The last two years have been my Walden.

When I came to Cornwall in July 2007 I had no idea how long I would be here. A few months? A few years? The rest of my life?

I came because I knew that, to be the person I wanted to be (even to work out exactly who that was) I would have to simplify my life, slow it down, free myself from the quotidian, shallow concerns that dominate normal society – such as moving up in your career, paying the rent, socialising, going through the rituals of attracting a partner.

I wasn’t interested in these things and moving to Cornwall enabled me to stop striving after them. I took low flying jobs with no career path, no responsibility and no commitment. This allowed me to focus all my energy and attention on what I thought was important: learning new skills, developing my physical abilities, appreciating nature, reducing reliance on money and possessions.

Unfortunately after about 1 1/2 years some of the hobgoblins I wanted to escape caught up with me.

I have learned and changed a great deal in the last two years. I’m not saying that a change wouldn’t have taken place had I remained in the city. I was going to go through this period of navel gazing in any event. But I suspect I would not have come so far if I had not removed myself from the rat race.

You don’t realise it until you live somewhere like this all the time: how it is to be able to see the stars at night or gaze out over the sea. Not need to dress up or rush around. No feeling competitive or inadequate or irritable or superior.

I have learned how to think again. I don’t think I’ve been so adept at thinking since my university days.

Even in the few weeks since I left my job I feel that I have embarked on a new intellectual adventure. It’s not the same as taking a holiday from work, knowing you have to go back. When your future is open-ended you don’t have the same pressure or the sense of urgency. There is time to spend all day in bed reading and thinking if that’s what you want to do. And there is the comfort in knowing that this is the right thing for you to be doing.

Living deliberately

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear”.

So wrote the American transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau in Walden, published in 1854.

I’ve never understood the truth of that so deeply as I do now. I suppose like Thoreau (not that I want to overegg the comparison but I’ve just been listening to a radio programme about his life) I am coming back to the world, “a sojourner in civilized life again” but with a new clarity and sense of purpose.

In no way have I sorted everything out, in no way do I have all the answers. In fact I want to keep thinking. But I have a new sense of what is important to me and the challenge now is to keep that alive while living in an urban environment. To keep that sense of simplicity and even solitude in the city, while being useful to my fellows and a more social being.

“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance (1841)

I have been accused by others at times of running away from things. Sometimes I’ve even accused myself. But now I’ve come to understand that I haven’t been running away. I have simply been abandoning what I know to be the wrong thing for me to do.

I have never felt obliged to accept what society wants from me. I think to other people this looks selfish but it is destructive only when I try to fight it.

For about ten years I have kept a notebook in which I write quotations that strike or delight me. The very first quotation in the notebook is from Socrates: “the unexamined life is not worth living.” As much as anything, this sums up my journey and my motivation.

There have been times when not having it has been deeply depressing but despite the occasional dark night of the soul, the acquisition of money has never been a motivating factor in my life.

In fact the chore of acquiring money seems to cause more problems than it solves for many people. How many of us have felt trapped in that vicious circle of needing to obtain ever more money in order to maintain our existing not-particularly-extravagant lifestyles?

From ‘downshift’ to ‘paradigm shift’

In a bid to break free of this imperative to earn ever more money, many people decide to downshift – deliberately take lower paid jobs or go part time in order to increase quality of life, spend more time with the family and so on. This means reducing expenditure and finding creative ways to live on less, buoyed up by social trends in being crafty, recycling and growing your own.

This is all well and good but my own experience of downshifting over the last couple of years and becoming a ‘low flyer’ is that it can become unsustainable alarmingly quickly. Moving to a rural area, for example, to keep your own chickens and grow vegetables might result in your having to run a car which guzzles money and your day job in the rural economy pays about half what you used to earn in the city while the cost of living is just as high.

So reducing income and spending less is one thing, but there is an even more profound difference that can be made: taking money out of the equation altogether and de-monetising your life.

