The Moneyless Man

by Boyle, Mark

  The interview went well, though I sensed Gráinne, the presenter, wasn’t my biggest supporter. This was fair enough and I couldn’t blame her. She’d spent half her life climbing the television ladder to get to the point where she could earn a lot of money. It could have seemed I was saying hers was an unethical way to live. After the pleasantries and the ‘tough’ questions (that I’d heard a million times), Gráinne attempted a question from the left field. ‘You’ve been quoted as saying that if you have £1,000 ($1,500) in the bank and a child in Eritrea dies from starvation, in a way you have some responsibility for that child’s death. Should you not be earning money and giving it to charities in developing countries?’ Gráinne asked with a slight grin. ‘Earning money from, and supporting, a system that keeps these people in poverty in the first place and then gives them some of the profits in the form of “strings-attached” aid or World Bank and IMF loans is no more ridiculous than Shell or Esso giving Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth $10,000 to help clear up the destruction that they inevitably cause. Would it not be better not to cause the destruction in the first place?’, I replied, quickly followed by ‘But yes, if you insist on earning money and, collectively as a nation, riding on the backs of the less fortunate, you should give as much as you can to charities’.

  Seconds after I mentioned the names of two of the world’s major oil companies, both of which advertise on RTE, I sensed Gráinne was receiving instructions through her earpiece from the producer. Suddenly the interview was at an end. My intuition told me that they didn’t appreciate me implying two of their biggest funders behaved in untoward ways and were probably concerned I was getting too political for a nice Tuesday afternoon lifestyle show.

  After the interview, it was back to Rosslare to get the ferry home. If I thought I’d got lucky with rides on the way over, the way back was even easier. I sprinted off the ferry to get ahead of the traffic in Fishguard, stuck my thumb out at a place where I wouldn’t normally have bothered and within two minutes I had a ride with a truck driver on his way to Germany. Not only was he going in my direction, he was going within a five-minute walk of my destination! Part of me was disappointed, as it meant that the adventure was coming to an end and I would miss meeting some new people. The other half was delighted; it had been a long journey and I would definitely be in a warm bed for the night.

  I thought the hardest part of my winter – an overseas vacation without any money – was over, but I returned to weeks of snow and ice. In the city, snow softens the harsh industrial edges and makes everyone feel they are living closer to nature; in the country it covers the hills and valleys with colossal white blankets. I love snow, but it did make my life a lot more difficult. For two weeks, the small country roads were covered in snow or ice as the local council hadn’t enough salt to go around. Driving in these conditions can be treacherous enough; when cycling, it’s extremely dangerous. But to eat and to get waste wood, I was very dependent on my bike, unless I wanted to spend the entire day walking.

  I ran down my reserves within a couple of days and had to look for new solutions. For wood, my first thought was to chop up the pallet that was the base of my front doorstep. But then I stopped and thought about what I was doing: contemplating burning part of my house to stay warm for a few days. This, I thought, was exactly what humanity was doing; consuming its assets for very short-term objectives, many of which are a lot less necessary than keeping warm. The doorstep stayed and I cycled off to get supplies. A couple of times I cycled for seven or eight miles on solid lumpy ice, on which, I soon realized, it is incredibly unpleasant to fall on your ass.

  Apart from everything else, it was just bloody freezing. Most days it didn’t rise above 32°F and on many nights it fell to 25°F; the temperatures felt even lower in my valley. I lived in a tin can; with the wood burning stove on, it was fine but sometimes I didn’t get home until late and just wanted to get into bed and sleep, so there was no point in lighting the burner. It was always freezing in the mornings. Sometimes the outside of my comforter was stiff when I woke up; the insulation in my trailer was so poor that even if I lit a fire in the evening, it would be cold within three or four hours of the last log. This wasn’t really serious, but made it very difficult to get up at five o’clock in the morning.

  9

  THE HUNGRY GAP

  In a world of cheap energy, highly efficient logistics, and vacuum packs, it’s summer all year round for your diet. Even in the shortest days of winter, grapefruit, pineapples and tomatoes can come from almost any corner of the planet within days. But before the technological developments of the eighteenth century, the vast majority of a British meal came from somewhere in the UK. Only life’s treats – the sugar and spice – came from further afield. Between January and March, food was scarcer than during the summer, as the crops growing at home were limited and few could afford to buy the bulk of their food from abroad.

  Living without money meant I returned to the diet of the England of the 1700s. You can grow enough to keep yourself going between January and March, but it means eating the same things most days. On a locally grown diet, you are limited to root vegetables and crops like potatoes and barley grain for the base of the meal. I think of barley grain as the ‘English rice’, yet it’s a grain very few people use, despite it being both delicious and nutritious. While eating locally during the winter seemed daunting, part of me was excited. There is something about the flavor of food you’ve grown or picked yourself that no spice in the world can match. Contrary to even my expectations, I quickly came to really enjoy my evening’s repast, eating each steamed vegetable individually, to savor both its taste and the taste of the British winter.

