Brazil hints thanks to street art

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. This post takes a look at just one football image to get into the World Cup 2014 Brazilian mood. Words from Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs).

Street art by Bambi in Islington, London. But who's the boy - he looks kind of familiar.

Sassy urban street artist Bambi reminds us that World Cup football isn't that important, and that it's kicking off big time in Brazil. I like football but 11pm starts for us UK viewers are hopeless - I doubt I'm going to watch any games this time.  For an interesting look at how to get a taste of football in as small as your own locale have a look at my other blog, here. You should be able to find a taste of every country, without  leaving your postcode!

For any non UK readers, do let me know if you also play this low-carbon, low-cost travel game.  

Good luck to your World Cup favourites.

Where to watch the World Cup 2010?

Pete, Nicola, Lola and Nell spent the summer of 2007 travelling around Britain without resorting to planes (simple!). Now they're home and keep up the carbon-lite world travel habit in all sorts of ways. This post is by Nicola

So where's the best place to watch the World Cup this July? I'm asking this less for myself, more as a puzzle. I know one sports writer/lecturer who is taking her toddler to South Africa for the full atmosphere (but worrying as much about which malaria tablets to take as how to get tickets). My Brazilian-based friend plans to come back "home" to London just in case England does really well - I also happen to know he likes being around the UK for the soft fruits season, so that's two draws. Meanwhile his wife thinks it might be more fun in Brazil, just in case her team does really well. While the Dads group from Nell's school look set to fall back on a CAMRA (ie, real) pub near Baker Street that serves Abbot Ale and when they drank there last undoubtedly set up England's recent victory in the friendly against Egypt. A winning ritual should not be broken they claim.

Where you watch and how you get to that place can be a brilliant way of sharing the joys and blows of being a football follower, or it can be rubbish (yes, that's why there's a picture of the rat infested rubbish truck from the recent Rio carnival!). I'm guessing I'll see some of the games with friends and family on outdoor screens, walkable distances from my home.

It's been 10 years - this coming April - since Lola and I took our last flights (first as well in her case as she was not quite two years). Nell is nine years and still hasn't gone on a plane. Pete has flown in the past 10 years but only twice, once for fun and once for work, so our family footprint has stayed low for a significant length of time compared to our friends.

Our no-plane boast is not so great if we compare with our own childhoods - Pete never took a plane journey with his family, it wasn't until he was 18 that he set off for an airport check-in. I think I made one return flight to Northern Ireland as a toddler (apparently noisily confusing nuns with Father Christmas) and then another aged 15 when my Dad suddenly took us all to Paxos, a Greek island.

Our family's experience shows you can have fun at home in the World Cup (why, even Lola was born at the start of the 1998 kickathon), in fact home is probably the only place you can watch every game, keep up to date with every bit of information and still keep that carbon footprint a blistering zero. Here's to an England win...

It's time to party

Pete, Nicola, Lola, 11, and Nell, 8, spent three happy months during summer travelling around Britain. Now we're home but the travel bug is still there. Join us for the occasional sightseeing plus tips on how to shrink your carbon footprint.

In the run up to the Copenhagen meeting next week there seems to be a sense of great sadness. See here at the Guardian. We did all this to the world. We made October the hottest, November the wettest, Sydney the dustiest, etc. And at night I am conscious that my bedtime reading, Notes from Walnut Farm - a collection of Roger Deakin's writing during the six years before he died - is imbued with sadness. Even the frothy spring cow parsley is berated for replacing rarer, and arguably more lovely, violets. See the cover here.

Which is why it is lovely to sometime crash a party and cheer the hell up. December is the best time to do this, but last month the highlight near home was when Algeria qualified for the World Cup. The guys in Little Algeria (an area around Finsbury Park) were able to celebrate qualifying for the first time in 21 years. They bounced up and down, they drove around the block hooting horns. They marched back and forth the zebra crossing. And they waved flags, smiled and gathered together (yes,blocking the buses) conscious of just how far their team had come in order to make the slot for South Africa in July 2010.

It was like a flashmob, but less contrived. You could smell the happiness.

Having fun doesn't make me forget climate change, but it does remind me how important it is to avoid the tendency for humans to look on the dark side. Yes the world is in a bad, bad place. But without hope it really is hard to summon creativity. And creativity is what we all need, and especially the journalists writing up the story and those world leaders whose job it is to get a deal.