Friday 16 September 2016

Thoughts from an empty room.



To be is to occupy space. Walls divide space from space. Walls take space and turn it into place. Place is humanised space.

A place is somewhere to put things. A space is a place with things in it. "Wherever I hang my hat, that's my home". Things are not human. Things are other. What I do to the world, I do by means of things.

Today I move out of one place and into another. I collect the keys, sign my name on various documents I say that I've read, and I arrive. My place. 

Your place or mine?
The place is empty. Some bare necessities have been provided: an oven, electricity, running water. There are no curtains in the windows. The walls are almost white. Accumulated post for the previous occupant, no longer at this address, please return to sender. They have gone to a better place. Round at their place. 

Furniture begins to arrive. It is as though I am already losing something. Space becomes place. 



An unbearable stillness. A king of infinite space. Life is here, I think, somewhere. 








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Thoughts from a non-empty room
Is minimalism boring?

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Monday 5 September 2016

The Cost of Living: August 2016



August 2016 is the end of 'stage one'.  This month I move from a flat costing me £650-675 a month in rent to one costing £350 a month. Since rent has been my biggest expense up until now, and will probably continue to be for some time, I'm very pleased about this.  It's also satisfying that I'm moving only about 10 miles from where I am now, into a one-bedroom flat that's about the same size as the one I'm in at the moment.  Manchester city centre has become prohibitively expensive for anyone you might once reasonably have described as "normal".  Perhaps it always was: I don't know, or really care.  Normal is relative of course, but you know what I mean.  Just don't live in a city centre, OK?  Trust me on this one.  I am not a normal person.  That's all I have to say about that.

A normal person.
This month's numbers are actually rather pleasing, all things considered.

OUTGOINGS
Food: £168.59
Postage/ebay costs: £89.20
Prescription: £25.20
Rent: £675
Mobile/internet: £87.19
Council Tax: £84.00
Alcohol: £25.14
Deposit and 'admin fee' for new flat: £680.00
Other: £123.64
Total outgoings: £1957.96

INCOME

Income from work: £958.20
amazon/ebay selling: £221.88
Other: £3.30 (refund)
Total income:  £1183.38

BALANCE:  -£774.58


When you take account of the £680 for the deposit and admin fee I had to pay for the new flat (and what is an 'admin fee', really?  Nobody knows) this is an acceptable result.  All being well I have a £750 deposit to be returned to me when I move out of where I am now, which brings me to more or less even for this month.  What that means is that with my rent about to drop by £325, I can live as I have been doing, sustainably, while working much less than I used to.  Goal achieved.  What's next?  Some more number-crunching, for a start...



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The Cost of Living: July 2016

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Sunday 4 September 2016

Two Weeks Remain



This week I began to feel for the first time as if I'm really making progress.  It's now 13 days until I move out of this flat and into the next one - a step sideways it may seem, but it's really a step down, by which I mean a step up.  It won't be as "nice" as where I live now, but it will cost less.  And less cost = more time, which is the whole point.  That's what I'm telling myself; I may be wrong of course.  It feels at least like I'm beginning to gain some

Packing does this to you.  I started packing seven months ago when I gave up my full time job and started selling things off to pay my way.  It felt good at first, there was even a tinge of actual joy, but became a chore sooner than I'd hoped.  Those trips to the post office, contacting those ebay buyers, hauling bags of clothes and knick-knacks over to Oxfam - it all becomes very tiresome - and time consuming.  It's a sacrifice worth making though.  As you cut through the clutter, you start to see the space around you for what it is.  It's just walls and windows, ceilings and floors.  However ornate a barrier you put between yourselves and the elements - however you decorate it, adorn it, clean and tidy it, it's not where you're supposed to be.  You're not supposed to be anywhere.  You're supposed to moving, living.  Somehow.

It occurred to me it might be therapeutic to start putting things in boxes, days before they're due.  It's comforting to see your stuff contained like that, to see it all in one place, almost as if out of harm's way.  This afternoon I started to sort a 90-litre plastic box that I've been using as an indoor compost heap, into easier to carry containers.  (90 litres of compost weighs a hell of a lot).  Along with the residue of unsuccessful plants and vegetable-growing attempts (more on my potatoes shortly) I've been making a point of throwing my cooking scraps in there, to decompose at their leisure.  I noted with some pleasure as I was digging this all out how everything I've thrown in there the past couple of years, with the help of a worm or two, has returned entirely dirt.

