The Downshift Project

So we’re into November, sailing past Halloween and Bonfire Night. It’s wet and mild. Welcome to Wales in late 2009. As usual it’s been too long since my last post. All sorts of reasons for that which I’ll probably get into below. It was this time last year that I first came to Carmarthenshire to see this house which is now my home. I remember arriving and being amazed by the beauty of the place, all the trees and the streams and the air so incredibly clear and fresh you could literally taste the difference from London. It still amazes me to this day. Every time I step outside I’m filled with such happiness that I’m able to live here. Yes the house is old and wooden and rustic and needs a big repaint, but who cares? The whole landscape is utterly gorgeous.

Growing season for the year has pretty much come to an end. There are still one or two new raspberries in the raspberry patch every time I go outside, but everything else has ground to a halt. My lovely woodland steps which I was so proud of in the Spring, are now completely covered in leaves from the big old oak tree that looms ominously over both garden and house. At some time this winter I’m going to have the oak cut. I feel very bad about this, but as well as blocking the light, it could easily drop branches onto our LPG tank, or even the house itself, if a storm was bad enough. Anyway, I’m putting off the inevitable.

Still no woodstove installed, so this winter we’ll be relying on gas for heating. Expensive, but installing woodstoves isn’t exactly cheap either. Financially, things have improved a little as I’m working through a 3 month contract with an indie iphone software developer I met on twitter. This job has been hugely enjoyable for me. Initially I was going to be spending half my time on .NET business applications, and half on iphone stuff, but instead I’m full time on iphone game development, which is the most fun I’ve had at work, like, ever. God willing, the game I’m working on will be a success and provide the finance to allow the boss to re-hire me again next Spring. I’d never have imagined this time last year that I’d have downshifted my way out of soul-sucking investment banks and into something fun and creative, working with lovely people.

Not only that, but I’m getting to know all kinds of people in the local community. It feels so much like home now. I don’t think I could ever live in London again. I’m still occasionally getting offers to go back to work in London, for hedge funds or banks, but why would I? That part of me is dead now. Eight years ago I encountered a group of young people trying to live in community in an eco-village, and that completely changed my dreams. It’s taken all this time for reality to catch up, for my addiction to career to unravel. And now the old conditioning is done with, the real me is starting to take flight.

A couple of weeks ago I had my first training day for the hypnotherapy/counselling course I’m doing in Cardiff. This is something else I could never imagine myself doing a year ago. I have essays to write, and books to read, and I need to practice. Fortunately a couple of people have already come forward who are willing to let me practice on them.

Dave has been away in London for the last few weeks, finishing the long painting job on his boat (can you believe he started on it last February if I recall?) and working on passing his driving instructor exams. He has a re-test in a week or so. So I’ve had the house to myself and have taken the opportunity to go out and socialise rather than stay in and watch tv. As a result I think I’ve done more miles on my motorbike in the last month than in the whole of the previous 12!

My last significant post on this blog was the 21st September. You may recall I was engaging in some religious soul-searching. Three days after that post I started attending the local Anglican church’s Alpha course. Alpha is a weekly evening of talks, food and open discussion about Christianity. I decided to go along because despite not believing in God, I’d come to realise that unlike most other atheists, I actually did want to believe.

It’s easy to ridicule religious faith as crazy and unscientific, full of made-up bigotries in the name of dogmatic tribalism. So often the only time Christianity (or Islam for that matter) appears in the news is when its adherents are engaged in behaviours that secularism finds offensive. One easily gets the impression that religion is just about crazy beliefs and oppression of others and repression of oneself. But on the other hand, when I think back to the people in my life that I’ve most admired, the people I’d most like to be like, they’ve been exclusively Christian.

These are the people I look at and say to myself, “If only I could express love and care for others the way they are able to. If only I could give of myself like they give.” These are the sort of people, who, when you see them in a room, you cannot keep your eyes off them because they are shining inwardly with some kind of peace and joy most of us never experience except for the briefest moments. Maybe you’ve never met anyone like this. Maybe you meet them all the time. As for me, I found I couldn’t easily dismiss Christianity in the way that most of my atheist friends rejected it. For a start, I’ve always had a strong religious or spiritual streak. Religion has always been the most interesting subject for me in any conversation.

