Fly-by-night

Confession: we have just returned from 11 days in South Africa, and no, we didn't swim there. The kids and I (Mark didn't come), climbed onto a plane for the first time in over a year - and blew about three years of carbon emissions in order to visit my grandmother (their great-grandmother), who is about to celebrate her 91st birthday. It wasn't just us: both my sisters came, niece, brother-in-law, boyfriend-in-law. Granny and Sipho flew down from Johannesburg to Cape Town for a week by the sea. Together, we probably emitted as much as Mali or Guam. Uh-oh.
I wish I could say I felt guilty about it - and I suppose I do, in a way. But it was also heavenly, a beautiful and joyful way to reconnect to my roots - both familial and geographical. I could try to argue that it was important. Certainly it brought a huge amount of joy to Granny. It opened Alf and Notty's horizons: they learned to surf, ride a camel, and what naturally-ripened mangoes taste like. We ate figs straight from the tree, fish fresh from the ocean. We saw squatter camps and vast, empty beaches. We talked about Mandela and apartheid, which should be a part of their history and heritage, as it is of mine.
On the grand scale of things, our proportion of the carbon emitted by our plane was a proverbial grain of sand. But it was also more than that. It was a betrayal of my moral position. It ran against what I've been preaching to all and sundry. It was a big, fat hypocrisy. What's the point of freezing in an unheated house all winter when I go and heat the equivalent of a hotel for a year? Someone described carbon offsetting as 'like eating a chocolate brownie and then going for a run'. That makes a bit of sense to me. This was more like gorging on ten double Big Macs and a gallon fries - with a Diet Coke on the side. Greedy, indulgent, not strictly necessary, but.... just wonderful.
I can't calculate the benefit from our trip. Nor do I want to. I want it to be a glorious memory, not an albatross.
But if it showed me one thing, it is that, however much we want to give it a positive spin, learning to live our lives in a way that the planet can support is not going to be easy. There are going to be sacrifices involved. I refuse to be a martyr - or to act like one - but if I never visit South Africa again, and if my kids never get to see the incredible things I have had the privilege of enjoying, then it will be sad. Very sad.