“The penguins have got it pretty good”

WE HAVE watched David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet.

Alas, while I was saying ‘aah look at the baby penguins, they’re so sweet,’ my husband was busy drawing a straight line from the melting polar ice caps directly to our house.

“The ice-caps are melting, all those delicate ecosystems will die because of people like [careful pause] us,” he says.

For years my husband has wandered round the house, switching off lights and muttering things like ‘such a waste of resources’ and ‘people wonder why there’s global warming’, but now the heat is really on. Or rather off. Under our new Stop the Ice Caps Melting regime, no sooner have I turned a radiator or light switch on than he’s turned it off again when I’m not looking.

Stop the Ice Caps Melting is a fine name for this regime but I can think of better ones: Turning the Lights off Where the Invisible People are, for example, or Put Another Jumper On. Anyway, whatever you want to call it, it’s running alongside another regime at the moment and this one’s called We Need to Tighten Our Belts Because Christmas Has Screwed Us Over Again.

Between the two regimes, I’m thinking the penguins have got it pretty good. “You can see this house from miles away,” he says when he comes home from town. “It’s lit up like the bloody Titanic. 1, 2, 3,” he says, switching off the kitchen lights so that I’m standing in darkness. “But I’m in this room,” I say. “You are now,” he says, “but you weren’t a second ago, I saw you come in from the hall when I came in, where you’ve left the lights on by the way.”

He goes into the hall. “Four, five, six,” he says, switching four, five and six off with righteous flourishes. He switches off the barn lights. “Seven, eight.”

He heads upstairs, switching as he goes. “Nine, 10, 11, this is unbelievable,” he says. “Twelve, 13. Thirteen bloody lights,” he says. I’ve followed him upstairs to get my laptop. All our light switches are situated in places that are least suited to purpose; for instance, the stair light is at the top of the stairs. He’s just turned it off and — I can only presume since I can’t see — he’s feeling his way down the stairs in total blackout while I am feeling my way up along the walls. Half way up, we pass each other. His disembodied voice says, “When you turn the stair light on, don’t forget turn it off before you come down.”

He’s replaced every bulb in the house with low energy bulbs and since these bulbs take approximately five minutes to emit illumination stronger than candle-light, I stumble around my bedroom in one-watt gloom, looking for my lap-top. I switch the stair light off and feel my way back down the stairs. I hear a voice in the blackness, at the bottom of the stairs. “Will you tell Dad to stop turning the flipping lights off?” the voice says. “How am I supposed to do my homework in pitch black?”

I hear another voice shouting from the upstairs loo. “For god’s sake, Dad, can you check to see if anyone is in the room before you turn the lights off?” As far as heating goes, I can only repeat: the penguins have got it pretty good. “I am going to light the fires from now on,” he tells me. “And we need to stop buying firelighters. What’s wrong with paper plaits?”

Paper plaits have made a comeback. I think they’re part of the Tighten Our Belts regime and they might belong to Stop the Ice-caps Melting too. And I can tell you this: THERE IS A LOT WRONG WITH PAPER PLAITS.

To make a paper plait:

1. Take a sheet of newspaper and fold it 400 times in complicated fashion.

2. Take another 60 sheets of newspaper and fold them 400 times.

3. When you’re done playing origami, plait the sheets together.

4. Put them in wood-burner.

5. Place one stick no thicker than a finger on top and light with match.

Generally speaking, this is when my husband says, “See, look at that fire go” and goes off to play origami for half an hour in another room — which is exactly the time it takes for the paper plaits and one stick to turn to ash.

Like I said, I’m not sure whether paper plaits belong to the Stop the Ice-caps Melting regime but there’s one thing I know for sure: they’re definitely part of Put Another Jumper On.