I’ve studied Advaita, Buddhism, Taoism (what’s left of it). I’ve read the book of Mormon and the Qu’ran. I have the Catholic Catechism on my bookshelf even though I thought belief in God was the sign of mental delusion. I definitely felt that God-shaped hole in my life. I needed a reason to live and love that was beyond my own selfish desires. So, yes, I wanted God to exist, desperately so. And I wanted to know how anyone could claim to have a relationship with a God they couldn’t perceive. How could anyone experience such a thing with sufficient certainty that their life would be transformed?

So I started asking every Christian I could about their relationship with God. Now you’ve got to bear in mind that I had previously been a Christian of sorts myself back in my early twenties, and at the time I came to the conclusion that everyone was simply faking faith, pretending for the sake of belonging. I figured that really, behind the shiny shallow smiles and homophobia, no one really believed there’s a God ‘out there’ who loves us. I mean, surely they’re just playing along for the good community and the authority that society gives to religious leaders to speak into our lives?

I posed this question to an Anglican vicar: “How to believe in God when there’s no evidence?” He wrote back thusly:

1) Coming to believe in God is not the product of a rational process. Any God believed in as a result of a rational process is an idol, a product of our own minds. There is an inescapable element of intellectual surrender involved, a ‘giving in’.

2) Believing in God is undoubtedly a matter of the heart – but that doesn’t make it irrational. It’s a delusion of Modern society that bringing emotion into play makes for a less rational debate, the truth is in fact precisely the opposite, but the heart itself needs to be educated. (That’s one of the things that religious traditions do, eg through prayer and meditation etc.)

3) Why is evidence so important for you? What do you think evidence can achieve? Are there any _really_ important areas of your life where you have made a decision based on “evidence”? Would you be willing to choose a life-partner on the basis of “evidence” or would you examine your own heart and trust that? If so, why have a different standard for God?

I came to believe because I realised that I had been deluding myself about ‘not believing’ in God, and that, in truth, I had been in love with God all along – it was the love for God that was motivating everything else, especially the search for truth.

I wrote a reply to the vicar that on re-reading now seems so painfully intellectual that I’m surprised he continued talking to me. I now consider that his first reply was perfect and complete but I didn’t grasp that until much later.

Almost simultaneously, a couple of other Christian friends gave me very similar answers. I felt a little dumb. After all, I’d been a Christian for 5 years myself after college, but never experienced any kind of relationship or communication with God. I’d become a Christian back then because of intellectual arguments that seemed to make sense, but I really didn’t get how those around me seemed willing to completely throw their lives into the service of an intellectually unprovable idea.

Something changed for me when I realised that I might not need intellectual scientific-style evidence in order to believe. Several people told me that faith is from the heart, not the mind. I began to think, ‘I feel such an urgent need to love God that I no longer care if faith is fiction. I’m going to act as if God exists and see what happens.’ Part of me felt this was intellectual suicide, but I felt there was no longer anything to lose.

I felt very comfortable at the alpha course meetings. I found it easy to make friends. I found the people easy to love. At some point between the second and third weeks I started to pray. I’ve prayed before. I prayed a lot in my twenties, most prayers of frustration at God’s silence. But I never prayed a prayer of love. I never expressed gratitude for my life, for the beautiful creation around me. I can blame it all on the gorgeousness of Wales drawing it out of me! So there I am, saying thankyou thankyou thankyou and for once it’s like there’s no doubt in my mind that I’m talking to someone. I go to sleep happy. The next morning I wake up, and the sun is shining through the window and immediately I feel an urgent need to start praying again. Thankyou Father for this awesome day! Thankyou for my life, that I can experience and be aware of this incredible universe. I’m so sorry that I ignored you for so long. Please forgive me. Thankyou for waiting for me! This went on for about an hour. Just this continuous stream of joyful thanksgiving.