The barter economy

In the UK a village pub, the Pigs, at Edgefield in Norfolk, offered pints in exchange for locally sourced food to be cooked in its kitchens. Thousands of others trade more formally through exchanges such as Bartercard…A couple named Dan and Gemma Scott cut £9,000 from the cost of their wedding by bartering for the church, the reception, the cars and the photos. To do this, they worked as housekeeper and labourer, dug ditches, delivered leaflets and repaired cars.
- Times Online, Money is dead – long live barter

If we put our minds to it, how many money transactions could we actually convert to non-cash exchanges such as bartered services, skills or items?

I can think of examples where I have done this in my life. I got my kettlebell by bartering – exchanging my writing skills and website exposure on gubernatrix.co.uk. So far though, I’ve never tried to do this systematically to eradicate money from as much of my life as possible.

There are people who do housesitting as a way to have a comfortable roof over their head without paying rent or a mortgage. There’s no reason ever to pay for a book; not only are there public libraries but free book exchange schemes are popping up all over the place, like Choose What You Read in London.

You can ride a bike around the city for free – and perhaps barter any bike maintenance. You can get your hair cut for free, if you don’t mind entrusting it to a student. You can do clothes swops with your friends. Organised swopping and exchanging via the internet has become more popular than it has been for years, fuelled by the desire to be green, the recession and the ease of connecting with a large number of people who might want your stuff.

Non market economy

Taking it even further, there are organisations like Timebank or Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) where you can exchange time, services and skills in your local community. You can offer, say, IT expertise and get massage therapy in return – all without any money changing hands.

“There is a market economy in which money drives transactions. Then there is a non-market economy that is not considered as an economic system at all: our network of support in the form of family, friends, neighbours and community. A time bank is a way to strengthen a non market economy.”
- Timebanking.org

Of course this happens in certain places without the help of charities or NGOs or the internet. My sister lives in a small town in Turkey where the local community is very strong and whenever a job needs doing there is always someone around to do it. Money rarely changes hands.

However we don’t all live in that kind of community any more. In our flexible and distributed society, people often don’t know their neighbours and community relations are weak. If it takes organisations to bring people together again, that’s probably a Good Thing.

But hang on a second, isn’t this exchange notion just like having a job? A job is just exchanging your time and skills for money – with which you can purchase whatever you want. What do we need with a barter economy?

Ah, but having a job doesn’t give you the freedom that a barter economy does. For most people a job is all-encompassing. You enslave yourself to a company that dictates when and where you work and might ask you to do things that conflict with your ideals and values. The working week takes up most of your time and energy, plus any travelling you have to do. And all you get in return is some money (which might not even be real money if it is funded by debt). Then you’ve got to go out and buy the services and objects that you want.

Why de-monetise?

For some people, the security of a regular income (until there’s a recession, or a price hike, or a merger) seems preferable to the idea of a fluid, casual barter economy .

But then why do people always need to earn more and more? Because they are at the mercy of the money economy.

However other people (myself included) believe that there are very good reasons to wean ourselves off money transactions where possible. The problem of seemingly infinite growth on a finite planet has been alive for decades (the classic text is E F Schumacher’s Small is beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered, first published in 1973), but is finally no longer dismissed as fringe economics or hippie-dippie tree-hugging. Many people have woken up to the implications of peak oil and population growth and believe that our civilisation is heading for a collapse or a crash as a result of unsustainable use of resources.

“It should be obvious that no amount of money can overcome the thermodynamic and statistical laws that have placed hard limits on the amount of highly concentrated energy resources that happen to exist on our planet. This is not obvious to most people nowadays, however, because the metastasis of money throughout the economy has trained nearly all of us to think that if you have enough money you can get whatever you want. The fact that the richest people in the world can put their entire fortunes into health care and still get old and die is one of the few persistent reminders that money cannot overcome the laws of nature, or provide access to goods and services that don’t exist.”
- The Archdruid Report, The metastasis of money

The uplifting fact about peak oil is the way it has helped people to think about how we can get by without money. People are beginning to understand that we can’t buy ourselves out of the problem. And if we can’t do that, maybe money isn’t as great as we once thought it was.

