The Moneyless Man (7 page)
Authors: Mark Boyle
The farm has a landline phone and they were more than happy to let me receive calls for interviews (radio stations don’t like interviewees to use a cell phone because of the poor sound quality). They were also happy for me to make some calls, as I was working so much, but I didn’t feel that spending their money
should form part of the experiment. The farm also had some WiFi flying around, which residents at the farm were already using. This meant that I could easily keep up with my commitments to the Freeconomy Community.
My main goal in the run-up to the start of my year was to ensure that I had thought about and prepared methods of providing shelter, food, heating, energy, transportation, and communication. There were many other areas of everyday living I could have thought about and several things I couldn’t possibly predict I might need. However, I decided that I was just going to have to deal with everything else as it arose. There really is only so much preparation you can do and I decided to put faith in the old maxim that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’.
With that, I put away my list, relaxed my shoulders and resolved to curtail my use of money as much as possible immediately, as a trial for the year itself. I thought it would be wise to get in a bit of practice before I started what was going to turn out to be a very public experiment.
BUY NOTHING EVE
When you are preparing for a momentous change in your life, the reality often doesn’t kick in until a few weeks beforehand. Then you start thinking about how it is really going to affect your life, wonder why the hell you decided to put yourself in such a position, and occasionally, inevitably, ask yourself whether you can get out of it.
It was only during moments of complete exhaustion that I felt like that. I decided to launch my moneyless year by putting on a ‘Food for Free Freeconomy Feast’ in Bristol. I aimed to make a free, three-course, full-service meal solely from waste and foraged food, for as many people as I could. The problem was I was already quite stressed about everything else I had to do in the run-up to the start date. And here I was taking on a mammoth mission right at the beginning; making what was already going to
be a demanding day even more difficult. I also decided that it would be a good idea to start living the no-money life a week early, giving myself the luxury of a trial run, with the idea that before Buy Nothing Eve, I could acquire any infrastructural requirements I had overlooked.
It turned out that this wasn’t even close to being a good idea. I had so much to do in the city that week that living the slow life in the country was impossible. I abandoned my trial run after just two days and hoped that I hadn’t overlooked anything too critical. I decided to stay with Claire in the city for the rest of the week, giving me a chance to spend some time with her in normal circumstances, which I felt was particularly important as we had only been seeing each other for a few weeks. Spending a few days in the city was a good idea; it bought me some time, took some of the pressure off and gave me a chance to catch up with myself. I had an instinct that the enormity of the year ahead would soon make more such chances almost impossible. This was when I really started to feel the pressure, with moments when I definitely thought about packing it all in and having a normal life, in which I got to spend time with friends, go for drinks and vacations, and maybe even have some time off every now and then.
Preparations for the free feast were going reasonably well. I’d scored 200 pounds of vegetables, about to be composted, from a local organic produce wholesaler. The problem was we had no idea how many people would show up and, given that we were organizing a free meal, cooked by chefs like Fergus, there was a chance it was going to be very popular. We needed much more produce.
By the evening of Thursday November 27, I was mentally exhausted. I wanted the year to start and to get back to living again. I decided to take the next day off, catch up on some reading and tie up a few loose ends. Oh, and go for that last beer.
CASHLESS COMMUNICATION
Before my moneyless year, I faced a difficult decision; whether or not to use two of the products – which most people would classify as luxurious – of financially-fuelled industrialization: a cell phone and a laptop computer.
It was a dilemma. If I decided not to use the tools that would enable me to communicate my experiment to the world, I risked being criticized for running away, looking out for myself and not contributing to society in any way. I also knew that if I did use them then I’d also be criticized, as I would be speaking out about money and industrialization using two pieces of technology that were reliant on both, which could be perceived as being very hypocritical. I decided to use them. If using them meant that I could let even one person know about moneyless living, that alone would be worth the accusations of hypocrisy.
Communicating without cash is obviously never going to be as convenient as with it, but it is still certainly possible. Communicating with those who live nearby has always been free; it just involves getting together. I’ve found it really beneficial to have been forced back into this situation. However, as cheap travel has enabled us to have family and friends dispersed across the world, we have a huge need for technological communication.
For email, there are quite a few options. You can usually get it for free at your local library, which doubles up as a great way of sharing a computer. If you have your own computer and Internet access, you can use Skype (
www.skype.com
) to make completely free computer-to-computer ‘phone’ calls with anyone else in the world who also has Skype. Many websites (such as
www.cbfsms.com
) allow you to send free text messages, but be careful which
you choose; some of them cost the person who receives the text message, which is hardly the point.
However, for all these, you need a computer. If you know how to put one together, you can easily get all the parts from Freecycle. Once you have the hardware set up, you can use Linux, a piece of free and open source software, as your operating system and OpenOffice for your spreadsheet, presentation, and word processing needs. OpenOffice is compatible with all Microsoft Office applications. Linux also has the added benefit of being really secure, so you don’t need to fork out on expensive security and anti-virus software.
Failing that, get two cups, a very long piece of string and ...
Having given myself the day off, I was finally starting to feel more relaxed and looking forward to the day ahead. My schedule was supposed to look something like this:
7:00am Wake up, have some breakfast and read for a bit.
9:00am Meet Fergus, drive in his van to the wholesale food market to see if we could get some waste vegetables for the feast.
11:00am Go into town, print flyers for the feast and pick up any infrastructural stuff I felt I still needed.
