The Last Post ( 1 day to go…)

by Max Akroyd

Time’s up!

The countdown is complete. Thanks to a big push over the last couple of weeks, there are now bottles and bottles of elderflower cordial in the fridge and jar upon jar of strawberry jam on the shelves. The early potatoes have been dug up and the paltry beans and peas podded and frozen. Each day starts with bread-making and ends with – well, nothing! – the last (commercial) wine having been supped and the last coffee drunk.

A pig is sleeping in the barn, unaware that today is the last day for him too…

The transition to home-made and garden-grown has been accomplished. Not completely, and far from perfectly. And we’re still waiting for rain of any significance here. The garden has been frozen by drought. Progress out there is faltering in the staring face of a yellowing and slightly sickly-looking reality. Without the abundance in the polytunnel and the glut of early fruit we’d be pretty hungry peasants, pretty soon…

But at least the relationship between the garden and eating is now direct and intelligible to all here. To put bowls full of delicious food from the garden in front of the family is the best job I’ve ever had. This does mean, however, a complete commitment to food production and food processing. Easy words to write, but a wholly different reality to the work-life balance we were brought up to consider as normality. The new (as in non-industrial) normal is invaded by uncivilised responsibilities – ranging from digging to killing – previously devolved to hidden, less fortunate others. It’s thus a return to what and how we are, with all the discomfort and difficulties that entails.

This blog has attempted to record this mental and physical shift (backwards, forwards, sideways..?) I hope the 325 previous posts at least give a sense of the efforts involved, as well as the available rewards. I maintain this transition could happen to anyone, at any time. Beneath that strange, calm surface, the world economy is a turbulent and wild place right now. It may be hard this peasanthood thing – almost impossible for an office body like mine – but it is safer than the alternative. After all, every increment of self-sufficiency is a step back from the ever-encroaching fire of debt slavery. It’s the only reasonable defence.

*

This chapter is over. We will be starting a new Rural Idiocy? blog soon – Emma and I – but the emphasis will be a bit more on the food itself rather than the growing of it. I’ll post the details here as soon as the kids, the animals and the weather give us the opportunity to finalise things… We may be some time! If it ever does rain, I’m sure you’ll understand that our priority will be to teem over the field with soggy seed packets to try and recoup some lost harvests.

Lastly but not leastly, I’d like to thank warmly all the fellow travellers who took the time to comment here or email me or even visit us. Your support and encouragement have been the difference between perseverence and despair on numerous occasions!

I hope to see you at the new place some day soon.

Max, Finistère, May 2011

Retrospective (12 days to go…)

by Max Akroyd

I became 44 the other day. It’s surprisingly hard to take a day off when every day is a day off from doing things you don’t like. To achieve a complete contrast to the norm, I suppose I could have done my tax return… Instead, I made the pigs wait for breakfast a bit longer than usual, and I chatted to Emma slightly longer over coffee. But I spent a lot of my birthday happy in the shade of the tool shed, fixing my strimmer.

This mainly involved whacking the thing with a hammer and chisel (don’t ask) and thus represented the latest expression of our make do and mend philosophy. A few years ago I’d have taken it to an Authorised Person to service. The transformation of attitude and circumstance pleased me – along with a bit of annoyance about the amount of money I’d given to people in the past to do stuff I should have taken responsibility for…

Reverie about how much things had changed soon got me thinking (in a very middle-aged way) about how I’d ended up having a ragged, happy birthday in a toolshed in Brittany rather than the pre-ordained one: dejected in a suit in a bar in West Yorkshire. Why had my official life plan unravelled so absolutely?

At about 4 years old – my earliest memory – I fell into a bramble-filled ditch in Ireland. That’s a certain proximity to nature, I suppose, but not really the thread I’m trying to pick up! At 14 I was living in my parents’ dream house in Cumbria. It had a big garden and a little wood and, I think, woke up the notion of rural living as the highest form of existence. 24 marked the start of a decade lost to an accidental career. At 34 life was suddenly re-illuminated by the arrival of my first child. The jolting discrepancy between parental values and those of my job caused me to trade my coupé for a purple saloon and drive off into a sallow Yorkshire sunset.

A bit later, somewhere between and the nappy bucket and the allotment, the plan to come here was born. A confluence of instinctual rediscoveries – or something. It’s hard to know where purpose ends and retrospective justification begins, isn’t it? But I do know that strimmer is working just fine now.

I am a peasant (19 days to go…)

by Max Akroyd

My promise to eat from our land from June 1st has worked wonders.

On countless occasions it’s got me outside when I was too tired, uninspired or downright lethargic to contemplate it under any other circumstances. Every bed on that ocean-sized field has now been cultivated (to some extent) and, despite May’s rampant efforts, I’m still afloat. Which is a novel feeling at this time of year and entirely attributable to the commitment I made here.