Dmitri Orlov’s oft-quoted essay Thriving in the age of collapse includes the following advice:

“You should appear to have no money or significant possessions. But you should have access to resources, such as food, clothing, medicine, places to stay and work, and even money…You should avoid getting paid, but you should accept gifts, and, of course, give gifts in return. You should never work for money, but always donate your time and effort charitably. You should have a minimum of personal possessions, but plenty to share with others. Developing such a stance is hard, but, once you do, life actually gets better. Moreover, by adopting such a stance, you become collapse-proof…

For each economic arrangement involving money, try to come up with an alternative arrangement that does not involve money. For example, if you pay a baby-sitter, try to find a baby-sitter who is willing to work in exchange for lessons. If you pay rent, find a caretaker situation where you pay with your labor. If you pay for food, start growing your own food.”

Orlov is over simplifying at least as far as life today is concerned. Growing your own food costs money and is impractical for self sufficiency unless you have a lot of land. On the other hand skip diving might be a more practical and productive non-monetary alternative for many people, particularly city dwellers.

The aspiration to de-monetise (the Eng Lit grad in me wants to read it as ‘demon-etise’) is a sensible one, even if the practical realities are tricky at the moment.

Intangible rewards

Taking money out of transactions can renew relationships between people and bring us closer together. We get the pleasure of helping someone directly. We can be more mindful of others because money isn’t getting in the way.  Think how much nicer it is when someone chooses a thoughtful gift for you instead of just giving you money.

Similarly if we could be less committed to the ‘earning money’ part of our jobs, we might be able to concentrate better on the fulfilment and development aspects of the work. How many times have you wanted to do something in your work because it was the right thing to do, but have ended up not doing it because something else worth more money took priority?

This imperative isn’t evil, it’s just the way the working world is structured at the moment. Perhaps a barter economy is a way to discover what we really have to offer.

How to do it

The more people prepared to give de-monetising a go, the easier it will become. Since more people than ever share these values, the infrastructure is there if you dig for it – such as the LETS organisations mentioned above.

Sometimes opportunities come along unexpectedly. For example I was recently offered free access to a gym. In return I will try to contribute to the community in any way I can, whether that is giving talks/seminars, helping out at events, lending a hand when something needs to be built, writing articles. Once you start to think about all the things you could do, you realise there are many ways to contribute.

In the coming weeks as I move back to the city I will be looking at ways in which I can take money out of my everyday transactions and try to lead a more mindful and useful existence.

“Being good is an adventure far more violent and daring than sailing around the world”
– from The Club of Queer Trades by GK Chesterton

One of the intellectual tasks facing all of us is working out how to have a positive effect on the world. I have a sense - as do many people - of wanting to contribute to society, to do something worthwhile and leave the world a better place. I’ve been struggling to do that for many years.

This makes personal decisions on how to live one’s life also political because of the effect they have on other people, the community at large. Man is, as Aristotle had it, a political animal.

Dropping out or dropping in or doing anything with regard to society is a political act. I’m not denying society or even abandoning it by trying to drop out of it. I actually want to change it, improve it even. But I suspect I can do this better from the outside, or by spending some time on the outside. (Where and what the ‘outside’ is might be an interesting question for a future blog.)

This isn’t about going to India and ‘finding oneself’, or going to live in a hut in the woods. It’s about trying to live differently according to values that you have actively chosen instead of values that have been imposed upon you or that you simply accept through laziness or lack of imagination. Antonio Gramsci wrote,

“All men are intellectuals but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals…everyone at some time fries a couple of eggs or sews up a tear in a jacket, we do not necessarily say that everyone is a cook or a tailor”.

