“We’ve just got a couple of chickens,” I said, “in an Eglu”.
“Ar!” replied the stallholder with a knowing smile, while preparing tasty hot-dogs for the Gee tribe, each dog lovingly made from his own home-reared Gloucester Old-Spots, “That’s the start of the Slippery Slope”.
It’s easy to get into a conversation with a smallholder, as I did – frequently – yesterday, at the first annual show of the Norfolk Smallholders’ Association.

Apparently, a couple of chickens is all it takes, and you’re hooked. It seems that when one expresses the desire to keep two fowl in the backyard, one is already in the smallholder mindset, and more will follow.

Not that we can do much in our suburban backyard. Pigs are out. So are ducks (sadly – I loved keeping these as a teenager) and alpacas (low-maintenance woolly ungulates, but really need a large paddock). There’s plenty of space, though, to make a proper chicken run, and there’ll be room for a small greenhouse and modest veg plot.

I’ve saved the old guttering and downpipes from our house when we had it all replaced last week, and will re-use it on our shed (a. k. a. Hagrid’s Hut) and the kids’ summerhouse (the Gryffindor Common-Room, naturally), so I can collect rainwater.

And whenever I am caught short outdoors, I pee on the compost heap. Seems a shame to flush all that useful nitrogen down the drain. Well, that’s what I’ll tell the police, when they call. But what with the clearings from the chickens – not to mention the rabbit – we’ll need a second compost heap. And a wormery.

Inside the house, all the light bulbs will soon be energy-savers; we’ve revamped our loft insulation, and are paying more attention to recycling. However, I think more extensive green solutions will be beyond our budget; our situation in a built-up area; or the space and layout afforded by a 1930s ex-council semi. So, though I might get a couple of solar-PV panels to charge things up in the shed, schemes such as rain-harvesting (to flush the loos), grey-water systems, solar-thermal heating and wind turbines are out.

The Gee’s emerging green conciousness has been fuelled by a book (a TV spinoff, as all books are, these days) called It’s Not Easy Being Green, by a retired army colonel called Dick Strawbridge. He and his family relocated from Worcestershire to a derelict farmhouse with quite a bit of land in Cornwall, and now have many of the innovations above, as well as a waterwheel to power their lights, and a shed where they make their own biodiesel from the chip fat of a local fish-and-chip shop.

What most impressed me about this book is that the author is a methodical man who is very far from a drippy hippy obsessed with everything ‘natural’ and who has a strong aversion to ‘chemicals’, as if organic food is made out of sugar and spice and all things nice, a kind of matter different from that governed by the law of mass action, and so on.

During the Strawbridge’s quest for greener pastures, they received an environmental ‘audit’ from Donnachadh McCarthy, author of Saving The Planet Without Costing The Earth.

Well, the Gees have this book, too, and whereas it has some useful tips (which we intend to follow), Mr McCarthy’s cloth is clearly cut from the knit-your-own-muesli grow-your-own-birkenstocks raffia-mafia stereotype now so easily lampooned. Strawbridge makes a welcome contrast to this, showing that green issues needn’t be confined to hemp-wearing crusties, glastonburying topics relevant to everyone, regardless of outlook or politics, as eccentric and rather smelly marginalia. Indeed, Strawbridge says quite candidly that he and McCarthy had quite a few heated arguments during the audit process, and one thing I noticed from my attendance at the Norfolk Smallholders’ Show was that ecowarriors were conspicuous by their absence – most people were in the Strawbridgian rather than the McCarthyan mould.

Thinking about green issues a bit more, and reading McCarthy’s advice on packaging and plastic bags, it occurs to me that many of the consumerist ills against which we are warned are relatively recent innovations. I can still remember shopping with my mother when I was a child. Plastic bags were a rarity; we went shopping to local stores on the bus, and not to a big supermarket in the car; my mother put all her shopping in a wicker trolley-basket; my father bought nails and other such manly things by weight, in a paper bag, and not in non-recyclable blister packs.

Now the Gees are resolved to do much the same, to take our reliable jute shopper with us to the local shops, and to ask for paper bags rather than plastic ones. It shouldn’t take too much effort to turn back the clock.

In those days, of course, people who had a car kept it for decades, and didn’t feel the compulsion to buy a new one every few years. I am comforted that it is greener to hang on to one’s ten-year-old gas-guzzling Volvo for another ten years, rather than scrapping it to buy an eco-car. Or, perish the thought, a 2CV. We may be going a little green round the edges, but really, there are limits.

On the other hand, my wife goes all gooey when she sees a dormobile…