Category: Perspectives

Luxurious and necessary

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I’ve just done a thought exercise where I was trying to imagine what I’d do on day one if I were put in charge of all of the things in government and it fried my brain. It created a real tension between my understanding of what changes are needed to generate change – systemic and cultural shifts which lead to cascading and tangible changes, with my sense of what politicians are looking for – tangible things that sound good even if they don’t really deliver anything meaningful. Beyond hurting my head, it was a good reminder of why change can be hard for politicians to enact.

Even just pretending to play the part of a politican made me feel I had to silence all of those parts of my brain that think how politics tends to operate isn’t helping, and I started to grab around for something that felt like a ‘good answer’. Trying to think about how I could turn something systemic, which also recognised the limits of government responsibility, into something that was shiny and press release worthy. I think that a big issue in the retrofit sector particularly is the extent to which it looks to government to create and fund the conditions for scale, and that in itself undermines the conditions for scale. That means more government isn’t going to help, and indeed can undermine the cultural and attitudinal changes needed, albeit there are things government can do to help unblock action which will help with those shifts. Yet the short-term press release driven nature of politics is too rarely a good fit for the deeper, harder engagement with the substantive issues or ambitions. Yet in that thought experiment I could feel the pressure towards that endorphin hit of one shiny thing because that felt like what I was ‘supposed’ to come up with – that it wasn’t a serious answer if I didn’t.

In the end I just pretended the world was different and politicians can give those kind of answers. I figured that’s a luxury of not being in that position and if I can’t use that luxury in a no-stakes thought exercise, how can I be surprised that people in those actual positions don’t do that? It felt both like a cop-out given I can imagine the push-back someone in that situation would get, and also like the thing that’s actually needed.

But it was a great reminder of how institutional isomorphism and social norms can help edit out those calls to think differently. It was also useful to reflect on that temptation to try and fix things and assume control of it, rather than saying there are limits to what government can do in terms of shaping attitudes and action.

Scattered thoughts

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A friend tightly hugs her knees to her chest as she tells me she’s not felt this anxious about environmental issues and the state of things for a couple of decades

It rains and people share photos of it with their friends and family. Look at this they say. Mad scenes.

My partner tells me that when he was in the office and it briefly rained, or really heavily drizzled, people went to the window to look at it in wonder – just as they would do for snow

At the same time – and there are so few times it rains of course it’s likely to be the same time – I stand outside feeling each drop of rain as it touches my skin. It feels so refreshing and also as though it’s making my skin burn. I hadn’t felt so hot, it’s been cooler the past few days – by which I mean in the late twenties – that I thought my body wasn’t so hot now. The contrast between the heat of my body and the cool of the rain tells me that’s not the case

I walk alongside the playing field on the way to the gym – a place I visit most days, sometimes twice a day – and I see the dry earth now has a crack in it. I try but can’t remember if it’s always been there, or if it just recently happened. How could I not have noticed?

We’ve not really talked a lot about his reasons why, but I have a friend who doesn’t believe in climate change. I think he says it’s because he’s not convinced by the science. I think it’s because he likes to be a contrarian, he feels he can look dispassionately at the science or other evidence and honestly who wouldn’t rather it was all made up and everything was fine? In an earlier heatwave – over a May Bank Holiday I think – he comes over to mine for lunch. When asked how I am in the standard just arriving kind of way, I languidly say I’m very hot. He quickly replies that it is hot but it’s totally normal for this time of year and this kind of thing happens all the time. In a later heatwave we’re exchanging stories about things we’re currently really obsessed by – I talk about the World Cup. He tells me about a theory he’s discovered that he’s very excited by. It’s by someone he connected with during the pandemic – they both agreed that it was basically not anything to be worried about and there was no need to take the kinds of actions that were being taken. Essentially the theory is that every c.5,000 years the Earth’s poles flip – that there’s a bit of a wobble in the rotation of Earth and eventually this wobble builds up and everything floods. And it’s getting ready to flip soon by this reckoning. This theory apparently explains why there are more earthquakes and volcanoes happening – it’s a sign of more wobbling. That isn’t the technical term but I can’t find it – when I tried searching for the theory after my friend and I met and I could remember the actual word I still struggled to find anything online. This theory also explains some aspects of climate change too. I wondered if the attraction of the theory for my friend was that it offers a way to continue to disbelieve the science of climate change while still acknowledging that things are changing – this isn’t normal. I don’t know how I could ask him that, what good it would do