I realised fairly quickly that I’d just fallen in love with a God that only days before I would have mocked anyone for believing in. Moreover, I noticed that what I was experiencing explained the behaviour of all those emotionally attractive Christians I’d found so mystifying. I suddenly knew how they could act the way they did. I dusted off my old bible – 15 years unopened, and suddenly the character of God that I’d experienced in prayer was evident on page after page. I felt like I’d slipped sideways into a faith I had no right to, and of course I don’t.

I used to pray for wisdom in my twenties, but now I realise I should have prayed for faith. Faith is a beautiful gift. You can’t capture it by intellect. I spent years trying and only achieved a fake sort of faith that had no reality or depth. The vicar was right. I was in love with God all along. And when I realised that, and sought after Him with all my heart, he opened the door, and granted me the faith I needed. I guess I expected it all to wear off after a few days. Emotions would fade and intellectuality would reassert itself. But… no. I’ve realised that the more I keep my mind focused on God, the more I talk to him, the deeper the joy becomes. Prayer is like the energy powerhouse that transforms the rest of our lives. In my experience it’s the only thing that can.

It’s hard to express the strength of the love I feel right now for my God. I find it amazing and wonderful that my experience of Him matches that of all the other believers both in the present and in the historical scriptures and writings. So for the first time in my life I know I have as much faith and belief as anyone has ever been blessed with in all of history. No more and no less. And that perhaps is the most joyous thing of all.

I would gladly be God’s friend forever. I’m still an innocent child in Christian terms, and I’m happy for things to stay that way for a while. I’m Just. So. Joyful. It almost explodes out of me. There just aren’t the words. I’d go to church every day if I could find one holding a service. High Anglican, low church, pentecostal, Catholic – doesn’t matter. I just love God. I love the way he says I Love You in the most unexpected moments. I love his tenderness, and his majesty; the soaring beauty of the way he revealed Himself in such a way that every type of person with every type of personality and talent can find a way home to him.

Love God, that’s the key. Love God and love others. And if you don’t believe in him, love him anyway; pray anyway, with all your heart and strength.

No deep speechifying today. Just some pictures from today walk with the local Christian walking group, around Llansteffan, which is just over the Towy estuary from Ferryside.

I love Wales :)

Why do Americans call Autumn, ‘Fall’ ? Autumn is a perfectly good and beautiful word, and given my mild synaesthesia, the word even looks the right colour, all reddy-brown and rustic.

I’ve spent the last couple of months away in Northolt, living on the narrowboat and repainting her for sale. After a slow start, Dave and I finally completed the work in late August and she does look gorgeous in coach enamel green.

I think the boat is a fantastic buy for someone. She’s far cheaper than the price I paid 2 1/2 years ago (because of the house price crash) and has been ‘blacked’ & repainted since then, plus engine serviced, a new cooker installed, and a shiny new boat safety certificate valid until 2013.

It’s a shame to sell her really, but unless I decide to take work in London again, she’s a tad expensive.

The problem with being away  from Wales most of the summer has been the way the garden has gotten severely out of control. Dave was here on and off but everything in the polytunnel was pretty much starved of water for 2 or 3 weeks at a time. The tomatoes did not like this. Nevertheless the crop they did produce (and are still producing) is absolutely delicious and next year I intend to improve their conditions immensely.

So what else succeeded in Wet West Wales? Runner beans cropped well, as did spinach and lettuce, once they grew above the slug onslaught. Also, Chard. Cauliflowers and cabbages… not so much. Next door has a fine array of celery and leeks which make me very envious – all ours got eaten while we away boat painting. I had loads of leeks one week – the next, nothing. Not sure what took them – they were too big for slugs.

I planted some sweetcorn for a larf. Didn’t expect anything to come of it in a wet semi-woodland location, but actually they’ve not done too bad. I mean, they’re still there for one thing, which can’t be said for every crop we’ve put in the ground. Not sure there’ll actually be any corn at the end of the day but it’s all about experimenting to find what works. At least, it is for me. I hate being told what works and what doesn’t… I’d much rather find it out for myself. After all, other people could be wrong. It happens quite a lot you know.

