiency test aged 11.  There are few childhood memories as wholesome as cycling on my brown shopper to St. Lukes church to sing at choir practice with our charismatic vicar and our cheery and rotund choir mistress.  Being able to do something so dangerous by myself gave me a thrilling sense of space but also centredness.  I was once stopped by the police for cycling without lights whilst coming back home in the evening time.  I developed a habit of cycling on the pavement which I’m afraid I still do.

By the age of 17 cycling was already such a habit that I didn’t consider the independence offered by driving as that important because I was already free.  This freedom was partly about the ability to get from A to B under my own steam, but it was also about cycling fast down steep hills.  I love the feel of my body falling whilst freewheeling a downward plummet.  Cycling was such a large part of my early life that walking still feels like travel at the wrong speed.

How have I managed without driving?  In the early years it was cycling.  Later at Durham it was the train.  Train to see M at York, train to St. Andrews to see D and S, train home to Manchester, platform 13, or Crewe, platform 1.  Not once did my parents drop me off or collect me from University.  I do not say this as a statement of resentment, but as one of curiosity as it was unusual then and probably even more so now.  I arrived and left Durham with what I could carry and consequently acquired very little during my time there, or indeed afterwards.  This is an example of one environmental good deed leading to another.  I arrived as a young graduate in London with a single suitcase and immediately was no longer an oddity because no one else drove either.

A secret of my car free status is that I am a happy accepter of lifts.  There is a certain type of older gentleman who will always give a lift to a younger lady rather than see her walk.  Another one of my guilty secrets is taxis.  I love to sit in the back of a plush London cab.  Without a seatbelt, slipping a bit on the smooth seats, watching the scenes of picture postcards and history books appear like a movie through the windows.  During my ten years there I never tired of this and I now tip with more confidence and panache than anyone I know. 

Taxis are of course expensive.  I travel a lot through my work as a researcher and it wouldn’t be unheard of for me to pay £40 for a single journey.  I spent a fortune on taxis whilst pregnant.  My mother in law would balk at such extravagance but in my experience the people who are least shocked by the suggestion of a taxi and indeed who would know the number and book one for you, are those people who don’t have much money and fully appreciate how expensive it is to own and run a car.

Public transport is uncomfortable but easy in London and I use it elsewhere as well.  Even the most remote and improbable places have train and bus services, tourist information boards, taxi offices and friendly people to show you the way.  You could drop me anywhere in the country and I would get home safely.

As I’ve got older I’ve begun to worry less about the environmental apocalypse that I fear is coming, and started instead to look forward to the time when other people live more like me.  I am hoping that after decades of increasing car use and ownership the trend will reverse during my lifetime.  Sometimes I look forward to this promised land where I will be old but my ideas will be as fresh as paint on a new, quieter world. 

There would be some cars in this world, but all those smaller unnecessary trips will have been wiped out.  Hitchhiking will have become popular and acceptable, even for small distances, even for the school run.  Parents will ride trikes, with ingenious child seats and space for shopping.  Neighbours and work colleagues will be able to take part in hi-tech car pools where tracking devices show where cars are going and whether a friendly lift is on offer.  I think people’s social lives will change too.  It will become more acceptable to cull friends who live far away, rather than carrying out dutiful long journeys to maintain the relationship.  People will base themselves more permanently in their locality, live their lives on solid ground, live in the moment.  Where longer journeys are necessary, people will use budget car hires trading in second hand cars and bargain insurance deals.  The cars that are on the roads will be smaller and less polluting and a modern interpretation of the Robin Reliant is on the market.  Professional walkers accompany school children to school and help older people get to the shops. 

Will I ever live in this world I wonder?  The world moves fast but not as fast as our imaginations.  Perhaps my world is merely a fantasy recreation of the 1950s England for which I have great fondness but never experienced.  Perhaps by the time the traffic slows down and begins to fade away there’ll be bigger problems to contend with, like extreme weather, panic migration, and financial collapse. Perhaps I’ll die early and I’ll never know.  In the meantime I walk down the street taking my revenge in small ways, like glaring at drivers as they speed round corners and pressing the pelican crossing button even when I don’t want to cross.

