I came to Tinkers’ Bubble nine years ago. There are eight adults here at the moment and four kids, trying to live sustainable lives. We try to avoid fossil fuels and live off the land as far as we can. We have 40 acres of woodland, orchard and gardens, and we’ve each built our own house. We aren’t on the mains — we use a solar-powered pump to get water from a spring, and the electricity in our houses is from solar panels and a wind generator. It’s enough for lighting and stereos, and to charge batteries for torches, but not much else.
The four cows and two horses have to be fed every morning. If it’s my turn, I’ll go and do it with Rosie in the backpack. Two days a fortnight are communal-work days, when everyone does things like fencing, forestry, barn-building or working in the communal garden. The rest of the time we all work on whatever it is we earn our living from. We pay £23 a week to live here, which covers everything from food to shoeing the horses. I earn that by growing medicinal herbs and making tinctures, salves, lip balms and hand creams with them. It’s all organic. We simply don’t have any machines, so they’re hand-planted, hand-picked, hand-dried, hand-sorted, hand-packaged — I can put my healing intent into it as I’m doing it, and it hasn’t had jarring energy and machinery and fumes and oil and yuck around it. I try to stick to native British herbs, and I often grow ones that aren’t used much these days, like groundsel, cowslips and yellow dock. I try to sell to herbalists within a 25-mile radius. You’re from here, your illness is from here, so it makes sense to me that your herbs should be from here.
Living like this, you can earn in a day what it costs to stay here for a week. But we have to fetch and chop firewood, wash clothes, work on our houses and do lots of work that we don’t get paid for, and that takes time. People in a normal house have to go out to work to earn the money to pay for heating. So when I’m sawing up my firewood, in a way I’m earning that same money.
Everything here takes time. If you want a bath, there’s a bathhouse. You get the wood, saw it up, light the fire, and it takes about two hours to get hot. I’ll do that about once a week, and in between I’ll wash with a flannel and a bowl of hot water. At lunchtime I’ll cook something in our communal outdoor kitchen, over an open fire: fried potatoes and eggs from our chickens, perhaps. Some stewed apple from our apple trees for Rosie. I love the earthiness of living like this. I’m surrounded by wood and earth, and everything is natural.
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One thing I wanted when I came here was to spend more time out of doors. The weather, how much daylight there is, controls how you feel and what you do. I know exactly what “under the weather” means! Even indoors, there’s not much between me and the outside world. My house is made from douglas fir and larch logs, with canvas, planking and thatch in between. The wood and thatch were grown here and the wood is sawn with our steam-powered sawmill. It feels calmer than a house with central heating and a fridge humming away.
Joe’s friends live with tellies and computers and flat floors, but they like coming here after school: they can charge round and make fires and huts. I’m glad Joe and Rosie will grow up realising that everything doesn’t come out of packets, that if you want a shelter you can build one, if you need food you can get it.
Every night one of us cooks dinner. They ring a gong and we all gather in the communal roundhouse. We’re not a vegetarian community — you can cook whatever you like. After dinner we’ll often sit and chat, or make music, or play silly games, and before you know it it’s time for bed. Some nights it’s quiet and we talk about whether to grow kale or chard. Or what to do about slugs. We’ve tried different slug traps without much success, so we go down at night with a bucket and simply pull them off, or put out a bit of plank on the ground and the next day they’ll be hiding underneath. Then there’s a bit of a moral debate about how to kill them. You can put salt on them or squish them, but I tend to let them out up in the woods. Other nights there’ll be conversations about politics — we all think a lot about green issues and global warming. There’s so much more people could do for the environment without massive changes. Most people couldn’t live like this. But one day they may have to. One day they might live like this if they’re lucky.
I usually go back to my house around 10. There’s no point being awake when it’s dark — it’s better to get up earlier. I potter around, tidying up, calming down, listening to the silence. Sometimes you hear owls or badgers, but mostly it’s quiet. As soon as my head hits the pillow, I’m asleep.