Your monthly invitation to jump in our van for a week’s worth of adventures.
Monday 14th October
Bawdsey Quay, Suffolk, England
Last night I went to sleep with the sound of small waves sneaking up over a tiny sandy strip beside the van. Bawdsey Beach disappears underwater when the River Deben swells with the high tide. It reappears again, between sea wall and sucking mud, when the water ebbs.
In Suffolk we often seek out the solace of Bawdsey. It’s quiet, remote and relatively unspoiled, and puts you in close proximity to the wild spirit of river, ocean, sand, shingle, wetland birds, and big skies.
We were here just under a year ago,1 awaiting the overnight arrival of rain and eighty-miles-per-hour gusts of wind courtesy of Storm Ciarán.
This morning Bawdsey is calm but the wider peninsula is thriving with subtle movements and sounds. The lap of the water mingles with the slurp-pop of the exposed mud flats. Flocks of birds go across the sky and curlews call out the long bubbling trill from which they get their name. Down the river bank toward the skeletal remains of a sunken barge, two little egrets with attractive white plumes on crest, back and chest perambulate. They keep their distance from their senior cousin the heron, who is standing perfectly still in the shallows nearby, looking stern.
Dotted around this section of the river are various small boats at anchor, their rigging rattling in the masts. Sitting squat on the point is the defensive Martello Tower and I can hear the distant roar from the waves of the North Sea beyond.
Someone has drunk the can of beer left in the little shrine in the sand. A toast to all our departed kin. May your cans be ever full.
A gull perusing the mudflats finds a middle-sized crab and with a deft peck and flick of its hooked yellow bill, sends it up into its open beak, before swallowing it down whole. The crab, surely still alive in the bird’s gullet, must be wriggling around on its way to the stomach. Notwithstanding, the gull looks satisfied and moves on in search of seconds.
With the tide out, and the sun shining, we set up the circular straw boss and string our bows for field-archery on the beach. It’s been a long time and technique is rusty. Arrows go askew and disappear under the sand. Search-and-retrieval takes a while. But as the muscle memory warms up, we begin to hit the target consistently: creak, twang, thwack.
As we turn in for the night there are no less than seven egrets strolling along the shoreline with the beautiful Bawdsey firmament looking like a Turner painting in the background.2 I smoke my last ever pipe3 and retire to bed.
Tuesday 15th October
Bawdsey Quay, Suffolk, England
Morning egrets are scrapping over the best mud pools exposed by the retreating tide. I watch an individual bird closely: after selecting a pool, it disturbs the mud beneath the water by dancing its yellow feet and then stabs, lightning fast, at whatever emerges with a sharp beak. Clever fellow.
We have to leave Bawdesy to do chores in town and maintenance on the van so we head back to Martlesham Heath. Grandad Brian is fashioning a neat window surround for the smart new birch ply panels he is fitting to the back doors.
While Tara helps her dad I visit the ‘recycling centre’ to dispose of more possessions that we no longer need since they have been sitting in a garage for a year untouched. This is the stuff we have failed to sell or give away. It is unjustifiable, unwarranted, senseless waste.
Everyone at the household recycling centre, or more accurately, the dump, is stressed. I observe myself and my fellow dumpers: we all seem to be regretful (at buying all this crap in the first place), angry (at the waste of money and resources), and guilty (because of the nagging awareness that in all likelihood, very little of this stuff will be recycled and most of it will either end up being buried in a gaping hole in the ground or burned in giant incinerators if it remains on these shores, or, if it is shipped off to far-away countries like China, it will be dumped in lagoons, rainforests or on remote beaches - that is if it isn’t heaved overboard into the sea before the ship docks).
This may explain why everyone here is perspiring and prickly: nobody wants to acknowledge the truth or register the impact of what they are doing and consequently everyone wants to get it done as quickly as possible and get the hell out of there so they can stop being confronted by the shitty backside of our consumerist society.
