The Moneyless Man (13 page)

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.

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.

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.