So with Lyndsey having spilled the beans on our new electrical hook-up, I wanted to tell you about another peculiar juxtaposition of our yurt-life. We have Internet access!

Of all the things that we just ‘can’t live without’, Internet access is one. Never mind a flushing toilet, hot running water, central heating and lights, the one thing that just seems so essential, is good Internet access.

Now our yurt is in the far corner of a field in deepest, darkest Carmarthenshire and we live a fairly simple basic life within it. But we have a huge amount of ‘human capital’ behind our web access.

Earlier in the year, a combined European effort put a new communications satellite into space. A big dish in Italy ‘sends the Internet’ up into space to it, which is then beamed back down to Earth. We have a small dish mounted on our stable to pick-up that signal. We then fire it across the field via WiFi to a USB receiver, tied to the yurt crown-piece, which we then connect to the laptop.

The technology behind all that is clearly amazing! The science and the engineering is mind boggling. And that all of that is now relatively modestly priced and fairly straight forward to set-up, bringing all of the world to our little corner of a field; fantastic!

Does this craving for the Internet challenge our eco-ideals? Well, there’s surely a lot of embodied energy and other resources in all that technology. I suppose it depends how much you value the Internet (and what you use it for). But it is great isn’t it? And I think a world full of Internet connected yurts, tipis, wigwams, adobe huts, log cabins, etc is a pretty good vision of a sustainable future.

And while I’m obviously a very privileged Westerner, I don’t have to feel too guilty about it all because, as I saw in the National Geographic the other week, they’re doing it out in Mongolia too. There’s a photo of a father and daughter in a ger (the ‘proper’ name for a yurt) in Ulaan Baatar watching a YouTube video on their iPhone! I wonder how interested in my story they would be.

After enduring three pretty harsh winters with no solar power to speak of we have succumbed.
Just last week we brought some armoured cable across the field and with it the wonder of energy.

With this modern marvel we are able to have a small oil radiator, we can charge up a radio and our phones and best of all we can have two small lamps on.

I don’t think we will ever take electricity for granted, particularly now we have lived without mains for so long. As this is our last winter in the yurt and as the last three have been so tough we don’t feel in any way guilty for this indulgence.

Why mains? We had considered alternatives however the only real alternative was wind. We had considered this carefully but positioning a wind turbine on our land is hard as there are so many hedges. There is one spot in the centre of our meadow, but we felt there could be issues with planning here so we opted out (for now).

In the future there is the possibility of hydro, at the moment it’s so prohibitively expensive we just cannot afford it (sadly). We are trying to do something at a community level but these things do always take time.

While they never totally lose their romance, candles are an essential part of our lives at this time of year. There isn’t enough daylight for our solar panel to provide us with electricity for lighting. So every night we dine by candlelight. Lovely. But having to cook and wash-up by candlelight is not great. It’s a little thing, but come the end of the winter, we really appreciate the days getting longer again.
So we know about candles. We’ve discovered that broadly there are two types: ones that burn, leaving behind an unburned substance that drips and clogs up candlesticks; and another type that is clean burning. You can happily stick them in an empty wine bottle and they won’t dribble down the side on to the table and they’ll kindly vacate the space, ready for the next one. While we have no idea what the ingredients are of those two types, we count ourselves lucky that the non dribble ones exist and that we can buy them quite easily locally.
Well quite easily. The Co-op is one source. Or at least it was. Our recent experience served to remind us just how far from the mainstream we are.
“Why aren’t there any candles on the shelf?”
“Candles are a summertime product. We don’t sell them in the winter.”
!
So when the nights are longer and darker, we don’t want candles, right?!
How does this make sense? I suppose it must make sense to someone and may be it is a sign of how lucky we (well most of us) are to have a reliable and seemingly endless supply of electricity.
It’s something we will never take for granted ever again.