Into the Heart of Advent — introduction

We're into Advent now, and in response to Charleen's request I've promised to blog again this year the readings of my book Into the Heart of Advent that I posted last year.

I checked with SPCK, who published the book and so hold the rights to it, and they have kindly given their permission. Accordingly I have volunteered (they didn't require this of me) each day to link you to where you can buy the book if you prefer text over having me read to you.

Today is the introduction, Day 1 is tomorrow, and the readings finish on Christmas Day.

 

Into the Heart of Advent is available from a variety of bookshops. You should be able to buy it direct from the publisher but I see they have let it go out of stock and anyway their despatch times are slow.  

You can get it from: 

Eden online bookshop, currently selling at £7.64 and they will give you up to £5 off your first order.

US Amazon. Low stock and much cheaper in Kindle ($8.99) than paperback ($18.87).

UK Amazon. Kindle (£5.69) is cheaper than paperback (£8.32).

If you have any difficulties getting the text — I see stocks are low, so the books may sell out — let me know and I will add the text for each day to the blog posts. I could do that anyway but I think it might be a bit mean on my publishers who depend on their writers for their living.

If you want the text but are really on your beam ends for money at the moment, tell me. Your comments on this blog reach me privately and I do not need to publish them. If you write your email address in your comment, I will not publish it and can correspond with you. 

Oh — incidentally — a reviewer, in the Church Times last year, complained that there was no mention of the pandemic. That's because publishing a book takes a while, so the manuscript had to be submitted at the beginning of 2020, before the pandemic began. So if it seems odd to have no mention of Covid, well, that's why.

Just one day

 Life is challenging and so are other people sometimes.

Here is a practice I find helpful.

For just one day — this day only — make your mantra and your practice and your focus, "I am here for love; only that."

Leave for another day the struggle for truth and justice, for setting people right and facing up to conflict, for cleaning house and dealing with the to-do list. 

Just for this day — "I am here for love". 

Let it be the prayer your life offers for just one day.

❤️

Finding things online

I never get over the astonishment at Google's capacity to find things I've lost.

If there's anything I don't know or I've forgotten, I ask as if Google were an actual person, and almost always find an answer — with a few supplementary questions sometimes, just as would happen in a conversation with a friend.

So last night while everyone else in our house was out at choir, I was listening to music in my room. Very rarely am I the only one home, and I dislike earbuds/earphones, and I don't like to disturb the others by playing music when they're home, especially in the evening when we've all settled down in our cells, so to speak — Thursday, being choir, is a good night. No one home but us chickens.

I was wandering happily from song to song, when I took a fancy to listen to The Soul of Man Never Dies. I looked it up and there were several versions on Youtube, mostly men, mostly American bluegrass — which I like but wasn't what I had in mind. 

I used to have that song in my personal collection of music. Back in 2012 when I downsized everything radically, I gave away my collection of CDs, first having moved the songs onto my computer. 

Time went by. I changed my computer, I changed my phone, and somewhere along the line I inadvertently set up a second iTunes account, when my email address morphed from Googlemail to Gmail. At some point when I got a new phone and went to sync my phone and computer, I could only go with the one account for music (obviously, to be synced) and thus lost the music I'd not bought on iTunes in electronic form but only moved across from CDs. In among it was the version I used to have (and loved) of The Soul of Man Never Dies.

I searched, but couldn't find it. So I thought back to when I first heard it, which was when we were living in Aylesbury. Tony and I moved there when we got married in 2006, and only stayed three years before moving back to Hastings at the end of 2009. It took me a while to get to know Aylesbury, and find where concerts happened and where the Quaker Meeting House was and all that sort of thing. I used to go to the lunchtime concerts in the church; they were free, so I went most weeks, but only went once that I can remember to the paying sort that happened in a little theatre in the evening — to hear the woman who sang The Soul of Man Never Dies. 

I remembered the concert, and the woman. I remember she said she liked Berocca (vitamins) which I'd never heard of and checked out later and didn't especially enjoy. But I couldn't remember her name.

