Lisbon 1 Durban 0

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. Here is a short news report on which gets more news coverage: the ministers meeting at Durban (on climate) or squabbling over the Lisbon Treaty (money). This post is by Nicola Baird 

I've been a poor sleeper for years, ever since I had children really. So this morning about 6am - after finishing the novel I was reading and messing on Facebook - I started looking on the web for info about the COP17 talks at Durban. These are important climate talks, not unlike the ones that hogged the world's attention when they were in Copenhagen. There is so little to find, although I did uncover a shocking post from Reuters about how the failure of these talks looks set to drown island states, with first on the list being Tokelau. In contrast the meltdown of the Eurozone (thanks again Cameron for messing things up) had headline after headline. 

In a contest of Durban v Lisbon, the latter is clearly the outright winner. Money drives news agenda a zillion times over attempts to save the world.

And yet there is some good news around. For instance I found this news item below on the ecogeek website. It's from the LA Times. I think it is good news that investments in renewable energy topped fossil fuels last year - although as the UK isn't exactly doing this, who on earth is? There's another glitch: the enormous sum of $157 billion was also invested in new natural gas, oil and coal plants - the fossil fuels that are causing climate change... 

Really you couldn't make this skewed understanding up - as I read in Rosamund Urwin's Evening Standard column yesterday we'd rather see our great grandchildren swim to school than pay just a tad more tax to try and tackle the problems of climate change now, when we actually still might be able to do something.

Investments in Renewable Energy Topped Fossil Fuels Last YearWritten by Megan Treacy on 29/11/11 For the first time, investments in renewable energy projects surpassed those in fossil fuel power plants, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.  Last year, $187 billion was invested in renewable energy installations, while $157 billion was invested in new natural gas, oil and coal plants. The increase in investments in the sector, even while in a down economy, has led to price drops in equipment and renewable energy power, making solar and wind power far more competitive with coal power. Renewable energy subsidies deserve a lot of credit for the spending increase:  about $66 billion in subsidies were handed out last year. It's a great bit of news as another round of global talks on the climate crisis is likely heading nowhere as we speak. via LA Times

Essex discoveries part 1

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell love travelling around the UK. Here's some ideas to fill your holidays and keep your carbon footprint low. This post about Essex is by Nicola

It's a swap thing: Pete was born in Herts, and I was born in Essex. But he's all Essex humour and I'm the posh bird from Hertfordshire. Although we didn't meet until I was 29 years old for a time we'd both lived pretty much equi-distance from Bishop's Stortford, the Hertfordshire market town that protects us from Essex. Or vice versa. Anyway, ahhh.

Nell, 9, is intrigued by Essex, she's hardly ever been there and yet there's a map on our corridor wall with rings around all the places that are family important (and yes, Nasty and Ugley, High Easter and Cold Christmas - we lost control of the highlighter pen!). And so the plan is get-to-know Essex better. It also means we've got a travel theme and Nell hopefully won't feel so cheated by her friends and their climate-bashing tales of "when I was at the airport...".

We've started well this Essex-themed Easter holidays well with a quick walk through Hatfield Forest, just outside Bishop's Stortford. Hatfield Forest is a remnant of the Great Essex Forest, mimics a medieval working woodland and is now run by the National Trust. As an added bonus it's opposite Stansted Airport working as a seriously green lung by the bypass and perimeter fence. Using a very easy to follow map we walked around the lake created by the one-time owner, a Hugenot refugee, who built a shell house for picnics - the shells (see pic left) are from the Caribbean and Africa, brought to the UK in the ballast of the ships that created such wealth for some of the old families (there's clearly a link to slavery here). The nice volunteer guide inside the Shell House encouraged the girls to play with these shells... And I swear I spotted the shells of African land snails too...

A family hunt
Next stop was just outside Great Dunmow (a place Pete could remember his Dad recalling the Saracen's Head and his mum rolling her eyes at the metropolis) for Great Garnetts farm by Barnston. This is where his dad, Denis May, had his first tenancy farm, eventually moving to the other side of Essex when offered more land for his dairy herd.

The big house at Great Garnetts was Elizabethan, with tall chimneys. There's still an interesting arch in or out of the stable yard and we hope to find out more when we go to the farmers' market held just about once a month (except August when everyone's too busy harvesting) - in 2010 they are on the 2nd Saturday of each month so try 10 April, 8 May, 12 June, 10 July, 11 Sep, 9 Oct and 13 Nov.

When Pete's mum, Sheila, moved in to the semi-detached farm cottage (see pic above) there was no heating except wood fires. I think she said there was no water as well. It must have been terrible for her especially looking after a four year old and Pete for his first eight months. No wonder he puts up with the cold... The farm cottages look picture perfect now and I think Lola and Nell were a tad jealous of the three children rolling outside with a pack of black labradors.

We also went to the pub that Denis used to walk to after his chores were finished. Lucky for us The Spotted Dog, in Bishop's Green (tel: 01245 231598), a lovely old thatched place, had just been redone and opened on 1 April (five days ago) as a gastro pub which still served real ale. We had our dog, so we ate on a bench outside, thinking about Denis all those years ago propping up the bar with a few old farmer friends. Maybe.

It's an irony that Denis felt so strongly that organic was a fad, and now even the old pubs are going all foodie and his old farm has recreated itself as a farmers' market. Obviously it's not all organic, but the locally grown element - pork and turkey - is key to this farming renaissance.

Where to watch the World Cup 2010?

