The Moneyless Man (20 page)

This was particularly relevant to me. I wanted people from all walks of life to get involved in the Freeconomy Community, not just the usual suspects. Again, I realized that my thoughts were no more right than anyone else’s; merely another opinion to throw into the melting pot of life.

The festivals were a time of fun, friendship and change, but they also reminded me of a number of important lessons I’d
forgotten along the way. And they gave me a great chance to promote the Freeconomy Community. I was amazed at how many people approached me, after the talks I gave, with stories about how they’ve used it and the friends they met through it.

The Freeconomy website took quite a lot of my time that summer; writing about my year had given it a lot of exposure. But it wasn’t all one-way traffic. I used it myself both for giving and receiving: I shared camping equipment with a girl who was going cycling for four weeks in August and built an integrated cash flow forecast and profit and loss account spreadsheet for a member who worked for a local charity bidding for funding to continue its work. This case was particularly important for me. Ironically, I was helping the charity acquire financing, but I’m a realist as well as an idealist; I knew the charity couldn’t survive without money at this stage and, without it, wouldn’t be able to continue its great work for the children of Bristol and Bath.

I also received a number of times through Freeconomy. I learned how to use a cut-throat razor, which by summer was an essential skill: the beard that had kept me warm through the winter had long since outlived its usefulness. And notable help came when my laptop broke down. Unless I’d found someone willing to give me an old one, I wouldn’t have been able to continue to raise awareness of the issues that laid the philosophical foundations of what I was doing or administer the Freeconomy website. But it just so happened that the following week’s Freeskilling evening was on ‘How to make a computer’. Ben Smith, the Freeskilling teacher for the evening, offered to put one together for me. He also showed me how to install Linux as its operating system. He didn’t just offer this help to me, he offered it to everyone in the class, together with continuing, free,
support for those who needed it. Ben wasn’t really anti-Microsoft, just very enthusiastic about people using free and open source software. Thanks to Ben, I got back part of my ability to communicate with the world.

Without the support of the Freeconomy Community, it would have been much more difficult to complete a year without money. But that’s exactly the point; it shouldn’t have to be something you do alone or a life that must be difficult. As new projects like Freeconomy, Couchsurfing, Freegle, Freecycle, and Liftshare emerge every year, living without money is getting easier and easier. And if I can do it, anyone can. I am, genuinely, one of the least talented people you are ever likely to meet.

I had a fantastic time during the summer. Though I was usually on the go from five in the morning to midnight, almost every day, it really didn’t feel like work and play were two different things. I loved what I did during the day and had an even greater appreciation of the time I managed to share with friends at night. Many evenings, a bunch of my musically inclined friends gathered around the campfire. Alex played the fiddle, Wally strummed the guitar, and we all sang and danced until the temperature told us it was time to cover the embers and get into bed. It did make me think how much easier my experiment would have been in a country like Spain, with more sunshine all year round. But running off to continental Europe would have slightly missed the point; models of sustainable living are needed in the UK just as much as anywhere else.

The summer solstice passed. While many people celebrate this day, I absolutely hate it. After the solstice, the days get shorter and shorter, and I had come to love the warm evenings that seemed to go on forever. But, though my first moneyless summer had come to an end, some of the best days were yet to be.

My tiny collection of eight CDs, nestled in a nook above my bed, had gathered a thick layer of dust. I could never quite work out why I continued to hold on to them. Most were albums that featured in the soundtrack to my teenage years; I guess I kept them to cling to a time when all that mattered was that gorgeous girl down the road and who Manchester United were playing at the weekend. I also suspected I was holding on to them until the time I might re-enter the world of outlets, those unlikely gateways to the beautiful realm of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

It had been nine months since I’d played those discs. Nine months since I’d bought my friends a drink or taken a train ride to the coast. But there was a strange sense of comfort in the dust. It was a sign of time passing. Every tiny layer added meant another week closer to accomplishing what I’d set out to achieve.

It was fall. The longer it went on the less I cared about making it to the end. The finishing line wasn’t so appealing. In fact,
the thing that weighed most heavily on my mind was the thought of going back. I had let go of so much mental and physical baggage and never felt so liberated or so free. What would I do? Would I go back to a job in the city, get a nice new apartment and slowly drift back into a ‘normal’ life? Or were the slopes I had climbed for nine months merely the foothills of an entire mountain range?

After a coolish summer, the sunshine eventually came towards the end of August, which pleasantly coincided with a brief lull in the chaos of my life. Although I appreciated the gift of life a bit more every day, I was tired. While my friends took their summer vacations abroad, I kept the weeds down. For rest and quiet time, a couple of days away in the woods was as good as I’d got. I decided to make the most of the fantastic fall weather that England enjoys and take some time out. The end of my year was rapidly approaching and I had a feeling that the slow life I was advocating to journalists would suddenly become the fast life again. I had to make big decisions about what I was going to do after my year was up; I needed thinking time, which thus far had proved elusive.

Fall is, without doubt, my most cherished time of year. The sunsets in September are wonderful; on clear evenings, my entire valley looked incredibly rusty. The birds too seemed to realize it was their last chance to have some fun; the swallows that lived around my trailer spent the last few hours of light immersed in a ritual dance only they understood. One evening, out for a short pre-dinner walk, I had to stop in my tracks, as hundreds of these little creatures flew chaotically around me, sometimes just inches from my body. The swallows’ dance seemed to go on for hours. At moments like this I really appreciated how privileged I was to live this way, in stark contrast to a commute through inner-city Bristol on such an evening.

And fall is the perfect time to go adventuring. My love of both camping and foraging meant that, for the next month, there
would be many more days when work and play remained one indivisible whole.