Doing research differently

I am currently reading Doing Research Differently by Wendy Hollway and Tony Jefferson.  It is really good and so far seems to endorse my own research style which is nice!  The authors are qualitative researchers looking at fear of crime.  They criticise traditional quantitative questions used to measure fear of crime such as "how safe do you feel walking alone in this area after dark" as too suggestive of particular types of crime and evoking fears which might not relate to crime at all (Why might you be "walking alone" in the first place?  Is this not the stuff of nightmares and films rather than everyday experience?)  They point to alternative qualitative approaches and in particular the "non-inventionist free narrative".  This approach does not expect the interviewee to understand completely their own actions, motivations or feelings and looks for clues within stories for psycho-social explanations for why they feel the way they do about crime.  Story telling has the advantage of having 'indexicality' in that they contain certain facts or signficances beyond the tellers intentions.

One problem with the free narrative is that whilst I'm sure it can work excellently in a one to one conversation about crime, which is after all a whole literary genre, I'm not sure it works nearly so well in group situations addressing less colourful subjects, say dishwashers or pensions.  In addition, one of my problems with facilitation can be overindulging  the keen story tellers at the expense of the other participants' boredom levels.  My rescue is the facilitator 'box of tricks' which has to be prepared well in advance.  This contains small exercises such as point allocation games, completion tasks or role play to get out of the groove of well rehearsed stories and into new and surprising terrain.

Nappy natter

It's hard to imagine being in nappies oneself.  But it must have happened once.  My first contact with the reality of nappies was realising as a teenager that the cloths used in the washroom for general cleaning and mopping up spillages were in fact ex-nappies and undoubtably once used for me.  Urgh!  I never changed a nappy until I changed my own baby's in hospital. 

Of course I use washable nappies for my baby.  Washable nappies are so almost-back-in-fashion that they have not yet settled on a permanent name for themselves.  They are variously known as 'washable', 'non disposable', 'real', 'cloth' and also by their oh-so-cute brand names TotsBots, Fluffles, Kissaluvs, Motherease, Sam-I-am and so on.

The Women's Environmental Network and the manufacturing associations have been at war for some time over the environmental credentials, of lack thereof, of the two different nappy choices.  Clearly disposables are bad for landfill, but it is equally clear that washables are bad for water and energy use.  My understanding is that the science is hazy and it is inherently difficult to compare a paper/plastic/silicon/waste system with a cloth/energy/water system and come out with a definite answer.

So if the science is hazy, why do I use washable nappies?  Well, I believe that new, better scientific research will show more conclusively that washable nappies are indeed better for the environment.  Common sense just says so.  It is also easier to cope with the guilt of using the washing machine a lot (electricity is invisible after all) than the guilt of generating massive multiple stinking sacks of rubbish for other people to clear up and send in barges down the Thames.

I also like to support the underdog so I view myself and my baby as sort of pioneers of cloth nappies in a smug sort of way. The odds are really stacked against us.  They are expensive because they are not mainstream.  Clothes are not cut to fit over the wider bottoms of cloth nappied babies.  Mothers no longer have the knowledge of how to deal with real nappies.  It's a lot easier to throw something in the bin than work out what temperature to wash them at, how full to fill the nappy bucket with water, what to soak them in etc. etc.  Nursery staff are not keen on washable nappies and some don't know how to use them.  Some nurseries even provide pampers as part of the nursery fee.

There are also other beneficial side effects.  By my calculations there is a cost benefit which becomes a lot more significant if the nappies are used for more than one child.  There's also an instant camarardarie between mothers of cloth-bottomed babies which is a real delight.

Climate clinic

I am planning to go to the 'climate clinic' today at Labour Party conference.  It is so well branded, sounds so cool.  But of course it is just a hotel.  Organisations are fond of rebranding hotels for the period of conference.  I remember IPPR's 'illuminations' at Blackpool a few years ago and there is the 'inclusion hotel' in Manchester this year (Novotel).