Everyone, that is, apart from the staff, who are pleasant and polite. Wearing high-visibility bibs they cheerfully direct the baffled and assist the confused. They have observed at close hand, and on a regular basis, the wasteful results of our insatiable desire for things. Day after day they watch it all being thrown into giant metal containers, crushed by machines and driven away in trucks. Occasionally they intervene to save a good bicycle or rescue a fully functioning fridge, but mostly they just witness the desolation. In order to show up here for work every day they must have had to go through some process of personal reconciliation and develop a few coping mechanisms to sustain themselves, otherwise the anguish would surely crush them. Consequently, I think they are developed beings. They smile sadly and watch us with knowing eyes that seem to say, ‘this is wrong, you know it, I know it, but what can we do? Unwanted electronic equipment over there please.’ Perhaps they embody our collective conscience and reflect back the horror of what we’re doing, whilst also being accomplices in the crime. I remember that I am here to take part, so I cast perfectly good things into the bottom of skips, then drive away in a state of helpless despair, feeling wretched.
Back at Grandad Brian’s I survey the last of our possessions that he is kindly storing in his garage. Ever since we decided to abandon housing and live in a vehicle we have been selling, giving away and dumping stuff. It has been immensely wasteful, liberating and has altered our consumer habits to the extent that we now buy fewer things. We can’t just buy stuff, impulsively or otherwise, when we have nowhere to put it. Other than what goes with us in the van, this is all that remains.
As I gaze at the old suitcases and metal boxes (themselves the result of my own consumer habits) I wonder what it would be like to have nothing (or very little) at all.
either way
takes courage,
either way wants you
to be nothing
but that self that
is no self at all,
wants you to walk
to the place
where you find
you already know
how to give
every last thing
away.4
Wednesday 16th October
Martlesham Wilds, Suffolk, England
Last night we retreated to the wilds to recuperate.
Owl is working out the end of the shift when I rise at six o’clock in the morning. I listen to its hushed calls while I squat over a freshly dug hole in the middle of a field full of the tall upright stalks of the annual wildflower, Canadian horseweed.
Horseweed came to this country as the hidden stuffing in animals that fell victim to taxidermy or in the fur of animal pelts being shipped across the Atlantic by trappers.
In the summer last year this particular field was characterised by a shimmering crop of golden wheat which turned out to be the last harvest of this thirty-year-old organic arable farm. The cultivation has come to an end, hence the horseweed.
A three-hundred-acre plot has been purchased to create a new nature reserve. From the River Deben and salt marsh, the allocated land sweeps upward, framed by thick hedges and ancient oak, eventually leading to woodland.
The project was initially made possible by money from two women: a significant financial legacy from a local school PE teacher with a fearsome reputation who bequeathed assets to Suffolk Wildlife Trust after her death, and a million pound philanthropic loan from a commercial-lawyer-turned-activist who made a fortune when she sold her share of the premium backpack company Osprey.
I’m trying my best to be pleased that a piece of land will be given back to nature, but the loss of an organic farm coupled with the dreaded outreach activities that turn nature into a theme park for townies, has me conflicted.
Take for example the ‘bat walk’ we witnessed last night. We were alone in the small gravel car park until just after dinner when about twenty cars turned up and disgorged a number of children.
While most of the adults remained in their cars looking at screens, the children were gathered together by a noisy, fake-happy, outreach guide, with a children’s-television-presenter voice, who proceeded to shout things at the excitable group like ‘who wants to see a bat?’ and ‘who respects nature?’.
After ten-minutes of shouting, a procession of head-torches sets off along the path into the new nature reserve, looking for bats. Unfortunately the bats bolted long ago, seen off by this noisy rabble of primates crashing around in their territory while they were trying to echo-locate dinner.
Half an hour later, they all traipsed back again, got into the waiting cars illuminated by the screen-glow of scrolling, and drove off. The car park emptied, everything settled down, and peace returned.
This morning I fail to avert a breakdown in communication with Tara which results in a wholly disproportionate and unexplained level of resentment on both sides, leading in turn to a miserable and selfish day.
I think it is punishment for being a mean and nasty person who disapproves of ‘bat walks’ and townies trouncing nature.
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In the evening we are still stewing in a residential lay-by when an unheralded angel appears under the nearly-full moon.
She arrives in a small car and parks next to our van, completely blocking one side of the road. Tired and grumpy after a grinding day I assume we have a nosy neighbour on our hands.