I reckoned this must have been around 2007, to allow enough time for me to have got to know the town, so I did a Google search for "English woman folk singer Aylesbury 2007", and there she was — Kate Rusby.

So I searched again for "Kate Rusby The Soul of Man Never Dies" — which is how I discovered the reason I couldn't find it before is Kate Rusby calls that song Canaan's Land.

And here, for your listening pleasure, it is.

Thoughts on UK govt, and on new UK regs for health and social care

 I did not vote for the political party currently in power in the UK — the Conservative party. I have four strong objections to their modus operandi, which are these:

• They are inherently dishonest — lying and deceit are routine in this party. I know there's a tendency for this always to be true in the corridors of power, but this government has taken this grave social problem to a whole new level.
• They are corrupt to a degree that hobbles the society they are meant to govern. In the course of pandemic expenditure, about thirty seven billion pounds went on deals not fit for purpose and massive payments into the back pockets of political friends and donors. The responsibility for balancing the books in respect of this expenditure has fallen not on those who so mishandled the finance, but on ordinary people — including the poorest, whose income has recently been substantially cut.
• They are committed to pursuing armed conflict as a business opportunity. Armed conflict is one of the two great drivers of the growing worldwide refugee problem (the other being climate change). Not only is war of itself a severe social scourge, but the UK government has a monstrously cruel attitude to those seeking asylum — while continuing to fund and escalate a primary root cause of refugees' destitution and flight from their homeland.
• Above all, I have a profound object to the UK government's frivolous response to climate change. It is woefully inadequate. This is not just one problem among many we have to consider, it is a problem so frightening, vast and humanly universal that we must tackle it with all the strength we have. The survival of life on Earth and all human wellbeing depends upon it. Climate change should be front and centre of our political effort. In the UK, it is not.

Those, then, are my objections, and until I see some change on those fronts I will never vote for that political party.

In the UK, the current govt is rightwing, and the political Left is in opposition. 

In the last week, our govt has brought into law new regulations about health and social care, which have provoked a howl of outrage from the political Left. In this particular matter, however, my sympathies are not with the foundations of objection, and I wanted to use this space to explain why. My apologies to overseas readers, to whom this may be tediously parochial — I just needed to write more than would go on a Facebook post.

Under the new regulations, the first £86k of care costs must be funded by the recipient. After that, govt steps in with care provision.

The objection from the Left is that the rich are the ones who benefit from this because £86k may scarcely dent their resources, while it may completely clean out the poor.

In particular, the issue of UK house prices has featured in this discussion. 

The point has been made that in some parts of the UK (perhaps the NE) a small terraced house (US 'row house') might be worth, say, £90k, where in the SE the same kind of house would sell for £300k. Therefore, the argument goes, those in the NE are unfairly affected by the new regs, because if an elderly person has to sell their home to fund care costs (presumably moving into a nursing home) the £86k will leave them only a paltry £14k left over to leave their children, while those in the SE facing the same situation would have £124k left to pass on. 

£86k would buy one person about 18 months in a residential care home, which is where you'd have to be if you had sold your home to pay for care and had nowhere else to go.

But I am puzzled by the logic of the Left in this instance, and I wanted to explain why.

Let us leave aside for the moment the rich, who have large funds at their disposal — obviously they will benefit disproportionately from this, because the rich benefit disproportionately from everything; that's what being rich is all about. The only alternative is Communism, but that is an unattractive option which brings its own (mainly bureaucratic) inequalities. I personally have no objection to people being rich — wealth can be used for good as well as ill, and can fund imaginative and innovative projects that would otherwise never see the light of day — I just have a concern that those who are poor and struggling should be rescued and assisted from the public purse.

What bothers me about the response of the Left to the new health and care regs is that they are lumping together with the fabulously rich everyone who is not grindingly poor and — in particular — everyone who lives in the SE where property prices are higher.

To make my point, I'd like to imagine two identical families living in different parts of the UK — one in the NE, the other in the SE on the outskirts of London.

Each family is made up of a husband who is a teacher in the state sector, a wife who has been the main carer for their children and also works as a care assistant to make the family income go further, and two children. Miraculously, these people have escaped divorce and are with the partner they started with.

