by Mark Boyle
Warning heeded, I put my work away in a folder, within which is the only copy of my last seven months of writing. It’s not saved anywhere on ‘the cloud’, it hasn’t been photocopied, stored on a memory stick or emailed to myself for safekeeping. Its 160 pages would be easily stolen, burnt, soaked or mislaid.
I contemplate copying them out by hand, effectively saving a copy of the manuscript. If I do two thousand words – seven pages – every evening it will take me about four weeks. That’s four weeks where I stay up late and get nothing else done. If I don’t do it, I could lose seven months’ work in a foolish or unfortunate instant.
I put the folder away for now. Que será, será. Trust in the universe. If it is Allah’s will. If it is God’s will. Fuck it. Or whatever your own way of saying it is. I finish the piece I’m writing, put it away with the rest, and go outside instead. I know that none of it is important anyway, and that the only things that actually need saving are the living, breathing landscapes, creatures and perspectives that rapacious forces want to convert into numbers.
~
Tales of ascending, and descending, with legs.
A couple of years before I quit technology, I found myself at the back of a large crowd of people who had gathered at the foot of an escalator that stretched from the bowels of the London tube system to the expansive universe beyond. I remember thinking someone must have collapsed and that everyone was waiting vigilantly for the paramedics to come. But it soon became clear that the emergency was nothing more serious than a broken-down escalator which had transformed the moving metal steps before the swelling crowd into what was once widely understood to be a set of stairs. If it hadn’t been for someone in the middle of the crowd shouting, ‘Just use your legs,’ there may well have been a crush.
This morning. I’ve a meeting with someone about this book, and the receptionist of the office complex where she works tells me I need to go to the seventh floor. As I start walking up the stairs, he shouts up to tell me it’s the seventh floor, not the second floor, and that the lift is just below me next to the flight of stairs. I tell him that I could do with stretching my legs, and he looks wide-eyed at me, like I’d told him I was about to embark on a solo Arctic expedition. When I get up there the person I think I’m meeting isn’t there, as she had no way of contacting me to cancel. I can hardly complain.
Lunchtime. I’m descending a set of stairs, in a train station, on my way to meet a friend. An almost empty escalator rolls on adjacent to me, the exception being a woman and her three children who are static, yet moving downhill at the same pace as me. At the bottom a man – I assume the father – stands facing upwards, with his phone pointed towards his family. What’s he doing? I wonder. Of course. He’s filming his family as they use an escalator. What else?
~
My taste buds and body have grown to prefer the simple food that I eat, but I sometimes wonder if, when friends and visitors come around for dinner, it looks like I haven’t made any effort for them. Ten years ago I would have thought so.
The truth is that it takes a lot of effort. Take this evening’s dinner. The plain roasted potatoes (with rosemary) needed weeding, watering and mounding for months, as did the bowls of vegetables and mixed salad. I cycled 40 kilometres and spent three hours trying to catch the pike. Instead, it looks like I knocked it up in ten minutes.
~
On the same evening in 2006 that I decided to sell my houseboat in Bristol Harbour, I climbed out of my berth and stuck a hand-written ‘For Sale’ sign on its foresail. It was an impulse, but an intuitive one which felt right, and one which I knew I needed to act on immediately, as otherwise I could all too easily convince myself of any of the persuasive, logical reasons why I shouldn’t. It almost broke my heart to do it, but the boat was a wonderful part of a life that I no longer really believed in. I was an animal rights activist and environmentalist at the time, yet there I was living a life manufactured from asphalt, plastic, stress, exploitation, oil, shopping centres, rush hours, undrinkable water, polluted air, factory-farmed clothing and synthetic everything. On top of that, I saw that all of my material needs were being mediated by money, which felt like the protagonist in many of our ecological, social and personal crises.
I had come to a point in my life where I wanted to have an economically dependent relationship with the people and landscapes around me, instead of one that was financially dependent on strangers halfway across the world. I wanted to take responsibility for my own material needs and to come face to face with the consequences of my actions. Money, I felt, was hindering me. It enabled me to buy tomatoes from an unknown producer in Italy, soya growth in ex-rainforest in South America, oil from the Middle East and fake leather boots from a factory in China, stuff I didn’t need from everywhere, all the while sheltering my senses from the sights, sounds and smells of everything necessary to bring them into existence: oil rigs, quarries, strip mines, the factory system, armies and everything else which I, thinking myself an environmentalist, had been campaigning against. Money enabled me to float around cities, enjoying the fruits of everything I didn’t like about the industrial world, without ever having to meet real life – blood, death, shit, dirt – on its own terms. At that, I admit, money excels.
That I needed to radically change my life was clear to me. I wanted to explore what a life without money – a life in direct relationship with what I consumed – might look like. But I didn’t have the faintest idea about how one might go about it, or if it was even possible. So I decided to do two things.