We don’t often park amongst houses because people don’t like big black vans with chimneys sticking out of the roof rolling up outside their homes. It activates all sorts of ancient tribal invasion anxieties.
Jumping out of the van ready for confrontation I am met by a weepy, confused, elderly woman with one stocking slipped down around her ankle. She looks ever so slightly dishevelled. Something is not quite right.
‘Can you help me. I’m lost,’ she whimpers.
Internally I pivot, standing down the warrior and dragging up some compassion from the murky depths.
‘It’s alright, don’t worry, we can help. What’s your name?’
‘I don’t know.’
Good start. It turns out there’s no name, no identification, no address, no phone number, no phone or documents in the car and ultimately no sense.
I offer her a cup of tea and a biscuit but she declines. She just wants to talk.
Her car is in a dangerous position in the road so I ask for her keys and move it into the lay-by in front of the van. The children watch curiously as Tara takes over talking nonsense with her while I move out of earshot to call 999. The police officer I speak to sends a car and asks me to call 999 again and request an ambulance.
Half an hour later I flag down an ambulance which is not responding to my call but just happens to be passing. To my relief they radio in and stick around to deal with my incident, rather than continuing on to their planned destination.
Three kind and patient uniformed young women get out of the brightly-lit ambulance and guide our disheveled angel into the back. While they’re talking to her, trying to find out who she is and where she lives, the police car arrives.
A kind and patient uniformed young man emerges. He knows the woman. Her name is Pam. She has dementia. She took her husband’s keys earlier this afternoon and took off in the car. She has done this before. The policeman knows where she lives and after thanking us for calling them and looking after Pam, the police and ambulance crew work together to get her, and the car, back home safe.
Pam has left Tara in tears. Tara spent the whole time talking to Pam, travelling with her down memory lane, to the local dance where she met her husband, via various family gatherings, visiting the different places Pam used to live.
Pam was quite cheerful and happy before the ambulance arrived because Tara was kind and patient and listened to her reminisce. Tara got a glimpse into Pam’s golden years, full of love, romance and joy.
Unlike Pam though, Tara can see the reality: a woman in the twilight of her years, who is lost, and cannot anchor herself in the world, such that she impulsively leaves her home and husband to drive toward a destination that is real to her, but has long since been lost to time.
Distraught when she arrived, Pam was quite content with us, chatting away, free to roam her happy memories. Although she was in safe hands with the uniformed men and women, I saw clearly the troubled look in her eyes when she was encouraged by them to leave behind the good old days and engage with the here and now.
We don’t have room for Pam in our lives, and we couldn’t offer her a safe sanctuary for very long. The real world impatiently demands her return. Tara’s tears testify to the sadness, loss and lack of a place for people like Pam in our modern world.
I note that the communication breakdown at the start of the day, which caused antagonism between us, has softened - Pam has done her work.
The day ends at a new sleep-spot under a full moon. Two noble oak trees stand sentinel nearby, whispering their secrets on the breeze. Flash lightning intermittently illuminates the wide Suffolk sky and thunder reverberates in response, grumbling dismissively about the trivial affairs of men.
The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.5
Thursday 17th October
Martlesham Wilds, Suffolk, England
Heavy rain in the night. It is muggy, mild and misty when I step out of the van.
We get through the pre-booked MOT with only minor financial damage and motor out to Orford Ness to expand our horizons.
The quay at Orford welcomes us with a silver-blue sunset sandwiched between salmon-sky and shining River Alde. Boats nestle in a curve. Egrets visit. A small wader works the shoreline.
Venus and Arcturus appear ahead of the other heavenly bodies. At dusk a haunting full moon rises opposite the dying sun. It sits on a bed of cloud, gazing at its shimmering reflection in the mirror-like surface of the cold black water.
In the moonlight, me, North and Oak have a simultaneous outdoor piss, crossing swords - boys pissing about, quite literally. Good larks and plenty of giggles.
Ducks quack on the pond, announcing bedtime, and later, owls sing us to sleep.
Friday 18th September
Orford Quay, Suffolk, England
In the early morn, Sirius, Betelgeuse, Jupiter and Mars arrange themselves above my head, orienting around a bright full moon in a clear sky. Owl signs off from night watch and cockerel clocks in for the day. There is a bank of dark cloud out to sea which looks like a great tsunami frozen in time. A skein of noisy geese flies over.
