The Downshift Project

Dave is putting the final touches to the polytunnel frame.

Things are progressing pretty well at Limpets. Dave is putting the final touches to the polytunnel. The photo is actually from a couple of days ago. There’s a window and a door nearly finished now as well. It’s taken a lot of work to put this up and I’m really looking forward to getting the plastic over and starting to use it.

While Dave has been putting up the polytunnel I’ve been building steps so we can get up and down the garden more easily. Typically when it rains the whole hill turns to a slippy mudpile, but no longer! I’m actually pretty impressed with myself; it’s probably the biggest DIY job I’ve ever done.

The steps begin their march down the hill.

I did the sawing of the steps, the making of the pegs, and the laying of the gravel. You can see here how it used to look before I started. There about 15 steps in total now. Unfortunately they kinda look like a partly undone zipper and Dave is calling them the Y-fronts.

Emerging Ferns

Curious ancient life forms of the fern variety are appearing all over the garden. It’s creepy how they emerge from the ground all curled up like insects, then unfurl in one grand inflation. In a world of monocots and dicots, these things are the dinosaurs of plantlife. They belong in an older world.

Tomorrow Dave is heading down to Pembrey for a ‘track day’ on his SV650 bike. This is his birthday present from me. I just hope he doesn’t do himself (or the bike) an injury. It’s my job to take good pics of him getting his knee down.

Then on Saturday we’re off back to London. It’ll be my first time on the narrowboat for well over a month now. I need to clean up inside and get her ready for sale. And there’s the small matter of passing the 4-yearly boat safety test which may or may not be expensive, we’ll see. I’m actually quite looking forward to getting back to London as my bike is there and I haven’t had a good ride since well before Christmas. It was around this time last year that I took my first lessons on a 125 and I’m looking forward to a nice ride in the sunshine. Hopefully my body won’t have forgotten how to ride after the winter layoff.

I think both of us are feeling pretty content with life in Ferryside. I’ve gone very ‘part time’ with my job, and Dave is still unemployed until he passes his driving instructor exams, so we’re having to relearn a bit more frugality than I’d been used to in London. But I think that’s the goal. My central motivation used to be maximising my income – now it’s become maximising my free time, and living as frugally as possible immediately becomes a large part of that. I’m now on the lookout for ‘other things I can do to bring in a bit of part time income’, preferably things I’d enjoy. Two things immediately come to mind. One is writing That Novel. You know, the one I’ve started a hundred times. The other idea is to write a few iPhone apps. Objective-C and the iPhone sdk are still a bit alien to me but they’re no harder than the C#.NET I spent most of my career using. The nice thing about the iPhone right now is that as a development platform it feels rather like the ZX Spectrum did in 1984. People are only just starting to explore the power of the device and the bar is pretty low as far as applications goes. You really feel like you can write a popular application in your bedroom again, whereas on a PC or console you need several dozen developers to put out a game (that ultimately isn’t as addictive as the ones I was playing in the 80s…)

Anyway, enough geeking out. Well okay, one more thing. The TV show ‘Lost’ seems to be nicking my latest novel ideas. I had this beautifully convoluted plot line laid out about a woman who travels into her own past but can’t change anything that happened (and yet can be responsible for those things happening). And now Lost has done the same thing with its non-paradox time travel thingummy. I swear I thought of this a year ago. C’est la vie.

Finally, did anyone else secretly cheer when those RBS windows got smashed in the demonstration yesterday? My brother works for the company and I have nothing against the staff (except the senior idiot management), but in terms of vicarious bloodlust, it was a pretty sight. Futile, but pretty. The whole demo was pretty futile really. In fact it probably just gave an excuse for people like Gordo Brown to claim to be ‘responding to the clamour of the people’ while doing exactly what he was always going to do anyway, which is to replace silly bank lending with silly government lending. Gotta reinflate the economy you know. Gotta get the consumers spending. Gotta keep growth going at all costs. We can clear up the government debt mess later.

Well, you know, here’s the thing. Maybe growth ain’t the best way to go. Maybe we should be aiming for a stable economy – something we could rightfully use the word ’sustainable’ about. Typically the word ’sustainability’ these days actually means ’sustainable growth’, which is an oxymoron if ever there was one. We need to get away from this crazy growth idea. It certainly makes the rich richer, but we’re like bacteria in a petri dish – if you increase the food supply you just end up doubling the population and the same difficulties come back time and again – except that now there’s half the space and everyone’s working twice as hard just to stand still. It’s great that so many people can afford 42inch plasmas, but does it make anyone happy who’s not already found it in themselves to be content? I think not.

Economic growth is similar in nature to the mortgage. Initially it seems like a good thing because people who couldn’t afford a house outright can now borrow over a long period and afford one. But now, since so many people can afford to buy houses, the price of houses goes up. (Which is great if you’re already an owner, not so great if you’re not.) And now that house prices are higher, people who might have been able to afford a house without a mortgage after saving a few years, now find they need a mortgage as well. In other words, the very idea of the mortgage, designed to help people afford a house, has become primarily responsible for the rise and rise of house prices into the stratosphere. And thus we have the subprime debacle, when people who had no income at all were able to get ridiculous loans, enabling them to buy property and pushing the price of housing even further out of reach of those who were cautious and frugal and saved rather than borrowed.

Without mortgages, houses would be many times cheaper than they are today and reflect their real value, not just the crazy power of made up monopoly money; and people might actually have a hope of owning their home outright at some point in their life, rather than just paying off the interest until they die, or sell their equity back to the bank for a meagre pension.

Growth never pays off in the end. Stability is the only sustainable way. You can keep making up money to lend with but since it all depends on using energy to turn resources into stuff and then throwing the stuff away and buying more, when the earth’s energy starts to wane, anyone who still thinks they can keep on growin’ is going to find themselves sorely mistaken. Best figure out how to be content in the here and now. Don’t send kids to school to learn how to live from other kids unless you want a society of bullies and x-factor groupies. Don’t sell them on aspirations of greed and power. Teach them compassion and contentment if we must have schools at all.

Okay, rant over. But seriously, I’ve only just begun.