The family in the NE has to find, say, £90k to buy their home. For this, they have to put down a deposit of 10%, so they have to save £9k before they can start. This takes a while and they may need help from their family, but they manage it. The mortgage they need to take out will therefore be for £81k, and perhaps their repayments will be about £400 a month (I'm not sure of amounts but exactitude doesn't matter too much for the point I want to make). 

Some costs in life are region-specific, others are national. Care assistants are paid minimum wage wherever you live, and only those teachers who work in central London get extra for regional costs — otherwise the wages are equal across the country (as far as I'm aware; correct me if I'm wrong).

So the income of these two families is identical, but the costs are not.

The couple living in the SE, on the same income, has to find £30k deposit for their family home of the same size, and has payments for a £260k mortgage to find, which may be about £900k a month. They live where they do because that is where they grew up — where their friends and family and sense of belonging and their roots are. I cannot for the life of me see why the political Left thinks these people are better off than the ones in the NE with the same wages but much less to find to fund there homes.

Not only that, but one of the costs that tends to be regional rather than national is building maintenance and repair work — it costs a lot more in the SE. So the couple living in the SE, on the same income as the couple in the NE, is only just scraping by, where the couple in the NE can live relatively comfortably — in the same kind of house on the same kind of income. This means the couple in the NE has better opportunity to save for their old age than the couple in the SE. Even if they save £86k each to cover the costs of care up to the govt cap, they still won't have any greater outlay than the couple in the SE if that couple (in the SE) can save nothing.

Let's say each couple inherits £100k on the decease of their parents. If the couple in the SE use it all to clear their mortgage they still have a substantial monthly amount to find for the residue owed. The couple in the NE, by contrast, can clear their mortgage and put some by in savings towards the care costs of their old age.

They pay off their mortgages and they grow old. 

If neither couple has put any in savings, and both couples need to sell their homes to pay for care costs, it is true that the couple in the SE will have more to leave their children — but look, what sacrifices they had to make along the way to get that nest egg together! The couple in the NE have less to leave, it is true, but still the value of the house is enough to cover the cost of care and leave a little over — enough over to fund a substantial contribution towards a deposit for a home in that area, for their children.

I simply cannot see why people are saying it is the couple in the NE who is suffering from this arrangement. Both couples will have to sell their family home to fund the care, but the children of the couple in the NE have less to find to set themselves up with their own home, and the couple in the NE have had much greater opportunity to save for their old age than the couple in the SE. And both couples have the shelter of govt provision to fund their care after the first few months in a nursing home.

Further, if the issue is (as the political Left is saying) about leaving one's home as an inheritance to one's children, then do not those children also bear some responsibility, and have some opportunity, in this scenario?

The (now adult) children in the NE have had the same disproportionately advantageous opportunity to buy a cheap house, so are less likely to need help from their elderly parents' property investment. 

And couldn't the adult children help with the care of their parents, and so reduce costs, and maximise the amount of inheritance left over? 

Where the cost of living in a nursing home is about a thousand pounds per person per week, a carer will usually charge about £10 an hour. So for £140 a week, a carer could come in for an hour morning and evening to help with dressing and washing and putting a meal ready in the microwave, while the adult children could look after house and garden maintenance, getting in groceries, and clinic visits. As this will result in a hefty inheritance, that seems reasonable to me.

Since the adult children's own children will now have grown up and gone into the world, there is also the option of taking the elderly parent into their own home, thus further reducing the cost of care and making 100% of the sale of the old people's home available to the family.

I do know there are all sorts of reasons — divorce and step-families being a primary one — why people don't want to follow this course of action; but surely that's on them, not on the government?

It comes back to the same old thing — sharing our resources makes them go further; helping each other enriches us. Yes, we rely on government to create a compassionate society in which people can flourish, but we also have considerable personal opportunity to make our lives work — and that inevitably involves sacrifice, difficult choices, and spending time with people we may not like.

I personally don't regard that as government responsibility. that's the bit I have to do for myself. I want government to get on with carrying out its duties with transparent honesty, working to establish world peace, and creating strategies to tackle climate change.