Struggling one day to work, irritated and frustrated with myself at not being able to concentrate or get things done. The next day it’s down from the peak of the heat and all of a sudden work feels much easier. All of a sudden? Even as I try to recognise the need to adjust work or play, I can still bump up against my expectations of how it should be

I look online for news about when it’s likely to rain next. For some reason the algorithm shows me a story from February this year. I read it, astonished and half-remembering the news and reality of ‘biblical floods’ with some places experiencing rain every day for forty days. The jokes we made about at least we’re not going to be needing hosepipe bans this year

Decisions, decisions?

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Influencing decisions is difficult at the best of times because so many factors are part of how and why people make decisions. When people don’t even realise they are making a decision it seems that much harder to influence them.

One way decisions can become invisible is through institutional isomorphism, where isomorphic means the same or a similar shape, structure or relational properties. In this scenario organisations of a similar type, and the people working within them, adopt the same kind of approaches to each other. DiMaggio and Powell, 1983 identified that this might be because people are forced to adopt an approach by coercive means through law or mandates from Head Office; it can also arise because people copy successful peers or where professional standards shape ways of working across a sector.

In the coercive scenario people might feel like they are consciously making decisions – where their own sense of what the ‘right’ thing to do bangs up against what they are being told to do. Equally though, where there’s a mandate it can feel like there isn’t any decision to make in practice, that’s just how things are or have to be. For the other scenarios, it might be less clear that a decision is getting made though, that sense of professionalism unintentionally or unconsciously leading people to repeat approaches or ways of working. Hard to know where they come from and harder to unpick.

Another way it can be hard to see that a decision is getting made is where there is path dependence – when the weight of historical precedents make a choice seem inevitable, or a different choice unknowable or impossible. QWERTY keyboards are seen to be the archetype of path dependence leading to lock-in, the example comes from W. Brian Arthur’s 1994 piece. For many people, if they need to get a keyboard they would just find when searching that they are being offered a QWERTY keyboard and most of us wouldn’t think to look for another one. Yet there are other options out there but a series of circumstances have led to QWERTY domination. It’s not impossible to unpick but the number of steps needed to do so feels prohibitively high and most people aren’t motivated to look for other options when the current one seems to work well.

And with all of the talk of behaviour change in relation to climate related actions, those examples show how much can be missed when trying to jump to change territory. There’s often an assumption that the behaviour, decision or rationale is clear to people and so it’s just a case of helping people realign their behaviour into another ‘better’ pathway. If that isn’t the case though, it’s hard to unpick something people don’t realise is tangled up.

These theories that make visible the invisible decisions can help us have some empathy when trying to understand where others might be starting from. Recognising that for many people, choices now considered to be environmentally unfriendly – such as getting a new boiler – don’t feel like decisions is a helpful way to ground yourself in the reality of people you’re trying to persuade. Starting from that point might then provide a better basis on which to sell or persuade.

Same but different?

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As summer temperatures increase, at night as well as during the day, people are becoming increasingly aware of how uncomfortable their homes can be but there isn’t an easy fix. One of my PhD supervisors reflects on the fact that part of the challenge is that the same homes are both too hot in summer and too cold in winter. We’re not, for the most part, trying to address one issue in one set of homes and the other issue in the rest of the homes. Yet we’re better equipped for dealing with the cold than we are the hot.

In the event of cold weather, most homes can be improved if you were to throw lots of money at it, without doing anything to the home. You could just subsidise people’s bills, or flat out pay the whole lot. It would be massively expensive and wasteful but still, there’s an immediate lever that could be pulled if we lived in a parallel universe and felt that something needed to be done. We already have an equivalent for cold weather of the Winter Fuel Discount and the Energy Bills Support Scheme in 2022.

Most homes have central heating, so to try and warm up the homes it’s then a case of having the heating on more. Census data from 2021 suggests that only c.1.2% of homes don’t have central heating so there are a lot of homes where it is then easier to provide funding towards the cost of energy to make it more affordable. For those households that aren’t using mains electricity or gas to power their central heating there would be more steps because they have to procure extra oil or solid fuel. If they already have this fuel system, this is something that they are used to doing and would have suppliers that they are able to contact to try and source supplies.

