Green, dismal and depressing

Well, I recycle, I freecycle, I compost, I hardly ever waste food, I have stopped buying clothes that I won't wear, I walk rather than drive, and I'm so saintly and earnest about it all that I revolt even myself (and many others when they hear that I save cat hair for birds-nest material in Spring), but the one thing that is unbearable is having to change to energy-saving lightbulbs.

My home, always cosily-lit despite varying stages of dilapidation and disorder, is gradually acquiring a bleak, chilly, unwelcoming and, well, unhomely look as these new monsters take over. Changing lampshades doesn't work that well, telling myself that we'll all get used to them doesn't help that much, and rearranging furniture so that some of the cold, stingy, mean-spirited light actually reaches me when I'm reading doesn't encourage settling down on a winter's evening with a good book. A 100-watt-equivalent went up in the hall today, and had to be removed once it had lumbered up to full strength, because the hall, already too pinched and narrow, was not improved by being lit like a shed. A lower-watt bulb on the first landing is grimly reminiscent of the gaslight which I saw once as a child, in my Cumbrian grandma's neighbours' house, and which impressed me enormously and lastingly as both ghastly and frightening.

I haven't read details of all the health concerns about these lightbulbs that are beginning to emerge; that would be altogether too depressing. The Lovely Son calls them Suicide Bulbs, and on dark, damp afternoons such as today's, I can wholeheartedly agree.