Moreover, I have convinced my biggest critic – myself – that I really couldn’t have worked any harder. Other people would have done it differently and, most probably, better. The field still looks like a field to me – although more nice people are saying more nice things about it now. After a couple of years of effort, the soil is, in places, doing more smiling than snarling!

If you pick a task which has an absolute relationship with the effort you put in, it’s very rewarding to stagger towards the conclusion of the first chapter… But before getting any further into this dry subject matter, here’s some nice things I probably won’t be eating:

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If you want to give nature a good laugh, show her your plans: none of this proud progress means that I’m where I hoped to be. I’ve failed in part due to circumstances beyond my intelligence to control – mainly lack of money and rainfall. I have no cow, no goats in kid and a dearth of early crops – all of which impairs the possibility of self-sufficiency. The all-encompassing effort required to roll out a year’s worth of eating has been almost too much for this man on this scale and has baffled any attempt to get off to a particularly flying start.

Sometimes I wish I’d never used the term self-sufficiency. That fundamentalist creed belongs to those hearty people who thresh their own grain, make their own soap and make underwear out of nettle fibre. Instead, I am a peasant who – along with my family, the love of a good woman and comfortable pants – realises he only cares about growing and eating the best food. The fact that this gastronomic pleasure is only available to the poor man at his gate, rather than the rich man in his castle, makes it an even more beautiful concept to me. I always think of this (re)discovery as like stumbling upon a neglected, overgrown, but golden road.

(As well as association with the nicest people, it’s no exaggeration to state that this blog has allowed a humble life purpose to be distilled out from all the other noisy and confusing fractions of modern life).

Anyway, what is to be done? Under my own terms, I was always allowed a shortlist of essentials; flour, olive oil, salt and sugar. I kind of assumed the continued ability to eat my good woman’s cakes and buy in spices and such to make chutneys and other preserves. Reference was also made to bartering for goods produced by other rural types.

With just over two weeks to go, it’s high time to tidy up the rules and put them before the committee of commenters!

In addition to sticking to the aforementioned rules, I’m proposing that any money I make from my land, from the sale of food grown on it to the proceeds from working holidays, can be used to buy in things I can’t grow (over and above the aforementioned shortlist). Such revenues (net of tax) would be calculated a month in arrears – so I’ll have May’s money to spend in June and so on… Expenditure in this regard will be accounted for, not out of some odd need to confess, but because it might be interesting to see what food products rise to the top of the list of priorities and to invite discussion of alternatives.

In time, I hope this amendment will allow the project to become a family-wide experience and mean that I won’t be eating nettle soup on my own indefinitely. I think this way of organising household income would be recognisable to my peasant forbears, too. Anyway, let me know what you think.

So, the struggle is almost over and the next chapter can begin. I’ll be announcing the final fate of this blog soon. In the meantime, anyone want to buy some strawberries?

Strawberry season (22 days to go…)

by Max Akroyd

Some things didn’t like August in April. I planted hundreds of broad beans in October for nothing. And the peas sown at the same time are looking pallid and weedy. But, for some reason, none of this seems to matter today!

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Anyone for dock pudding? (25 days to go…)

by Max Akroyd

I’ve not even started yet and it’s apparent this subsistence thing is like crossing a big, hungry river on wobbly stepping stones.

I’m sure it’s all the same flow in reality, but it helps my brain to organise edibles into conventional categories of animals, vegetables, fruit and wild foods. The organisation – chronologically and otherwise - of the first three things has been an obsession of this blog over the last couple of years: when to sow seed to get cabbage in June and that sort of thing. And, as the ultimatum draws closer, the animals become less and less like pets and more and more like starvation insurance. (I found myself seriously contemplating eating a goat today, but she had broken her tether again).

But even more profoundly peasanty is deciphering the back-story that is the hedgerow harvest. Could there be an unbroken, three-season narrative to uncover, starting with the wild garlic and ending with wild mushrooms? I’ve already discovered that the main attraction of this food sauvage is to take the pressure off the cultivated stock. Poignant when your peas are piddling and your first potatoes paltry.

But, after being plundered these last six weeks, the wild garlic is now looking a bit glum and the nettles… well, despite several attempts, I’m still waiting for the right recipe. So, what’s the next dish on nature’s menu? The elder is about to flower and plans for cordial and other concoctions are afoot. Less familiar to me, however, is dock pudding – this despite our shared provenance. Not that dock, by the way, but common bistort, polygonum bistorta. Here’s the Yorkshire version. The last time I saw something like that, the dog hadn’t been very well at all. But needs must.

Back in the mainstream, and this book has become increasingly referred to, splashed with sauces and generally loved. If you want to know how to make a rhubarb dumpling or chestnut soup – both could become regulars around here – look no further.

Coincidentally, after spending two years trying to define the difference between this and that, I find the perfect definition in the introduction to a cookbook of all places:

” … it’s an attitude of mind: the peasantry can be defined as those for whom agriculture is a livelihood and a way of life, not a business for profit.”

Et voila!