I have been in another life a blogging and even internet sales 'expert' - only of ethical items such as the books i kinda live by. Only as needs must. .. as really it's no fun and I feel the endless battle with poorly made tech drains real creativity.
But never ever look at a screen indoors whist it is light outside. And never in the evening - the science says that's bad for you (it has for many years)...and i like real science. So being as summer's near here, that restricts me.
Twenty years ago, for five years awaking at 5am every day to sell books online, perhaps make a few hundred quid in that so dull existence (even then no one read anything even in an email properly; and nowadays as for actually dwelling on some internet blog and thinking what may truly be meant by some sentence - what nuance may that character - me in this case, imply? and maybe not even be free to express fully, ehhh herrmmmm) only so that by the time my single parented nipper shook off the night at 7 or 8 in the morning I was fully THERE all day always - phones turned off screen lids sealed down all day, so that she could in all sorts of ways be engaged with the fantastic hills that surrounded us and our rather large zoo of sometimes dozens of ferrets, cheap mad pony we had to break ourselves, rescued hedgehogs, and the rather useful lawnmowers in the form of cages of rabbits with wire bottoms (moving them around saves on messy petrol mowers that also ruin the perfect tranquillity i always seek).
Rural one has to work at. Really....And above all make time for. For years bringing forward several children into living that life was my passion and I was quite good at it. I speak casually with many locally decade the last who seem to wish this for their children. But sadly they never seem to quite make it happen. Dare i say because you have to simplify ones life down to the barest essentials to enable it to evolve. But that's for another day.
I said to a rare good communicant a few weeks ago on the hill I walk three or four times a week " ehh the Richard Maybe version is rather wrong" (nature as 'cure'). Most will think I am speaking sacrilege. But i care for the many i have observed over several decades perhaps not cured by that version of rural peace and tranquillity.
Anyone who has spent time around, for example, ferret rescue specialists know that humanity can be rather dodgy. We would encounter ferrets who had had their paws cut off with nail clippers - done rather artfully in fact. Clearly for some sick version of 'fun'. Denial is boring and bad for you. A head in the sand will end up with damaged eyes and ears. Never mind a gob full of dryness. Reality is and there is no cure for us. Except just learning what actual genuine good (hint it takes a long long time) can be garnered from coexisting with ones surroundings if they are full of loads of bugs, some undesirable beasts and lots of weather doing things to ones prized favourite garden tree earlier this month when some very weird wet snow came by and wreaked havoc. Many cherry trees have broken boughs - never seen this before.
The only way i know to become resilient to the sometimes tragedy of humanity is to in fact spend time, alone in the reality of outdoors. Without making a video for facebook as you go, perhaps 'ill', perhaps mourning some rather good love that had failed, in midwinter, in a rare dry snap, renovating ones ferret cages - perhaps three years behind schedule. Spending 3 or 4 weeks cutting out the dead wood, drying, rebuilding, creosoting - three coats so it's done PROPERLY and may last ten years..... ending up feeling so smug one has at last got that job done despite the biting easterly.... and then quite randomly, as if an act of god, something that simply cannot happen, does. And really rather privately ruins your day. Just when you are having an unusually low year.
Due to a particularly warm November (2015 ) the rats which quite naturally inhabit the woods that surround the spot i inhabit, deep in the wild woods hidden away, sortof, had managed an extra litter that year. But when that cold snap came they ran out of their ordinary food supplies and thus being there were many more Rattus around than normal at that time of the year, started to do what every old wives tale ever says cannot be: gnawing their way IN to the ferret cages to get at their food. Every yokel ever encountered (as i have for many years) will tell tales of how in fact ferret poo would be sold in markets in days gone yore, to ward off rattus.... the one thing guaranteed to make em run a mile - eau de Ferret... sprinkle some of this around their oles and they are gone...
Until every country lore ever was broken and they over a few days completely destroyed several ferret cages.
The 'bad' weather is key. Even if weather doesn't know it's being bad, it just is. That month spent struggling to get the job done in the finger numbing cold. Grey dull miserable. Success, done, I feel so proud and centred. At peace! And then rattus goes and voids all that hard work.
'Depression', gloom..... no, Richard, a reminder from the real version of nature, that it just is. And that the 'ego' or sense of self worth or whatever we wish to call it, is shattered just like that. 'By' it....no. Some days are good, some not so. Period. So put a smile on yer face maybe and get back to doing the whole job over again. Having firstly discovered (with an ironic smile) what use the several years ago rescued conservatory glass of a once neighbour about to dump it, that had been piled up behind a hedge getting in the way, was 'for'. To build temporary shielding around all the (large) ferret cages until this maybe once every 50 years mad rattus thing had died a natural death.
