The Moneyless Man (15 page)

For most British people, there are many ways to make a cup of tea: black or white, with or without sugar and of infinite degrees between weak and strong. However, if you consider the whole process of making tea, there are just two. The first is what I’ll call the ‘sane’ way of making tea. I’m assuming the overwhelming majority of the British population is sane, so given that this is the
way it makes its tea, it stands to reason that this is the ‘sane’ method, or people would choose otherwise. It goes like this:

1. Get people in India to grow some black tea. Plant it, weed it, harvest it, dry it, then sell it to a local wholesaler for a sum of money on which they find it increasingly difficult to survive (unless it is fairtrade).

2. Send it 4000 miles by air or sea to the UK.

3. Send it to a UK wholesaler or central warehouse by lorry.

4. Transport from the warehouse to a retailer close to where you live, usually by van.

5. Give the shopkeeper about 99p, not a lot when you consider the number of people involved in the process.

6. Bring it home and turn on the stove, thus ordering the national grid to give you energy to boil the kettle.

7. Grab yourself a mug and enjoy your cup of tea, perhaps while watching television at home, or maybe outside a café watching the cars go by.

8. Feel awake and alert from the caffeine in your tea.

9. Start feeling tired, in the short term as the effects of the caffeine wear off, and in the long term as the tannin in the tea stops your body absorbing certain nutrients.

10. Urinate the tea, its toxins and your nutrients into your drinking water supply via your toilet.

However, there is another way to make tea. This I call the ‘insane’ method, on the basis that the sane masses choose not to do it this way. It’s how I made my tea after the spring.

1. Pick a handful of the abundant tea that grows freely around you. I’m fortunate; my tea grows wild within ten feet of my rocket stove.

2. Pick up some bits of wood lying around to burn in the rocket stove to boil the tea.

3. Light up the rocket stove using this foraged wood and boil the water with nettles and cleavers in it for about ten minutes.

4. Grab a mug and look around you at the stunning landscape while you’re waiting.

5. Pour the tea into the mug (and some into a flask for later) and enjoy it outside in the country.

6. Feel refreshed and packed full of iron, calcium, magnesium and anti-oxidants.

7. Urinate into the compost heap and activate the fertilizer for your future crops.

It mystifies me that we buy, for example, dried nettle tea bags in a shop for a premium, then, through our taxes, pay our city council to chop down fresh nutritious nettles in the spring! An even better example is the people I’d see passing a huge rosemary bush at the entrance to a gigantic supermarket near where I lived in Bristol, who’d then buy the same herb, dried and in little plastic packets, at high prices! Can we no longer see the food that surrounds us, abundant and free? Or are we so disconnected from nature that we can only see it in a packet on a supermarket shelf?

Not only is wild tea free, it is also much better for you, especially if you make it straight after harvesting and leave it to brew overnight. That way, it is fresh and retains many more of its health-giving benefits. Wild nettle tea helps your digestion if you drink it before meals, is fantastic for your skin, hair, and nails and is a perfect tonic if you are feeling physically drained. Given that moneyless living is all about using your body, it is quite useful to keep it healthy!

During the winter and until the end of spring, my friends and family were, justifiably, concerned about my health. Not only
could I not buy the nutritious food I’d become used to, but I also had no money for medicines if I did happen to get sick. My physical well-being was especially important, as I was, for the first time in my life, reliant on my body for my survival. Until the beginning of May, my mom phoned every week, from Ireland, to make sure I was still alive. But I think the fact I had made it to the spring, through the coldest winter of my life, reassured those around me that I might live to tell the tale.

One of the truly great things about the UK is its – free – National Health Service. But this year, I wasn’t contributing, and I didn’t want to sponge off it. Having said that, I’d paid in for seven years without using it once, so I wasn’t exactly dependent on the service. I’m a big believer in being pro-active about health. Putting the best possible food and liquid into your body gives you the best chance of staying as healthy as you can. Because I was going to be even more physically active than usual, I was concerned that I might lose a lot of weight. This probably sounds appealing to those who pay money for gym memberships and diet books, to shed the pounds, but my battle has always been to keep the weight on. I weighed just under 154 pounds when I started the year and I really didn’t want to lose any more.

Contrary to what I imagined, the opposite happened. By early spring, I felt fitter and healthier than I had since my early teens, when I played a lot of sport and I’d gained twenty-eight pounds. I’d followed a rigorous daily training schedule, from the very beginning, because I knew how physically demanding the year would be, and the last thing I wanted was to have to quit the experiment through physical exhaustion. Putting on so much weight by mid-spring was something I’d wanted to do. I believe that no matter what life we live, we are an advertisement for it. People judge the success and health benefits of whatever diet we’ve chosen both through how we look and how we behave. Unfortunately, society tends to judge on looks these days, so I
knew that if I did lose loads of weight while living without money, this would send the message that without money, you won’t get all the food you need.

This became even more important when I realized I was becoming a public experiment. Living without money doesn’t mean you will necessarily either gain or lose weight, any more than does any way of life or diet. In the six years I’d been vegan, people had always questioned me about my diet, usually with a genuine, well-intentioned concern for my well-being. I chose veganism for many reasons, one being that, over time, I’d found it a healthier, more natural diet. But you can be a healthy or unhealthy vegetarian just as much as you can be a healthy or unhealthy omnivore. The same applies to living with or without money.

