Guilt trip TV...

Mea culpa. On Friday I bought a new TV. A 32" flatscreen telly to replace our 25 year old set that had gone on the blink and was too small to watch modern programmes without pressing your eyeballs to the screen. 32" looked modest in the shop and with a toddler in the house we don't get to the cinema much and watch a lot of movies on demand, but since we've got it home it's given me a massive guilt trip, dominating a corner of the room - a big, black, earth-crushing monolith of consumerism...

Except it's not really.

Its power consumption is 100W - a traditional light bulb's worth. OK that's almost twice its teeny predecessor, but it also includes a digital receiver which we'll need in a couple of years when analogue signals are switched off - that cuts out using 38W of digibox and unlike the latter it has an easily accessible off switch, avoiding even shortish stints on standby. And we don't leave the TV on in our house unless we are actively watching it (hint: check the TV schedule first before switching the thing on). So the difference between this and our old set up quickly disappears if we redouble our efforts to switch off unnecessary lights through the winter.

I'm not trying to paint this as a green move - it is a carbon sin, but on the grand scale of things it's a teeny-weeny one. Yes, we could have stuck with our tiny old flickering picture, we could have bought a smaller set, we could have tried to go without (tried that, OK for a while, but wait until you're ill and/or shattered and just want to veg out), but we decided differently.

So, why do I still feel so damn guilty? Where do we draw the line in luxuries? Deep green living in a teepee, or light green life-as-usual with a green electricity tariff and ecover at the sink? It's the space in between that's much more difficult, if you, like me, want to benefit from the joys of modern life but want to make a difference to the planet. I've insulated the loft, replaced the windows, walk and cycle for most trips, work from home, eat local and organic food, use manure on the allotment, feed the birds, work to cut emissions from 100s of clients, avoid foreign holidays - can I not have the TV? And the DAB radio? And...

The guilt trip continues...