Nature or the 'rural' is there to centre one into the frailty and indeed randomness of pretty much everything. Not have one peacefully orbiting reality cured of it. And a child brought up in that kind of daily environment I think learns fundamental lessons that create lifetime resilience. The real version. Just don't take anything human, especially ones own success in 'controlling' ones environment, that seriously....or you will be very very upset- perhaps lethally so, when something or someone doesn't quite match up to what she wrote on the box. But it's very much the 'weather' - hard jobs done in bad weather I am not sure anyone gets any more: frig the bath you have at the end of that particular day is a bath far far more luxurious than even the Jacuzzis of the Carlton Hotel Cannes.
But it is rural people that for some years I have wandered amongst and wish to log some findings. Not in any way ever location or person specific. I have only thus far handed my new blog adress card out to five people face to face. And they are five people i feel may get it. Maybe I am wrong. My previous digital life like everyone else thinking of who may 'share' some rare online perhaps real version of life, is of no interest to me in any way. It fails. There is nothing in any share. There is only face to face.
A decade ago i wrote a blog a few years supposedly read by several thousand (if analytics can be believed). No properly thoughtful comment even came of it. No solidarity emerged. No real friendships arose.... in fact as a 'normal' rural dweller for 20+ years - without inherited or downsizing wealth, without some 'professional' income (ie usually mined in the towns or cities) one has to get by on not that much... and it is then, enjoyably, one appreciates that in fact allies is the absolutely key thing of rural life. The wealthy incomer or several generation landowner family can afford to pay people to look after their beasts if some unforeseen accident or illness comes along and takes one away. Ordinary people need reliable allies to pledge that in-emergency backup.
I fear that for many in these 'atomised' times people no longer understand this. It becomes almost a viscous circle " i am too busy to make many genuine local friends, and anyway don't have reliable rural types who would put a bit of backup above personal feelings, so i will not get animals for the kids ...or even onesself" And thus they also have no incentive to move beyond these modern choices about who we muck in with (even if we don't 'like'them), so as to make rural life viable. And in turn in my opinion the greatest fillip to the human soul is infact learning to muck in with (and we are talking here not in the false and enforced environment of paid work) those around and about...no matter what we may think of them. That seems to me the absolute key to eventual centredness and maybe is even good for ones 'metal health'. I am not sure dear Richard would get that....it is the cure i discovered.
Rural is in fact also social - human social, the real prob is god many of the supposed wise rural philosophers aren't any more. Has tv rotted their heads too? sadly one does hear many opinions nowadays at the style or farmers gate ( a random natter) that really do belong back in Nigel's fantasy version of 1950s UK...
None of the farmers i knew well in my youth in the most backwards part of these isles ever expressed such ignorant attitudes ....indeed i have lived a life all over the world including in that Cannes hotel (awful) and have never met people as modern as the true rural people I knew thirty years ago. People who despite fairly biting rural poverty and winters of many nights out there trying to rescue that one lost lamb that may mean they can afford the next roll of netting for the fence in the main believed in other humans, fully. They knew there was no 'other'. They knew that the land levels all class or status humps. A badly renovated old track will ruin the exhaust of the Porsche jut as indiscriminately as the moggy minor or Peugeot 205 ('farmers car').
There is one aspect to the rural that many may well 'disagree' upon. Well I pull rank. I am no blow in. Though have also at times lived a full and frank dodgy city existence - the very toughest and weirdest. I say to people "don't mess with me (meaning disrespect or patronise) i have done drugs with the best of them in The Bowry" this is not a literal report, it is figurative. Although i did spend far too many months in my 20s drunk trying to understand who the hell to be, near the Bowry. Ehh I am not sure many understand that concept any more. It means I am saying it that way to make a nonagressive unobtrusive point. It is shorthand language a rural person with many ferret cages needing a rebuild pressing upon his mind may speak.
I am no blow in in that 'rural' means one left the cities and special existences largely behind BEFORE one has 'become' something.In my case it was 32. So many arrive after they have become something. Well they ain't that any more once they've moved out ere. And i pity those who do not understand that - its not good for them. I have seen many end up very unhappy and lonely due this syndrome. It means i have raised a child among (truth) backwards people who let the schools fill their children with sugar just for getting each sum right[sic]. When Seeds of Change, Hobhouse, a truly beautiful book unlike Dick's diatribes, was published 1985 -and a scientist clearly stating sugar is as good as a poison....