That isn’t the case in terms of cooling a home though. Even if you subsidised everyone’s bills in the same way to try and make the home cooler, there would be more steps in between. Some of that would involve getting more immediate cooling options such as fans or cooling units. Having invested in a fan the internet told me was whisper quiet and effective, which turned out not to be so, I don’t think we can assume that it’s quick or straightforward for people to get something which will make a difference. There are things that could be done but they aren’t quick – from shades, shutters and awnings to more hard-core air conditioning units. That means there are a lot more steps, which need a lot more levers.

This also suggests that where possible, it obviously doesn’t make sense for people to be coming up with separate but related proposals. Too often adaptation and mitigation can get separated out but in many cases it should be the same approach which addresses both, or could be the same approach with some tweaks. That if there are going to be works done to a home, they should be things that will make sense for as many of those scenarios as possible. Instead – as my supervisor’s work surfaces – they can work against each other. Measures to improve the ability of the home to retain the warmth in winter can, if not properly detailed and dealt with as part of a wider approach which considers ventilation, make the home warmer or more difficult to cool in summer too.

If vulnerability is a mix of the underlying circumstances and the extent to which you can or can’t adjust, then these heatwaves reflect how much more vulnerable we are to hotter weather than cold weather. The design of our buildings increases our vulnerability as the climate warms up because, for the most part, they aren’t designed to cope with this amount of heat, this regularly – particularly with nights where the temperature doesn’t drop that much. The fact we have much less ability and focus on managing in the heat than the cold will continue to exacerbate this. A lack of quick levers we can pull to try and help (some?) people in emergencies compounds all of this.

Addressing this vulnerability therefore needs a focus on both addressing the underlying conditions alongside the levers to provide more immediate support. To date the focus has been more on trying to address the way buildings operate or how we can use them differently. Reducing the vulnerability to extreme heat will need a more systems based approach to try and make a substantive difference, focusing on one aspect is better than nothing but ultimately has limitations.

This is bad weather

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There are different aspects to vulnerability and adaptation – some relate to physical aspects and some to capability – and the current heatwave in parts of the UK are showing both elements of that, but I’m particularly interested in the social elements of it. The social and cultural elements of adaptation, as with mitigation, are challenging but unlocking those aspects could then help provide the resources needed to deal with the physical aspects.

I’m, very slowly and a bit brain foggily, writing this piece as where I live in the UK experiences a heatwave and it doesn’t currently feel like actively enjoyable weather. I haven’t sleep well last night as it was too stifling, with no breeze. The room felt suffocating, I eventually got up and went outside where it was a bit cooler. Today I’m really not feeling very awake or engaged and I’m lucky enough to be able to arrange my work activities to do things that don’t require so much brain power. I was out in the hot, hot heat as I had an event to go to but it really didn’t feel like a good idea.

Yet I’ve heard and read lots of people describing it as nice or good weather – even as they might otherwise be talking about how uncomfortable the heat is. This does not seem like good weather to me, and nor does it seem like they actually think it is when they talk about different elements of their experience.

Perhaps the reason adaptation struggles to get much traction is that in the UK people associate ‘bad weather’ with rain, wind and cold weather. By contrast, hot weather can often be considered to be good weather – in part because of the conception that it’s really rainy and you can never trust it to be sunny in the summer. Hence the cultural idea of having a rainy Bank Holiday BBQ or rain-lashed picnic in the car. The idea that sunny weather could be ‘bad’ doesn’t fit with that view and so then the default for many is to describe it as good, even as they might talk about the impacts negatively.

While some impacts of hot weather can be obvious – such as wildfires, train cancellations or sunburn – it can be less so than floods or heavy snowfall where the impact is more visually obvious. If there are fatalities as a result of flooding or snowfall it tends to be more immediate and clearer to see the connection, whereas with heatwaves it can be harder to tell. Often people die as a result of an underlying condition which is exacerbated by the hot weather. These deaths show up as ‘excess deaths’ which is not a mechanism that is as easily communicated or has the same clarity of cause and effect.