Sources of joy — demonetising

 My mother was a complex woman, from a family with a lot of mental illness. She herself had suicidal depression and was under treatment for it her whole adult life. At the point of her death she was on the max dose she could have, but was still seized with anxiety and terror. But her personality, like everyone's, was many faceted. She also had (I know this sounds incompatible) a sort of casual insouciance — "Oh, it'll be all right," she'd say. And she found much of life funny; she laughed a lot. As well as that she was shrewd and careful (she made some seriously ill-advised decisions toward the end of her life, but I expect many people do), not miserly but never one to overspend.

She loved material things — her furniture and paintings, her clothes and china, her jewellery, her ornaments, her rugs and curtains, pretty much everything in her home, even her handkerchiefs and nightdresses. She loved her car. She liked doing ordinary domestic things — enjoyed driving around rural England buying things and going out for coffee, while she still could.

For all this you need money, and well-judged investment meant she reached old age with plenty of it. 

But it intrigued me that I never saw her look so truly happy as when she gave it away. She gave me and my sister some truly enormous dollops of money in the course of her life, and when she did so I saw more joy in her than anything else ever brought her.

St Paul said the love of money is the root of all evil, and we do well to pay attention to that observation, because it's true.

I personally find money more than useful — necessary. I know there are people who live entirely without money, and I esteem them, but I also notice they depend on the money everyone else has, to create the infrastructure in which they continue to participate. I mean, if you have a bad ankle break, it is money that makes it possible for society to work together with the end result of fixing your ankle — the manufactured and equipped ambulance and paramedics, the pain meds and antibiotics and surgical instruments, the surgeon and nurses and anaesthetist and hospital with its theatre and wards and communication system and lights and kitchen and plumbing and sheets on the beds . . . all these have to come from somewhere, which implies co-operation, and money is like a kind of machine oil that keeps everything working together. Without money, in that scenario, you'd have a lot of pain, you might die of blood loss or infection, and you'd probably have a deformed (and probably painful) foot for life. Even if you were one of the people who lives without money, all that would still be true.

So I don't even try to live without money, but at the same time I try hard to demonetise my life — to give things away, to share, to recycle and upcycle and swap and re-use and make things for myself out of stuff left over.

I have made hats out of dish towels, dresses out of old sheets, a bed base and shelves from a fence we replaced with a hedge that we grew from cuttings from friends' gardens. Our pets have been rescue animals, not bought from breeders. In my room almost nothing was bought from a shop, but made for me with love. I have a chair — a plastic garden chair a lady along the road was throwing out because she no longer wanted it. When I expressed interest she washed it up as good as new and brought it along for me.

I know we all need some money to get by, so I try to buy some things from small family firms — my warm winter cardigans come from the wool of sheep in the Pennine hills spun and knitted and sold by a small firm in Leicestershire. The meat in my shopping basket that will be delivered to my home on Friday comes from this farm in Staffordshire.

But some things — like the bread I'll be toasting for my tea in an hour or so — come from the big supermarket at the end of the road. Although it's a big corporation (Asda) it also has a very benign presence in the community, collecting for the food bank, and allowing schoolchildren to eat free in the café, and helping generously with various community projects. There are two reasons I like to shop there — one is that the products are cheap, which makes my money go further so I have more to give and share; the second reason is that I can walk to it, so I don't have to run a car or even spend money on a bus. 

I believe in walking, and living simply, and owning little, and sharing what we have. 

So, although this may seem contradictory, I both accept the necessity of money and believe in demonetising my life. I think it's all there in that word "currency" — I see it like a stream flowing through the landscape for the nourishment of all the people and animals and plants on its banks (yes, the banks — where we keep a little set aside for the needs of our lives, and for contingencies).

I think security and peace and contentment can flow from having enough money to participate in society — but I think joy comes from demonetising; from giving, sharing, making things yourself, writing your own books and getting together to make music, growing your own food, making friends with wild creatures, gathering food from the hedgerows.

