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Self-Sufficiency in Style

outlaws!

From Hereward the Wake, through to Robin Hood in England to Jesse James in the States and Ned Kelly in Australia. 

From Wales and Scotland to Canada and Ireland, the hunted man figures in a thousand stories.

Romantic, mysterious, sometimes murderous, it is not too obvious, at first, that the smallholder is about to join them.

He is right, of course, it has changed its tone, but since this reader's hobby involves compost, it is ironic that compost has become political in Britain.

Ridiculous though it sounds, it is now impossible to own pigs and have a compost heap, unless you have another sink, aside from the kitchen, to prepare vegetables. It is illegal.

It is also illegal to own a single pig.

So smallholding has become political - not just smallholding, but the whole business of self-sufficiency.

An extra sink so we can have both pigs and compost.

A simple example of the crazy rules.

A place to watch your words.

One of the many places in this world, where the very act of saying where you live, becomes a political act of choosing your allegiance.

So it is with self-sufficiency - a realm of shifting political nomenclature on the edge of society.

Self-sufficiency ought to be a withdrawal from political affairs, but far from that, politics becomes central to the survival of the way of life.

Alas, it has always been so.

Prepare to either stand and fight or become an outlaw. Our society simply will not make room for alternative life-styles, and in particular those that demand a lack of dependence on the State.

The same story is everywhere - from Canada, the US, from the Southern seas, from all parts of the UK - and even from the once rebellious Republic of Ireland.

In some ways the last is the worst.  To see a proud people leave what they felt was a tyranny behind and launch into a glorious rural  anarchy, only to volunteer to put new shackles on their hands and feet.

One of the saddest sights I have ever seen, was to see the people tamely accepting an unnecessary parking meter in the far west of Ireland. 

Once, it would have been torn from the ground and thrown into the office that ordered its installation. That miserable machine was a modern symbol of servitude to the State.

Even when you leave it behind, the world of the pay cheque seeks to recover you.

Dodging the Sheriff.

They will build a shed without zoning permission, sell for cash without paying tax for services they don't want or need and generally disobey the law with lusty abandon.

They will simply refuse to obey laws and requirements that make no sense to them.

They have become outlaws in their own small way engaged in a guerrilla war with the forces of law and restriction.

The natural heirs to the pioneers that carved a country out of wilderness with a six-gun in one hand and a cattle brand in the other.

Ducking and dodging the modern equivalent of the Sheriff of Nottingham or Tombstone. A "sheriff" that pays lip service to their aspirations, whilst making the reality impossible by fair means or foul.

Brave people indeed, mentally courageous, but liable to be picked off one by one.

The writer is of that opposite and complimentary tendency, taking up the blunderbuss of ridicule and pedantic opposition, rather than the Smith and Weston of downright disobedience.

Hence the politics. We are right, they are wrong. Every time someone reads this site and is even a little convinced, a nail is banged into the coffin of tyranny.

A tyranny that will destroy individuality and the ordinary man or woman's humble dreams of living a more independent life.

Ridicule and pedantic opposition.

We still see the occasional Gypsy caravan, but doubt that they are real Romanies.

Any group that has sought to live within itself to a different code will always meet fierce opposition.

From the Kentish Gypsy to the Connemara Tinker and the many religious groups that spread across the New World.

Even the Red Indian and the Aborigine or Eskimo who sought to simply stay as they were, all were subject to persecution and restriction.

The Gypsy has become a Romany, the Tinker - a Traveller. The Red Indian ....

The old expressions are now seen as insulting. 

The patronising power of the state, the inclination to build reservations, mental or physical, has been at work.

Just for the tourists - smallholding and homesteading will become the same.

A barren landscape empty of animals.

The warning signs for self-sufficiency are there too.

Now factory farming is heading ever more quickly into disrepute in Europe, it has become fashionable to purloin the vocabulary of the homesteader and employ it for commercial advantage.

They have organisations and officers, fees and subscriptions.

Don't be misled - just a new form of factory farming. They take the words devalue them with sleaze - and forbid their use to the free and independent spirit.

They took free-range, abused the hens and the words - and now seek to bar the cockerel from the muck heap as a health risk.

A symbol of freedom.

So, a modern Robin Hood, we may not be. It is not our style.

Although our life may occasionally resemble "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," we are far from being outlaws.

We prefer to harass their pretensions and show them up for the fools and rogues that they are.

Politics, sure, but if we do not attack back, there will be nothing left of our dreams.

You can return to Five Years On to read about our conclusions on the first years of self-sufficiency.

fighting back

from

Hangman's Cottage, just to the south of Misery Corner.