The art of downshifting – finding freedom with the simple life

As a devotee of the works of the late Rosemary Verey, for some years now, each Christmas morning, I’ve gone around the garden to see what’s in flower.

Ms Verey’s book The Garden in Winter is what first gave me the idea. Winter is my most dismal time of year and by February, after months of rain and fog I’m usually at a very low ebb. So when I first began to plant my garden, about seven years ago, my first priority was winter interest.

I’ve never bothered with herbaceous planting, as it will take me the next 20 years just to get the backbone of this garden in, so my focus has always been on trees and shrubs. That’s paying off in spades now, which is the happiest part of woody plants – they may be expensive to buy, and an effort to plant, but every year they just get better and better.

Quite by accident, this year my bouquet contains more flowers than other winter interest (berry, bark and evergreen leaves). The biggest surprise was the Graham Thomas roses, of which there were half a dozen still in bloom on Christmas Day. My Graham Thomas is a complete thug and flowers prolifically despite its windswept Western-facing site. Each year the wind rips it free of the wall and today I’ll cut it to the ground in the hope that the new growth will face upwards rather than straight out at 45 degrees.

Also in flower was rosa Evelyn, another English Rose by David Austin, and much more tender. So too was mahonia media ‘Charity’, planted over the body of our beloved cat Worthing, and abelia grandiflora with its pinkish flowers and modest, shiny evergreen leaves.

An unknown spiraea which flowered in the spring and once again in autumn this year has lent its tiny white flowers, and my subtle parrotia persica is in flower too, with tiny dark-red flowers encased in brown velvet, which betray its relationship with the witch hazels. Real hazels come next, with their dull winter catkins, and finally, there is the mimosa, often cut to the ground by the Normandy winter, but always reappearing, a little forward of its old site. Its flowers are still in bud, but if it makes it through the winter, they’ll be heads of fluffy, yellow, vanilla scent by March.

Yesterday I forewent the peeling bark of rosa roxburghii, preferring to let it grow a little more before I prune it, but I took the dark red twigs of cornus ‘Gottschaud’,  the fiery-red twigs of cornus sanguinea ‘Winter Beauty’ and the egg-yolk yellow stems of salix vitellina. For a bit of structure, I also added stems of salix tortuosa – the Devil’s Claw Willow – which has shot to 20ft high in six years in spite of the steep, barren north-facing slope on which it’s planted.

The lovely red berries – disliked by the birds – are from cotoneaster cornubia, which shares that same slope and even though it was split right in half by the wind five years ago, still towers over my head.

Walking around the garden in the bitter weather is a wonderful reminder that the earth isn’t really dead and that plants need their winter hibernation like human beings need their sleep. Gathering my Christmas Day bouquet each year gives me a real lift, with its memories of summer and the promise of spring.

Europcar was named the world’s ‘leading green transport solution company’ at the 2008 World Travel Awards ceremony on December 2. The award is a new environmental award launched this year.

“We are truly proud to have won [this] award,” said Guirec Grand-Clément, global sales and marketing director of Europcar International.

“The ‘Green’ award recognises our commitment to a sustainable environmental policy that focuses on the safety and well-being of our customers, employees and partners.”

Last June, Europcar announced that it had received certification from Bureau Veritas for its “Green Charter,” which formalises its commitment to protecting the environment. It is the first such certification for a company in Europe by Bureau Veritas, the world leader in inspection and certification services applied to quality, health and hygiene, safety, the environment and social responsibility.

Downshifting leaves you time for the things you love

It wasn’t until recently that I finally realised that I’m a downshifter.

I mean, I know we live in the country and we survive on about a tenth of our previous income, and I make all our meals from scratch and we can’t afford to eat out… But it hadn’t quite dawned on me what a paradigm shift we’d made from our old lives in London.

We live in France, I should point out, and we were having a visit from close friends for the first time in a couple of years. S and I went out to lunch – a rare treat for me – while the boys went off to the Normandy landing beaches to paint the gun emplacements.

After we’d had our fill of wine and food, S turned to me and said gleefully: “Let’s go shopping!”

And I thought: “Where on earth would you do that?”

It suddenly occurred to me that it is literally years since I ‘went shopping’. Shopping in the sense of wandering around with money in your pocket looking for something to spend it on, or window shopping, or trying on dresses in department stores just for the hell of it.

I SHOP, of course. I shop every week at the market, at the supermarket -  food shopping, essentials shopping, picking up the socks and knickers with the groceries. And I allow myself a book every couple of months on Amazon, and once or twice a year I look at the gaps in my wardrobe and I get on Ebay to fill them. But one thing I don’t do is wander into shops looking for things I haven’t got and don’t need but just might fancy. Frankly, what’s the point?

I suppose that attitude might strike the average non-downshifter as rather grim. After all, shopping is fun (we’re constantly told). And it’s not, of course, as if I object to OWNING things. I own my house and my car, and a cupboard full of vintage cashmere that I delight in wearing – I am not quite ready to knit my own yoghurt just yet.

But the other side of the argument is that I don’t want to be owned BY my things. There are plenty of other things I can do instead of shopping that are more worthwhile and fulfilling – make jewellery, bake a crumble, make preserves, tend my garden, chat to a friend, walk my dog, do my yoga.

The trick, it seems to me in life, is to strike the balance between enjoying your things and being burdened by them and that is what downshifting is partly about. I never want again – and cannot afford – to buy something daft on impulse and then regret it. Nor do I want to live in a house that is a burden to clean, or own a car that is too expensive to run, or have a job that leaves me exhausted and angry at the end of the day.