In other words, whether society sees us in the role or not, we should all be intellectuals on an everyday level. This is how we challenge cultural and societal norms, this is how we start to have an influence and to change things.

Hey it’s not just pansy-assed lefty intellectuals either! Here’s how political activist and punk rocker Henry Rollins describes his mission:

“I am a guy with a high school education and I wasn’t a very good student. I am from the minimum wage working world, that is what I was doing before I joined Black Flag…I am basically equipped to park your car, sweep up after your pet and put fries in a bag as you drive by a box on the side of a Wendys.

And so what I am doing is basically trying to stave off the inevitability of me going back into that world - and I will be back there with a microphone round my face before all of this is over, I have a feeling.”

Well, I don’t agree with the inevitability but he has managed to transcend that minimum wage working world through being political. There’s a reason why the so-called third sector (non governmental, non profit organisations) has become so popular and powerful in recent years. I’ve worked in the public sector for six years, I know that the power to change things doesn’t reside solely in government institutions. In fact, government institutions are much more reactive than proactive.

The Australia Institute, a think tank whose study I quoted from in What dropping out means today, comments that:

“The downshifting phenomenon represents much more than the decisions of scattered individuals to change their life priorities. Because it requires downshifters to reject powerful social pressures, it is a social force with far-reaching political implications.”

This is true really of any issue or aspect of society that you choose to take a stand on. Whether it is feminism or sustainable development or animal rights, you make a decision to stand for something and to organise your life around it and you become political.

The ancient Greeks believed that only people with leisure time, who did not have to work for a living, were able to participate in the state and in democracy. Time was needed for thinking, debating and decision making.

It is true, we all need time and space to cogitate and make decisions (although of course lack of time should not preclude participation!). We need time to read, time to discuss, time to write. Why not give yourself more time?

Dropping out isn’t about abandoning the world, it’s about removing oneself from the cultural hegemony (to use Marxist terminology) to enable oneself to think more clearly.

Photo by striatic

The burden of stuff seems to be one of the Problems of the Age.

Daytime television is full of people trying to sell old crap – sorry, heirlooms – from the attic. Ebay has become as much a part of life now as car boot sales and bring-and-buy. Recycling centres have never seen so much business and we are actually running out of places to put our waste.

But we are dumping our waste in Asia, and we keep buying more things! It’s compulsive behaviour, not particularly healthy. Most of us periodically have a ‘clear out’ but in six months time we’ve filled the available space with newer stuff.

It’s like a health kick after Christmas – a few weeks of radical dieting and going to the gym before gradually falling back into old habits.

I really want to kick this habit. For me it’s the quest for greater simplicity. It’s not about ‘making do’ with less, in a wartime spirit-of-the-Blitz kind of way. I genuinely believe I will be better off with less stuff, just as I’m better off without cigarettes. But what I have to remove is the dependency on these objects.

Do you know what I mean? I feel weighted down with possessions. Sometimes I buy things on impulse and get that sugar hit of instant gratification that disappears within minutes instead of the slow-release pleasure of choosing and buying something that one has saved up for and carefully considered for a long time.

I’m a slow learner. I started this process of simplification over two years ago and it is still in progress.

I asked in a recent post around the time of the forest fires in Greece, “if you had, say, an hour to gather what you could and flee your home, what would you take?” My aim with my latest move is to reduce my stuff to the point at which it is possible to pack it all in an hour.

Photo by MGSpiller

O Reason not the need

Much of the time we unconsciously lock ourselves into needing a particular possession in order to justify getting it in the first place.

A car is a great example of this. I happily went for 33 years without owning a car, or indeed being able to drive one. When I passed my test last year and bought my first car, almost without thinking I started making changes to my life that locked me more and more into having the thing.