However, a consistent message in the literature is that people underestimate the impacts and are reluctant to take action, even where it will affect them. In relation to flooding which has historically been more common than heatwaves, people can underestimate the likelihood of being affected, as the title of Burningham et al’s 2008 piece ‘‘It’ll never happen to me’: understanding public awareness of local flood risk’ suggests. Research on attitudes to and behaviours undertaken in heatwaves from by Erens et al (2021) found that people who were the most vulnerable or potentially vulnerable to heatwaves didn’t realise they could be affected and only a quarter of potentially vulnerable people changed their behaviour. Research by the British Red Cross found relatively high levels of understanding of actions that could be taken, yet there was a significant drop-off in the number of people who actually took action.

Helping to shift that narrative and getting people to engage with the fact this isn’t good weather for many feels like a pre-condition to then take steps to adapt to it. In the absence of that understanding, it is unsurprising people wouldn’t take action. It’s something that happens to other people rather than to them, until it isn’t of course.

London School of Economics research suggests there is a low expectation among people that government is taking sufficient steps to respond. This could partly be projection by them but also seems to be outsourcing responsibility to a government that is unlikely to be getting lobbied on this by people who don’t think it’s an issue for them. All in all it’s currently quite a hot mess and likely to keep getting hotter unless we can find a way to recognise how things really are and go from there.

Dis-aggregating the home

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It sounds obvious but it can be helpful to think about the home in terms of the different parts and how they have changed, recognising elements don’t all change at the same time or in similar ways. This moves it away from thinking of it as one monolithic entity which changes in a monolithic way and it strikes me this feels like a shift from some ways in which people can talk about the home. And it made me wonder if perhaps part of why it can feel difficult to improve homes is that often the homes get conceived of as monoliths, which can feel quite daunting.

From a historical perspective, there’s been lots of investigations of how the home and parts of it have changed over time. Judith Flanders brilliant ‘The making of home’ takes the long view, while ‘The great indoors’ by Ben Highmore is looking at how homes have changed over the last 100 years or so in particular. There is also plenty of work looking at different aspects of the home, from Barbara Penners ‘Bathroom’ to chapters in Irene Cieraad’s ‘At home: an anthology of domestic space’ that variously cover how entrance halls have changed, Dutch windows or the move to open plan living.

Perhaps the focus on a ‘whole-house’ approach might be part of what drives that sense of the house as a monolithic space for many in the environmental sector. That the need is there to try and improve all of the building fabric, think holistically about the ventilation strategy and consider factors that will affect the movement and management of moisture in and around the building to avoid damaging the building or creating issues with mould and damp.

In part that view of the home as a monolithic entity also seems to stem from the understandable intention to try and avoid the performance gap. Treating the home as a whole system and trying to understand what’s particular about it – from a technical perspective but also in terms of what people value about the place. Albeit in practice that isn’t what happens enough of the time – either in terms of the design or the installation of measures.

It’s obviously possible to do a whole-house retrofit that takes place over time – so even if that’s the end goal it can then be more light in terms of the interventions. For a long time I had a great love for building renovation passports as a way to help people work out how to integrate retrofit measures into their wider home improvements. There’s lots of work happening in the social housing sector that takes a more piecemeal approach to improving homes over time. Some of that is driven by applying for sources of funding as and when they come up, and some of it reflects that over time a home will move through different teams who are responsible for works to homes – from voids to repairs and maintenance or special projects for instance.

Whereas if the discussion was dis-aggregated and focused around specific aspects, might it feel slightly less daunting? Dialling down the stress of it all, reducing the temperature a bit. It might feel easier to imagine looking to engage people with the need to change out a heating system rather than trying to get people on board with thinking about the whole house in one go. For most people, that’s how they think about their homes more generally – the bathroom needs doing, something needs to be done about the cupboard under the stairs etc – so it brings it in line with other elements too. In and of itself that makes it more manageable for people when thinking about their own homes.

This shift also allows for an approach which accepts that it isn’t just going to change incrementally in terms of aspects of the building but also over time too. So that then it isn’t about trying to claim that this is the ultimate perfection that can be offered but recognising that a particular technology might be the best for now, but that is likely to change in time too.

That change of mindset can then help people think more tactically too. My PhD is all about linking in environmental improvements to wider home improvements – instead of thinking about the whole house it’s then trying to find a way in and working from there. Going with the grain of works that either need to be done because something has broken, or works that people are exploring or choosing to get done.

There are lots of practical implications which arise from making that shift, and I hope to explore those further as my PhD progresses. But the act of thinking differently about our homes, and therefore parts of our homes, feels like it could be a helpful mindset shift that makes it much easier to talk to people about changes. Taking the idea apart to help put the actual space back together a bit differently.