Orford is home to bakers and chocolate makers, the Pump Street Bakery. Occupying a fifteenth-century corner shop in the old market square, the pink painted bakery, a father-daughter collaboration, stocks freshly-baked sourdough, viennoiseries, and pastries.
The hot chocolate with a single homemade marshmallow, which I never buy because it is so expensive, is celestial. The raspberry jam doughnuts, bear claws and almond croissants, which I do buy, are equally expensive and even more heavenly than the hot chocolate.
Our friend cycles over on his bike to join us for breakfast on the quayside. I brew coffee in the moka pot and we spend an enjoyable few hours in the autumn sunshine, eating some of the very best pastries money can buy while gazing out over the sparkling vista.
After breakfast we fish for crabs. Eldest son Thor is showing off his crab-handling skills when a particularly big one catches his thumb with its pincer and clamps down. It won’t let go despite his loud protests. Eventually he manages to drag it off and throw it back in, leaving a bloodied wound.
Later I find out that my uncle has died: an English teacher, he had a great love of literature and was always reading. He could quote with ease throughout his life. He said he wasn't clever, just had an elephant's memory, but in truth he absorbed books, poems, and theatre like a sponge, and was something of a literary polymath, albeit a humble unprepossessing one.
He took me in when I was going through a crisis in my thirties and showed me heaps of generosity and kindness. Sitting on the quay, I think of the long walks we took in the countryside with his family, sitting on a bench with a good view eating sandwiches and drinking tea from a thermos flask. Simple pleasures.
A swan flies over, gathering the blue sky under its wings, and I say farewell.
Saturday 19th October
M25, England
An arduous drive along main roads and around the M25 through the heart of the artificial, inhuman, industrial-technological system, created by us, to our own detriment.
The big motorway service station, once a gleaming temple of fast-food convenience, looks tatty and tired. The car park is in disrepair, full of potholes, and the whole place is in need of significant maintenance.
Thirty years ago, the UK’s road network was among the best maintained on the planet… so much so that drivers were exceeding the speed limit simply because the ride was so smooth. At the same time, water and (especially) sewage infrastructure was undergoing a positive transformation as clean drinking water reached all but the most remote locations even as our rivers and beaches qualified for world-leading cleanliness awards where once raw sewage outflows had been common.
Today, the opposite is true. Our rivers and beaches are among the worst in Europe, and even clean drinking water is no longer guaranteed. Nor is there a journey of more than a mile in the UK free from potholes or the rough, temporary repair thereof. Meanwhile, public buildings constructed in the 1970s are now having to be propped up with scaffolding poles as even the cost of repair is too great.6
When I drive along main roads, through towns and cities, I cast a keen eye over the state of the infrastructure. I’m curious to see whether civilisation is beginning to slide down hill, perhaps never to return.
On one hand, western society has been through a series of economic ups and downs over the last few hundred years, ever since the Industrial Revolution put a coal-fired rocket under the means of production and gave birth to the modern economy.
An economic downturn is always followed by a recovery, so we’re told, but recoveries need energy to fuel them and this time round it’s not so clear where the energy is going to come from.
In the pursuit of energy to drive growth we first mined coal, then oil, then gas to keep everything moving apace: the discovery of oil reserves under the North Sea just one example of an unexpected boon in (temporarily) plentiful energy supplies that particularly benefitted the UK.7
More recently, wind, solar and hydropower have served as add ons, and we’ve now taken to burning pelleted trees and incinerating our recycling to generate electricity on an industrial scale.
The thirst for oil in particular has convulsed world politics. Invasions have been justified and wars fought to increase the supply and control the transportation, which has served up wealth and prosperity for the few while destroying the lives of millions.
Up to the 1990s, the double edged sword that is nuclear power generated a quarter of the UK’s electricity (now significantly less). Nuclear fusion may be a dream8 but nuclear fission can generate large amounts of electricity.9 The trouble is it can’t operate in isolation, because our society runs on diesel and everything is made out of other diminishing and finite resources like copper, lithium, cobalt, graphite and sand.
