It is quite fitting that I did not pay any money for this
book. It is stranger and more appropriate too that I found it on a wall in an
alleyway.
I walk to work every day, and my route takes me away from
traffic and down a series of quite safe alleyways between rows of houses. There
is frequent fly tipping that I have to dodge. On one such occasion in October
last year I saw a pile of fly tipped bags, and the fly-tipper with a conscience
had obviously decided to put the books he was throwing away visible on a wall
so that someone might take them and re-use them. It was about to rain, so
taking pity I picked one up. It’s certainly the strangest circumstances in
which I have chosen a book to read.
It turns out I knew of the author already. Mark Boyle has
cause a stir in recent years, and I first came across him in an episode of ‘New
Lives in the Wild’ on Channel 5, presented by the impossible-not-to-like Ben
Fogle. At the time, Mark was experimenting with a life without money.
As the title suggests, he has taken his way of living a
little further and now lives in a house he built himself; with no electricity,
running water, internet or heating other than wood fires. Here’s the rub: he’s
not doing it to change the world. He knows that for almost everyone else it
would be impossible and that we can’t all live the way he does. He’s doing it
not to escape the world but to approach nature and live a more real life.
He is particularly cutting in his criticism of
smartphones and the way that many people seem to now be addicted to them. It must
be an interesting perspective to stand outside and watch all of this happening.
There are few other people who have divorced themselves more completely from
the technology of the Twenty-First Century. He explains that it is all by
degrees, and that life is a question of where you draw your line in the sand.
For example, he uses a spade to dig the soil in order to grow food. I hadn’t
even thought of a spade as technology, and yet it is a device designed to make
our lives easier, just like almost everything else.
His perspective also allows him to see some of the
hypocrisies of people’s behaviour. He notes wryly that when he was an
eco-warrior running a health food shop he sold vegan products to happy
customers which was shrink-wrapped in plastic. The food they were eating,
although vegan, was factory produced and imported from another country.
There is an ambiguity about money in this book. His
progression from ‘No-Money-Mark’ to a person rejecting technology brought
publicity, a column in The Guardian and requests for interviews. He seems to
have stoically replied by letter, and written in pencil. However, there are
frequent references to evenings of craic and beer, so it must be assumed that
he either has generous friends with whom he exchanges work or food for favours,
or that he does spend some money.
He is a frequent reference of previous thinkers on
ecology and it is good to read that he has a deep knowledge of Thoreau, Wendell
Berry and others. I will certainly be looking up Aldo Leopold, who I was
unaware of before. There is a good Further Reading list at the end of the book.
The final irony of this book is that he hand-wrote it by
candlelight, but realised that unlike Wendell Berry (whose wife types his
manuscripts, an act of love) he could not impose on anyone to type up his book
so he compromised and sat for seven days to prepare his manuscript for
publication by word-processing it.
But then life is a series of compromises.
A fascinating and thought-provoking book. I’m glad I
found it.
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