We cropped quite a lot of onions and potatoes – albeit small, but we think we would have had more if the land a) had been well manured and b) had more light. So the plan is to take out more obstructing trees this winter, including the big oak that towers over the house and garden like an ominous headmaster. I feel quite guilty about this but hey, it’s one oak tree on the edge of a woodland, not the Amazon rainforest.

---

Dave is still working on his driving instructor training. He has a final lesson next week before his ‘part 2′ driving test in a few weeks’ time. This is where they test your driving skills to extreme levels of perfectionism. Once that’s passed, he gets to go on to learn how to be an instructor proper. Then there’s more tests. Then, finally, he can solicit business and earn money.

For myself, the very nice work-from-home programming gig I thought I’d secured back in July unfortunately went away at the last second. They agreed to hire me but then decided they couldn’t afford to take someone on after all. This was a great shame as I really liked the company’s owners and would have enjoyed working with them I think. In the last couple of days however another opportunity has arisen which potentially looks even more exciting. I’m currently in the interview process so I don’t want to say too much at this stage or count any chickens.

I’ve really been indulging my love of coding recently after becoming inspired to get into iphone/objective-c development. After so long immersed in Microsoft technologies (c#, .net, sql server etc) and business applications, the wonders of objective-c, cocoa and core animation are a new and fascinating thrill. The iphone as a software platform reminds me of the early days of ZX Spectrum gaming – you can still make something worthwhile either on your own as a coder, or in partnership with an artist, or as part of a small team. The day will probably come again when you need 100 people and a $200m budget to make a game for a mobile platform, but for now it’s the pioneering days again. I was just too young to get involved when 8 bit computing was kicking off, so I feel like I have a second chance 25 years on. I definitely feel a surge of excitement when I get my little sprites running around a scrollable maze on the little iphone screen. It reminds me of my teens when I used to design and create board games. I may have missed my calling the first time around…

---

In late October I’m starting my counselling course, which runs one weekend a month over in Cardiff. This is something else I’m really looking forward to. I had a few therapy sessions back in Northolt and found the experience very helpful, so I’m excited to be able to learn some of the skills myself. Almost as interesting as the study will be meeting a bunch of people who are dedicated to learning and practising the therapeutic process. It is always a pleasure to be around such folk.

I find the same attraction to being around religious people, even though I’m an atheist, and this is really what I wanted to talk about in the second half of this post. I’ve noticed recently that despite an increasing willingness on my part to admit to a complete lack of belief in supernatural deities of any description (encouraged no doubt by strong atheist voices such as Richard Dawkins and Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio among others), I still find the idea of faith and God completely compelling, as if I’m yearning for something I’m excluded from.

There’s no question that I wish I believed in all all-powerful deity who loves me. There’s no question that I’m envious of those who can and do believe in the existence of such a being, without any great evidence to speak of. But this yearning I think may say more about my experience of growing up and my relationship with my parents than anything about whether a god exists, let alone the quite specific Judeo-Christian God.

But whatever the reason, there are certain aspects of religious faith and practice I find incredibly appealing, something which also applies to many adherents of said religions – particularly the more liberal-minded inclusive types such as anglicans, methodists and so on that don’t see misogyny and homophobia as their raison d’être. When I meet people who are deliberately and consciously trying to become better people and bringing the practice of virtue into their lives, I find that incredibly attractive. So it seems a shame sometimes that I can’t just join in by willing myself to Believe in things I can’t perceive.

I do know that when I act as if God exists I feel a sense of completeness and peace. Sometimes I have conversations with my imagined idea of what God would be like if he existed, and I can imagine that if I was a believer in such things I would call it prayer and feel hugely reassured and fulfilled by the communication.

I’m treading a fine line here. Atheist readers of my blog will no doubt be appalled at this equivocation. It does seem to me that there are three very distinct categories of people on this subject: There are those who simply utterly believe in God and will never be convinced out of such a thing. There are also those who simply will never subscribe to any kind of religion (except maybe the religion of scientific enquiry).

Dave is one of these people. I cannot imagine Dave under any circumstances getting on his knees and praying to a supernatural being. It just would never happen. He has his own beliefs about right and wrong and although most of them will have been directly or indirectly inspired by Christianity simply because of our cultural heritage, I don’t expect I’ll ever see him worshipping or communicating with God, or taking instruction from any kind of spiritual authority.