1:00pm Lunch.
2:00pm Back to bed for an afternoon nap and some reading.
5:30pm Dinner.
7:00pm Meet my friends Chris and Suzie for a few farewell drinks before they took off on an around-the-world trip over land and sea.
10:00pm Bed.
10:01pm Read.
10:02pm Sleep.
Life regularly indulges its annoying habit of not letting things go to plan. Instead of relaxing before the most bizarre day of my thirty years on this planet, my day turned out something like this:
7:00am Wake up.
7:35am Wake up again and disable the snooze function on my phone. Have some breakfast and read for a bit.
9:00am Meet Fergus. So far, so good.
9:30am Realize the battery in Fergus’s van has died overnight. Shit. That is not good. Blood pressure is rising, anxiety is increasing and need to hide in a cabin in the woods is becoming stronger.
9:35am Realize there isn’t a chance of being able to get the battery charged and make it to the wholesale market before it closes at 11am.
9:50am As the market won’t re-open until five o’clock tomorrow morning, decide to give up on it for the day and leave getting 60% of our food requirements until the morning of the feast. This is obviously a very risky strategy. I am slightly anxious.
10:00am Go back to Claire’s house to check my emails.
10:15am Read an email from a journalist I spoke to earlier in the week, who says her article has gone into the
Irish Times
. I read the article; it’s far too kind to me but I have a sinking feeling I know what is going to happen next.
10:20am I get a call from BBC Radio Bristol, asking if I could do a live interview at eight o’clock the next morning. I say ‘yes’ despite knowing I have also got to find about 300 pounds of waste food, somewhere, at around the same time. I realize my
story is probably now on the BBC news feed, so I put away the book I planned to read.
10:25am BBC Breakfast News phones. Can I come in for their morning show? They say they’ll pay for cabs back and forth to London. I tell them I think they’ve missed the point, so they agree to send one of BBC Bristol’s satellite trucks to do it live. I tell them I have already agreed to be on Radio Bristol at the same time; they say that they’ll look after that. Why do they want to speak to someone who, as yet, has achieved absolutely nothing?
10:30am BBC Radio Bristol calls to say that I can do their interview from the same truck.
10:35am South West news feed phones for some more details. This is both a good and a bad thing. It means my message will get lots of publicity over the next two days; it also means I’m going to get very busy.
10:40am BBC Radio Wales phones and asks for an interview tomorrow morning too. Nice. I now have to do three interviews
and
find 300 pounds of vegetables for free before eight o’clock on the first morning of my year without money. But I never refuse interviews, especially live ones, as each one is a chance to get the message out.
10:45am My story is obviously on all the news feeds. Sky News is now on to it. They just want some quotes for their website, which is often the feed for the news stories on the Yahoo homepage. Good job Fergus’s van wasn’t working.
10:50am Start replying to as many emails as I can but they are coming in more quickly than I can type.
10:55am
Newstalk
, one of Ireland’s major radio stations, calls. I do an interview. All over in ten minutes.
11:05am A journalist from
The Independent
newspaper wants to do a story and calls to find out more. She talks forever and meanwhile Claire’s phone is constantly ringing. It was a bad
idea to give out the number to the news feed agency. Now I have two phones on the go, non-stop. I tell the journalist I need to go.
11:15am Someone phones about making a short documentary for Korean TV next week. Apparently the Koreans have gone money-mad over the last decade and they think I’d be a good, thought-provoking story for their viewers. They’ll probably just make me look crazy, but I say yes. Today I have decided, like Danny Wallace (author of
Yes Man
), to say ‘yes’ to everything and see where it gets me. It would be a good day to ask me for a one-year interest-free loan, if I had any money.
11:20am Sky News Radio phones for a pre-recorded interview. I say something about my year not being nearly as extreme as the entire news media being owned by so few people. I have a feeling they won’t use that bit.
11:25am Get an email from a literary agency, asking if I am represented. This is more like it. One of my goals is to write a book on the year but I haven’t had time to look for an agent or publisher. I reply saying ‘yes please’.
11:30am The BBC World Service phones. They want to do an interview tonight at eleven o’clock. I’m meant to be asleep by then. However, my passion for the message I want to give out, and my new ‘say yes’ rule, forces me to … say yes.
11:40am RTE (Ireland’s national broadcaster) phones. Can I do a live interview at 12.15pm?
11:41am BBC Five Live rings on the other phone. I ask them to call back in five minutes as I am on the other line.
11:45am BBC Five Live rings again. Yes I can.
12:05pm ITV calls and asks for an interview at the café where we will be cooking tomorrow. Yes I can.
12:10pm Cell phone battery dies. I plug it into the mains. I won’t be able to do that after tomorrow.
12:15pm RTE Radio 1, phones for an interview. Quite a serious one for a change, so sign off very happy indeed.
12:30pm An Irish station, i105-i107fm, calls. Asks for an interview at 3.20pm. I oblige. I’m starting to get tired and stressed. This is too constant, I need some help.
12:40pm Another Irish station, Midwest FM, calls. They want an interview there and then. Yes. Questions are the same as most of the other interviews, largely trivial stuff. I’m getting slightly frustrated.
12:55pm Friends from Ireland send texts to tell me they have seen me in the paper and now they’ve heard me on the radio. What on earth am I doing? I forgot to tell them about all this. Oops.