Disgruntlement Against The Machine

Along with the vast majority of people in the UK and the rest of the “developed” world I have grown up with the idea that all homes just come with electricity and heat and water supplied. Like the air we breathe these are simply essentials that we take for granted, although unlike air we have to pay someone to ensure the supply keeps coming. What with the aggressive price hikes in recent years from all the major suppliers (and suspicions of inter-company price-fixing) more people than ever are finding it difficult to pay all their bills. But we don’t often concern ourselves too deeply with how these fundamentals of modern life actually find their way to our home, or where and how they originated. We just trust the suppliers to sort it all out for us because we have no other choice, or so we assume.

There are of course a bewildering array of tariff choices from our friendly energy companies, some of which claim to be greener (and therefore more expensive, naturally) than others. The attempts by our government to force a simplification on the industry may be naive but it certainly chimes with a widely held and reasonable belief that we are being collectively taken for a ride.  It must be partly this lack of trust in our energy companies giving us a fair deal that has fueled (if you’ll pardon the pun) the middle-class urge to stick solar panels on their roofs to gather the rays that our Sun fires out across 96 million miles of space at zero cost to anyone, cleverly converting them into the motion of electrons down your copper wiring to make your XBox work. During daylight hours only.

But that’s about as far as most of us get to being off the grid. Despite an increasing nagging feeling that we are placing too much faith for our basic necessities in the hands of private companies who spend millions on externally projecting an image of trustworthiness whilst fleecing us all, we are as helplessly dependent on what they provide us as a piglet is on her mother sow’s milk (to take an image I am getting quite familiar with). And of course a sow will occasionally eat her runt...  or perhaps I’m taking this analogy too far?

Even Pilsdon, which gets all its water from a private spring-fed reservoir and heats its guest accommodation with a biomass boiler and solar-heating, buys in all its electricity, oil and Propane gas. A few years back they did look into getting a wind turbine installed up the hill but apparently the estimates for how much power it would deliver proved to be slightly too low to warrant any success with the planning authorities.  And ever since I’ve been here there has been talk of solar panels on the office roof, and a planning application put in many months ago, but I don’t know whether I’ll still be here when the shiny black oblongs finally arrive, if they ever do. This being an Area Of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the planners presumably meet any such application with the kind of outrage last displayed by the warden of Oliver Twist’s orphanage when asked for more soup.

Shortly before Christmas I had the privilege of meeting someone who lives entirely off-grid only a few miles from here. Pat is a woman in her early sixties who about fourteen years ago decided to move out of her comfortable home in Litton Cheney and onto a 5 acre field just outside the village which had been used for keeping horses. Public opinion at the time ranged from antagonism to incomprehension.  For years she lived in a little caravan with a hole cut in it to allow a vent for the wood-burning stove, and slowly improved the land, putting in irrigation channels that could divert the stream to water her vegetable raised beds, planting trees, creating a grey-water drainage ditch and building a compost toilet. And in the last few years she, with help from friends and family, constructed a beautiful and simple single-storey wooden house and rather miraculously received retrospective planning permission for it. So there she lives, alone except for her chickens and occasional volunteers, and loves it. 

Linda and I spent the morning there helping to build a timber box that enclosed a bale of straw which soaked up urine piped from the compost loo. It’s a very peaceful place, a peace only shattered when a mouse that Linda released from an outside bathtub leapt up her sleeve in gratitude. A small wind turbine whirrs next to the house, supplementing the electricity the solar panels provide. Pat uses very little of it anyway. Her drinking water is taken from the stream, passing through a ceramic and charcoal filter before use. She makes some cash running an organic vegetable box scheme and leading permaculture courses, but her outgoings must be pretty low - maybe some food to supplement her homegrown vegetables; petrol for her car; council tax; the occasional book. One thing’s for certain, she never has to deal with bills landing on her mat!