"Candles"

Tangles of wire form part of modern-day reality. Here and there are those who escape it, like Emma Orbach, but most of us accept the Electric City as inevitable.

I don't mind it, though. My living space is small, but at any given time I have only a very few paper books — I pass them on once read. Most of my books, including the big, heavy ones like the Bible — are in electronic form on my Kindle. It means I can have both a tiny living space and a huge library.

My income is likewise small, and beeswax candles — which I love — are expensive. Candlelight is beautiful, and at the end of the day as night falls I like gentle ambient light.

The lantern hanging on the wall is a Taotronics one that I wrote about here. I charge it during the day when the solar panels are feeding our electricity supply, and its light easily lasts all evening — even in winter when the hours of darkness are long.

My charging station lives under my bed where I don't have to look at it.

It has plugs for my laptop, Kindle, lamps and phone. My clock is on my phone, too — I recently downloaded the "Clocks" app, which keeps a clock on the phone screen without going to sleep; so I can have it on a stand as a clock for as long as I want it. Really handy.

Then there comes a time in the late evening when I want to stop reading or writing, and just think and drift and reflect. So I turn off the lantern, and just have the candles on my wall altars.

These are the candles you can see in the photo of my charging station. They take 5-6 hours to charge up, and each one lasts a couple of days. They're these ones from Auraglow, that I wrote about in this post. I really love them. They aren't exactly like beeswax candles, but good enough; and if I fall asleep while they're still alight, there's neither danger nor puddles of wax.

I like to sit just quietly in bed at nightfall, in the peaceful "candlelight".

Then when I'm almost ready to fall asleep, I turn off the ones on the wall altars, and just have a bedside candle.

To keep warm through these icy winter nights, I have a hot water bottle. In the morning, the water in it is still warm, so I can use it for washing, to save running water down the sink until the hot comes through.

During the day, I wear layers:

And a hat — good for keeping my hair out of my eyes and plus it's a thinking cap that helps my mind.

At night, I wear socks and a knitted wooly dressing gown in bed. I haven't been cold even though the weather has.

Sometimes, if I want to read for a while before I go to sleep, and if my current reading book isn't on my Kindle but is a paper one, I have my reading lamp that looks over my shoulder from the little bookshelf tower Tony made me. It sits in the corner at the head of my bed — just right for my reading lamp. 

The reading lamp is also cordless, and I can charge it during the day at the charging station under the bed.

This is the book I'm reading at the moment (I've linked the picture):

The frugality of this lighting combination really pleases me. It means I can have everything from bright reading light, to peaceful lantern light, to quiet drift-off-to-sleep candlelight, but all of it is charged during the sunlit hours — so, low in cost for me and kind to the earth by abstention from fossil fuel electricity.

I wondered if, with constant use, some or all of the lights might stop working, but they haven't; they're as good as new. 

Tomorrow morning I have to be up early to unlock the porch for our organic food delivery — it arrives at about half past five!! 

To be sure I don't oversleep, I set the alarm on my phone — a very lifelike dawn chorus, a nice way to wake up.

Well — goodnight then. It's 10.15 now. Time I got some sleep. Alice and Hebe talk about catching the ten o'clock "train" that takes you off to sleep. I think I ought to make sure I'm on it.