For myself, and I know I’m not alone (although we may be rare), I find myself flitting nervously between the two camps. Intellectually I see no evidence of a transcendent deity except for the existence of reality itself and the self-awareness to perceive and consider it. Maybe there’s a creator beyond the universe, but absent some kind of definitive communication, it seems like the possibility solves nothing. Maybe we’re all AI subroutines in a massive computer; how would we know? But regardless of the intellectual questions, I still find great peace and happiness in bowing down before an imagined creator and expressing gratitude for my life and the wonders of existence. And I love to hang out with people who feel the same way, especially if they can get over those many years of self-righteous petty theocratic indoctrination by people who only found satisfaction in power and authority.

Some of these same sentiments are also expressed in the first part of a three part article about an American woman’s seven year journey into Islam. Only part 1 has so far been published but the reasoning the woman offers for converting to Islam sound remarkably familiar to me. None of it was driven by a belief in God. She actually had to indoctrinate herself into belief in order to experience the belonging and understanding and acceptance she was seeking. Some of us just love to join religions. We love that moment of intellectual and spiritual submission, even though we don’t believe.

I don’t as yet understand this motivation I experience to be a committed believer in some kind of spiritual path. It rides in horrendous conflict with my intellectual scepticism and causes a kind of perpetual cognitive dissonance. I know I yearn to be a kinder, less selfish person, and communion with God – even a made up imaginary God – seems to be efficacious towards this end in a way that nothing else seems to be.

For almost every Christian I admire (and I do admire Christians more often than atheists I confess), a relationship with God almost forced itself on them at some point in their lives. Anyone who is intellectually argued into a belief in God will later tend to be intellectually argued out again. Those that stick it out for the long haul tend to be people who just find the whole intellectual debate irrelevant. They have this thing called Faith, which doesn’t mean they necessarily ignore evidence, but that they accept they don’t know the answers, and decide to submit their lives to their idea of God anyway, because they love it/her/him so much.

It’s this passionate love for an ideal while suffering in a state of uncertainty and unknowing that I find completely admirable, and this is why I will never feel the sort of dismissive abhorrence expressed by many hardcore atheists towards believers as if the latter were stupid and ridiculous children to be scolded, mocked and laughed at whenever the opportunity should arrive.

And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if I didn’t have another go at trying to be a believer at some point before I die. I still love God, even though I don’t remotely believe in Him.

In mid May, someone, somehow, somewhere  sent me a link to Freedomain Radio (‘FDR’), and I feel like my life got turned upside down. I talked about this website a little bit in my last podcast, but I’d barely scratched the surface of it at the time, indulging in a few intellectual debates about anarchism, property rights etc. Underneath all that politics though is a conversation about the philosophy and psychology of the personal, about our relationships with each other and with ourselves. I started listening to FDR podcasts in which stupendously bright people from college age to middle age and beyond, talk openly and honestly about their dreams of intimacy in friendships, relationships, and with their parents. The dedication shown by these people in working their way towards the truth of what was really going on for them below the fog of psychological defences and childhood conditioning was profoundly compelling and shocking to me.

I felt that they were avidly pursuing an honest intimacy with the world that I had myself once dreamed of, but long since allowed to die in my heart. Well, but for a little flicker perhaps. The mantra of the site (run by one Stefan Molyneux in Ontario, Canada) is ‘reason leads to virtue leads to happiness’. The latter part is perhaps the more straightforward: A virtuous man can be happy, a corrupt man will find it almost impossible. The more a person deludes themselves about their true feelings and motives, the more they create a false self framework of conditioned reactions rooted in irrationality and self-justification. So when someone does or says something that reminds me of my mother or my father and makes me angry, am I really aware that my emotion is rooted in my childhood, or do I blindly lash out and then chastise myself later for not being able to control myself?

