If you're undecided about what to buy the eco-warrior in your life for Christmas, then this just might be the answer. Natalie Fee, the Bristol-based campaigner who set up City to Sea to reduce plastic pollutants (among her other achievements), has written a book full of everyday switches you can make to reduce your Earth-shattering footprint in everything you do.
This is a nice-looking product as well, and one would presume it is plastic-free! With it's uncoated hardboard cover and saddle-stitch binding, there's not a hint of glue or bleach about this book. But you would expect nothing less from Natalie. Especially given the fact she de-plastics your life from bedroom to gym throughout this tome.
Written in an accessible, chatty tone, Natalie isn't overly preachy but uses lots of recent research to back up her points (slightly annoyingly, none of the endnotes lead you anywhere as you have to log on to a website to access the citations used, which is a bit of a faff, but it's a minor grumble).
A lot of the ideas in here you will already be familiar with or already doing (such as switching to plastic free packaging, ditching the car for shorter journeys, turning off taps, refilling your water bottle etc), but there are still plenty of suggestions you may not have considered. For instance, I had never really thought about the environmental impact of all these potentially carcinogenic WiFi signals clogging up the environment, and how often do we really remember to turn off absolutely all our electrical things (except the fridge, obviously) at the wall at night? I'm sure I'm guilty of a lot of the little things highlighted in this book but have been given a lot of pointers to make sure I do things better in the future.
It's unlikely that anyone will do every single thing suggested in this eye-catching book, but even if you only adopt a handful of them, or mention a few of them to your friends, then you will already be making a big positive change for the planet.
Published by Laurence King, you can find out more or order direct from the publisher here with free postage. After all, you wouldn't possibly consider ordering unethically from Amaz*n... would you?!
Oh, how delicious Expiation is. If revenge is a dish best served cold, then Elizabeth Von Arnim's unlikely shero Milly Bott manages to tuck into second and third helpings without needing to go anywhere near a hot plate.
In its prime, Persephone Books, that wonderful publisher of long-lost women's fiction, issued years and years of book after book of fantastically readable, unputdownable literature by writers you often had not previously heard of but would go on to seek out in every second-hand bookshop you passed. There followed a few years of slightly tougher tomes, but I'm delighted to say that in the past year or two, almost every single Persephone Book I've read has been a treat. None more so than this delight from Elizabeth Von Arnim.
Elizabeth Von Arnim isn't a writer I had come across before, although she has written around 20 books (of which Expiation was the one of the few not still in print) and experienced a colourful romantic life that clearly influenced her writing.
Because in this novel, our protagonist Milly Bott is introduced to us on the day she buries her husband, Ernest, who has been killed suddenly in a road accident. But (and this isn't giving anything away because the reader finds this out in the first few pages), wealthy Ernest has written her out of his will on account of finding out that for ten years she has been having an affair with an academic named Arthur.
Surrounding Milly's disinheritance is the wider Bott family - who see themselves as the leading lights in the fictional London suburb of Titford. The small-minded Botts are terrified that the neighbours and servants will gossip and that they will lose their social standing. They are aghast at what to do about Milly, who has been left penniless and homeless, so that they are simultaneously least inconvenienced by her and least tainted by her sins.
In this claustrophobic but sprawling social satire, we follow closely behind Milly's shoulder in the few days following Ernest's funeral. We see her escape the Botts, reunite with her long-long sister and meet again with Arthur... and through it all we quickly see we are following the one, calm, steady influence in the book, the one who remains un-rocked by the constant disturbance that is whipped up in her wake.
The Bott brothers and their wives are hideous people, painted as caricatures who deserve everything that they bring on themselves. The outsiders (solicitors, siblings, boarding house keepers) are painted as ridiculous, pseudo-Dickensian tropes who are fresh from the boards of your local pantomime. And all the while, grieving Milly quietly goes along trying to do the right thing and atone for her indiscretion - as the novel's title suggests.
To my mind, the absolute star of Expiation is the very elderly Bott matriarch who, encased under shawls in her bed, sees her sons and daughters-in-law for what they really are, and has the authority to send them all away when she's had enough. Bravo, Mrs Bott.
Expiation is a thoroughly enjoyable study into the social mores of the late 1920s. It's a delightful look at the small-minded Brits who live in fear of the servants finding out who they really are (the detailed description of Mabel Bott's terror of her preposterously named butler, Mr Butler, is an absolute hoot). It's the sort of novel that hooks you in from the very first page and keeps you turning until, 362 pages later, you have breathlessly reached the end and barely paused to think.
