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Jayne Dawson: When green means gloom
That's it then. The end of being able to see in the dark.
Bring out your candles, hunt down your torches and trim your oil lamps (yes, we'll all need a training course to find out exactly what that one means.)
But we'll definitely need all these weapons in our armoury because life is not going to be the same. The good years, the years of being bathed in sweet light no matter what the sun happened to be doing, the years of defying mother nature, are over.
Because proper, old-fashioned lightbulbs have been banned and from now on we will all have to exist in the murky half-light that is the energy-efficient bulb.
Since yesterday, the 100 watt clear and the frosted incandescent of any wattage are no more. Once the stocks in the shops run out, that will be it. It will be curtains for clarity, and incandescent is pretty much how some of us are feeling, and not in a good way.
Soon we will look back on the years of the so-called old-fashioned, so-called energy-wasting bulb as a golden period in our so-called lives.
We will remember with a longing, a yearning, a painful nostalgia, the days when we could snap on a switch and flood a room with brightness.
Glory days
We will feel the way we do when we look back on the glory days of the welfare state. You know, that golden period post-1945 when people had jobs for life and secure, final salary pensions, and NHS dental care as a right, not a hang-on-to-it-for grim-death privilege.
That's all gone now: the economy is in gloom and so, very soon, will be your living room.
Proper, light-up-a-room bulbs will become a bit like the Roman period of British history – you know, that time when we were briefly introduced to all manner of magic gadgets, like straight roads and baths, before the dark ages descended.
Soon the dark ages will descend again when the proper bulbs run out, and they will run out very soon because people have been going on raids, staging massive buy-outs, becoming cunning and determined in their search for a 100 watt frosted with bayonet fitting.
They have been doing this because they know what I know: that energy-saving bulbs are just rubbish; that they give off a "light" that is thick and yellow and dull, and that they don't release even that until at least ten minutes after you have switched the switch.
I speak from bitter experience because I've already had them in my home for far too long, attached to various lamps like alien beings, and sneaked in by others who care nothing for being able to see. Trust me, they are the oddest of concepts: a lightbulb that doesn't cast any light.
Trying to read by the "glow" of one of these things is to experience life before the Smokeless Fuel Act when thick smogs would descend on parts of Leeds, so impenetrable and nasty that passengers would be forced to get off buses and walk in front of them to guide the bus driver – well, that's what happened to my mum once anyway.
Soon she's going to experience that journey all over again, only it's going to be in her own home, the day she decides to switch on a light after the sun has gone down.
Don't get the wrong idea here: It's not that I'm against saving energy. Not really. Not totally. It's true that I have a fair bit of leeway, since I pretty much didn't use any of the planet's resources before the age of 25. We 1970s girls, making our way without benefit of cars, telephones, central heating, and hair straighteners, we were the Apache Indians of the carbon footprint world, we left no trace.
But I don't want to go around positively squandering the stuff now, of course I don't. I'm as willing to be energy-efficient as the next mother with children to leave behind on the planet, it's just that those energy-efficient alternatives, well they've got to still be able to do the job, haven't they?
All-electric
If petrol cars were banned and only all-electric cars were available, but only ones that would travel at 15 miles an hour, then things would be said, wouldn't they?
Jeremy Clarkson would be leading the revolt. There would be slow crawls up the motorway to Downing Street, insults would be traded, comparisons would be made with food mixers and irons and other things with more electrical oomph than the new breed of car.
Well that's pretty much what has happened to our bulbs.
So this is me, not exactly in the Jeremy Clarkson league of protest, but feeling a bit fed-up and making a protest on behalf of people everywhere who don't really fancy the course on oil-lamp trimming.
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Weather for Leeds
Sunday 12 February 2012
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