Now I’m looking forward to making the changes that will allow me to do without it again. I’m not a sandal-wearing, lentil-eating car-hater, but they are expensive, environmentally damaging and unhealthy. Moreover they can make you feel completely helpless when you don’t have the use of them for a period of time and I hate feeling helpless and dependent.

So there’s the practical need to examine and also sentimental value, that other old chestnut that keeps attics, garages and spare rooms across the land full to the brim. I’ll allow that people feel differently about photographs, old letters, childhood scrawls and what-not but what do you get from dragging the flotsam and jetsam of your entire life around with you?

I have never particularly enjoyed photographs as memories. When I look at old photos it never looks the way it does in my memory. I have a handful of photos (maybe 10-15) set aside in a slim little album. In the 5-minutes-to-escape-the-house scenario, this is one of the things I would grab. The rest can burn.

Colin Wright of the Exile Lifestyle thinks you don’t need any of it. He threw a ‘shred party’ literally to shred all his possessions and free him from his admittedly thin past (he’s only in his twenties).

But I agree with him that old possessions, even sentimental ones, are just reminders, symbols, not the thing itself. Ultimately these possessions are just shadows of the actual experience, which is locked deep inside you and can’t be thrown away.

Practically speaking, it is so easy to store photographs and videos online and blog about your experiences on someone else’s server space, that why keep any of it at home? It’s the thin-client model applied to your whole life.

An even more extreme example than Colin Wright is Michael Landy, the artist who destroyed all, all of his possessions in an empty retail space on Oxford Street, London in 2001. I remember this, it was a big story in the press at the time.

“Landy gathered together all his possessions, ranging from postage stamps to his car, and including all his clothes and works of art by himself and others, painstakingly catalogued all 7,227 of them in detail, and then destroyed all in public. The process of destruction was done on something resembling an assembly line in a mass production factory, with ten workers reducing each item to its basic materials and then shredding them.”

Landy was doing this as a piece of art – performance art, I guess. Destroying to create, perhaps? Although it seems that it was surprisingly easy to recreate his life again, from applying for a new passport and birth certificate, to buying new clothes.

The truth is that our lives aren’t our own any more and one individual can’t wipe themselves off the face of the planet. I have a fair amount of my life on the internet. I do all my banking online, I have blogs, photo albums, Facebook.

These days we have the ability to be lighter and more agile, with only a laptop and a dongle to carry with us. Now we can all be like Ford Prefect – travelling through the universe with nothing but a towel and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy! (I have actually written entries in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Yup, Douglas Adams started a guide website which is still going strong. My very random entries are here.)

So what is at the heart of this anti-possession stance? For me there is certainly an element of anti-consumerism. I do think that society has become stuff-obsessed and the cycle of constant producing, buying, consuming and disposing takes us away from the essentials of life: thinking, experiencing, interacting.

We are losing touch with (and here’s where my other obsession enters the fray) what our bodies can do on their own. No, not that – or not just that – but strength, movement, endurance, play. (Read some thoughts here.)

But, as I wrote recently “There is a fine line between ’simplicity’, ‘downsizing’ or ‘being happy with less’ - and just having sod all.” I’m not saying junk all your possessions for the sake of it. I just think that reducing the number of things you have in your possession for dusty old reasons can make you lighter and happier and help to re-focus your life on what is really important to you. Then the challenge is to stop the possessions building up again.

What happened was that I tried to ‘drop out’ of normal life, but somehow found myself back in the old traps – of working nine to five in an organisation I didn’t believe in, for people I couldn’t respect. Yes, I was in a different part of the world, but I had been pulled back into the vortex nevertheless. So a correction is needed. I need to escape the centrifugal force of normal life and fly off at a tangent.

I have no idea what I am going to do when I leave Cornwall. Literally, no idea. It’s pretty scary at times. But I prefer to be scared than to be miserable. I like going out rock climbing and scaring myself shitless up some windy sea cliff. Fear enhances the experience and leads to action: you either freeze – which isn’t really an option - or you do something about it.

