The Moneyless Man (8 page)

1:15pm BBC Five Live phones again. Different show; they want to do an interview plus a live phone-in with listeners’ questions at 9.30pm on Buy Nothing Night. Yeah, why not, I was only meant to be having some home-brew with my friends after an easy day of thirteen hours cooking and hosting.

1:30pm Do an interview with Phantom FM on the spot. I should have bought a voice recorder, taped myself answering the questions everyone asks and played it back to them.

1:40pm BBC World Service phones. They want another interview for another program. It’s at 5pm but they need me in the studio, which is about four miles from Claire’s house. I say ‘no problem’ but actually it is. I am stressed. I’ve agreed to do far too much already because I want to get my message out to as many people as possible. I know I have to do it; I just don’t know if I can manage it.

1:55pm Get call from
Seoige
, an Irish television lifestyle show. Want me to come to Ireland to talk about my year and ideas just after Christmas. This could be my ticket across the sea and
a chance to talk about the philosophy behind my experiment to the money-loving Irish.

2:00–2:20pm Three more small local stations call for quick interviews. Although they don’t go to millions of people, I say ‘yes’ because the presenters are always very kind and supportive and it’s a bit more personal.

2:25pm Quick lunch. Get email that I am giving an hour’s talk at a Permaculture event on Sunday. Nice to be given so much advance notice.

2:45pm With Claire, set off in a van to try and find some grains destined for the trash. Go to a local organic food co-op. They give us fifty pounds of polenta, fifty pounds of wheat flakes, seventy pounds of rice and twenty pounds of couscous that were all out of date. Big result.

3:20pm Interview with 105–107fm from passenger seat of van, while looking for out-of-date food. I’m bored with hearing my voice say the same thing over and over. I try to sound like the words just came to me but I struggle. I’ve said the same thing in the same manner so many times today. I hope I don’t sound unenthusiastic, because I’m not; I am just bored with the same questions.

3:45pm Get back to my friend’s house, get my bike and cycle to town.

4:15pm Quickly print flyers.

4:30pm Buy some food for the last time for a year.

4:45pm Buy myself a book while I still can.

4:50pm Cycle to the BBC’s Bristol studio.

5:15pm Do an interview with the World Service. I love World Service interviews – they ask the real questions and waste very little time on trivia. It’s a pity I couldn’t have done interviews just with them all day. They were the first people not to ask what I was going to miss the most.

5:50pm Start cycling home.

6:05pm Get a puncture in my back wheel going through a part of Bristol synonymous with broken beer bottles. The shortest route isn’t always the quickest.

6:25pm Walk a mile to Fergus’s house. I am extremely concerned that I have buckled the back wheel of my bike with about fifty pounds of stuff in saddlebags. That cannot be good for the tube.

6:30pm Fergus and I (in Fergus’s van that is now working again) go to Claire’s house for dinner. I am going to stay there for my last night of normality. Whatever that means.

7:00pm Trying to fix the puncture, I unscrew the rear dérailleur instead of the wheel. I’m dead on my feet and this is the last thing I needed.

7:02pm Kick the sofa. Apologize to Claire. Lie on the floor utterly exhausted.

7:03pm Watch Fergus attempt to fix the rear dérailleur.

7:10pm Tell Fergus it is utterly, utterly hopeless as neither of us has a clue.

7:45pm Fergus claims to have fixed it. My body receives a second wind.

7:47pm Hug Fergus.

8:00pm Still hugging Fergus. He wrestles me off before asking when dinner is.

8:05pm I test the bike. Although the front dérailleur is not working, the back gears are fine. I have a functioning bike again.

8:15pm I start making dinner. Eat half of it, digest very little, fix the puncture.

9:45pm Cycle to town on my half-mangled bike.

10:00pm Meet my friends Chris and Suzie. Buy my last beer, and a couple for them, and drink it rather quickly.

10:40pm Cycle home to do my last interview of the day at 11 pm.

11:00pm Interview with the BBC World Service, the European
edition. I remember to speak as slowly as is possible for an Irishman to do, since English isn’t the listeners’ first language. Not sure it’s mine, either.

11:30pm Give the last few pennies in my pocket to Claire. Being a student, coupled with the fact she is soon to be the girlfriend of the UK’s most financially-challenged man, she gladly accepts.

11:35pm Get into bed.

11:36pm Asleep.

11:36pm Woken by a text message from a producer in an Oscar-winning production company. Not knowing this at the time, I respond with something to the effect of ‘yeah no worries pal, I’ll give you a shout sometime’. Not my most impressive move.

With my ‘relaxing’ last day over, it was time to start a year without being able to use money. As I lay in bed, I knew that when I woke up the next day, life would have changed drastically. It was almost impossible to not let that thought weigh heavily on my mind. I had completely underestimated the public and media’s interest in a story which hadn’t even been written yet and I had a feeling it was going to put a lot of additional pressure on what was going to be a very labor-intensive way of life.

My first day without money.

It felt like it had been coming for an eternity. For weeks, when people had met me, the only thing they would talk about was my impending moneyless year. It had become all-consuming. Every sentence, not just from reporters, but also from my friends, seemed to end in a question mark. ‘Why are you doing it? How will you do it? Will you smell?’ I completely understood and expected this, but it didn’t make it any easier. Sometimes I just wanted to have a normal conversation about something other than money or the lack of it. It was a relief finally to get going.

