A Possible World: The Map and the Terrain

This week the Labour Party adopted a policy of reducing the average working week to 32 hours, within 10 years of taking office. By a funny a little coincidence, I also started work on a new 32-hour a week contract. This was actually an increase for me, from part time (22.5 hours) to something more closely approximating "full". So it goes. Cheers, John.

John.

Now I'm already a Labour voter, and see no good reason to switch (and no, I really don't care about "Brexit" one way or the other) given the other options available, and in fact I'd prefer it if we didn't have to vote at all but just worked out which policies are objectively the best and then implemented those, subject to periodic (and also objective) review without any of the ideological and bureaucratic faff that passes, anachronistically, for government in the present age. Which is one reason I don't talk about politics very much any more. People tend not to think I'm being sincere. Which I may not be, it's too soon to tell. Put it this way: once we had the divine right of kings, and soon we'll have superior artificial intelligence to rule the minutia of our lives (or give the appearance thereof, which amounts to the same thing) but in the meantime, briefly, we had to make do with democracy. So none of the new policies Labour have unveiled at their conference this week strike me as radical, controversial, or un-achievable - even if they are, in these dark times, unrealistic. The right for a two-day weekend was hard fought for, but eventually won: a three-day weekend shouldn't be too much more to ask. Three days down, four to go.

Three years ago plus a number of months, I gave up working entirely and went to the Highlands of Scotland for two weeks to camp out in the stillness, breathe clean air and think about my life. I had the vague intention of trying to live a new life without money, which was of course ridiculous. I'd saved up around £6,000 - a comfortable buffer against immediate destitution; and had given myself the impression, also ridiculous, that I could make ends meet during the transitional period from citizen to vagabond by selling of most of my stuff, grifting here and grafting there as I eked out a place for myself in world dependent on the flow of this thing called "money" - points in a game I had never asked to play.

This was all, I re-emphasise, ridiculous. I am not a reasonable person. Perhaps the three years of working at night had pickled my brain in unused melatonin, and 12 years on Prozac had inhibited the reuptake of serotonin selectively enough to the point I could no longer think clearly at all: or perhaps to rationalise my impulsiveness away like that is to miss the point. Life doesn't teach lessons, doesn't make linear sense, and isn't supposed to because life isn't the sort of thing that's supposed to "do" anything at all. The abstract doesn't rule our lives, only the material does that.

George

On Sunday, the day before starting my new contract, I returned from another trip to Scotland, where I spent a week with the charity Trees for Life, helping to rewild the Caledonian forest. I'll have more to say about this in subsequent posts: suffice to say here that it was intense, beautiful, spiritually and bodily rejuvenating, and maybe even a bit worthwhile. So that's another trip to the Highlands - the only place on these islands approximating "wilderness", and this time not as a result of coming out of contracted job, but coming back to an even more secured one. Another funny little synchronicity it's fun to imbue with some deeper meaning it doesn't need. The parallels amuse me, and that is enough.

What on earth am I doing with my life? Well believe it or not, I have a plan. It's not a complete plan, but it looks something like this:

Having spent the last three years living, not entirely of necessity, hand to mouth, I've got rather good at skrimping my way through the weeks and months. I got myself an allotment and started growing my own food a bit; I've learned how to bake bread, preserve and multiply food in various cheap and tasty ways, and bring down living costs to a lower the average level by using fewer appliances, experimenting some to find what is and isn't really "essential", deliberately limiting my spending to various degrees, and so on. This means I an easily live on the wages of three days a week or less, while working consistently at least four, and saving up between £100 and £150 a week. Over 3 years, this adds up to approximately £15,000 to £20,000.
That's a nice little chunk of money. Why save any up if I still harbour a desire to live without it? Well, what's changed is I won't be saving it up specifically for me, but to invest in a community I'm hoping to build. This is something I haven't blogged about much yet either, but is becoming a larger part of my life - out of the stunted beginnings of the "Manchester Tiny House Eco Village" Facebook group something substantial is starting to emerge. We're meeting now every two weeks - a scattered but Greater Manchester-focused bunch of architects, engineers, dreamers, musicians, gardeners, environmentalists and the curious - to plan and scheme our way into building some kind of community. It's early days but the words "sustainable", "affordable", "alternative" and almost as often "happy" keep coming out of our mouths. I'm one of the dreamers/gardeners of the group, so the curve of learning from people who really know what they're talking about, about things like passive houses, planning permission, local politics, project management and building regulations is a steep one for me, but I feel that I'm part of something special. Special enough to invest not only my time in but also, when I have some of it, my money.

That's really it, in outline form. Live as simply as possible, work a little harder, to save up enough money to put into a form of life I want to live on a more permanent and sustainable basis, maybe just in time for when that sort of thing becomes not only desirable, but essential.

There's a web of contradictions I still have to untangle in my head, but that's all part of the process. What do I really think about "money"? Is community something that I, more of a solitary soul by inclination, really want? What, in the end, is "work" and is it really that bad? How can working to survive and really, joyfully living be combined? - and so on.

But the map is not the terrain.