freedom ahead

Six weeks in, and my Year of Buying Nothing New is going pretty well. Some things, like white paper, have been hard to source. Freegle this week yielded two bird feeders, and chicken wire for the allotment. I’ve been borrowing and lending a lot more things like books, and giving away quite a lot of stuff including my own produce and preserves. I’m buying the seeds we need this year, though – aiming to save a lot more next year. My Saturday Guardian has mainly been sourced from the Ellie where I have started to lurk, beer in hand, towards closing time.  Generally, though, I lack for very little.

Being in my early 50s, I find that I already have enough ‘stuff’ and clothes, probably, for a lifetime if carefully looked after and mended. But age isn’t the only factor: buying second-hand and making do with less seems to come naturally my 22-year old daughter and many of the younger people in our 36-strong Facebook group. Perhaps it’s because they have less money and are also more canny and more aware of the problems of the throw away culture.

I can sense that some of my contemporaries are uncomfortable with this little experiment and project on to me that it’s an exercise in righteous self-denial and even self-punishment. Far from it. As anyone who has experienced fasting or conscious simplicity knows, there can be an increase in connection, joy and freedom.

Freedom Ahead is the title of a lovely new film being shown by Transition Town Lewes this Friday; see here for the trailer. It documents the lives of a growing number of people across the world who are turning to the land and a simpler life, with fewer overheads, less stress and more community and more security. As an eloquent young Indonesian says in the film, ‘Security is in seeds, not money’.

Fortune favours...

A fortnight by the sea is enough to wash away all troubles. We set off to Newhaven Harbour on a blustery day, the youngest two children, Dirk and me, with backpacks containing what we needed to get by: tents, sleeping bags, clothes, plates and mugs. It was a risky venture; we’d always used a car to go on our camping holidays, and this one involved our 15-year-old daughter who likes her creature comforts.

But there’s something quite wonderful about walking (staggering in our case) out the front door into the unknown; a powerful sense of adventure accompanied us all the way. Mostly I felt like a cross between an 18 year old and a 3 year old, fully engaging with and savouring the new sights, sounds and smells as if for the first time.

We spent two days getting to the French southwest Atlantic coast, by ferry and train, to the best campsite in France, recommended by our friend Mark who cycled there recently. Ensconced on top of the biggest sand dune in Europe, surrounded by pine forests, we spent our time catching buses to remote surf beaches, being dropped on a sand bank for the day, foraging for oysters in the oyster beds, sleeping out under a tarp in thunderstorms and two whole days sunbathing on a chaise longues by a swimming pool with my daughter. Round the Basque coast of Spain to Bilbao, the language is from Mars and the food is even more earthy and ripe than that of France. Lewes seemed poncy after supper in a working men’s cantina, where the plates were loaded of cheap wholesome food, there was football on the telly and free bottles of beefy red wine on each table.

Arriving in Portsmouth by ferry from Bilbao, as we carelessly hauled on our backpacks for the 16th and last leg of the journey, I realised that the holiday was more than just a quest for the sun and the waves. We’d thrown ourselves in to the arms of fortune, and fortune had smiled on us.

Stairway to Devon

This week our family of six is going by foot and train to Devon. It’s a pretty low-carbon holiday, renting a group of wooden chalets on a 20-acre nature reserve with my siblings. We’ll set off on foot to Lewes train station, and walk the two miles from the tiny Eggesford station at the other end. There are old bikes on site and a farm shop along the lane. We’ll take cards and booze and books. We’ll unplug the TV, go on walks, play some outdoor games and, if it’s not wet, sit around a fire most nights. The kids will get bored, for a while - always an essential precursor to self-directed play. And the simplicity of our fortnight, I suspect, will be deeply relaxing.

George Monbiot in his Guardian column this week questioned whether it’s sufficient to simply become ‘green consumers’ or whether in fact we need to consume less overall. It’s an essential question. Twelve months ago I drove without compunction, flew with little hesitation, ate meat with abandon and sourced my clothes and other consumer goods wherever I wished. Those days are gone forever. Knowing what I do now, I can’t justify a three-planet lifestyle, or even such things as offsetting. I’m slowly adapting to live within my planet’s means. It’s not very sexy and it doesn’t boost the economy. So it’s deeply unfashionable. And it puts the journalist in a tough spot: there’s only so many column inches one can write about the frugal life.

A day at the sea

I’m starting to really enjoy the low life (energy-wise, that is). On Sunday, the sun breaking through called for a trip to the seaside. We hastily packed some sarnies, some plums and a bottle of water and took the next train seawards. Seaford, it turned out, was our destination. But it could have been Bexhill, Bishopstone or Brighton. The trains were plentiful, even on a Sunday. Half an hour after stepping out of our door we were stripped down and settled on to the shingly Seaford beach. It was barely populated, and the sea itself empty, waves plopping on the beach and the Newhaven ferry pooping in the distance.