  I hadn’t accounted for the heavy rain that came between December and February. At the farm, down by the river, were some polytunnels; large, cheap greenhouses used to grow foods that need a slightly warmer climate than the UK can provide. I am a bit torn about polytunnels. They are made of plastic, with the embodied energy, pollution, and suffering that goes with it, yet they allow us to grow food throughout the year, meaning we have to import less, so using much less fossil fuel. Without them, sustaining more than sixty million people, all year round, is unrealistic, at least in the short term. These modern greenhouses were a great source of nutritious, fresh food for me during the winter, until we had two days of extremely heavy rain, accompanied by inevitable flash flooding that filled the polytunnels with about three feet of river water. The flood was fine in itself; no major damage was done. But the river had been polluted, in various ways, for several years. Now, not only was I unable to drink the river water, I could no longer safely eat the vegetables I had spent months preparing, planting and weeding.

  Throughout much of the world, including the UK, we have an unnatural system; when water comes from a tap, few people really care about polluting a river. As far as most people are concerned, it’ll get cleaned up before they have to drink it. Floods are natural events. While it’s impossible to say it has increased because of climate change, since 2004, flooding in the UK has increased both in frequency and severity. Dr Tim Osborn, a leading expert on flood risk due to climate change, estimates the chances of three or more days of heavy rainfall have doubled since the 1960s. I suppose it is common sense to think that the more you disrespect the planet, the more extreme the consequences will be.

  This flood caused me no end of problems. Instead of eating the food I had grown, I had only a few vegetables left in another field. Thankfully, one of these was kale, a sturdy, robust crop, essential for anyone with ambitions to live completely on local food for a year. It is very nutritious and grows through the hungry gap. The loss of my other crops meant I was going to have to find alternative sources of food, which would mean more time and more cycling. I had to eat a bit more waste food than I had planned and do some more bartering. For me, it was important to do a variety of work when bartering, and with a lot of different people, not just ‘alternative’ environmental types. One day I worked with a
Hungarian man, Peter Horvarth, who supplies snacks such as bhajis and pakoras to Bristol’s grocery stores. For five hours’work, he gave me more than thirty falafels, which had to be eaten within a week. While the quantities involved were not entirely my idea of healthy eating, I think folk in pre-industrial times would have been very grateful for such a bounty at this time of year. I also did a bit of casual work in a Health Food Co-op in the city, which I felt was really important. I wanted to include both city and country folk and to prove you can do this no matter where you live.

  WILD FOOD FORAGING

  Foraging for food, whether in the wilds or an urban neighborhood, can be done by anybody. However, I recommend that you follow some guidance to begin with and take reasonable care at all times, as some wild plants can be toxic. To get started, I’d recommend:

  A little book called Food for Free by Richard Mabey; get it from book swapping websites such as ReaditSwapit.co.uk

  Taking a wild food foraging course – you’ll find an excellent one at wildmanwildfood.com

  Check forums such as Selfsufficientish.com for hints and tips

  THE ENERGY GAP

  Never having lived off-grid, and coming from a fairly normal background, I’d got as used as anyone to seemingly infinite energy being available at the touch of a button. Spending an entire winter, the time of the year when daylight is most limited, using only solar power, was an interesting – and often frustrating – experience.

  It gave me a new appreciation for energy; it was no longer endless. The interest from the media at the start of the year meant I’d taken on a lot of writing for magazines and newspapers. This put a huge strain on my battery; it regularly ran down. I found this quite frustrating at some times and downright infuriating at others. Learning that I couldn’t have all the energy I wanted when I wanted it was a real test, as was learning that if I did, I had to find a way of producing it.

  One solution I found was first to write my articles using pen and paper, then type them on to my laptop, to save the solar energy running down as I structured my thoughts. However, I couldn’t buy pens or paper, so I needed a solution for that as well. I had two options. The first – the ecological but time-consuming option – was to make ink and paper from mushrooms; I’d learned how from Fergus. (My biggest advice to anyone considering living without money is to befriend Fergus; the extent of his knowledge is equaled only by his incredible willingness to share it.) But given how much writing I had to do, I had neither the time nor the natural resources to use this method very often. Instead I turned to waste.

  Paper was easy; I took sheets of paper from paper recycling bins; almost always only one side had been printed. I gave it another use before it went back into the recycling bin or was used as a starter for my fire. It’s really surprising what a difference we could make just by printing on both sides of the paper. Ashley Steven of NuRelm, an US organization that runs workshops on how to reduce paper use in offices, estimates that a 12-foot high wall, running from California to New York, could be erected using just one year’s waste paper from American offices. When you consider that recycling one ton of waste paper (the amount an attorney in New York gets through in a year) could save seventeen trees, the benefits of reducing our paper consumption even slightly could be huge.

  It wasn’t quite so easy to find waste pens. There’s no obvious place to look, so it comes down to serendipity. Pens (and lighters) are probably the most disrespected products on the planet. When I worked in offices, just a handful of us, forgetting where we’d left the old one and pulling out a fresh one, could regularly get through a box of cheap pens in a month. I benefited from this disrespect, finding pens behind park benches and pens on footpaths, not to mention the half-eaten ones down the back of various friends’ sofas. Not exactly a solution all the world could use, but while things are going to waste, isn’t it our first obligation to use them before producing anything else?