Knowing how much I had to get done before eight o’clock, I had set the alarm for 5.30am. Usually, when it goes off, I let it ring and vibrate for many minutes before I clamber out of bed. This time, I was up like a shot, not fired by enthusiasm to start
living without money, but in my eagerness to conserve as much battery power as possible. It was good to start as I meant to go on; this year was going to be busy and sleep-ins were probably going to be a treat. One of the oddest sensations was not having anything in my pockets, as I had given up using keys weeks before. I had decided never to lock my trailer, as I wanted to start trusting the world more. To be honest, there wasn’t much to steal anyway.

The most urgent task of the day was to get the remainder of the veggies we needed for a three-course meal for somewhere between one and two hundred people. I had planned to go with Claire, who had a lot of experience in liberating good food from trash cans, before the sun came up. But just as we were about to start, I realized that, given the rules I had set myself, I couldn’t actually get in the van. In an act full of ridiculousness, Fergus agreed to do my fuel-burning dirty work for me, with Claire. This was great. For the first time in my life, standing up for what I believed in had got me out of some work. Just minutes into my year, the experiment was affecting how I lived. This turned out to be a blessing, as it gave me a few clear moments to contemplate the year ahead. I felt just as excited as I did anxious, but my intuition was that I was going to have a lot of fun.

The day ahead didn’t bother me from the point of view of survival, as I would be surrounded by tons of food and lots of people. However, the thought of organizing a three-course meal, possibly for over a hundred and fifty guests, without being able either to spend or accept a penny, didn’t exactly leave me relaxed. The challenges of the first day weren’t related to moneyless living, although making five hundred dishes is always a bit easier if you have a few pennies handy. If anything, it was going to be the easiest day of the year, as I would have plenty of food to eat and no spare second to contemplate buying anything. I felt the pressure of making the day come together. I didn’t just want to
make lots of people a half-decent meal; I wanted to make them the most delicious feast they had ever had. One of my goals was to show that you can thrive, not just survive, without money. If this meal were mediocre, people would be grateful but they wouldn’t feel more attracted to freeconomic living and that would be a lost opportunity.

Just as the BBC Breakfast team arrived, Claire and Fergus came back and told me all they’d got was one plum. My heart sank. I’d told the world about this and we had no food. Then they opened the back doors of the van and revealed several hundred pounds of waste vegetables and fruit. The BBC Breakfast team loved this, as it highlighted the very serious issue of the amount of food we waste. They asked us to take it all out of the van to use as a backdrop for the interview. The team decided they wanted two interviews, the second twenty minutes after I was meant to open up the kitchen and meet the volunteers. Money-free for only a couple of hours and I was starting to feel the pressure. I quickly amplified that pressure by telling millions of viewers exactly what I was about to attempt. Even Fergus’s sister, who didn’t know we were good friends, sent him a message to say she had just heard on the news about some guy in Bristol who was going to be living without money and that she thought he would be interested. There really was no backing out.

The good news was that visitor numbers on the Freeconomy Community website were going through the roof, with four or five new members joining every minute, thanks both to the Breakfast interviews and the fact that Yahoo had put the story on their news homepage. Luckily, a local web developer, Matt Cantillon, who had joined the Freeconomy Community months earlier, had offered to host the website for free. This meant no money was needed to keep the site running, no matter how much traffic it got. This wasn’t a one-way transaction; Matt frequently used the site to find free help for the animal rescue
project he had set up the previous year and I suppose hosting was the most useful ‘skill’ he could offer. This summed up the spirit of the community perfectly and Matt and I became good friends during the year.

Fergus, Claire and I got to the venue pretty late and met the first ten volunteers from the Bristol Freeconomy group, ready to start preparing and chopping the food. We got the food together, ready for head chef, Corrine Whitman, to take on a scaled-up version of the BBC television show,
Ready, Steady, Cook
. On television, the chefs get twenty minutes to create a delicious dish from ingredients they’ve never seen. Likewise, Corinne had no idea what her ingredients were going to be until she arrived. And she had just six hours to turn a couple of tons of food into a delicious meal for what was to be a packed house of more than one hundred and fifty people.

Although the job of quickly formulating various recipes was extremely challenging at that scale, especially as it was all vegan, she had the luxury of a huge choice. The mix had everything from local vegetables such as rainbow chard, celeriac and kohl rabi to wild mushrooms like chanterelles; from chickweed, nasturtium flowers and rosehips to a plethora of international foods like quinoa, bulgur wheat and couscous, which had traveled thousands of miles from places such as South Africa and New Zealand to end up in Bristolian trash cans. We ended up with so much food that we had to send some of the volunteers into the ‘bear pit’, a large circular underpass where drug addicts and homeless people often find shelter, to give out free food for the entire day. Corrine, backed by a growing army of volunteers, managed fantastically well and within an hour had pots and pans of various concoctions on the go, including Fergus’s amazing field blewit and wild garlic soup. I had to remind myself not to get too excited; my food wasn’t going to be of this standard every day for the next twelve months.

The day went incredibly well. Inspired people unexpectedly volunteered; some of Bristol’s best acoustic musicians added an ambience to the occasion and the food was ‘to die for’. Everyone got free drinks and full service. They couldn’t believe their palates and, most kindly, told us so. Andy Hamilton, my self-sufficientish friend and home-brewing enthusiast, arrived with one hundred and twenty pints of his best beer, made from locally-foraged yarrow and his allotment-grown hops, as a treat for the volunteers. I finished the last interview of the day, for the
Wall Street Journal
, of all publications, a definite sign that Freeconomy was increasing in popularity. Exhausted and elated, I grabbed a glass of Andy’s finest.

Seeing freeconomy work so well in action gave me so much confidence and satisfaction. I decided that if I did manage to make it through the year, I’d end it with something even bigger.