The Moneyless Man (9 page)

Even normal change can be destabilizing; think how you felt when you had to move house, start a new job or make any changes to your usual lifestyle. You can imagine how it feels to wake up one morning and realize that you can neither receive nor spend a single penny for another 364 days. When I was younger I found giving up chocolate or swearing for the thirty days of Lent a real struggle. Happily, swearing was free and I could continue to do it as much as I liked. My Irish upbringing meant it played an important role in expressing both elation and despair; I had a hunch the coming year was going to contain lots of these emotions.

The morning after the free feast, I woke up at nine o’clock, which was a real sleep-in for me. The adrenaline from the last few days had taken its toll; I felt a little fragile and empty. I ate some
of the fruit and bread left from the day before and headed for the Permaculture event at which I was speaking. The last two days had been a circus. The real year now began. Instead of being in the newspapers, I would be wiping my rear end with them.

Life without money started smoothly, with no major catastrophes in the first few days. I’d always felt that things would get increasingly difficult the further into my year I went. Stuff would break, I’d run out of supplies and accidents would happen. However, at the beginning, I still had a little bit of everything. This was a good thing. After only a couple of days, I realized that time was my most precious commodity. First, going off-grid was very time-consuming. No switches to turn on energy; even charging up my laptop was a mission. In the dark, I had to hold the wind-up flashlight in my mouth as I screwed the cable of the laptop’s car adapter to the solar panel’s charge regulator. It was such a tight space that it frequently took me five minutes to get it plugged in properly.

To compound my lack of time, I spent far too much time in that critical first week speaking to journalists, filming bits and pieces and writing emails to people who had contacted me with questions, opinions and messages of support. This was neither the slow life of self-sufficiency nor the fast life of the city: it was both. Just as the stream started to dwindle, the
Daily Mirror
sent along a reporter for a day, to see how I lived. This was a very positive thing; ten years ago this newspaper would never have been interested in somebody living without money. In some ways it symbolized how far the environmental movement had come, although the credit crunch had doubtless played a part in their decision to follow the story. The article came out fairly well and was mostly positive, if rather sensational. They quoted me as saying ‘Gandhi blew my mind, man’, when what I had really said was ‘I’ve been inspired by Gandhi in the past’. To convey to the public that I pick nettles every morning for my tea, they wrote,
‘Every morning at 7:15 am he crawls on his hands and knees into a field of nettles’. I’m living without money; I’m not crazy!

When you do an interview for the BBC, usually the
Guardian
or
The Times
follows. From my two-page spread in the
Mirror
(with advertisements for Tesco and Boots juxtaposed beneath), I started getting calls from a section of the media I had never engaged with. The
Trisha Goddard Show
(a UK talk show) wanted me to come on the show with Claire, to ask her how terrible it was to be in a relationship with a man who had no money. I wasn’t interested, but they didn’t stop ringing until I said that conflict really wasn’t my thing and that it didn’t matter what they asked me, I wasn’t going to be negative. They never called again after that.

I also got offers from other publications, including a women’s weekly magazine. I checked it out to see what I would be letting myself in for and I was appalled at its stories, from the sensational (a man who tried to kill his wife so he could be with her daughter), to the utterly bizarre. But I felt this was exactly the type of publication I should be talking to. Writing for magazines like
Ethical Consumer
and
Resurgence
is great but there is an element of preaching to the semi-converted. This magazine was certainly not the medium of choice for the alternative class.

Blogs and articles about my experiment popped up all over the internet. A year or two ago, when I first started down this path, I would have been overwhelmed. I would have felt great every time somebody wrote something positive but angry or down every time somebody didn’t approve. Now, I didn’t care. I’d long ago accepted that the Freeconomy movement was something people were either passionately for or against, with very little in between. I was concerned only with living the way I truly believed in; people could think what they liked.

I do get a bit frustrated when people misquote me or write falsehoods, as once it goes to print or on air it is too late to take it back. One major news channel claimed a friend of mine was
paying any income tax which I owed. I’ve no idea where they got that from but as far as I am aware, paying someone else’s tax contributions is impossible. I don’t think the world of officialdom works like that and I’d be surprised if the reporter didn’t know it. Experience made me suspect that they just wanted me to look like a freeloader.

It did feel wonderful finally to start living the way I had wanted to live for so long. There were time pressures and stresses and a lot of physical issues to be resolved, but isn’t that so for any way of life? I believe you become a healthier person – mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually – the moment you start living the way you believe you should, whatever that may be. Self-discipline is meant to liberate and not constrain the soul. I felt as if a huge weight had finally evaporated from my shoulders.

I started to find my rhythm of living without money. By the end of the week I had a nice little routine going. I absolutely adore the morning, so I start the day at five with ‘morning oats and oaths’. Oats are a locally-grown food that strengthens me physically, and the oaths are a list of personal ethics and thoughts that strengthen me mentally and put me in the right frame of mind for the day.