Rural existence is learning to shut up as you are not powerful. Backwards views prevail, I argue moreso. But it also is knowing there is one thing worse than disdain. Pity.
I along with many of my kind around the early 80s joined the Green (then 'Ecology' party) for a few years (having age 16 'run of with the hippies' - ehh not literal even if one was so wonderful i had to run to the other side of the world to get away from my genuine love for her - equal love... rural love respects women as 100% ones equal...the escape necessary as she had a good partnership relationship with one of the other 'hippies'. As every one i ever knew also did).
'Green', or just careful about good old ma earth, was absolutely sane and even reasonably scientific. Most farmers understood the fragile ecosystem that must not be unbalanced to rapidly. But the other thing rural people into my early adulthood knew was do not assume about people. We are all in it together (rurally) and need over time to establish who indeed is reliable. Reliability is key. The person who says "i will be there at 8am tomorrow to yank you out of the ditch" always meant it. Even if he had discovered the night before after ten pints from his neighbour you may have been spied in flagrante sneaking out of his barn, as his wife came back in to the house unusually covered in hay, he would honour his pledge to you. But people needed to know something about others around and that would be discovered medium term in person. Not every opinion would be jumped at. Several may be needed over time.
I roll this together with 'Green' as to some extent this is my existence. I say to people I am environmentalist, well that is part time, and is doing the hardest kind of environmentalism of all - in rural areas largely taken over by wealthier city escapees (bored though they cannot admit this), i support a leading local (but nationally known) true ecoscience brain. I am his ally and help him get access to the local community. I only know local community people through raising a child nearby etc otherwise keep myself to myself. But the backstabbing talk i hear from bored and supposedly educated blowin types is nowadays too much. It is 100% assuming.... secondhand reports (about my ally whom i would not support unless i knew he was 100% pukka). Unkind personal comment, all assumption. Rude and ignorant - mainly from Guardian Reader types as it happens ("oh he seems on the spectrum" etc). In fact the man is a dedicated miracle worker who is a bit nervy as he is often up far far too late working on the science of making agriculture more carbon footprint lite....doesn't have time to relax.
But above all, with all this assuming barriers are imagined via the typecasting and pigeonholing that seems most prevalent even in my present very fringe rural region. I like to sometimes attempt to build meaningful bridges with the most ordinary, even 'lowly', many many year or even generation inhabitants of such places. And to perhaps be let in to the real version of such peoples lives (rather than that the tourist and estate agent guides pedal) it is far easier if one is thought of as nothing. Irrelevant. Just a seemingly rather raggeddy virtual hobo peddling around the byways on my very old rusty bike which is my greatest pleasure. One of them.
And as i say to some, "when i meet some old farmer at his or her gate, I can indeed speak 'farmish' ". Find some common ground upon which to fashion a way in - before assumptions are made. Usually on the state of the swath or even the prices at the markets. And thus i like to be thought only some nobody. And certainly not someone who may be able to wield words in order to maybe even connect further afield beyond their field we will spend hours musing upon. I thus guard fiercely my anonymity which is only for the reason that i wish to be able to natter away with those i meet who are still unable to accept the changes that have happened in society that i believe are good: there should be never any secrets or nothing to hide. But i also know that doesn't work for all - especially those in these fringe places. And thus Ralph, for me someone who was everything and still is, must be no one. I look for him everywhere just as anew friend. Because i knew and still know why he was the only fully enjoyable person i ever met. Certainly in the so called modern western societies.
Rural people and properly 'green' people even 20 years ago did not do this. They knew they needed to build bridges with others not necessarily like them. They did not assume or judge in fact until they had seen the lay of someones metaphorical land for themselves. I have had enough of this myself and thus start afresh with a new writing identity and even name soon. I said today to a rare wise person "i have never met anyone worth naming in some negative fashion in my region..." she got it. But everyone assumes that they will be besmirched. (i dont do facebook). I only besmirch one group but only as a group. The official 'Greens' made it about fearing ones fellow human. they also made it about sex (sorry three or four openly gay young men had wonderful lives where i lived in back of beyond - i know as they were our friends - real ones who one respects as fellow mad human).
I pity all modern green politicians and Councillors - they have taken on 'victim' politics and even victim demeanour. We learn nothing from pity - the pity they have attempted to coopt in the furtherance of their message. All pity i have encountered over many years is anyway false. It is what is genuinely useful in simpler rural living (or low carbon city living even) i would wish they tell the populous.... they don't seem to know how to any more. That's because they are almost one and all died in the wool townies.....ergo.
