Movin' On Up

Stuff for going off grid

So this is it. In three days time I will be leaving Pilsdon and setting off with my caravan into uncharted territory.  No more bells to bring me to the dinner table. No more weekly task rotas. No more waking at 5:40am to milk cows (although they have got me doing that on Saturday and Sunday as they know I so love waking up early.) And perhaps most significantly, no more others.

For this is where my next six months will be different from any other period in my life. I will be alone. From living with twenty or thirty others this past year I’ll be going to live with me, myself and I. There will be no one to banter with, or get frustrated by, or cook with, or try to avoid. No one to offer me a cup of tea. Not a soul to fail to meet their expectations or to receive thanks from. Nobody to reminisce about episodes of The Prisoner with. Not even another person simply to sit with, reading the papers.  Everything I do from now on will be just that - “I” not “we”.

Now this is of course not strictly true as I will be joined by others from time to time to check I’m not gnawing bark from trees with underpants on my head. I’m not even going there alone, as my friends Matt and Mary (formerly known by their pseudonyms Geoff and Linda in this blog but now honoured with their real names as they have both left Pilsdon and said they’re happy for their real identities to be revealed) will be heading up in convoy with me on Monday and stay there for a week, helping with the first task: building a compost toilet. But for the most part this next half-year will be a time of solitude.  How I will cope with it I have no idea. Perhaps writing my weekly blogpost will be the only thing keeping me from putting pencils up my nose and going “wibble”.

Having a plan of action will help of course, and I do have lists of things I want to make happen, under various headings. For instance, “Settling In” has stuff like getting the caravan sited properly, building the compost toilet, creating mulch pits for waste water, laying a water pipe from the stream to my caravan, buying the biggest propane bottle possible, making an outdoor fridge by fixing a covered bucket in a stream and improving access to the river with some rope.  “Getting to Know the Land” includes taking lots of photos from specific marked points where I will in future be able to take more photos to capture the changes, getting a professional ecological habitat survey done, and just being there and being observant. I may just spend a whole day contemplating an interesting leaf.

“Preparing the Land” is about getting it ready for agriculture, such as clearing bracken and rushes, taking soil samples for analysis, draining the worst of the boggy bits, liming the soil to raise the pH (I already know it is acid from a quick test I did in December), creating compost, and sowing a few potatoes and salad leaves to see what happens. Some of this will depend on the outcome of the habitat survey as I don’t want to disturb or uproot something that some rare mammal or bird might depend on. “Preparing for the Future” consists of fun projects like figuring out how to get hydro-power from the waterfall, and building a base for a yurt (and maybe the yurt itself).

On top of all this I hope to be making contacts with people in the area, perhaps volunteering occasionally for some local eco-project, attending church services if they happen, visiting the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, and meeting one or two people in the vicinity who are friends of friends and already know I’m coming.

This week is a frenzy of preparation and a long drawn out goodbye to a lot of people. On Wednesday we had a “Swansong” farewell evening of live music, when the old Wind Band got back together for the last time to blast through our five numbers, and one of Pilsdon’s trustees gave a rendition of the jazz standards on his tenor sax, accompanied by yours truly on the honky-tonk piano. Matt and Mary announced they were engaged to be married. Our first three lambs of the year were born. A fine and memorable night.