In years gone by, I’d often picked up a cold around March, when we usually experience a big shift in the weather. This year it completely passed me by, as did the much-vaccinated-against swine flu. An American moneyless comrade, who alternates between living in a cave and housesitting, told me he only got sick when he moved indoors. I have to say my experience tends to agree with his, in complete contrast to what I thought before I started the year.

At the beginning of May, completely through my own carelessness, I did give myself food poisoning. Preparing for a bike trip into the city, I’d grabbed a loaf of bread that had been in the trailer for a few days. When I arrived, I noticed some black stuff on it, which I wiped off, thinking the loaf had rubbed against the soot on the old burned pot I used on the rocket stove. Big mistake; it was black mold. For the next three days, I suffered. I tried to rest as much as I could, but living the way I do means there is always something to be done. The experience gave me my first chance to see the difficulties of doing such an experiment on my own. And it made me wonder what I would have done if my illness had been more serious. Having no money means living without the security that I’d been accustomed to.
Even a little money in the bank can buy you time to get back to health, but living hand to mouth means you don’t have that safety net. Fortunately, I have a lot of good friends and they helped me with my usual tasks. Deasy, the farm co-ordinator, who’d become a really good friend during my first six months, made me a couple of light meals while I rattled between the bed and the compost toilet. It was an excellent reminder that friends are the best security and that no matter how badly you behave during your life, the good ones are much harder to lose than money.

I have one chronic health problem that I knew would hit me in the last week of spring and make my life hell: I am allergic to grass pollen. Hay fever (allergic rhinitis), which affects millions around the world, is bad enough when you live in a city, where grass mostly grows in the space between the footpath and the road. But this year, I was living in a big grassy field; my move from city to country was like someone allergic to dog hair going to live in a dog shelter. During the last week of spring, all I wanted to do was climb under my comforter and put a wet towel on my head. Not the most productive way to survive without money.

When I was young, nothing had worked against my hay fever. At eighteen, I had a steroid injection, against the advice of my doctor. When the effects wore off, three years later, the hay fever came back worse than ever. Antihistamine tablets from the drug store served only to make me drowsy. In desperation, I looked for alternatives and discovered herbalism, particularly Chinese herbalism. Within one week of taking a Chinese herb, my hay fever had gone. This was my first experience of alternative medicine and I was really surprised by how well it worked. This year, buying Chinese herbs wasn’t an option. I had to look for alternatives to the alternative!

Through the organic food co-op that I’d worked for, I met a local bee-keeper who gave me a couple of jars of his honey. Being vegan, I never eat honey unless it is made locally by a beekeeper
I know and trust. Even then, I’ll only accept it if they let the bees keep the honey they need and don’t replace it with sugar. When bee-keepers do this, for me local honey is no longer local, as it has the food miles of the replacement sugar embodied in it. The honey helped, but only marginally, so I used my blog on the Freeconomy Community website to send out a plea for help. I was inundated with offers of advice and one of them worked. A lady, Grace, advised me to use plantain, a very common perennial weed that grew all around me. Both greater and lesser plantain are rich in anti-inflammatory chemicals. Apparently many people who believe they are allergic to grass pollen are actually allergic to plantain yet, ironically, taking plantain can help reduce the symptoms of the allergy.

And it seems like the problem is only going to get worse. The results of research by scientists at the Center for Health and Global Environment at Harvard Medical School show that higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere also
lead to higher levels of pollen, giving me yet another reason to want to reduce my carbon footprint.

Sometimes, we forget that our minds are part of our body and that the foods we eat affect our moods and level of general happiness. Before I started this year, I’d lived for a year without using oil or any of its derivatives, such as plastic. My diet had consisted totally of organic, locally-grown, vegan food and I hadn’t used any oil-based packaging. At the beginning, I’d felt quite down and emotionally low. My body and mind had got used to the protein, nutrients and minerals that China’s lentils, Bolivia’s nuts and the US’s soya supplied, and it didn’t cope very well when I couldn’t find instant replacements. It’s not that we can’t grow these types of crops in the UK; rather, we’ve subcontracted our food security to countries where labor is much cheaper.

In the first month of my oil-free year, my sleep was quite disturbed and I felt weak and unhappy. At the time, I had no idea why, but a consultation with a nutritionist revealed that I lacked an essential amino acid, tryptophan. Supplements were out of the question, so I hunted down locally-grown foods high in tryptophan, such as mustard greens, foraged hazelnuts and seaweed, broccoli, kale, sprouted rye grain, and spinach. Within weeks, I wasn’t just back to normal, I was feeling more energetic than ever and sleeping better. This experience stood me in good stead for my moneyless year and I made sure my diet contained a mix of these foods.

Throughout the winter and early spring, my mental health was really good. But, healthy as it had become, in the middle of the spring it faced its first test.

As anyone who lives outside in the colder months understands, mice and rats are never far away, as they attempt to escape from freezing temperatures and be close to a nice steady supply of food. Modern houses are built to make it difficult for rats and mice to get in; it’s harder to keep them out of low-impact dwellings.