I feel like I’ve been doing the latter for most of my 38 years. It’s not like I wasn’t aware of it, but I just didn’t see any way out of it. In my late twenties I began to deal with my anger by dissociating from it. I never really questioned why I was angry, I just set about trying to fix the symptom. I tried to tell myself my negative emotions were not just, not deserved. No one is really to blame for anything: it’s all just one big clockwork universe and if the rain soaks me through, I don’t blame the sky as if it were personal. Just meditate and let the emotions pass…

But what I was missing with all this relativist/subjectivist stuff, what I still found most attractive in my life, what I had always found most attractive, and what I’d always felt was entirely absent, was the pursuit of virtue. I’m one of those people who just point blank believes in right and wrong, in virtue and corruption, and when I see people drift towards the latter, I get anxious, upset, angry. Now if you’re being raised in a home where obedience is the highest virtue, and if you don’t happen to agree, then pretty soon you’re going to find the weight of physical punishment coming down on you to force you back into line. And as a child, if you’ve no way to express your disapproval and anger, then the only thing you can attack is yourself.

So I spent my teens and twenties beating myself up, attacking my own failures remorselessly. I made myself miserable. People told me I was aloof, but really I just saw no point in communicating. Nihilism beckoned! And then in my thirties to escape all this I started to project to others what I thought they wanted (or were willing) to see. Nothing was really right or wrong, everyone was equally to blame and therefore no one was to blame. There’s no such thing as a true self, just an endless onion layer after layer of conditioning, so why bother with intimacy? Why bother with honesty? What is honesty? Even kindness is selfish.

And yet somehow throughout all this, I still yearned for virtue. I was jealous of the Christians and the Muslims with their clear objective morality and their focus on right living rather than making meaningless money, but I couldn’t join them, because I couldn’t submit to the irrationality behind their belief system.

The truth is though that everyone subscribes to some form of morality in some parts of their lives. They just tend to apply it inconsistently. Murder is always wrong… unless you’re wearing a soldier’s uniform. Bombing our land is evil, but bombing their land is virtue. Spousal abuse is wrong, but… maybe I brought it on myself. Hitting people is wrong, but … sometimes children have to be smacked for their own good. No!

I’m no longer sure it even matters where morality comes from or whether it’s cultural or objective – what matters to me is consistent application between myself and others. If I refuse to blame my father for beating me because he was part of another generation and didn’t know better, then I don’t get to hate myself for being worthy of a beating as a child. If I forgive my boss for being a jerk, I must also forgive myself for letting him take advantage of me. There’s no virtue in blaming the world and claiming perfection for myself – that’s hypocrisy. And there’s no virtue in forgiving the world and cursing my own lack of self-mastery.

So instead of sinking into this morass of self-blame and inconsistency and suppressed emotion (because, let’s face it, you can’t suppress moral anger without also suppressing kindness and empathy), I’m seeing a new path open up to me. I can use reason and self-compassion to analyse my emotions as I feel them in the moment. I stay curious: what was I thinking just before I started to feel angry or sad? Is there some trauma in my youth that could have made me susceptible to such triggers, or is all the emotion rooted in this moment? Anger is like an antibody against corruption, against immoral behaviour. To suppress it is to deny all morality, objective or relative. But to express it is a dangerous responsibility. Just because I’m feeling anger it says nothing about where the fault lies! Whose issue is this, really? Mine? Or Theirs? Both? Or neither?

This is why reason is so vital in the pursuit of virtue. Irrational emotional outbursts are like tracer fire from a dead man slumped across his machine gun. If I don’t have the self-knowledge to understand the cause, I can’t possibly appropriately direct the emotion, and if I can’t direct the emotion, I’ll just hurt the innocent, or let the guilty escape unchallenged.

And here’s the key point: It’s not enough to simply feel the emotion. We have to express it, to own it. We have to say what we’re feeling. If someone makes me angry or sad or happy or joyful, neither of us learns anything about ourselves if I sit on my emotion and stew in it. Keeping silent is not the way to intimacy. Keeping silent is not the way to self-understanding, because we can’t get there all by ourselves. We need the curiosity of our friends to help us see into ourselves. And better still, we need the insights of the trained professionals – the therapists – to show us what we would otherwise spend a lifetime blinded by.