  Between the solar panels and good old-fashioned handwriting, I met all my writing commitments, though not without the odd expletive. But that wasn’t the end of my solar panel problems. Interest in my experiment remained high until the beginning of February; journalists would regularly phone me for comments. This put a huge strain on my phone and its solar charger just wasn’t up to the challenge. I often had to charge it via my laptop, which put a further energy drain on it and my battery.

  MAKING MUSHROOM PAPER AND INK

  Figure 2 Birch polypores – ‘you’re going to need a stick!’

  PAPER

  Find some birch polypores (Piptoporus betulinus) that are white on the underside and flexible. They can be moist or dry but not dried out. Or you can use old (no longer tender) Dryad’s Saddle fungus (Polyporus squamosus), even large, maggot-eaten ones.

  Get enough to experiment with. The contents of a medium basket will make about 15–20 8½ × 11-inch sheets of paper.

  Remove the dirty bit where they were attached to the tree and chop the fungi into small pieces. Liquidize with water or natural plant dye (berries, leaves or roots) to the consistency of runny wallpaper paste and pour it into a tray.

  Use a paper-making mesh and deckle, or a fine pan cover, to scoop up some pulp evenly across the mesh.

  Allow to drip for five minutes.

  Flip mesh over on to a fine cloth. Gently press all over with a sponge, to absorb excess water, squeezing it from time to time.

  Cover with a towel and press down firmly all over.

  Carefully remove the mesh, making sure to hold the cloth down. Allow to dry completely before peeling off the finished paper.

  Figure 3 Mushroom paper

  INK

  Gather some inkcap mushrooms and leave them on a plate for 3–5 days to liquidize.

  Strain liquid through a fine cloth and boil to concentrate to half its volume.

  Experiment with different colors (using plant and berry juices) and different thicknesses.

  By the middle of February, people had stopped calling me so much. This was interesting; for months I’d received text messages and missed calls that I was unable to reply to. People who knew I was living without money, especially journalists, nonetheless often asked me to phone back, which was frustrating. How they expected me to, I’ve no idea! My lack of response eventually made me something of a forgotten man. I told myself it wasn’t through any conscious decision to ignore me, but because I could no longer remind people that I didn’t see every week that I was still alive. At least, I hoped that was why!

  Between the media interest calming down and the longer days as winter faded away, the problem began to sort itself out. The toughest part of the year was over. I was really looking forward to spending less time putting on and taking off my galoshes, and more time lying under a tree with a book; to cycling in daylight and to the sense of new life and freshness that we experience when spring arrives!

  10

  A SPRING IN MY STEP

  In the past, I’d never really noticed the change of the seasons; living in a city disables your ways of reading the signs of such an extraordinary evolution. But living among nature makes you much more aware of her idiosyncrasies. There is definite magic in the change of a season, in the same way the first glimpse of the sun over the horizon signifies the end of night and the break of day. I can pinpoint the exact moment I felt winter was over.

  It was the second to last Thursday of February, seven days after the last of the snow had melted. I found myself, for no apparent reason, waking up even happier than usual. About 7.15am, as I was reading, a ray of the sun burst through a gap in my curtains and I heard a beautiful little song just outside my window. Before long, this had become the most tremendous choir; I felt the birds had spent the winter practicing just for me. Later that morning, I walked outside without galoshes for the first time since I began my experiment. I even contemplated losing the t-shirt and getting into shorts. And only one week earlier, my trailer had been covered in snow.

  Walking around the farm I saw flowers in b
loom; snowdrops, rhododendrons and daffodils – for me the embodiment of spring – were showing their faces. But I was concerned to see the cardamine (lady’s smock) and euphorbia also coming out; flowers you wouldn’t usually expect to see before March. I’ve noticed them arriving slightly earlier every year since spring 2005. In nature, a few weeks is a long time; this trend to earlier flowering is an indicator of a changing climate.

  For the first time since I had begun, that night I cooked my dinner after six o’clock without having to use my wind-up flashlight. The thought of things getting easier was fantastic. I felt completely renewed by the thought of the longer, warmer days ahead, but what excited me most was the start of a new food season. I do love winter vegetables, especially pumpkin, celeriac, purple-sprouting broccoli, turnip, rutabaga, carrots, and parsnips. And what Irishman doesn’t love a potato? These crops are earthy, heavy, and warming on a cold winter’s evening. But it was spring, and I could sense the life and energy coming back into my body.

  I wanted food that matched my new needs. I didn’t want to blast the nutritional value out of my food by cooking it at high temperatures. I craved raw food. Luckily for me, spring is the start of the raw food season in Britain; unless you are happy to eat imported food during the winter, it really isn’t very possible then. Now I had wild watercress, wild garlic, cucumbers, and salads like lettuce and arugula coming through. Life tasted fantastic again. It’s lucky that nature supplies us with this extra energy at the beginning of March, as spring is one of the busiest times of the year when you live off the land. One of the first and most important jobs is to get the wood in.