One thing I have learned is that there is a very fine line between stripping things down to the essentials so that you have clarity, and being miserable and despairing because you have less than you need. It’s a bit like dieting. So many people get it wrong because they can’t balance what they need with what they want and they find it difficult to change their behaviours to suit their goals.

If my history with dieting is anything to go by, there will be a long period of trial and error fuelled by a great deal of chocolate before I even get close to getting this right.

I do believe that there is a role for me, I just haven’t worked out what it is yet. I know that there are many others who feel the same way. I think that all we can do is survive in whatever way we know how until we figure out why we are here and what we have to give.

…Mais…chanter,
Rêver, rire, passer, être seul, être libre,
Avoir l’oeil qui regarde bien, la voix qui vibre,
Mettre, quand il vous plaît, son feutre de travers,
Pour un oui, pour un non, se battre,–ou faire un vers !
Travailler sans souci de gloire ou de fortune,
A tel voyage, auquel on pense, dans la lune !
…
Bref, dédaignant d’être le lierre parasite,
Lors même qu’on n’est pas le chêne ou le tilleul,
Ne pas monter bien haut, peut-être, mais tout seul !

- Cyrano de Bergerac, Act II, Scene VIII

I have the opposite problem. I am very good at making decisions. I make them all the time. I usually make them very swiftly and in reference to no-one except me. Rarely do I share my decision-making thought processes with other people, so to those around me it seems as if these decisions come out of the blue.

Two years ago I made my decision to give up my job and move to Cornwall in this way. And I hurt the feelings of some of the people closest to me because they felt that they were not part of this decision-making process. Which, in all honesty, they weren’t.

And now I’ve done it again. I’ve just resigned from my job and will be moving back to London. Once again, although this has been building in my little head for a long time (not the decision itself but the need to do something) I forget that everyone else is not exactly up to speed. It doesn’t really occur to me that anyone else might want to or need to participate in this decision and have their say. It’s either selfish or just really thick and unimaginative. And I’ve gone and hurt people again.

Me screwing up like this isn’t exactly news. But perhaps I will learn the lesson this time. To broaden this out beyond me and my fuck ups, involving someone in a major decision is one of the easiest and most genuine ways to show you care, to show that you respect them, their acumen, their important place in your life.

Excessive independence of mind can put you in danger of believing that other people don’t actually care about your decisions.  This isn’t modesty or self-effacement, in fact it can be a gross misapprehension of the way someone else feels. Believing that a person close to you doesn’t care about your destiny can be very unfair and disrespectful.

Going it alone may in some circumstances be a brave thing to do, but in other circumstances may be a way of avoiding the intricacies of involving other people in your life.

Trying to get someone else to make a decision for you because you are unable or unwilling to make it yourself is irritating. But making someone else part of the mulling process, testing ideas and listening to their point of view is an act of love.

I have an ego the size of a house. It’s a bit like having a large, untidy, lazy-ass flatmate who has been a good mate to you in the past but really you need to get rid of them and move on.

Ego holds me back a lot in my strength training. I have a tendency to focus more on numbers (putting more weight on my back) than working on my form and getting it perfect at lower weights. I’m not alone in this, of course, but since I’d like to rise above the ordinary when it comes to strength (you see, ego again!) I should take a stricter approach to training.

I do that thing that fat people do when they see a slim person who appears to be able to eat anything. I look at people who have beautiful lumbar curves and think “lucky bastards, they are just naturally very flexible”. Which of course gives me an excuse not to work hard at my flexibility because that would mean lifting smaller weights, and ego doesn’t like that.

The same applies in all other areas of my life. I’m more likely to junk something and start again, rather than admit I was wrong or mistaken and simply try harder.

This isn’t always a destructive trait. There are people at the other extreme who will stick with something even if it is making them miserable and not doing anyone else any good either. Sometimes it is good to junk your present reality and change it for something better and more positive. You can not only improve your life but the lives of those around you. A self-centered act can be undertaken for altruistic reasons.