Pete, Nicola, Lola and Nell spent the summer of 2007 travelling around Britain without resorting to planes (simple!). Now they're home and keep up the carbon-lite world travel habit in all sorts of ways. This post is by Nicola

So where's the best place to watch the World Cup this July? I'm asking this less for myself, more as a puzzle. I know one sports writer/lecturer who is taking her toddler to South Africa for the full atmosphere (but worrying as much about which malaria tablets to take as how to get tickets). My Brazilian-based friend plans to come back "home" to London just in case England does really well - I also happen to know he likes being around the UK for the soft fruits season, so that's two draws. Meanwhile his wife thinks it might be more fun in Brazil, just in case her team does really well. While the Dads group from Nell's school look set to fall back on a CAMRA (ie, real) pub near Baker Street that serves Abbot Ale and when they drank there last undoubtedly set up England's recent victory in the friendly against Egypt. A winning ritual should not be broken they claim.

Where you watch and how you get to that place can be a brilliant way of sharing the joys and blows of being a football follower, or it can be rubbish (yes, that's why there's a picture of the rat infested rubbish truck from the recent Rio carnival!). I'm guessing I'll see some of the games with friends and family on outdoor screens, walkable distances from my home.

It's been 10 years - this coming April - since Lola and I took our last flights (first as well in her case as she was not quite two years). Nell is nine years and still hasn't gone on a plane. Pete has flown in the past 10 years but only twice, once for fun and once for work, so our family footprint has stayed low for a significant length of time compared to our friends.

Our no-plane boast is not so great if we compare with our own childhoods - Pete never took a plane journey with his family, it wasn't until he was 18 that he set off for an airport check-in. I think I made one return flight to Northern Ireland as a toddler (apparently noisily confusing nuns with Father Christmas) and then another aged 15 when my Dad suddenly took us all to Paxos, a Greek island.

Our family's experience shows you can have fun at home in the World Cup (why, even Lola was born at the start of the 1998 kickathon), in fact home is probably the only place you can watch every game, keep up to date with every bit of information and still keep that carbon footprint a blistering zero. Here's to an England win...

Out of Africa

Pete, Nicola, Lola, now 11, and Nell, a just-turned-nine, spent summer 2007 travelling around Britian. They're back home now (not so far from Tower Bridge) but still trying to find ways to see the world without racking up their carbon footprint. This post is by Nicola.

Thanks to my friend Nicky, who I met at university, I've been to many places in the world I would have thought weren't for me - starting with Chitral in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, which borders Afghanistan. This was back in 1987 and my first trip to Asia. I really enjoyed it thanks mostly to Nicky who was living with her family there. Another summer we trained it around Europe (1984) - eurorailing was a belated right of passage for us both.

Nicky is a menace with the air miles (although I get to benefit and stay in touch as she comes by London Heathrow frequently as does 10-year-old Xander, see pic below with Lola and Nell). But last year, after nearly 10 years based in Zimbabwe, she and husband Robert (another uni friend) took their kids out of school and on to the dirt roads of Africa so that they could drive north-south from Cairo to the Cape and back again to Zim - a 25,000 mile road trip.

Robert is a fabulous photographer (that pic of Tower Bridge is his), films anything, and a good writer too so the blog entries on his trip, enlivened by the kids' entries, have been great. I loved popping to their blog between cups of tea and dull tasks, and now their route and adventures have also been poured over by Saturday Guardian readers - see here.

Six months cost their family £12,500, which sounds a hideous amount, but for an adventure fo a lifetime in which their children learnt so much - and not just how to use sand ladders to escape out of sand dunes and a combination of GPS and stars to navigate - it seems to me money well spent. Here at Baird Towers it would have gone on wine, bike services and energy efficiency which is nothing to write about... except that I do, see here.

If all of us could just take longer to get to places, perhaps we'd reduce the amount of mini trips made. Robert says there's a Swahili* word for this - mahali - the place that becomes a journey. That's exactly what this blog attempts to do as we wander around the world without ever needing to leave Britain.

*Swahili is spoken throughout east africa, including Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

It's time to party

Pete, Nicola, Lola, 11, and Nell, 8, spent three happy months during summer travelling around Britain. Now we're home but the travel bug is still there. Join us for the occasional sightseeing plus tips on how to shrink your carbon footprint.

In the run up to the Copenhagen meeting next week there seems to be a sense of great sadness. See here at the Guardian. We did all this to the world. We made October the hottest, November the wettest, Sydney the dustiest, etc. And at night I am conscious that my bedtime reading, Notes from Walnut Farm - a collection of Roger Deakin's writing during the six years before he died - is imbued with sadness. Even the frothy spring cow parsley is berated for replacing rarer, and arguably more lovely, violets. See the cover here.

Which is why it is lovely to sometime crash a party and cheer the hell up. December is the best time to do this, but last month the highlight near home was when Algeria qualified for the World Cup. The guys in Little Algeria (an area around Finsbury Park) were able to celebrate qualifying for the first time in 21 years. They bounced up and down, they drove around the block hooting horns. They marched back and forth the zebra crossing. And they waved flags, smiled and gathered together (yes,blocking the buses) conscious of just how far their team had come in order to make the slot for South Africa in July 2010.

It was like a flashmob, but less contrived. You could smell the happiness.

Having fun doesn't make me forget climate change, but it does remind me how important it is to avoid the tendency for humans to look on the dark side. Yes the world is in a bad, bad place. But without hope it really is hard to summon creativity. And creativity is what we all need, and especially the journalists writing up the story and those world leaders whose job it is to get a deal.