Across the pond

Wake up early. How early I don’t know, but I cannot see any chink of light through the curtains. There are immediately two or three blogs in my head, which I want to get down on paper. But I don’t jump out of bed. The energy is there but my limbs are frozen by the voices in my head. ‘Are you getting enough sleep, Robert.’ ‘Stay in bed otherwise you will be falling asleep again by lunchtime.’

Turn on my bedside lamp. The light blinds me, so I turn it right off again. Pick up my led pocket torch which I keep on the bedside table, so that if I do wake early in pitch dark I can get out of the room without falling over something and waking my wife. It is 3.30 PM, a lot earlier than I thought. But I don’t feel at all sleepy. And since I am alone in the house I don’t have to worry about disturbing anyone. Or face worried voices at breakfast, ‘Were you up all night, Dad?’.

Free to please myself and behave in whatever way I want to behave. So instead of blinding myself again I use my torch to light the stairs and take me to the kitchen to make my first cup of tea of the day. I don’t switch on the hallway light and I don’t switch on the sitting room light. Dawn is surely near. The lights of Portland Bill are sparkling but the sky is grey not black. And when I out on to the terrace I find a light grey sky with a few small black clouds. The moon is shining in the eastern sky, but all I can see of it is the last slender curve of an old moon. Beneath it the sky is much lighter. Is that the light of the moon or is the sun already rising?

Inside the house it is still darkish, but I can see quite well enough not to need the hallway light, nor the dining room light, and when I get to the kitchen I realise that I don’t really need the kitchen light either.

By now I am into an experiment of doing something in my own personal lifestyle to help stave off global warming. I realise how much energy I am wasting by turning on all these lights and leaving them on, until I remember to turn them off again. I keep my torch on, although I can actually see quite well enough to fish a tea bag out of the tin and fill the kettle. And there is no problem in finding the milk because as soon as I open the fridge door the light comes on automatically.

I cannot remember what time sun-rise is at this time of year, but there is a newspaper on the kitchen table. It tells me that sun will rise at 4.57 A.M. in Bristol, which is the nearest place in their table to Charmouth. An hour and half to go, yet it is light enough for me to write in my notebook, and read what I have written, without any strain.

Now I am at the computer there is absolutely no need to turn on the light in the study. The screen is brighter than it is at the middle of the day and I can read the smallest print without any strain. And I can read my notebook. But it feels odd. It is still darkish and normally I would have the study light on.

Habit is the most powerful of all the rulers of human emotions. And it affects one hundred per cent of human beings, not just those who become habitual users of alcohol and the far more powerful pills that today’s teenagers seem to be able to buy on street corners.

Habit is so powerful because it helps us to be more efficient. Our unconscious minds take over and guide our actions like sleepwalkers, leaving our conscious minds free to wrestle with more important and difficult choices we have to make while getting through the day. Even now, nearly three years after my final, final retirement, when I jump on my bike in Gospel Oak I find myself riding the route to City University. To go anywhere else I have to concentrate hard on the route I am taking. How much more difficult for us all to make the radical changes in our habits, necessary if global warming is going to be turned back.

But human beings can change their habits. In my regular trips up and down the M3 since I moved to Dorset just under a year ago, I had noticed how the average motorway speed had increased. Most of the traffic was moving in two of the three lanes at between 80 and 85 miles an hour. On my last trip down it was radically different. Apart from a few impatient idiots, weaving in and out of the traffic in their urge to get somewhere as soon as possible, everyone was keeping to 70 mph or a little above. They were even obeying the 50 mph sections, even when there was no obvious evidence of any road work actually going on.

This change has come about not because everyone now accepts the threat of global warming. But simply because of the surge in the petrol price which means that even the owners of modest family cars now have to take £50 from their wallets to fill their tanks.