So while ‘reason leads to virtue leads to happiness’ seems so pithy and simplistic, it’s actually completely alien to my way of thinking over the last three decades, and could just be the stepping stone to a completely different approach to life for me. And, I hope, a happier, more intimate one, as I let my emotions live again after a lifetime of shutdown, suppression and self-attack.

Just one more thing, before I sign off. The people on FDR are just AMAZING. I’ve just never before encountered hard core rationalists and atheists who are so insightful, gentle, open and willing to practice what they preach. I love to go deep into my unconscious motivations, and can discuss the weirdnesses of the mind like a champion, but it is so rare to find a whole tribe of people willing to accompany me along the journey of self-discovery, and not only that, but curious about my every experience along the way. I love it.

‘When people lose compassion towards others, I know they’ve lost compassion towards themselves.” – Stefan Molyneux.

It’s about time for another post isn’t it?

I’ve been wanting to post or podcast for a while, but things have been changing so rapidly that I felt like whatever I wrote/said would become out of date almost immediately, perhaps even by the time I finished the post!

Let’s deal with the practical stuff first. I’m back at Northolt right now, gradually working on repainting the narrowboat and cleaning her interior. The gas work that I thought was going to be expensive didn’t need to be done in the end. The problem was found and the boat safety certificate was issued. So now she’s all ship-shape except for general grubbiness. It’s still rather frustrating how long this is all taking, but at least we’re coming to the final straight I think. It remains to be seen what price level I can sell her at – one broker insists the market is 20% down on two years ago in line with house prices, another says that’s ridiculous and prices haven’t been in any way affected by the housing market. Who knows.

In terms of making money to sustain life away from the Big Evil City, three items of good news there:-

Firstly, Dave just passed his theory exam to become a Driving Instructor, so now he can move on to learning the practical side of things – how to teach people to parallel park etc – slightly ironic since of course he never had to do that himself when he learned to drive!

Secondly, I’ve had a provisional job offer for a working-from-home IT gig, doing product development for a Sharepoint software house. It’s a startup firm, but the CEO comes personally recommended by a guy I used to work for in the late 90s, for whom I feel a high degree of trust. The salary will be low, but I’ll be sharing in the profit from product sales, and there’ll be share options, so there’s enough entrepreneurial excitement to make things very interesting. First though, I need to learn Sharepoint and pass one of those multi-guess Microsoft exams!

Thirdly, I’ve signed up for a part time course in Counselling offered by Chrysalis. This is a relatively cheap course taking an eclectic approach to counselling and psychotherapy. It’s a subject that really does fascinate me, and increasingly so since I’ve been away from the money-making City rat race. I’ve no idea what the quality of the training will be like, but it’s cheap enough so that I don’t feel like I’m selling my soul (c.f. the £24k cost of my MBA, which did indeed leave me the Master of Bugger All).

I’ve been away from Wales for a couple of weeks now, so no doubt the garden is just more bonkers than ever. Dave’s been there to keep things under control. Last I heard, the broadbeans were cropping, the runner beans were rocketing off the top of the long bamboo climber poles I’d put in for them, and the spinach was all ready for cutting. The tomatoes I think are suffering a bit from overcrowding and lack of light, but there’s not a lot I can do about the latter. Besides, it’s all good experience. This first year I just want to see what happens. I can worry about ‘getting it right’ later, which I suspect is going to involve a lot of tree culling.

That’s the practical side. The other things that’s been going on for me is philosophical. I’ve discovered that not working full time has sent my mind into a full-on introspection that I haven’t really experienced … well, ever. I’ve always been introspective, but at every other point in my life I’ve been so distracted by more immediate concerns that I never really got at the heart of things, like, what are my values, really, and where did they come from? That’ll be the focus of my next post.

It’s a hot sunny day in mid-May and the polytunnel is finally up and ready for business! This has been an epic build by Dave using a lot of trial and error but it’s all turned out brilliantly in the end.

The polythene was easy to stretch over the frame but it was a little tricky to wrap the plastic around the ends neatly and cut off the excess. After a long hot day an argument about the origami of polytunnels was not something either of us really enjoyed!