The boys played in the sea and invented a complex game involving throwing pebbles at each other, and my mate and I settled into an afternoon of napping and reading, reading and napping. One of the best pastimes on earth, I reckon. As evening drew in we headed home, ice creams in hand. Cost of travel: £5 for four. Cost to the earth: affordable, even, probably, for six billion of us. Pleasure factor: high. Britain, apparently, is less happy than in the 1950s. Could it be that voluntary simplicity on a fossil fuel diet could lead us towards greater happiness?

Back to the future

Strange man, Al Gore. One minute he’s telling us to save the planet by changing our light bulbs. The next he’s asking us to take an ‘easy’ seven-part Live Earth pledge that would in fact be extremely difficult to carry out. Last weekend Al told a billion of us that Part One is to lobby all our governments to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 90% - or the grandchildren die (kind of thing). Ok, so let’s tease that out a minute. That essentially means - and leaders are still unwilling to spell this out - that we must learn to live on 10% of current fossil fuel. In our lifetimes. The rest will be current sunlight in the form of plant food to fuel humans, horses and oxen - and renewable fuels. Trying to keep the show on the road with large-scale biofuels, nuclear or new coal plants could literally cost the earth.

So what’s the answer? Living lightly, it seems. Consuming less, working and eating locally, and getting used to living on much smaller amounts of energy. It’s not very sexy but living within our means - one planet living - is how most of the world actually lives. We’d do well to learn from older, simpler cultures, or from our grandparents. Putting it another way, we need to go back, with more wisdom, into the future.

Whatever the weather

This morning John Humphreys said on the radio that the weather forecast “is not very nice at all”. Yesterday he said it was “gloomy” and the day before he said that “rain threatens”. I shall be writing to him in person. Following the driest April on record, with about one hour of drizzle, and predictions of drought, the rain this week came as a blessing, to me. When the first drops spattered against the window at the Transition Town Lewes HQ I gave a great cheer and threw the window open to savour the whole at-long-last event. I hurried home and planted out all my seedlings in waiting, and the herbs from Wellingham Gardens and the bushes from Goldcrest Nurseries.This is what you do before rain - you plant out your plants and then let the rain come - April showers, it used to be called - and after a day of rain I mulched with grass cuttings from the Ham Lane dump. I went there on Sunday, in the community car, on the off chance I’d find mulch (and not minded to buy a bale of straw, my usual mulch of choice, being in a non-buying mode these days). I got four sackfuls of someone’s sweet, fresh first-of-the-year grass cuttings, and four more of hot, rotting grass cuttings from another woman about to lob them into the bins. I went home and mulched the newly planted forest garden, safe in the knowledge that I am preserving the rain in the soil for the rainless times ahead.

Flipping the switch

My brother-in-law Mark emailed me from South Africa last week to tell me about an event to celebrate Earth Day on Saturday. The idea was that people around the world switch off their mains electricity between 7.30 and 8.30 local time. So at the appointed hour we flipped the switch and settled into a peaceful spell of pottering by twilight and candlelight, having baths and chatting.I suspect that a few people saving an hour of electricity didn’t even offset the massive surge caused by people watching the first Dr Who in the new series that hour (including us - I fudged - we put off our start by half an hour to accommodate that habit).

But what going off-grid, briefly, made me realise is that this is what I want, deep down. The feeling was what you get when you walk through an old wood, along the river at sunrise, make love particularly beautifully, happen to coincide with the dawn chorus or spend an hour over supper with your family just chatting. Times like that you feel, this is real; this is what I value.

And every step I take, away from dependence on electricity, cars, supermarkets and all the supposed luxuries of the modern world, feels sane and safe, a step in the right direction. Maybe there a better life just around the corner and it’s only when we do something random and un-habitual that we realise it in a gleeful peak moment. So I say bring it on, flip the switch!

The scrag end diet

If we’re looking seriously at one-planet living, food leaps up near the top of the agenda. Especially meat. Land which is used to feed animals could produce far more crops (except for unploughable hilly land, of which there’s a lot round here). Plus, animal farts are speeding up global warming. (There must be a way to store this methane for use as fuel...?)

Have you noticed that most meat sold today is the prime cuts? What’s happened to the ends, knuckles, tails, tongues and offal that our grandparents made do with so readily?With the thought of moving towards weaning ourselves off meat, I decided to subject my long-suffering family to a new experiment: the scrag end diet. I was talking about this recently with Derek, the butcher at Boathouse Farm, my favourite organic meat supplier. He recommended I get hold of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Do you know this lady had four children, ran her house like a ship and died in 1854, aged 28? This week I asked Martin of Boathouse what were the most nutritious cuts to feed a family of six for a week for a tenner. He suggested liver…

Hm. I took home a brisket of beef (which I stewed, fatty and thick, with root vegetables and lashings of mash), some chicken carcasses, which I boiled down for stock for two soups, and some sausages which turned into Toad in the Hole with a massive winter salad. Results! No leftovers. Next week, liver..?