The Anna Karenina principle?

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I was reminded of the Tolstoy quote from Anna Karenina that ‘All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ when thinking about the surprising absence so far in the novels I’m reading for my PhD. One of the strands of my research is looking at existing materials to try and get a perspective on homes and how they’ve been represented, what the view is on how to improve them or just what ‘good’ looks like. As part of this I’ve read a few novels, and have still lots more to read but I’ve been surprised not to have found many examples of ‘the ideal home’, or even ones which are very happy yet. In remembering the Tolstoy quote it made me wonder if there’s something inherent in novels that explains this lack, or whether it’s more a reflection of my limited reading so far.

The Anna Karenina principle takes the idea from Tolstoy and applies it more broadly, holding that there is only one way to achieve success in that the key factors need to be in place, but there are countless ways to fail. This principle has been applied in contexts as diverse as ecology, banking and the domestication of animals.

Turning to the novels, there are a few slightly oblique glimpses of homes that seem to be happy. The couple who have their home and themselves attacked by Alex and his droogs in Anthony Burgess’s ‘A clockwork orange’; the family home of one of the main characters in ‘Glass Houses’ by Francesca Reece – although that’s more how it is represented or seen through the eyes of a visitor than by the occupants. Maybe some traces in the Elizabeth Gaskell novel ‘Cranford’ – but even there it isn’t straightforward because of the financial concerns of many of the protagonists. Alice’s home in Sarah Moss’s ‘The Fell’ has some details in there about how she takes comfort from details around the place, yet there is also a real sense of her isolation as she is recovering from cancer alone in a time of pandemic.

Looking at the list of novels I’m still yet to explore, none of them jump out at me as being about homes that are harmonious, idyllic refuges. I might find some more representations of that in the surrounding characters but the central premise of many of the books is about the home as a site of, or representation of, things falling apart, disconnection and sadness.

Perhaps this is because fiction tends to have a narrative drive at the heart of it. A tension which needs to be resolved somehow, and so happiness can be less easy to place there because the ‘happy ever after’ is the end not the through-line. That there is something implied about unhappiness being ‘news’ or a step away from the norm of a happy home. The novel is then a way to show how the world could be, and is for many others with all of the pain and darkness that can bring. Allowing us to understand something we might not experience ourselves.

Or could it be that the home as an unhappy or unsafe place works as a plot device because it immediately enables the reader to compare the context to the idea and ideal of home. A difficult home context allows the reader to get a sense of the protagonist being in a bad place. This can make them more sympathetic to the character. It also makes it understandable the character would be seeking a way to improve their situation in a way the writer doesn’t need to explain as much as they might for some other choices or needs.

Of course it could also be because writers don’t see enough happy homes around the place to make them feel believable or true. Writing novels can be a way to draw attention to things that aren’t right. To reflect back things society needs to or isn’t engaging with. From Dickens and Hardy in Victorian times to the novels of the 2020’s, art and culture can offer insights to lives that are beyond our own, and empathy for them which makes taking action necessary. For the novels of the 2020’s on my reading list, without even having read most of them there’s a clear theme emerging around how precarious housing can be. From Ella Frears’ ‘Goodlord’ which takes the form of an extended email to an unscrupulous estate agent to Megan Nolan’s ‘Ordinary human failings’ about families in temporary accommodation, to the 2024 novels ‘I see buildings fall like lightning’ by Keiran Goddard and ‘The lodgers’ by Holly Pester, about a housing estate and the UK housing crisis respectively.

That leaves me wondering if it’s less of a surprise I’m not finding more happy homes in the novels. While the quote from Tolstoy helped shape that sense of surprise, the principle doesn’t feel quite right in terms of the view of home. It’s true that even in the 14 novels I’ve read so far I’ve loved the diversity of style, tone and characters – a huge range even as the subject itself remains fixed and the homes are largely unhappy. Yet while there are lots of commonalities in the factors constituting a happy home, the plurality of ways a good home can be made seems to undermine the principle from that direction.

What if it could be fun?

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George Saunders talks a lot about how when he goes to write, he’s wondering about what will be fun in the work he’s doing and it’s such a helpful reminder that play can really unlock your thinking and help you make progress. In a context where the emphasis on productivity and efficiency can be strong – hacks and hints, tips and how to’s abound – the call to fun can feel counter-intuitive.