Sources of joy — being loved

 One of the greatest sources of joy is being loved. It is comforting and makes me happy.

In the mornings, every day, my husband makes me a cup of tea when he makes his own, and brings it upstairs to me.

I usually wake early but spend the first couple of hours of the day doing things online or writing, so that means I have a cup of tea in bed every morning. Nettle tea is my tipple.

Here's my cup of tea from this morning.

But the thing is, there's more than just a cup of tea in that picture. It's a photograph of love.

Having a cup of tea brought up to me every single morning feels like the most amazing luxury — it makes me feel most extraordinarily loved and blessed. 

But then, there's the cup the tea is in. My youngest daughter saw it when she was living in London, and thought I'd like it, and bought if for me, because she loves me. I drink my morning tea from it every day. The tea is made with love and the cup was chosen and given with love.

Then there's the thing the cup is standing on. I asked my husband (he's a woodworker) if he would make me a little white cupboard to cover the electric sockets on the wall by my bed — I think electric sockets are very useful but also very ugly. So he did. He made it for me carefully and precisely, and put it on the wall for me, just because I wanted it and he loves me. And it made a dinky little bedside table right by my bed, perfect for my cup of tea. How lucky am I?

And then there's the wall, painted yellow — but not by me. A few years ago, my husband painted that room pale green for me, at my request, and it was lovely; but over time I decided it was not quite right — I wanted spice box colours. So he dismantle my wardrobe (which he made for me) and took out my bed (which he made for me) and unscrewed the socket cover that he made for me, and admitted my room all over again, in the colours I wanted — two shades of yellow and a shade of green, including the ceiling. It's perfect now. So my room is painted in love and furnished with love, and how blessed can one person be?

But look, there's also the calligraphy above the cup. That was made for me by my eldest daughter as an encouragement and affirmation of faith when our family was going through difficult times. It was her gift of love to me. I had it framed and hung it on my wall, and every day I see it and it reminds me that she loves me and made something beautiful for me, and that God loves me and has a shining path for me to walk in and I will not miss my way because his love over-shines me.

This — this love that surrounds me and upholds me and nourishes my soul, is a source of joy to me.

Who loves you? If nobody loves you at all, there are dogs waiting to be rescued. Dogs have so much love to give.

Sources of joy — music

Well, I am very blessed to share a home with musicians, which means that on any evening there's a chance of the house having Mozart arias billowing around it as violin and flute duets — and that brings me joy for sure!

To participate in music is probably the most joyous of all. Here's the father of my children as a young man singing with the friends we lived with in York, and here are my children playing for a chapel Christmas coffee morning a few years ago.

A memory's treasure for me is the long-gone days of sitting round the table singing folk songs after supper — I am so glad I had that in my life, even if it has gone now. Norma Waterson and her family and friends singing together reminds me of those days. We still sing round the piano sometimes, and it's a wonderful thing that we have such a wealth of music online, and here are some of my favourites:

• Just about anything by George Ezra — I love Budapest, Shotgun and this glorious video of Listen to the Man with Ian McKellen.
• I love the music of Joni Mitchell, and I used to have her album Blue and listen to it over and over. My favourite song of all was Carey.
• I love classical music too, of course, and Mozart is my favourite composer — just about anything by Mozart, but two favourites are the Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute, and this aria from The Marriage of Figaro (though I wish Dame Kiri of the sublime voice wouldn't slide the notes so much). Oh, and there's the incomparable Laudate Dominum from Mozart's Vespers, sung here by Cai Thomas. When I was writing my Hawk and Dove novels, it was one of the pieces in which I soaked my soul. 
• I love music from a variety of religious traditions — like the songs of Taizé, or the Plum Village community, or the a cappella harmonies of Anabaptist choirs, or this long and beautiful chant from Robert Gass and friends which was the last thing my husband Bernard heard on this earth; his soul slipped free and left us just as it finished playing. He had the Mozart Laudate Dominum (above) at his funeral, and chose this to play as we bore his coffin in.

And there's so much more! It's like being able to get joy in a packet like butter or flour — you just open it up and there it is for you. 