The Worst Journey in the World

I've just finished reading this book by Apsley Cherry-Garrard.  It really is magnificent and goes once again to show that it is only worthwhile reading books recommended by my mother.  I've had a lot of disappointing fiction reads recently (you know who you are Donna Tartt et al) and I think I'll stick to the world of fact for a while.  There's enough in the annals of Antarctic exploration to keep me going for some years I feel.

The book is two inches thick and heavy going at times.  I don't understand how large, wooden sailing ships work and much of the detail in the account of the sail from New Zealand to the Antarctic is lost on me.  But if you can tolerate being a little baffled by the scientific description and concentrate on the heart of the book, which is about friendship, tragedy, great risks, scientific discovery and an awe of nature, this is one of the most rewarding reads you can ever imagine.

At the end of the book I was left feeling intensely sympathic towards the author who writes with a clarity and honesty which rises above the ideals of the day.  The men on Scotts expedition were heroic, patriotic and patriarchic in a way which seems misplaced now. Cherry-Garrard himself was all of these things yet was also full of doubts about them.  A young man desperate to prove himself (he paid to go on the expedition) he paid the price for his three years in the South with a lifelong overdraft and a series of nervous breakdowns.

One reason for his distress is widely supposed to be his preoccupation about the five men who died on their way home from the Pole.  He and another companion made up the last support party which laid depots for the returning Polar party.  He could never have known about it at the time, but Scott and his men died in a blizzard only eleven miles from the last depot Cherry laid.  It is a fruitless thought but what might have been different if Cherry had gone eleven miles further and laid even just a small amount of food and fuel under a cairn and a flag?  One of the fascinations with the story of Scott's Last Expedition is the 'if onlys' about how the men could have survived.  In fact the real wonder is why more men did not perish in the support party and the additional scientific expeditions - all of which took huge risks.

In his foreword to the book, Paul Theroux suggests that in contrast to the Antarctic "one of the reasons we are still ignorant of what space travel or lunar exploration is like: no astronaut has shown any ability to convey the experience in writing".  I certainly feel that this observation is true.  I sometimes feel I have even been to the Antarctic, whereas I never feel the same about outer space!  I have noticed further parallels in my recent work with Demos on the future of space travel.  One dilemma that The European Space Agency and others face is whether to focus their resources on one grand gesture - such as a manned mission to the moon - or whether to focus on a wider range of scientific probes which may be of practical help to life on earth. 

They may take some inspiration from history.  The goal of Scott's expedition was twofold.  To reach the pole and to carry out scientific observations and experiments on unknown terrain.  In contrast Amundsen's expedition had only one goal: to reach the pole for the glory of Norway.  Scott's expedition was a failure in its first goal but it captured the public imagination for its heroicism in a way that Amundsen's never could.

Pay as you throw

Microchips in wheely bins, compostable supermarket food packaging (as announced today by Sainsburys).  Sounds like the waste debate in the UK is moving in the right direction.  But what about flytipping?  Tightening up the existing laws don't seem to be tackling this endemic problem.

A recent article from the IPPR states that "fly-tipping must be made as socially unacceptable as drink-driving and smoking around babies".  But the fact is that flytipping IS already socially unacceptable, the problem is policing it.  Enforcement officers currently search through rubbish bags for giveaway address labels, but now the flytippers are getting wise to it and don't include old letters in their rubbish.  The incentives to flytip are high for some people (e.g. cost and lack of local knowledge) and these issues need to be dealt with.  But penalties are crucial.

One solution is to involve communities more in finding out who is behind the mess.  OK i t's a bit stasi-state but surely more worthwhile than the 'shop a smoker' hotline currently being planned by the government.  A residents association I've visited in Stockton on Tees have seen great reductions in domestic flytipping since they began weekly volunteer walks to monitor where the flytipping is coming from and informing the council about it.