When it comes down to it I suspect most of us just want everything to keep on working without too much disruption or price increase. We definitely don’t want to see the wheels of civilisation fall off and we can put a little death and destruction in far away countries to the back of our minds as long as the potholes get fixed and the petrol pumps keep pumping and the food lorries continue to supply our supermarkets overnight while we’re asleep.
Unfortunately, the inconvenient truth is that maintaining this system is getting more and more expensive, as we have all no doubt noticed recently, to our own personal financial cost.
What we’re told is that if we just hang on in there, stay the course, get our heads down, keep calm and carry on, the economy will recover. The next boom is just around the corner. The experts will figure it out. Tech will save us.
But as we’ve historically seen, economic growth and recovery requires a nice new shiny energy resource, which isn’t forthcoming at the moment.
There is more coal, oil and gas in the earth and under the sea, but getting at it is becoming more and more expensive. If a barrel of oil costs one-hundred dollars to harvest but only fetches fifty dollars when sold, the oil will remain in the earth, because there is no financial incentive to get it out.
This process is already well under way and because there is no viable alternative to fuel a recovery, economic activity is on the wain.
If we don’t mange to invent a magical unlimited energy supply and the economy continues to descend rather than recover, when will things begin to bite?
In 2016, John Michael Greer wrote that we have years, decades and centuries of collapse ahead of us.10 Writing this month Darren Allen speaks about a breakdown in about fifteen to twenty years.11 How old will you be in twenty years?
The fall is unlikely to be off a cliff edge, instead more like a slow motion car crash. A man I know who bought a remote farm in Sweden in an attempt to build a small resilient community capable of weathering such a world storm, uses the frog in the pot analogy, whereby the frog is not confronted with boiling water immediately, but rather sits around in comfortable warm water which is slowly, imperceptibly rising in temperature. The frog cannot adequately discern that it is being poached and as the heat increases, it eventually boils to death.
We can get an idea of the temperature of the water we are sitting in by noticing that more and more of what we took for granted in the boom years of abundant energy and cash is becoming more expensive, degraded, or disappearing completely.12
All of which leads to some rather difficult questions about what happens if we never recover and how you might feel about dying in a hellhole as civilisation collapses around you. Or, if you’re lucky enough to be in the twilight of your years and so will escape dying in a hellhole as civilisation collapses around you, how you feel about your children and grandchildren dying in a hellhole as civilisation collapses around them.
Techno-future idealists, optimists and hope merchants are still thinking through a more beautiful future13 powered by an as-yet-undiscovered energy source or yet-to-be-developed technological solution.
Unfortunately, these ideas tend to rise like a rocket and fall like a stick14 and whatever they say, You don’t need a weatherman, To know which way the wind blows.15
Sunday 20th October
Budleigh Salterton Beach, East Devon, England
Last night, sharing the driving, we pushed on to reach our destination: Budleigh Salterton, the affluent, aspirational, baby-boomer retirement town my parents chose to end their days in. It is also down the road from Exmouth, where I am doing a training course.
While we slept Storm Ashley came in off the sea and hit us hard with heavy rain and wind. It’s the first good blow since the storm season last year and I wake in the night feeling the fear.
As I’ve written about before, a storm rocking and jostling the van in the darkness is one of the few things that awakens existential fear in me. There is no real danger, perhaps something gets ripped off the roof but even that is unlikely.
The van shields us from storms but it also lets us feel, see and hear them up close. I think my deep fear response is an old instinctive high alert state that wakes up during severe weather now that I don’t have the solid protection of stone, concrete, bricks and slate around me.
I’ve also noticed that storms feel much more intimidating when I am cowering away inside the van. Step out into the squall and face it, and my fear gives way to exhilaration and wonder.
In the morning the winds have dropped and we drive to the esplanade in Exmouth where we can park up on the front and watch the rough seas.
A group of middle-aged men have brought their bodyboards, beards and bellies to the beach, squeezed into wetsuits, donned flippers, and dived in. It looks fun and as a middle-aged man boasting both a beard and a belly, I am well qualified to join their club, but I choose to watch from the comfort of the cab instead.