Sources of joy: colour

 I made a little poster out of these words that appealed to me.

That says exactly what I feel is my path for this present time.

If I ask myself what contribution I can make in these days of transition when the edifices of the past are crumbling and the future so scarily uncertain, I have to acknowledge the only things I can offer have this in common: they are all extremely small.

Every passing day brings urgent calls for money from people whose need is dire — those who have to watch their children starve, those who have no clean water (or even none), those unjustly imprisoned, those facing homelessness and destitution, refugees who have lost everything; also animals abandoned or tortured in vivisection laboratories and factory farms; and people trying to create a better future by regenerative farming and planting trees — all of them deserve funding, and what I have doesn't go very far at all.  

When it comes to activism and political commitment, again I can offer so little. I get tired easily and quickly, I have low energy levels these days.

But I think it is possible to keep faith with the purposes of God simply by maintaining a quiet radiance. 

I like this website about joy — they made a good video, which you come to if you scroll down the page. 

And then I saw this on Facebook today —

— and my heart immediately acknowledged the connection between gratitude and joy.

In years past I was somewhat sceptical of the whole follow-your-bliss school of thought, but I have come to accept that happy people are good to be around, and it is extremely hard to make someone else happy if you are not happy yourself. 

I also remember vividly how luminous and infectious was the joy I saw in others that first drew me to discover the presence of Jesus for myself.

So I think raising one's vibration and reaching for joy form an essential part of spiritual practice, and are a gift to others in days when so many are anxious and afraid.

Joy doesn't depend on money, status, power or success — you can just rootle about and find it like a pig looking for truffles, in the ordinary everyday circumstances of life.

But you can't be joyful if you don't honestly feel it — pretend joy has an uneasy artificiality in it; toothy grins and a bogus gleam in the eye are a poor substitute.Therefore, you have to look for sources of joy, in order to keep raising your own vibration so you have something to share. You have to forage for joy.

Giving this some thought, I reflected on what is a source of joy for me, and certainly colour is. I love colour. I like the sun on brick walls or filtering through stained glass. I like russet apples, and citrus fruits. I like the flames of a burning log on the hearth. 

Today, just for a brief while, the setting sun slanted across beneath the brooding grey November clouds to shine on the chimneys of the house opposite —

— and that shone a light of joy into my heart.

I particularly enjoy the colours of my clothes and the blanket on my bed. 

They make me happy.

So do my earrings.

I know these are only small and humdrum things, but so what? My whole life is. Just pausing to rejoice in them and give thanks, to wonder at the colour of fallen leaves and dawn light — even to delight in the colour of strawberry jelly made in a plastic bowl — it all helps raise the vibe.

For me, clothing is a really important part of this, because it's so up close and personal, and part of every day. I take a minute in the morning to deliberately choose my clothes for the day and lay them out on my bed, enjoying the textures and colours and how they look against my colourful blanket. And it makes me happy.

Colours — just one of many sources of joy.

Do you love colour too? Do you enjoy your clothes? Do you have a favourite colour?

Simplicity for social justice and the wellbeing of creation

Climate change is — and should be — claiming our attention.

Eco-responsibility is not a niche interest or a different issue from Christian holiness. 

If you know the Bible, you will have grasped that the early stories include God placing eco-responsibility on humanity in the Garden of Eden, and entering a covenant relationship with all creation (not just Noah and his family) after the flood.

You'll know, too, that social justice is inextricably entwined with love of God, and that this two-stranded thread of faithfulness runs centre and front in the Law and the Prophets. The two sins of Israel that feature repeatedly are apostasy and social injustice. Climate change has a social justice component, because it creates poverty and impacts most heavily those who are already poor. The plight of many refugees can very often be traced indirectly, if not directly, to climate change. For instance, the Syrian conflict that erupted into so ugly and prolonged a crisis, and made so many settled middle class ordinary people into refugees, can be traced back to roots in degradation of the land through climate change, that forced young men to seek employment in the cities to fulfil their family responsibilities of care and provision. It started that simply and ended in multi-national bombing and people strewn across Europe, destitute and persecuted, risking their lives under lorries and on the open sea.

