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Cadwell NOT Caldwell
Things aren't what they seem
[ 5 minute read ]
Who do you believe?
I read that Welsh farmers used to toast their cows by name with cider, (celebrate not cook) on the Twelfth Night and then hang a cake with a hole in it on the first cow's horn. Omens were read from how the cake was tossed off by the cow. If it didn't throw it off immediately it was tickled or pricked until it did. Depending on which direction it was thrown determined how the future might unfold. Essentially, everyone, of course, was seeking affirmation of good luck.
It seems that farmers had a more fairy-tale relationship with their animals in folk-lore than they might today. Daisy, the cow in 'Jack and the Beanstalk', however, must have been quite old because Jack decided to trade it for what can only be considered to be desperate or wild hope; a single magic bean.
In the modern world, away from fairy-tales but still clasping fantasy to our breasts as an alternative reality, hope solidifies into something almost real. The anticipation of being a winner; having all the worries of the day dissolve through serendipitous chance can be overwhelmingly inviting; a day or month or year that is really just a fleeting moment in what seems to be an eternity. Of course, many years can go by before people are relieved of their worry, and our memories are reluctant to remember further back than five years or so, to how things really were. It is at this point that we start to use selective memory. If our minds were books, selective memory would be focused on where we left the bookmarks or dog-eared the pages.
Jack, in 'Jack and the Beanstalk' steals the ogre's golden-egg-laying chicken, I think. Anyone with a chicken in medieval times might have had an income. Chickens feed themselves as they roam. Chickens laying eggs must have been seen as providing free money, if the eggs were sold at the market.
In the year 1600 in England:
'How much for the chicken? I am hungry.'
'Let's see. It is a young chicken, not even a full year old, so it will lay a lot of eggs for at least another eighteen months; say one a day. If I sell you one egg it would be for a penny. That makes the chicken worth more than £2 5' 3d.' (two pounds, five shillings and three pence). Realistically, I think you would need to be one egg short of an omelette to pay 1d (one old penny when there were 240 pennies to the pound) for a single egg. However.....
According to the national archives site, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk this is equivalent to £311.95 in 2017. In the year 1600, this is 45 days wage for a skilled tradesman; or the price of a cow; or six stones of wool (84 lb or 38 kg).
It is no wonder then that the ogre thinks his chicken lays golden eggs and Jack steals it.
However, the Jack and the Beanstalk story first appeared in the 1730s and the same amount of money was worth only £266.51, or 22 days wage for a skilled worker.
I always think that fairy-tales are set in medieval times. I suspect I fool myself by removing economic and customary constraints just to be able to get something out of the story. By removing metrics by which something can be measured I am, like everyone, susceptible to manipulation.
It would take a pretty shrewd person at a market to price their chicken to be the same as the cost of a cow in the year 1600, yet the numbers add up. That is how much a young chicken was worth to the right person; a person who would otherwise buy an egg a day for the next eighteen months. Of course, anyone with a cow might not swap it for the chicken because if the cow is young and healthy it too has a continuing value, in that it produces milk each day, which can be sold at the same market.
Of course, I use spreadsheets, which make calculating the value of a resource easy for me. I even factor in 'Opportunity Costs'. Yet, I still find, in our modern world, some warped thinking.
Yesterday, I had a conversation on how important it is to have extractor fans in the bathroom and kitchen. Many of us would say, of course we should have extractor fans in these rooms to avoid having damp and mould in our homes.
'We could open the windows.' I said. I noticed the look of confusion on the man's face. I knew he was thinking it would let the heat out and the cold in. That, however, is exactly what needs to be done to avoid moisture-laden air from condensing on the walls. Extractor fans are not sold to us as doing this though.
'What about the heaters in the kitchen and bathroom? They should be on to heat the rooms. It would be a waste of energy to open the windows' He replied.
'Warm air has a higher capacity to hold water vapour.' I said, 'It needs to go straight out the window.' He was not convinced. He thinks we all have a right to luxury, so having a cold bathroom is just plain wrong for him.
He advocated for installing an extractor fan that constantly runs and detects humidity levels. When it detects humidity levels of 60% or above it switches to a faster mode and dumps the interior air outside. The thing is with this, is it removes all the attendant features of this air, including the heat it holds, and, of course, kitchen smells. It is a bit like opening a window, except you don't get a choice as to when the air is shunted away. These extractor fans also cost money (electric costs) to do it.
'It is such a small amount of money; hardly any at all. The manufacturer's data suggests that they cost about £5 to £7 per year.'
'On trickle mode; when it is just ticking over and detecting the air for moisture.'
My spreadsheet for this tells me that such a device uses only 2.2 Watts on trickle mode. My portable radio has 4 Watt speakers and they hardly move at all. Alarm bells are ringing in my head. He was undeterred. I knew he would be.
'Yes, but they don't come fully on until it detects 60% humidity or more.' He triumphantly cried.
'In England, it is unusual for the outside humidity levels to drop below 60%. It happens much more in summer and almost not at all in Autumn, Winter, and Spring. Simply opening a window for some fresh air would have a financial cost.'
Some numbers: Last night. at about 10pm. the local humidity, where I live, was 73%, and rose to over 90% by 4am. At 3pm yesterday it was 48%. Today, at 07:00 am, the humidity level is 70%. Opening a window right now would, if I had those extractor fans, cost me money; they have no off switch.
Insane, isn't it? The whole point of installing extractor fans in a bathroom is ostensibly to remove humidity, yet warm air holds more water-vapour than cold air. You can see this for yourself; you don't see steam from your kettle during the summer because the warm summer air is capturing the water-vapour. The actual twist of thinking that needs to be made is not believing that it is humidity that needs to be shifted; it is a question of temperature differentials. Ideally, all the walls in a home need to be really quite warm so water-vapour does not condense on them. But, an extractor fan that detects humidity levels will remove the heat in a room simply because they are designed to reduce the humidity. Crazy! Open a window yourself; it's free.
I calculated that it would cost me more than ₤130 per year at today's energy prices, if I had those fans installed.
It might seem now, that a chicken at a market in the year 1730 really is worth as much as 22 days wage for a skilled tradesman. Loosely, because I don't use tradespeople, I might then guess that a chicken is worth almost £2000.
Prices, inflation and values are all a bit skewed though. I used to get 50p a week pocket money as a nine year-old. Back then, I could buy twenty packets of crisps with that. The equivalent value today, if we use packets of crisps as a metric, is over £20. So, there definitely needs to be a common and consistent metric we use to value things.
Things are rarely what they might seem to be.