Portable plastic boxes of dirt, stacked up next to the washing machine, in my home, three storeys off the ground.  A visual metaphor, no doubt, but I'm not sure what for.

Related posts

Thoughts from an empty room
Thoughts from a non empty room
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Friday 2 September 2016

Out of the Heartlands and Into the Spleen




In two weeks I move out of Manchester city centre and into Bury, a distance of less than 10 miles but that crosses a couple of constituency lines, taking me out of out of Labour territory and into Toryland.  Middle England, perhaps. If ever an understatement was to be made, it's this: this is disappointing.   A cursory glance through the charmingly useful theyworkforyou.com reveals my soon-to-be local MP to be a Mr David Nuttall, whose astonishing voting record reads like a list of all the top things a person would have to say if they wanted an absolutely guaranteed way to piss me off.

It starts badly, and only gets worse. "David Nuttall is a Conservative MP, and on the vast majority of issues votes the same way as other Conservative MPs."  Oh dear.  Let's look a little closer.  Here are some of the things David Nuttall has voted against in his parliamentary career: equal rights for gay people (including the right to marry), greater European integration, increasing welfare benefits to at least keep them in line with inflation, new high speed rail infrastructure and slowing the rise in rail fares, against allowing terminally ill people to be given assistance to end their life, a wholly elected House of Lords and a proportional voting system for MPs, measures to prevent climate change and - this one's my favourite - he has voted against the Human Rights Act.  That's right, in 2012, David Nuttall voted in favour of repealing the 1998 Human Rights Act, a act that requires UK law to be consistent with the European Convention on Human Rights.  In this instance, fortunately, Mr Nuttall was in the minority, and the Human Rights Act was not repealed.  How irritating that must have been for an elected representative of a constituency of human beings.

So, OK, David Nuttall is against legally protecting human rights, against co-operating more with our neighbours, against developing transport infrastructure, against allowing people to alleviate the suffering of their loved ones, against introducing more democracy into our bizarre and dysfunctional political system, and against taking action to deal with the climate change that has already begun to make parts of our planet uninhabitable.  So far, so Tory.  But really.  What's going on?  Is he just against human life?  Who elects these people in the first place?  I've visited Bury many times, and human beings most assuredly do live there.  18,970 of them voted for David Nuttall in 2015.  I wonder it what it was they thought they were voting for, exactly.

Let's have a look at some of the things David Nuttall votes in favour of in his capacity as a public servant.  They include: the use of military forces in combat operations overseas (including, of course, against ISIL/S, perhaps ignorant of the fact that this serves their insane apocalyptic ends very nicely indeed), replacing Trident with a new nuclear weapons system, more restrictive regulation of trade union activity, raising university tuition fees, mass surveillance, selling state-owned forests, killing badgers, the privatisation of the Royal Mail and restricting the scope of legal aid.  I'm not joking about killing badgers, by the way: Mr Nuttall has had four opportunities to vote for killing badgers, and has done so twice.  He was absent for the other two votes, which leaves open the possibility that, at best, Mr Nuttall takes a neutral position overall on the issue of badger killing.  So the evidence suggests that Mr Nuttall is against not only human life, but badger life as well.  For those of us left alive, he supports the privatization not only of public services, but of forests (so, basically, of the very stuff of life itself).

It boggles my mind that such people can win elections and exercise power over a country of civilized human beings.  I hasten to add I wish to make no personally disparaging remarks against David Nuttall or any other human being.  In all sincerity, I find it hard to doubt that even someone with such a patently inhumane voting record is still at his core a soulful human being with basically good intentions; but as the saying goes, by their fruits you shall know them.  It is the ideology that motivates people that I despise, not the people themselves.  I'll just take some comfort in the fact that Mr Nuttall won his seat in Parliament with a majority of only 378 votes in 2015.  That's about to be cut by at least one.

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