This is what I was trying to do when I dropped out of the rat race and moved to Cornwall. It did work in part - it’s just that not all the pieces are there yet.

A fellow blogger put his finger on it recently when he quoted Ayn Rand, who writes:

“Just as I support my life, neither by robbery nor alms, but by my own effort, so I do not seek to derive my happiness from the injury or the favor of others, but earn it by my own achievement. Just as I do not consider the pleasure of others as the goal of my life, so I do not consider my pleasure as the goal of the lives of others.”

And then he comments:

“Sounds pretty darn lonely, if ya ask me, just like all the lead characters in her joyous, uplifting books. Play this through and see what the end product would be. A planet full of self-actualized humans it isn’t”

I’m not quite in the same place as Ayn Rand but there’s a strong theme in my life of ‘needing’ to do all this self-actualisation business away from other people. Like the hero who goes into the desert to train alone, in order to return a complete, actualised, able person who can now take their place in society and fight their cause.

But it is lonely and isolating. It has an air of hairshirt and self mortification about it. I think it comes from a combination of guilt and ego: feeling that you don’t deserve the help of others and (to counterbalance this depressing notion) feeling that you don’t need it either. And god forbid we admit we might be wrong about this!

For anyone who has stumbled across this post by accident and knows nothing about me, the summary is: I moved to Cornwall to pursue my dream of a simple, independent life but I have no money, I’m a wage slave and I hate it.

All of a sudden it seemed completely logical to leave my job, move back to London and stay with my mum until I decide where on earth my life is going next. This thought actually made me quite happy for a couple of hours - a solution, by jove!

But then, driving back from work through the country lanes, gazing at the view over the fields and to the sea beyond, I was overcome by complete misery at the thought of leaving this all behind.

The only thing I am sure of right now is that I have to leave my job. Sooner would be better than later but I have to have done with it by the end of the year (when my contract runs out anyway). It’s the proverbial albatross and I can’t even think straight while I have to get up and go to a job I hate every day. I know millions of people around the world do this every day - how on earth do they do it? So many small acts of bravery every single day.

I suppose they do it because the alternative seems even worse. But is it? Yes, you might have to give up your independence, but aren’t you doing that anyway by doing a job you hate?

What about all your possessions? How many of them do you need and how many are just “stuff”? Recently there have been forest fires in Greece and I heard a report on the BBC from a reporter who happened to live in one of the affected areas. He recounted how he and his wife had to prepare to leave in a hurry. He said that his wife collected a few essentials - photographs, passport and so on. Everything else was left behind but it was just “stuff” - all replaceable.

If you had, say, an hour to gather what you could and flee your home, what would you take? That’s a rhetorical question, I don’t actually want to know what you’d take with you.

Dropping out really is quite hard. Harder than I ever thought it would be.

It’s shit not being able to afford things that work (why can’t I have an internet connection that fucking works properly!!). It’s shit not to be able to go out and buy something that you need (a book, a hoover) because you don’t have the money. It’s shit pleading with the bank at the end of every month and wondering whether you’ll be destitute by morning.

So that’s my big revelation of today. Alert the Ministry of the Bleedin’ Obvious.

I am coming back from a dark place this evening. A dark night of the soul, I suppose, except that makes it sound grander than it was. Actually it was more like a pathetic, snivelling night of the soul.

What my life amounts to at the moment is pretty pathetic. On the face of it, I’ve achieved nothing except poverty and debt. If money isn’t important, why is not having it so awful? I guess the only people who think it might be nice to have less money are those who have too much. Can I have some please?

Moreover I live in the middle of nowhere away from family and friends, the only advantage of which I can see right now is that no-one can hear me scream.