I’d decided to pack in as much camping and foraging as I possibly could. In September, every possible gap in my diary was filled, heading off with one friend or another on a long walk or ride into the English wilderness, armed with baskets and bags for gathering food. This also proved to be a refreshingly successful alternative to going to bars or restaurants on dates. I was surprised by my rate of success in asking women out to take a break from the norm. This was strangely life-affirming, reassuring me that not everyone was interested only in how much I owned or earned. It gave me hope that somewhere out there, amid the fields of mass consumption, stood the Moneyless Woman, searching the horizon for her Pauper Charming. I wasn’t convinced many of them would be interested in it other than very part-time, but the hope sustained my weeding.

One of my September foraging trips was a completely last-minute decision to go camping with fifteen friends for a long weekend of food, fun, fire, and friendship. We grabbed a map and spun a bottle to see what direction we’d take. It pointed us west. This particular short break wasn’t about the destination, in the way that previous vacations abroad had been. The journey itself was the vacation; where we decided to rest our heads for the night was almost irrelevant. The journey’s beauty lay in its effortlessness. Because it was so spontaneous, we had little time to get any food together, though I harvested as much as I could carry to share with the others. But the experience wasn’t really about getting the food together
before
we went; it was about gathering it
as
we went. We picked food as it appeared along the hedges and fields that enclosed the paths we wandered.

Many of the group really wanted to find out about the varieties of edible fungi. When you speak to people about foraging, the first thing that usually comes into their heads is mushrooms. Mushrooms, in some respects, have a terribly unjustified reputation; the vast majority of fungi are safe to eat. Having said that, pick yourself a handful of Ivory Funnels instead of Scotch Bonnets (both often grow in the same place) and you’ll have an uphill battle to survive. Just a forkful of Death Cap mushrooms (a fungus I threaten Fergus with weekly if he doesn’t teach me a new skill) can kill an adult. This sounds a bit scary, but it shouldn’t be. I have very little idea what I’m doing and I am still alive. So it made a lot of the crew very happy when we stumbled on a giant puffball among a field of nettles. For many it was their first puffball and because of its size – as big as a soccer ball – everyone was really excited. It was big enough to feed all of us for lunch; absolutely delicious fried with olive oil and garlic.

Another much-loved fungus we found along the way that weekend were chanterelles, a yellow mushroom that smells ever so slightly of apricots. Our experience of finding these was much the same as Dorothy Hartley’s, in her book,
Food of England
: ‘You find them suddenly in the autumn woods, sometimes clustered so close that they look like a torn golden shawl dropped amongst the dead leaves and sticks’. Chanterelles can be hard to see, camouflaged in the leafy carpet of the forest, but their taste makes it well worth keeping a careful eye out. We also found field mushrooms and blewits (a common fungus in grassy pastures), adding even more flavor and texture to our evening’s meals. But we didn’t plan to live only on mushrooms for four days. They wouldn’t have sustained us for the twenty-five miles we walked each day. We also needed to look for anything with a high protein content: the most obvious source was nuts.

The most abundant, and most edible, nuts on our route were hazelnuts. Hazelnuts are really expensive in the grocery store but
free, in large quantities, if you know where to look. Not only that, they store well; if you start looking in September, and beat the squirrels to them (though don’t forget to leave them some), you can easily keep yourself in good-quality protein for a year. I grabbed an extra load, to start my winter stock, but they didn’t last long as my so-called friends dived into them as we made our way through the woods. What kind of people steal food from the mouth of a man without a penny to his name? We came across some walnuts, a bit too young and wet to taste very good. We found acorns everywhere, but these weren’t much use; their high tannic acid content makes them taste incredibly bitter. However, if I’d been prepared to bring them home and put in a bit of processing, I could have made delicious acorn bread.

Foraging expeditions can take a lot out of you. Maintaining our energy was absolutely essential, especially if we wanted to have fun in the evenings after we had pitched our tents. I’d brought tubs to collect whatever berries we could find along the way: gooseberries, raspberries, and blackberries were the most abundant. We’d fill our tubs, eat the berries, and refill. This truly was ‘food on the go’. In supermarkets, conventionally farmed raspberries can cost as much as $2.50 for a small portion; organically grown raspberries even more. On our walk, we’d sometimes pick a tub of glorious wild raspberries in just a few minutes. It felt like we were getting paid to travel. The cycle path that makes up a quarter of my journey to Bristol and back was full of berries between July and September. If I saw a cluster of really juicy ones, I just couldn’t help myself. My purple-stained fingers gave me away whenever I showed up late for meetings, trying to use the terrible traffic as an excuse!

We’d set up camp every evening no later than six, get the fire going and cook the fruits of our labor under a full moon to the sounds of acoustic guitar, violin, and African drums. We danced, we sang and we eventually slept, some beside the fire. If there’d
been anyone living nearby, I’m sure they’d have complained. But that was the point: there was no one nearby. This was the closest to real liberation I had experienced all year. I feel eating food as you wander pushes some deep ancestral buttons and, although I struggle to work out why, I’m at my most alive out in the wild, picking the food that nature freely supplies, before falling asleep under the stars.

The actual food is but one aspect of the wild food foraging experience. It’s also a great excuse to spend time with friends away from the stress of modern life and the relentless sound of cars. Foraging combines everything I adore: being immersed in nature, adventuring, exercise, great food and – if you manage to convince your friends to come along and camp out – a bit of a party to boot.

Weekends like this were a great antidote to my ‘normal’ life which, if it weren’t for my passion to spread the philosophy behind moneyless living, would have been like this all year round. I also found it invaluable to help me stay grounded when all else around me could have started to make me a bit crazy. If it hadn’t been for this moneyless break with my friends, I think I would have probably done just that.