Supersize everything

When we got home from our trip (this home, the other home, the home that is our house in America, I mean), my immediate reaction on coming in the door, apart from "warm" and "not too smelly" and "ceiling hasn't caved in, so that's good", was that this is a lot of space for just us chickens. And that we have a lot of stuff. Why do we have so many saucepans?

I'm sure this isn't the first time I've remarked that everything is bigger here. The houses, so the furniture. The roads, so the cars, so the parking spaces. The plates, so the portions, so the people. The fridges, so the number of things that must be kept in the fridge. (Or maybe that's the other way around.) The ovens, so the cookie sheets. The number of channels; the hours of day or night during which children's programming is available.

And sometimes it makes no difference, but sometimes it makes life just that bit easier. Driving is easy, because the roads are wide and well signposted, and fuel is cheap, and you hardly ever need to reverse into a parking space with only three inches to spare on either side. We do take public transport, but we don't take public transport to the public transport: that is, we always drive to the Metro station rather than taking the bus that stops at the end of our road. I don't even know how often the bus goes past - that's how much we have never considered taking it.

I'm certainly not trying to imply that Americans are lazy; far from it. They work harder than any other people I can think of, with worse conditions as standard - no statutory vacation, no mandatory health insurance, no damn maternity leave at all.

And yet, I can't help thinking it's not good for people - my children, let's say - to grow up with all this largeness. Taking these things for granted and viewing the other, the things they see when they visit Europe, as the oddity; the quaint tinyness of things that are not American. Wouldn't it be healthier to view the smaller item as normal and the Cheesecake-Factory-sized portion as humungous and possibly obscene? (Okay, so most people understand that Cheesecake Factory portions are completely off the charts. Don't they?)

I think it must come down to environmental ethics and small-footprint stuff. Americans have the biggest carbon footprint of the planet, simply by living here, because we use so much of everything without a second thought. Because it's easy, and it's right there, and why the heck wouldn't you? You need a certain amount of leisure time, of disposable income and peer pressure, to implement the other, more environmental option, whether it's composting or hanging the washing on a line, or taking the bus or using cloth napkins.

Not everyone has the luxury of such things: until they (that anonymous "they" who are synonymous with communists, or at least socialists, to a lot of America, in a way that mystifies Europeans) actually make it more difficult and more expensive to live life the other way, by charging for your non-recylable trash - I think this happens in California, actually - or making a Big Mac meal more expensive and harder to find than fresh fruit and vegetables and ethically raised meat and hormone-free milk and HFCS-free everything - until that happens, most things in this country, including our collective carbon footprint, will probably continue to be supersized.

Observations on the people of England, probably full of over-generalisations and not to be taken too seriously, no offence meant, honest, guv.

1. They love roundabouts. Or at least their traffic planners do, and nobody seems to have complained. In one 20-minute stretch between the M25 and Berkhampsted, we must have hit ten roundabouts, some of which had just one entry and one exit, with all the traffic going the same way. A simple bend in the road would have sufficed, but apparently they forgot about that possibility.

2. Skinny jeans, and leggings, and - heaven help us - jeggings, are in. Everyone is wearing them, and most of them are people who shouldn't. Maybe I'm just old and curmudgeonly and stuck in my bootlegged rut, but they look bad on about 85% of wearers, unless they're under 25 in which case they've about a 40% chance of looking okay. The only people who can almost always carry them off cutely are the under-11 set, and then you're teetering on the edge of children dressed as sexualised fashion plates, which looks wrong in a whole other way. Little girls seemed to be much more trendily dressed there in general.

3. Everyone is much more environmentally conscious than in the US. (By everyone, I mean the small sample of people we stayed with, so this might be biased by age, or class, or something; and by in the US I mean where I live and have lived, which is biased by not being in uber-hippy places like, um, Colorado or Seattle, to generalise some more, and in a non-z-using way at that.) In our stays at four different households, at least three compost as a matter of course, all carefully recycle a much bigger selection of things than we have the ability to here in our neighbourhood, and all grow some or a lot of their own food. One household even had actual chickens clucking and scratching around, much to the children's delight. Everyone dried their laundry outside on the line and kept their dryers for the winter. I resolve once again to get a washing line and start a compost bin at the new house.

4. They drink lots of tea and have good biscuits. But we knew that.

5. They have smaller, more streamlined strollers/pushchairs/buggies. Our BOB Revolution, which I love, is obscenely big in any other country, and gets in the way on buses and tubes. Sorry, everyone.

6. The word "pushchair", despite the fact that I used to sit and swing my legs in a stripy blue-and-white one of my very own, sounds extremely odd to me. As if it should be some sort of old-fashioned wheelchair device. Buggy sounds more or less the same, only with horses.

Green

I always wanted the chance to decorate with colour. I like colour. I rarely wear black - at least not in the daytime, and since I never go out at night these days, that means I never wear black. Grey does nothing for me. I'm scared of wearing patterns, so I just try to coordinate a couple of nice colours on top with a neutral/denim bottom. Which is really not the point I was trying to make but I'm distracted by a film just now. (How to Kill Your Neighbour's Dog. Kenneth Branagh being an English curmudgeonly type. Sort of engaging, actually.)

Anyway. I loved choosing the paint colours, but I admit I didn't fully think them through. Maybe that's impossible before you live with them. So now my bedroom walls are a lovely taupe/tan/light brown with a tinge of pink and I have no idea what sort of bedspread to get (seafoam, I think). And my living room walls are green and picking a sofa is suddenly annoying because it has to be a boring beige or else another dark brown leather (which would be practical, and I love our existing dark brown sofa, but doing it again seems lacking in imagination. I suppose I can make it pop with bright cushions or something. (I didn't just say "make it pop". You imagined that.) I want it to be restful and calming, but I'm afraid the whole house will just look like it was decorated by a child, with all this yellow and red and green. I suspect my next house, if there is one, will be all tasteful tones of toffee and taupe. And then I can have the green sofa.

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Every time we're home in Ireland I'm amazed by my parents' frugal living. Their global footprint is practically in the negative. They hardly ever seem to spend money, but where I really notice it is in the size of the bin. They have a tiny rubbish bin under the sink in the kitchen, and a space for recyclables and paper/card and a compost bin. The "everything-else bin" takes forever to fill up - until we visit and suddenly it's full of used nappies and whatever other non-recyclable detritus we shed as we go through our consumer-driven life, opening packages and going shopping and ripping off labels and breaking stuff. Part of it is having small kids, part of it is that when we're there we're on holidays and it's more than likely Christmas too, and part of it is the fact that it's not 1977 any more like it was when I was four.

Also, the recycling in Ireland is better than here. Our local people only take plastic containers numbers 1 and 2, when they're bottles with a neck narrower than their body. Which means all those yogurt cartons, margarine tubs, hummus and fresh pesto containers just go into the regular bin. And you're meant to sort out the paper and card and leave it out separately, tied up (we just dump it all into a big Pampers box, since there's always one of those on the go), even though I could swear I've seen them just chuck the lot into the same truck with the plastic/glass/cans stuff.

I'd like to consume less and produce less waste, but then what would happen to the economy? If I can just manage to get through the summer without spending almost $10 at Starbucks every day to keep the kids entertained, that will be a start. (At least if we go to IKEA it's only about $5. Assuming I don't buy anything but comestibles. Miss recognises the underground parking lot there now: she shouts "Kee-A, Kee-A" as we drive down, and I break into "IKEA, IKEA, I just saw a store called IKEA," with apologies to West Side Story, every time.)

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All a bit disjointed, but that's what happens when I update with the tv on.