The list of loser-ness goes on. Basically, think of all the self-pitying things you’ve ever cried over and you’ll have a good idea what’s on my list. I’m not going to repeat it here otherwise I think I really would crumble into a sad little pile of dust. It’s a good thing hardly anyone reads this blog!

By the way, if you did stumble across this post by accident and your finger is poised above the ‘comments’ link to offer some ‘helpful’ advice - don’t! Miserable people don’t want advice, they just want sympathy. Money would also be nice. On the other hand, if you too are a miserable loser, feel free to vent your troubles or tell your story below. Misery loves company.

I had my first go at foraging for and eating wild food recently. With the aid of my handy pocket sized guide, Food for Free, and a penknife, I advanced into the highways and byways of my local area to see what the hedgerows had to offer.

I found nettles (lots of nettles!), alexanders, cow parsley, cleavers and snails. All within 100 yards of my house.

Foraging

To collect the plants, I used a flat-ish cardboard box – the sort used for transporting fruit. It’s useful to be able to lie things down flat so that they don’t get crushed. A flat-ish wicker basket is probably the ideal foraging receptacle but I didn’t have one.

I was a bit nervous about nettle collection but pride made me attempt it with my bare hands (you could of course use gloves or cake your hands in mud). It didn’t take long to become quite confident with the nettles. After a few initial stings, which don’t hurt really, I was able to collect nettle tops quite happily without getting stung.

My guide told me that the part of the Alexander to collect is the pinkish stem near the bottom of the plant. The plants I found were not very pinkish – perhaps it was a bit late in the year for this? They turned out to be rather stringy eating (though not unpleasant) and I am not sure whether they are always like this or whether, had they been pinker, they would have been easier to eat.

You have to be careful with cow’s parsley as it is very similar to hemlock. I was reasonably confident that I wasn’t picking hemlock and as I’m not dead yet, I must have been right on this occasion!

I also gathered some snails which I put in an old strawberry punnet and fed for two weeks on lettuce in order to ‘purge’ them of any nasties! More on that later.

Eating

Nettles

I boiled the nettles for a few minutes; I didn’t want them to go too soggy. Added plenty of butter and sea salt and they were rather good eating. I’ll have those again.

Alexanders

I boiled the alexanders for 10 minutes but they were quite tough so I boiled them a bit longer. It didn’t seem to make much difference. They are quite sweet and you can chew them and suck out the sweetness from the pith. However you are left with the very stringy tough bits which are not worth trying to swallow!

Cow parsley

I chopped the stems of the cow parsley up into little bits and sprinkled them on new potatoes, like you would with chives. The stems are tougher than chives though. They have quite a nice aroma but feel a bit twiggy.

Snails

Two weeks later it was time to try the snails. I was rather nervous about this to be honest. When you watch wild food programmes on TV, some animals are eaten whole and others have to be gutted or otherwise modified with dire predictions of what might happen if you don’t do this. I’ve never seen anyone eat snails from the wild, on TV or anywhere else, so I was unsure of myself and the information on the internet doesn’t always tally (surprise, surprise).

Having fed my snails on nothing but lettuce for two weeks, I was pretty confident they didn’t contain anything nasty. I put them in boiling water for 15 minutes, spooning off the frothy scum that forms on top of the water.

I took them out of their shells (which was a bit tricky) and chopped them up into small pieces because they are quite chewy. I think I could have eaten them right away but I decided to bake them with some mushrooms, garlic and butter. When I finally got round to eating them, I couldn’t quite detect what they tasted like as the butter, garlic and mushrooms overpowered them!

The main part of the snail (the foot) seemed fine. I was a bit nervous about some of the other ‘bits’ and scraped them off without eating them. Perhaps this was just squeamishness on my part.

I would certainly like to try snails again now that I have got over my first time nerves. I’ll try to eat them on their own this time to experience the taste (but maybe with some butter!).

If you have any advice or tips about keeping, cooking and eating snails - or indeed any of these wild foods - do share them here!