Thinking about, and trying to find the fun in something is in part about just allowing yourself to be open to things. There’s a sense of curiosity and wonder about which mitigates against a lot of that sense of being stuck which makes it hard to see things as they are, or to imagine how they could be otherwise. Looking for fun also suggests the need to review a situation from a variety of perspectives – if at first you don’t find the fun, keep going. That’s a brilliant suggestion more generally when working on something because considering multiple perspectives is a way to see if there are other interpretations or test approaches.

There’s also a sense of lightness about looking for the fun in something that can be really helpful. It makes it easier to hold the issues a bit more lightly – rather than clinging on to ideas, whether your own or existing ones – it can create a space to think. That isn’t to downgrade or dismiss the difficult, fun can be respectful of the circumstances while also giving a better chance of not serving to the make the issue bigger than it needs to be.

Whether it’s a knotty work problem, challenging relationship with someone or wrangling with an idea or issue, thinking about looking for the fun can help unlock things. I recently wrote something for another context and audience that was very different to other kinds of writing I’ve done before. It felt like it still had my voice but did feel much more exploratory and, yes, playful than some other pieces. I had gone to it feeling quite heavy, not sure if I could translate a general idea I had for the piece into something more specific. Reading Saunder’s encouragement to be playful totally altered my perspective and reminded me how lucky I was to have the opportunity to explore and try.

There are lots of ways to start. It could be something more organised using an approach such as Lego’s Serious Play, designed to develop imagination and problem solving. Equally it could be a quick activity or game by yourself or with others – as is often the case, the Squiggly Careers podcast has a fun and useful episode with some suggestions.

Go looking for chances to bring fun into your day, think about how you can make play more of your every day. Have fun trying to have fun…

Echoes across the pages

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Spoiler alert: this piece is about the endings of two novels ‘Glass Houses’ by Francesca Reece and ‘Rebecca’ by Daphne du Maurier.

As part of my PhD I’m reading, watching, looking at and visiting cultural materials and buildings, museums and houses to get different perspectives on home. It isn’t surprising that I would start to see echoes between them but I was a bit surprised that burning down the house would be an early contender.

I’ve just finished reading ‘Glass Houses’ by Francesca Reece – about Geth and Olwen – a couple of people from North Wales who were connected as children and then reconnect as adults. The book is set in and around a house – Ty Gwydr, which for Geth isn’t a place he owns but feels like it is his, and that Olwen and her husband briefly own and creates a place for them to reunite. At the end of the novel it implies that Geth sets fire to the house but we never explicitly see this. Having recently read ‘Rebecca’ by Daphne du Maurier, that links back to the end of the novel where the implication is that Manderley has been set on fire. We don’t directly see the flames but the red sky and falling ash clearly suggest that is what is happened.

In both stories the home is a place of memories but also becomes, for those who decide to burn down the house – Geth and it seems Mrs Danvers in ‘Rebecca’ – a place that reminds them of a future they can no longer have. For Geth, it seems clear that Olwen chose to stay with her husband James, rather than leave him for Geth. There’s something about not being able to be with the only person he’s ever loved in that way. For Olwen, when thinking about telling James she wants to end things, she says something about it never being about not loving him, even as she clearly has very strong feelings for Geth. So there’s a difference in terms of the space that the other has in their lives and what that relationship means for each of them in terms of the possibility of love. There is also something about what the relationship would open up or close down for each of them. For Geth, there’s a suggestion of the relationship with Olwen allowing him to live in different ways – partly that he might get to live in the house he’s come to think of as his own. But also perhaps a life that goes beyond the area he grew up in. That he knows everyone and is a kind of big fish in a small pond there, and while that’s comfortable, Olwen offers him a chance to go beyond that. For Olwen it would be more of a narrowing down – financially she would be leaving someone who is very rich for someone who definitely isn’t. But more than it’s also someone who moves through the world in a quite different way – Geth is perhaps less comfortable in some situations than James is.

The ending of the stories serves to makes the home more of a character – a place that has held and facilitated ways of being in the present, as well as a holder of memories. Something that acts upon people as well as being acted upon. In Rebecca I was surprised by how the destruction of Manderley didn’t seem to have quite freed up the de Winter’s in the way the oppressive nature of Manderley, and Mrs Danvers, had seemed to suggest it might have done. For Geth though, it’s less clear what might become of him once the house is burned down and there’s presumably an investigation. Olwen and James seem to still be together and had planned to sell the house – their second home. So while they will be somewhat affected, given their wealth and decision to leave and sell, the impact for them is likely to be much more cushioned.