The first was to set up a website that would enable anyone, anywhere in the world – me included – to share skills and tools within a neighbourly radius. I used the money I received from the eventual sale of the houseboat to fund the project, which was entirely free to join and had no adverts. Its success surprised me. Within a year it had become the largest skill-sharing platform in the world, with members in over 180 countries, something my little bedroom operation wasn’t set up for. Through, it people started giving their time and labour for free – no barter, no cash, no credits, no points, no ratings – to help others in their own real-life community with a job that needed doing, often teaching them how to do it themselves in the process. At the time I felt hopeful that we could help reclaim a sense of real community from the jaws of industrial capitalism through the application of cutting-edge technologies.
Seven years later I would come to the conclusion that, if anything, this gift-economy website might actually be making industrial civilisation more resilient, by making it more palatable, a slightly nicer place to be. I wasn’t sure I wanted to aid and abet the process of mass urbanisation, drawing people away from the places where gift economies occur naturally without any need for fancy websites. So I decided to merge it with another platform, Streetbank, whose team still felt that complex technology could be a force for good. After putting my heart and soul – and life’s savings – into the project for the best part of a decade, it was a hard pill to swallow.
But while that website was still growing in popularity, I also decided that I wanted to walk from Bristol, in the south-west of England, to India without using money. Looking back now I think, ‘What a massive hippy.’ Needless to say, this turned out to be a monumental failure, mostly down to my own naivety and inexperience. I made it around the south-west and south coast of England fine, albeit by losing almost 10 kilogrammes in weight I didn’t really have to lose. By the time I got to France, I was walking up to 80 kilometres per day – sometimes through the night too – on about half the food I would normally eat while working in an office. People offered me cash along the way, but under my own strict rules I couldn’t accept it. Things started to go pear-shaped in France, and after six weeks I returned to England with my tail between my legs. The media picked up on the story and understandably had a field day. The Observer even ran an article, shortly afterwards, highlighting my incompetence as a way to fail, publicly and spectacularly, in style.
The pu
blic criticism didn’t bother me, though I later found out that it pained my mother, who had been following it all, and that was the only aspect of it that hurt. That and the fact I felt I hadn’t done justice to an ancient mode of being. But I was as determined as ever to explore what a life without money, and all that it buys, might look like. I wanted to test how intimately I could live with the landscape around me.
There was only one thing to do: try differently.
~
There’s good news, and there’s bad news. The bad news – for me – is that sometime over the last few days I’ve lost a colony of honeybees. Why or how, I’m not entirely sure. Such things are unfortunately no longer uncommon – in fact, they have become frighteningly common – though the reasons differ. A friend lost eight out of nine colonies to the varroa mite last summer, while neonicotinoids and mobile phone signals – which continue to play havoc with their sense of navigation – are said to have reduced their populations to a fraction of their former size. Human interference, in order to obtain short-term higher honey yields, isn’t helping matters either.
The good news – for me – is that they have left a hive full of honeycomb behind, from which we extract honey. Some of this we use for wine (called mead) and beer (later some bottles will be heard exploding in crates), along with beeswax for candles. Not having much of a sweet tooth and needing candles, I’m more interested in the beeswax than the honey.
Last spring we planted red clover on the land around the cabin. Its deep red flowers are out now, carpeting our semi-wild garden with hundreds of red spears among the yellows of ragwort and creeping buttercup, the pink-purples of foxgloves, the white of ox-eyed daisies, the red of poppies and the many shades of green of everything else. As I write on a wooden bench among it all, I notice that the common carder bee and the red-tailed and buff-tailed bumblebees are busy working their way through the red clover, making hay while the sun shines. They’ve made their own homes in some burrow, and look to be doing well. Roaming among the rest of the garden are spiders, ants, ladybirds, damselflies, dock beetles, wasps, pond skaters and butterflies. Things are as they should be.
I contemplate getting a new colony of honeybees, but decide instead that, for now at least, my time may be better spent creating wildflower meadows. What they need from me, more than anything, is protected habitat. I also decide that whenever I do start keeping bees again, I’ll ditch the commercially produced hive that makes interference so convenient and make the kind of skep – a basket hive traditionally made from straw stems twisted and bound together by bramble canes – that broadcaster Alexander Langlands documents in his book Cræft. An experienced bee-keeper, Langlands tells us that out of all his hives, ‘I have absolutely no doubt that the bees in the skep hive fare the best,’ and adds, ‘The cræft in beekeeping is not in the meddling in the bees’ affairs but in the preparation of their home.’
In this endeavour I’ll have to be patient, however. It will take me a year to grow the correct variety of straw alone. Cræft takes time.
~
Having lived in, or visited, many intentional communities – what some might call communes – in my twenties, I slowly started to build up a picture of why some places worked well, and why others didn’t. As someone who values his freedom and has heard enough stories of cults-gone-wrong, I’ve always been cautious of trying to create brand new communities from scratch, where those involved have none of the familial bonds or cultural commonalities that are the hallmark of tribal and indigenous peoples and which, by their nature, can only emerge with time.
