My Carbon Footprint: Refresh or fail, said nobody ever

It’s all my best mate’s fault. She came around last week and casually deposited a copy of the countryside aspirational living type of mag she’s got a rolling subscription to on the sofa. There, in big letters scrawled across the shiny cover – in yellow, obviously – was that word.

Whatever total chaos is going on in the wider world – ignored reports of an “unliveable planet”, genocide, political “leaders” ignoring the law but staying in office because of all the other chaos – nothing says stability, predictability, hope and, apparently, shopping as the turning of the seasons to spring.

You can sum it all up in one, increasingly grating, instruction: “refresh”. Now that the days are longer, the retail world is yet again telling us we need one – that what we really, definitely need to do right now is refresh our wardrobes, homes, entire lives it seems. That will make everything better. Definitely.

The suggestion is that we are inadequate without an update. Our lives are stale. We’re out of touch with the rest of the tribe. We’re not living our best life because our Easter table decorations (when did OTT decorating for Easter become a thing?) are last season, our jeans are the wrong length and our cushion covers aren’t lemon.

We need to reset, we need different, we need more, we need new. Not for any good reason, just because it is spring. Or perhaps because it has been a few months since we bought a whole load of other new stuff for Christmas, and the other artificial consumption frenzy around Black Friday is still ages away. Even better, we should all have an eco refresh and buy all this other stuff that comes in unbleached boxes with a picture of the planet on the label to prove their sustainable creds, too.

Well, they can do one. For starters, someone needs to tell the acres of lifestyle sites, vacuous identikit social media accounts and women’s home living-type magazines (plastic coated, with a carbon footprint of around a kilogram each, and a cover price that brings out the inner Victorian great aunt in me: “I could buy a second-hand copy of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (abridged) for that and get change”) that there’s quite a scary cost of living crisis going on.

Inflation, we were told yesterday, is now rising by 7 per cent, but wage growth and benefits are only up 3-4 per cent. So in real terms we’re already looking at a 3-4 per cent cut to income every year. Experts are warning that it’s not over yet, and that 9 per cent inflation is more than possible within a couple of months. Some of us are probably there already.

A new round of soft furnishings can wait, thanks. Second, this all played beautifully into my hands when aforementioned best mate launched into the latest round of “all this eco stuff is so complicated, so conflicting, I don’t know where to start, and I haven’t got time to start delving into it all”.

She’d had a few by this point in proceedings and had clearly forgotten that I have a properly smug stock response to the question she’s not actually looking for an answer to. Consume less. Easy peasy. In fact, she could start with that magazine subscription. Once she’s finished bashing me over the head with it.

To be very clear indeed, we’re not, at a time when millions are relying on food banks and millions more are crumbling under the pressure of trying to make ends meet, talking about going hungry here. We’re talking about ignoring the massive, clever, omnipresent buying messages that work so very hard at telling us that everything will be brighter with a consuming splurge, a shake-up... a spring refresh.

And a summer one. And an autumn one, and a random Tuesday one. Ooh, and would you look at that, there’s even a handy buy now, pay later option if you can’t actually afford any of it. It’s just not sustainable – in any sense of the word.

‘Going Zero: One Family’s Journey to Zero Waste and a Greener Lifestyle’, by Kate Hughes, is out now