Initially we didn’t plan on having anything supporting the plastic except the water pipework that forms the roof arc, but when rainwater found a way to form a puddle in the roof it proved too heavy and squished one of the pipes. In response Dave added some additional internal support poles, which have had the additional benefit of providing a frame for shelving which I’m now using for my seedlings!

In the picture on the right you can see the shelves in the upper left, a few tomatoes below, and a row of peppers on the upper right. There are also some leeks still growing in pots, which are doing nicely. Unlike spring onions, none of the wildlife seems to like taking my leeks so they’ve survived to adolescence while every spring onion I’ve put in the ground or in pots has vanished within days of appearing. What you can’t see in the pic are the dozen or so tomato plants just out of shot. They’re hugely enjoying the warmth! I’ve been warned to keep good ventilation in the polytunnel though or the tomatoes might suffer from blight.

Also planted in the polytunnel are basil, coriander, parsley, beetroot, brussels and a few rows of carrots, which have been so far singularly unsuccessful on our outdoor plots. Not sure what’s taking them, but no point fighting it. So it’s indoor security for the orange roots for the time being.

Down at the lower end of the garden, I’ve now finished and painted the steps that lead up to the polytunnel.

I think they’ve turned out pretty well and I got to play with Dave’s circular saws into the bargain. Dave’s mum (a life long horticulturalist) gave us several pots of ornamental plants for the garden so I’ve given over a couple of plots to flowers rather than veg production. This goes against my self-sufficiency raison d’etre but I can’t deny it looks good. So it’s two plots of flowers and two of potatoes between the stairway to polytunnel-land.

The broad beans continue to flourish. Little bit of nibbling from slugs and insects but nothing that’s slowing the plants down. Actually I’m finding the slug problem isn’t nearly as bad up here above the house as it is in the tiny plot outside the front door. I’ve put in a load of cabbages and celeriac (kindly supplied as seedlings by our neighbour) and they appear to be thriving despite the odd slug slime trail appearing on their leaves.

We’re currently trying the non-lethal approach to slug prevention, mainly because Dave doesn’t want to cause problems for the birdlife or indeed our cat that might come from using poison. It remains to be seen whether we will need to escalate to more cruel warfare techniques. So far, I’ve lost entire crops of spring onions (twice), carrots and radishes (until they reached a certain size, after which the slugs stopped attacking the leaves and started going after the root instead). Curse their little slimy hides. Maybe we need to get some ducks. But to get ducks we need to dig a new pond, and so the work goes on.

The whole exercise has been one of pure joy so far, let me state that without any prevarication. In the last month I lost my job with the hedge fund after they got credit crunched, but I don’t really mind. I will need to find new ways of earning a living but for the time being it’s good to be able to spend my time on things that make me feel good about myself and the world. Both of us own narrowboats back in London which we’re intending to sell over the summer. This will give us the breathing space to build new lives out here in Ferryside. And I’m looking for short term IT contracts to tide us over. I don’t absolutely need to get one, but if I did, it would definitely help, and make big capital expenditures like fitting a woodstove, new water heating system and solar panels easier to manage. 

I wish I could say “I should have done this years ago,” but then I couldn’t have afforded to do it years ago, and I didn’t know Dave years ago, and what’s more I wouldn’t have been psychologically ready to give up my ‘career’ until I’d put my all into it. So I can only say I took the opportunity when I was good and ready and who can say fairer than that really?

I feel like there’s another period of my life now beginning. I’m not so much different to who I was ten years ago, but I feel like I’ve walked a long journey, reached the end, and am now starting out on another trip into the unknown. Almost like having another life. It makes me wonder where and who I’ll be in another ten years.

For now, selling the narrowboat is my main objective. But first she needs to pass her boat safety test, and to do that I need to pump out the toilet, thus lifting her a few inches out of the water and emptying the gas storage locker which must be clear of water to pass said boat safety. All very convoluted. And then it’s off to the dry dock for bottom blacking. And then we need to give her a fresh coat of coach paint. It’s a good thing I’m unemployed otherwise I’d never have time for any of this stuff!