Some of those I stayed with were fairly dysfunctional, often a raggle-taggle group of back-to-the-landers, New Agers, lost souls and industrial refugees who appeared to have few values in common. Even when they did, they often displayed vastly different levels of commitment to those values. Enthusiastic meat-eaters would be sitting at the same table as animal rights activists and vegans, anarchists working alongside those who demonstrably felt that hierarchy and strong leaders are needed, the work-shy living with workaholics. There would be people from England, Spain, Nigeria, Japan, Australia, the US, China and Argentina all trying to figure out how to live together, despite the fact that all of them have come to the party with distinct narratives of the world. I respected their commitment to diversity, and their initial enthusiasm would often see them through the start-up period. But the differences would inevitably come out in weekly meetings, and because individuals had no long-standing ties or connection to each other or to that particular piece of land, they would either fall away, one by one, or the whole community would simply implode.
Yet others were working, and working well. From what I could tell these were the places whose inhabitants possessed a sense of common purpose. For some that was veganism and various humanitarian causes; for others, like the Gandhian ashrams or Amish communities, it would be their religious and spiritual beliefs. Personally, I feel incapable of thinking much higher than the ground under my feet, and so on the days when I feel at peace with things I see the world around me as God; the woods, river or mountain as my temple; and my relationship to it all as prayer. On my not-so-at-peace days I find myself just getting on with practicalities, or struggling to overcome one or other of the addictions, habits or expectations I have gained in my thirty-eight years of living in industrial civilisation.
Looking back historically, it’s easy to forget that, in the early 1800s, those who left the mainland for the Great Blasket Island did so because they could no longer survive the mainland economy’s rents. Because of this, the island effectively became a newly created intentional community of sorts, with a clear common purpose: survival. Not a dog-eat-dog style of survivalism, but one based on values of decency, craft, honour and integrity. Being a small island, its inhabitants were all economically and socially dependent on one another in the realest of terms. They lived and died together. There was no ambulance, no social welfare and little money to bail them out when things went wrong. They had to row their naomhóga on wild oceans together, and to resist bailiffs together.
Strengthening those economic bonds was their shared religion – Catholicism – which permeated every aspect of their lives. Their faith in their God, and the Virgin Mary in particular, saw them through many a storm, both meteorological and metaphorical. Peig Sayers would often say that ‘God’s help is nearer than the door,’ despite many personal tragedies, throughout which she would turn her ‘thoughts on Mary and the Lord, and on the life of hardship they endured’. There was no church or priest on the island, so they would row into Dunquin for Sunday mass whenever they could; when the Atlantic made that impossible, Peig would say the rosary at her house, and all attended. They celebrated births and weddings together, and grieved the loss of family and friends together.
With the exception of the first generation to move there, most had never lived anywhere else and, like my own father, had no longing to either. They played Gaelic games on the beach. Football was played with a sock filled with grass. Hurling was thrashed out with hurls made of gorse and a ball, called a sliothar, made from stocking wool sewn with a hempen thread. They were proud of their cultural heritage, and all spoke in their native Irish, with all of its West Kerry idiosyncrasies. Scholars from the mainland, Britain and Europe would visit them to study Irish, something which played an important role in the renaissance of the language and therefore, it could even be argued, in the political independence of Ireland. Steeped in folklore, many Islanders were fine storytellers – seanchaí – with Peig Sayers being the most notable. They passed many a dark winter night telling stories to each other, or dancing jigs, reels and hornpipes to music composed mostly of the tin whistle, melodeon and fiddle – which some Islanders could make from driftwood washed up on their beach. They sung ‘The Faeries’ Lament’ in the gathering house together, and they gossiped about each other together.
Left to their own devices I suspect that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren might still be there today. But in
this global, all-consuming industrial world of ours, nowhere can be left to its own devices, as new expectations and romantic visions of city life spread like wildfire.
And so now the only people keeping the Great Blasket’s paths alive are tourists, like me, who gawk at the ruined remnants of a people made extinct by the homogenising, all-consuming factories of industrial civilisation. And to think that we call the people who drive such extinctions ‘innovators’.
~
After one night of drowning slugs in beer, at the beginning of July, I stopped. It hadn’t felt right, and never had. The following night a deer paid our vegetable garden a visit – an unusually brave move considering the garden’s close proximity to our cabin – and chewed the tops of our calabrese, sweetcorn, Brussels sprouts, cabbage and purple sprouting broccoli, doing the damage of a thousand slugs in one brief browsing. It was as if Nature had said, ‘If you want to do heavy-handed, we can do heavy-handed then.’ I decided to listen.
The next day I made a scarecrow out of straw, a few lengths of timber, an old shirt and jeans, a bicycle helmet I no longer used and a Fawkesian mask. It looks so convincing that it still takes me by surprise when I enter the garden. The deer haven’t touched the vegetable garden since I put it up.
Watering the plants with the liquid nettle fertiliser I made last month, I notice how strong and healthy the greens look. There is almost no slug damage. Near the long grass and wildflower patch between the garden and the pond I spot three frogs leap out of my way in quick succession, all presumably off to the safety that only wild areas can provide for wildlife. I’ve not seen that many at one time since I first got here, when the land hadn’t been inhabited by people for five years. I notice two are making their way back towards the garden, from which they will eventually have their dinner too and, through doing so, allow me to have mine.