The Downshift Project

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.

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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…

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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.

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!

We have a curious half-acre of land to work with here at Limpets Folly. The house is a small wooden bungalow at the bottom of a steep south facing hill. Managed sycamore, oak and ash woodland lies to the west, while our neighbours have a similar property, also bounded by woodland.

Neither of us are complete newbies at the veg growing lark, though Dave has more experience than I do, due to his mother having trained as a horticulturist in her youth. She still grows the vast majority of her own fruit & veg needs in a garden far smaller than ours. Personally, until Spring 2008, I hadn’t touched a seedling since I was a child.

Still, it can be quite addictive, watching a plant grow from the tiniest seed into something bearing edibles. For a city girl, that first home-grown radish can be quite an emotional experience.

But we have no particular expectation of self-sufficiency or anything close to it. If we have a goal, it’s probably self-determination, the desire not to be under the authority of bosses. We’ll live as frugally as we need to in order to be as free as possible from wage-slavery. Yes, there’s also the desire to live with a low environmental impact, but speaking personally, this comes second as a motivation. It probably shouldn’t, but it does. At least it comes second.

So far, since we moved in after Christmas, most of the work we’ve done here has been outside the house. Inside, Dave’s put up some shelving and installed the plumbing for our washing machine, but it’s outside where most of the effort is going. The shed was falling apart due being soaked in Welsh rain, so Dave weatherproofed it and redid the felt roof. We have a new water butt for rain collection, with plans to install a pump to take the water up the garden (about 10m head to the polytunnel). The polytunnel itself is Dave’s primary project right now. He’s nearly finished it – the structure is up, it just needs some final strengthening and then the plastic sheet can go on. I’m very impressed with it.

While this has been going on I’ve been digging the veg beds and repairing paths and adding steps. Some garden archeology reveals olde steps winding their way up the garden (which shows signs of serious cultivation in the distant past), but these steps are now overgrown and moreover are partially obscured by a patch of raspberries, which we’d rather keep in situ. So I’m making some new woodland steps, which I’m rather proud of. And in front of the house another patch of ground has been reclaimed for a herb garden. I had to cut down a eucalyptus tree to get light onto that particular area. This was particularly tricky as the tree was quite large with many stems, and was quite interwoven with the power cable feeding the house, which had me nervously checking the lights inside every time I sawed off another branch.

Two veg plots have been planted so far. The aforementioned front-of-house herb plot has thyme and rosemary and sage and parsley. I filled the rest with radish seedlings. I am a big fan of the radish. I can eat them like sweets. The second veg plot is full of onion sets. You can never have too many onions. They go in just about every meal.

The third plot is just about ready for planting. This will be split in two I think. One half will be broad beans, while the rest will be leeks and spring onions. I’m not an expert yet at the proper rotation of the four main crop types, nor do I know much about which vegetables like to be close to others, and which dislike it, but I figure best just to get the stuff in the ground at first and figure out how to finesse the system later. I am an optimiser by nature. When I was a software developer, everything was done by gradual iteration, and I still like to work that way. Try and design it all perfectly up front and either nothing will ever get done, or something will go wrong anyway.

I like the idea of permaculture. It makes sense to me to take the waste of one system and turn it into an input into another system. I sometimes wonder how many of the clever permaculture ideas one hears about have actually been proven to be efficacious in practice, but it’s the thinking process that counts. Once you start to think along those lines, all sorts of possibilities present themselves. I figure, the more experience we get, the more naturally we’ll start to develop and enhance the way we lay out our garden for optimal food yield.

And it’s not all about food of course. I may have a fascination with small scale food production, because of the possibilities it holds for escape the dominion of The System of owners and wageslaves, but I’m not without an eye for the pretty. There are some obvious areas of the garden which are just begging for flower beds. Most notably the raised bank that the polytunnel sits on would look stunning in flower, especially from the bottom of the garden as one looks upward. I can imagine putting a bench up there, and maybe digging a pond just below. We have a tiny pond already, not much more than a bath, which is presently full of tadpoles. Such wonderful wildlife could do with a more salubrious home methinks.

Before I go, I’d like to recommend if I may, an article by Charles Eisenstein called, “Money and the Turning of the Age” which is a long but interesting analysis of the role of money in society. I particularly like the following quote:

No matter how highly paid, if you lack the opportunity to fully apply your gifts toward a purpose that inspires you, any job eventually becomes soul-destroying. We are here to express our gifts; it is among our deepest desires and we cannot be fully alive otherwise.

This kind of post-modern critique of civilisation intrigues me a lot. I imagine the people around Marx felt the same way about his ideas, as if the whole damn elitist kaboodle had just been laid bare for everyone to plainly see. Still, more of the philosophical side of things in another post I think.

~Tess