For both Geth and Mrs Danvers, there’s a sense they are trying to take control of a situation that is beyond their control. That the choices they wanted have become impossible for them, in Olwen staying with James and with the death of the first Mrs de Winter. It’s hard then to imagine what they can do, how they can be, and so they kick out and bring down the house which epitomises that. It’s a narrow kind of control because it can’t get them what they want but it can at least take them further away from their lost chances and so it’s understandable that might feel like the only choice they have now.

I’ve still got lots more books to read so I’m interested as to whether there will be more stories of the house burning down to end it all. As a plot device, burning down the house has a finality to it so I can see why it would be something that authors might reach for. A way to draw a line under what has happened and show that a situation, or way of being or seeing the world is now no longer possible. It serves to heighten the emotions of those who destroyed the homes physically, while showing how others might have destroyed the meaning of the home in other ways already.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

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Everyone thinks everything is worse than it is – a sense that things are getting ever more extreme and polarised. Social media throws our sense of, and crucially MPs, sense of, what people think about issues off. Social media focuses on the extremes, especially now that X has become a site which actively provides a platform for extremist right-wing views. As such, it is reassuring to read examples which show views which are both less extreme and more progressive than it can too often seem.

The Climate Barometer report ‘Signal in the Noise 2025/26‘ showed that the difference between what MPs thought the public believed and what they actually thought is significant. MP’s continue to underestimate how much support there is for renewables amongst the public, including in their own constituencies. Even with the news in the state that it’s in, people still overwhelmingly think climate change is a crucial issue and one that needs to be addressed. They also think it shouldn’t be forgotten in amongst all of the other things going on at the moment.

The disconnect between the perception and reality of public opinion is really important because MP’s will be thinking about how their constituents will react to actions they take. If the image MP’s have in their head is wrong, this can throw them off doing what they might think is the right thing to do. It might persuade them to stay quiet and not push on something, rather than feel like they can put their head above the parapet, let alone that they might be supported by their constituents.

This disconnect can be taken to extremes by some politicians who seem to be very online, and react accordingly. Yet the report is more evidence of the fact that lots of social media increasingly serves to platform the more extreme views, creating a sense that those views are more representative than they are. Climate Barometer looked at discussion about net zero on X and found ‘conversation is dominated by right-leaning skeptics, who make up 86% of all users discussing the term’. This active network of voices against net zero, and other social issues, contrasts with more disparate, less active and co-ordinated voices that are in favour of trying to address environmental issues such as net zero.

This matters even more because of pluralistic ignorance – a phenomenon where people privately disagree with a norm or view but assume others don’t, so they don’t say anything. This helps perpetuate the norm because no-one speaks out, so there’s social conformity to the norm which further reinforces it. If people are given the impression extreme views are the norm, that people are less pro-environmental than they are say, then it has real-world impacts. This can make us feel more weird and isolated from those around us. It also means we’re less likely to raise the subject and put across our views, thereby discovering we’ve got more in common than we had realised. We are also less likely to vote for parties that support those policies because we assume others won’t either so our vote would be ‘wasted’ or take action in some other way.

Creating spaces to have conversations about issues can be a way to try and surface views and get a sense of where people are in practice. It’s why I make a point of talking about how I travel by train, occasionally boat and even more occasionally, by a train on a boat, rather than flying when I go overseas now. For a long time before I started travelling that way I felt bad about flying but I was surrounded by people who were continuing to fly – including those who also worked on environmental issues. The social norm of flying, perhaps with a helping of feeling bad and a shrug of ‘oh well, nothing to be done’ was just so common that it allowed me to convince myself it was ok to fly. If someone had been talking about how fun it is to travel without flying and had helped me to think about travel differently, which is a key part of getting into the zone of it, I would probably have switched to train travel sooner.

As climate and environmental issues become more noticeable, there’s a lot more to discuss about how impacts are arising and what can be done. Even if you don’t use every opportunity that arises, using just a fraction of them to raise in conversation with others would still lead to a lot more discussion on the subject. The chances are they might have more in common with you than you imagine, and if they don’t, at least you know for sure.