They frolic about in big rolling waves. It’s high tide and the ocean is roaring. The shoreline is foamy and the storm has whipped up the orange sand and soil, colouring the water.
We have pancakes in the van then Thor runs down the beach, strips off and stands under a waterfall pouring off the cliffs. The flow of water is heavy, engorged by the rainfall. He comes back cold, bright-eyed, and energised.
The sun almost comes out later, and families emerge for Sunday afternoon strolls. A warm and engaging man, about my age, approaches. He has a beautiful younger lover, who hovers at a distance. He tells me they have five children and a dog. She is cradling the little one and the rest are running free on the beach.
Impressed with the van he asks lots of questions, particularly about the log-burner. There is a yearning in his eyes when he looks it over. Eventually, they continue on.
When they walk past later, heading back the other way, he stops by again to share how he thought we look like a very peaceful couple.
The tableau we have presented to him features the van with the side door flung wide open, revealing the cosy interior. At the table, Tara sits knitting and I am sipping tea while reading a classic Penguin paperback in the front. The children are happily engaged on the beach, playing together, coming and going.
Although he has ostensibly witnessed a verifiable moment in our lives, his observation of us as a peaceful couple is a fiction. Nevertheless, I accept the compliment and we part again with mutual smiles.
I watch them walk down the beach and then tell Tara what he said. She bursts into a loud guffaw.
We drive back to Budleigh Salterton to sleep. The moon, three days past full, rises over the River Otter and estuary. The wind in the trees sounds like waves: nature is blending and layering in on itself.
Monday 21st October
Budleigh Salterton Beach, East Devon, England
We are hanging around in Budleigh Salterton in the car park by the beach waiting for a few coughs and colds to pass.
Tara is in an appallingly bad mood and I have myself to blame.
Already despondent, I managed to tip her over the edge by starting a conversation about corrupt politicians, venal capitalists and the hideous technocratic system. As a woman, although she is quite capable of holding her own, she doesn’t do well on this sort of thing.
She takes on the evil in the world more readily than man does, and becomes far more deranged.
She has no defences against being corrupted by man, and by his world.16
Distant and remote I sit with the pain of my responsibility for this. The world seems grey and hopeless, but I let it all in, and wonder what I can do.
In the midst of my melancholy, my father delivers homemade apple turnovers made by my mother. He is passing while on his daily walk. Later, my mother brings beef stew and potatoes. Things are looking up.
We feast on good food. Lips are smacked. Thanks to their generous and thoughtful gifts, for a while, all is well.
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A Storm Builds
You join us on the first day of November. Come on in out of the wind, there’s a storm building outside and it’s cosy in the van. We’ve got the Anevay Shepherd stove going, burning ash wood we foraged from windfall on a golf course in the summer. Drying out on top and all around are metal baskets full of maple logs, cut to length by me and Oak…
The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up by J.M.W. Turner (1838).
The Bell and the Blackbird by David Whyte (2018).
King Lear by William Shakespeare (1603).
Or should it be FIVE Es and a C? by Tim Watkins.
Arguably the money was thrown away: Thatcher used the oil revenues to bankroll the unemployment bill, destroy manufacturing, terminate British coal mining, and fund the big-bang that turned London into a capital of global neo-liberalism. Read more here.
Fusion is a dream. It can produce electricity, but the costs required to do so (not to mention the glacial pace that fusion tech is progressing) make it completely unfeasible - not just financial costs, but costs in energy.
Darren Allen.
Over the years and decades and centuries ahead of us, as industrial civilization crumbles, a great many people who believe with all their hearts that their cause is right and just are going to die anyway, and there will be no shortage of brutal, hateful, vile individuals who claw their way to the top—for a while, at least. One of the reliable features of dark ages is that while they last, the top of the heap is a very unsafe place to be.
Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead by John Michael Greer (2016).
The population, which will never stop being crushed by the system, until the batteries run out (in about fifteen to twenty years), alternatively supports one cock or another, hating the other side.
Darren Allen
Take for example, automated car washes.
The origin of this phrase is a jibe made by Thomas Paine about Edmund Burke’s oratory in a 1792 House of Commons debate on the subject of the French Revolution. Paine remarked: ‘As he rose like a rocket, he fell like the stick’.
Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan (1965).