If we are serious about the Gospel, we have to pay attention to climate change. In our day, loving the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our mind and with all our strength implies and includes eco-responsibility.

Two of the very best responses every one of us can make are simplicity and sharing. Neither of these requires wealth or technology of particular skills and abilities. Both should be foundational to our daily practice. This article, about increasing cost of living linked to increasing scarcity driven by climate change, makes very clear that our wellbeing as individuals and as a community will in the very near future depend heavily on simplicity and sharing. I think we would do well to pray every single morning, "Please show me how to practice simplicity and sharing today. Please lead me in the way of sharing and simplicity."

To add to that general thought, I'd like to offer one particular issue to think about today — microfibres.

As I'm sure you know, when we wash synthetic clothing it releases microfibres into the water, which find their way into the ocean — they are even in the Arctic ice and the remotest reaches of the deepest seas. From there they enter the water cycle and get into the body of fish, with the end result that they are also in our food and from there they get into our bodies. The bodies of animals, birds, fish and human beings have an increasing percentage of plastic.

In recent times, as I've grown older and found life more tiring, I've increasingly opted for clothing made of synthetic fabrics. I did know the damage it does, but I made that choice anyway. I've had to repent of that and go back to making natural-fibre choices as far as I can. But still my skirts have some polyester in as well as wool, and I wear nylon tights and my bras are made of something synthetic.

Going forward, washing machines (at least some, and I hope all) will be made with filters to catch microfibres and prevent them flowing out when we wash our clothes. There are also filters that can be retro-fitted onto existing washing machines.

But there is an easier, cheaper, less technical option we can reach for right now — filter bags for laundry. The one I have is about the size of a pillowcase and zips shut. You put any synthetic fibre garments inside it, and just wash them as usual — they can go in the machine or washed by hand, whichever you usually do. You fill the bag up to two-thirds, so the clothes inside can move about in the water and get properly clean.

Washing the laundry inside a bag extends the life of the clothes, because it reduces by a lot (about 85%) the breakage of fibres through the garment being tangled up with other things and bashed about in the machine.

When the wash is done, the clothes are hung out on the line as usual to dry, and the filter bag is zipped shut and also hung out to dry. Once it's dry, you unzip it and scoop out any fibres traded inside, putting them out with your household waste.

The bag I have is called a Guppy Friend. It's made by a non-profit organisation called Stop Micro Waste. They have some helpful advice about laundry here.

I got my Guppy Friend washing bag from Boobalou, but it's available from several online eco-stores (it's here on Peace With The Wild and here on Ethical Superstore), and seems to be the one most commonly recommended.

I thought £25 rather a lot to pay for a mesh bag — but I guess this is yet another benefit of practicing simplicity; it makes the money go further, putting expensive items like that within my reach. It is, after all, a lot cheaper than running a car. And it's also where sharing comes in. Because I live in a shared house, I can fold it up and leave it ready on top of the washing machine, so the other people in our house can use it when they do their laundry too — and it doesn't cost them anything; which is a small way of loving them.

Both for washing my hair and washing my clothes I've also gone over to using laundry strips and shampoo bars (I've linked to the ones I've been actually using, but there are all sorts to explore), to eliminate one more unnecessary piece of plastic packaging.

On the subject of plastic packaging rather than laundry, I'm also reluctantly accepting the wisdom of committing to getting my vegetables from a veggie box scheme — local veggies and no packaging at all (they collect the box and re-use it). I did this before but found it hard to keep up with eating all the veg, but I'm trying again. I get mine from Abel and Cole, and I'm also going to get my baked goods from them because they come in paper wrapping not plastic (these are delicious), and for my meat I'm going to buy their wild game, because their packaging is minimal and the animals have been the most free and natural they can possibly be. I can get eggs and bread from them too, but I like to get some things from local shops, so I'll get these on the high street mostly. And at the present time all our fruit comes from our garden, and our herbs for seasoning. I'm starting to think wistfully about oranges, but they'll be in season soon, and you can buy them unwrapped from most shops.