Living without money means I no longer go to the gym. Instead, about 5.20am, I do one hundred and twenty push-ups to warm up and get my blood circulating. Brimming with energy and armed with my wind-up flashlight, I take off in search of some wild food. In a somewhat crazy choice, I’d decided to start my year just at the beginning of the ‘hungry gap’; the time of year when there is very little fresh produce available in the vegetable garden. My main wild winter harvests are medlars, ground elder, cow parsley, pine needles for tea, dandelion leaves, stinging nettles, and whatever edible mushrooms I can find. ‘Jew’s ears’ are my favorite; a purple to dark-brown, rubbery, ear-shaped fungus. Its texture is fantastic; I call it my vegan meat. They mostly grow
on dead elder trees, although you also find them on beech and elm. My trailer is surrounded by dead elders, so I have a fairly constant supply. It’s also known as Judas’s ear; legend tells that Judas, the apostle who is said to have betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, hanged himself on an elder tree. I also pick some of the kale and purple-sprouting broccoli that I grow – these aren’t wild but are fresh and delicious and essential for getting through the hungry gap.

About six o’clock I head back to my trailer. Living off-grid, I can’t just stick the kettle on, so I fire up my rocket stove. Watching the beginnings of the sun coming up over the eastern horizon and listening to the birds tune up, I boil up the nettles and pour the brew into my flask, so I have tea at hand all day. Next comes the rather normal chore of washing the dishes. The not-so-normal part is first breaking the ice in my makeshift outdoor sink. It is really cold at this time of the morning, at this time of year, in the valley where I live. The water is icy but the view is exhilarating.

Before it gets bright I put my compost toilet to good use. My particular model has no toilet seat or bowl, which means I have to squat. This is common in the East, where it’s considered the ideal position for clearing the bowels. It’s the position we’ve used to defecate for almost all of human history; our bodies haven’t evolved at the same rate as modern toilet-bowl technology (if you can call a toilet bowl a technology). For toilet paper, I get a second use out of one newspaper or another. Using newspapers isn’t as bad as it might sound; choosing the right publication is the important thing. I don’t find the broadsheets very pleasant, although their content is much better to read. The tabloids work best and at least means they have a useful function. They aren’t quite the double-quilted standard I had previously enjoyed, but I got used to them remarkably quickly. The best of all, ironically, was
Trade-it
magazine; perfect size and reasonably soft texture. The funniest moment was when I ripped off a strip of the
Daily
Mirror
one morning and, just as I was about to wipe my rear end with it, saw my ugly mug staring right back at me. Needless to say, I carried on; you don’t often get the chance to have such utter disrespect for yourself.

Next, teeth. I use a mixture of ground wild fennel seeds and cuttlefish bones (which wash up on British shores from time to time). Cuttlefish bones provide the abrasive needed to clean and get rid of plaque, while fennel seeds both leave your breath smelling incredibly fresh and kill bacteria and everything else which can lead to bad teeth or gums. Fennel is an ingredient in even the most conventional of toothpastes. My toothbrushes come from a batch of seventy or so a friend found in a supermarket trash can. They were perfectly fine; it seemed they had been thrown out because their packaging had a bit of water damage. I gratefully accepted them as another potential problem sorted.

I have a quick shave – head and chin – using a cut-throat razor, which I sharpen using the birch polypore (otherwise, aptly, known as the razorstrop) fungus, rather than a leather strop. This is a vegan trick taught to me by Fergus. I finish with a very quick wash under my solar shower. The water is absolutely freezing, as it is winter, but the contraption at least allows me to shower. I fill the black bag from the river for the next day.

It’s now seven o’clock and time to boot up my computer. While I’m waiting, which isn’t so long because I use Linux, I do another sixty push-ups and ninety lifts above my head with a thirty-pound cinder block. Freeconomy has been growing so quickly over the last two months that I am slightly overwhelmed with work. I dedicate an hour to administering the website and its inevitable queries, then reply to my personal emails. I can’t make phone calls so email is now my secondary form of communication, after face to face. Once on top of all these responsibilities, I prepare the day’s lunch and dinner before starting work on the farm at 8.30am.

Work on the farm is extremely varied. One day I grow veggies, another manage the hedges, the next (ironically) use my business background to help put together a sustainable business plan for the farm community. I take a break at eleven o’clock, during which time I promote the weekly skill-sharing evening, ‘Freeskilling’, which I run with the local Freeconomy group. One week it could be on bread or beer-making, the next how to build an earth oven, the next how to make a computer. After another few hours of hard labor, I retire to the trailer for lunch. This is a mix of the food I foraged in the morning, out-of-date bits I garnered from dumpsters the night before and local organic and vegan produce for which I’ve bartered my skills. While eating, I try to write something: a column, my blog, or this book, before getting back on the land.

By 4.30pm I get the rocket stove on for dinner. I usually cook two days’ worth together, to save wood and time. This stove is extremely efficient, so I eat around five. I devour my meal at a much greater speed than I would like and cycle to the city for a meeting. I tow my trailer; although this adds weight, I can pick up stuff (anything from food to a vegetable steamer) from trash cans on the way back. The eighteen-mile journey takes about an hour and ten minutes going into the city and about an hour and half on the way back. Going home is all uphill – and I am more tired.

If I don’t have a meeting in the evening, I spend thirty minutes chopping up wood, a by-product of our hedge management work on the farm, then get the wood burning stove going using waste paper and cardboard, some straw, a flint and piece of steel and fine kindling. Once it’s going, I get back to the computer for a couple of hours. I do my best to take a quiet stroll through the fields around half-past nine, appreciating the tranquility, beauty and chilly night breeze that surrounds me.