People often a have a romantic idea about downshifting, but it isn’t about moving to the country and growing your own veg. It’s really about making a mental decision to free yourself of the endless desire for MORE. Then you can decide where you want your life to take you – a part-time job, perhaps, or one where you work partly from home; a smaller house that costs less to run; more free time for the things you enjoy.

I was talking about these issues to a friend recently – a ‘comfortably off’ wife of a lawyer, who is finding that the things in her life that were once assets have suddenly become burdens. The house in Spain, the two houses in France, the five-bedroom house in England that once gave them so much status. They’re all lovely to have, of course, but they’re also all items that have to be insured and maintained, and which incur taxes, just as her husband is retiring and they have to live on a greatly reduced income.

What, really, is the point of all this STUFF? After all, you can only live in one house at a time, only inhabit one room at a time. But it can be difficult to make the shift to wanting less when you live in a society that encourages you to want just the opposite. In the West, we judge our success by how much we own, not by how much we contribute. The more successful you are, the more things you HAVE – more houses, more cars, more books, more art, more clothes. We accumulate our shiny toys like bower birds.

We also live in a world that bombards us constantly with images of things we don’t really need or even really want, but which – the advertisers tell us – will show the world that we have really made it. We ‘need’ the right house, the right clothes, the right car, the right toilet paper. And we forget – or are not even aware – that this vast army of advertisers has only one role in life: to fill our hearts with discontent so that we will buy their products.

Freeing yourself from this pressure is difficult, but the good news is that you can do it in stages. You don’t need to pack up all your things and become Tom and Barbara Good overnight. You can turn off the TV one night a week. You can switch to a non-advertising channel. You can refuse a work promotion and opt for a four-day week instead.

For most of us, our real needs are simple and so is what makes us happy. A comfortable house, enough to eat and the ability to spend time with the people we love are more important than a high-end car, a month in Bali or a designer wardrobe. Money can bring comfort and it is very nice to have nice things – but it can’t bring fulfilment. For that, you need to work on your emotional and spiritual life, and success in those areas is not something you can buy.

Ten years ago, the DH and I earned £120k a year. I had over 40 work suits, a huge wardrobe of shoes, ate out at the best restaurants and spent £100 a month getting my hair cut at Vidal Sassoon’s. We also worked every hour God sent and were ill every weekend with stress. We barely saw each other and I ate three meals a day at my desk, putting £5,000 a year the way of Pret a Manger. Lucky them – it’s a lot of bagels.

Now we earn about £15k a year, and we don’t eat out or take expensive holidays, I dress in jeans and Uggs all day and we go out once in a blue moon. But on the upside we have far more free time, live in a beautiful place and are far more tranquil and contented. I no longer work 16-hour days or make five-hour commutes and the DH can spend much more time on creative writing and photography. We would not change it for the world.

At times, downshifting isn’t easy. Of course it would be nice to have a bit more money, especially now, in winter, when the fuel bills mount up and I’d give my eye teeth to be able to buy more wood for the burner. But isn’t it always nice to have a bit more money, no matter how rich you are? The trick is to know when you have enough.

It is also true that necessity is the mother of invention, and that the more you know, the less you need. Downshifting, though at times precarious, has made me more confident as a person, which is something I didn’t expect.

If I had had the money to buy plants, I wouldn’t have learned how to propagate them. If I had had the money for clothes, I wouldn’t have learned how to sew. If I had been able to afford meals out, I wouldn’t have become a good cook.

My skills were perhaps acquired unwillingly, but they are now mine forever, and having them makes me feel capable and confident about life and my place in it. As a friend once said: “The thing about you is that you could wash up on a desert island and you’d be just fine”.

That is one of the many benefits downshifting gives you – the ability to find out how competent you truly are. And that’s something else that money can’t buy.

Late on parade with this blog today.

The reason is, I’m trying to buy a new woodburner.

I recently had a small windfall when my pensions company demutualised and I found myself with shares I didn’t know I had. Since it was money I wasn’t expecting, spending it on a new woodburner seemed like a good idea. I don’t know how we’d ever afford one otherwise, and I want to do something to help my asthma.

Our current woodburner is 11 years old, and it’s the wrong type. So naive were we when we bought this house that we didn’t know the difference between a freestanding stove and an ‘insert’, so we simply bought the latter because it was the most powerful we could find.

For those who don’t know, inserts are designed to fit inside a closed fireplace. Only the front of them is visible, so the top, sides and back are all insulated to keep the heat in, and you drive the heat out of vents in the front by using fans.

However, we have an open fireplace, so what we should have bought was a freestanding stove, where the heat radiates from all sides. These generally don’t have fans, though some of the newer varieties use turbo chargers that redirect the hot air so that it comes out of the bottom of the stove, reducing the ceiling temperature and increasing the floor temperature (see drawing at right).

This is the type we’ve opted for – the Alsace Turbo 2 from a firm called Supra. The Alsace without turbo is the best-selling stove in France and several of our friends have it, and the result is houses that are far warmer and cosier than ours. It is also double combustion and a third more efficient than our current stove, which will mean should pay for itself over the course of two to four years.

Another mistake I made was that back when we bought this house, there wasn’t really an Internet, and I had a lot of trouble calculating how much kilowattage we would need (it was the kind of information heating engineers used to keep to themselves). Eventually Country Living magazine furnished some calculations, and I came up with a requirement of 12kw, so we bought a 12kw stove.

It’s never been anywhere near enough. Running both fans full pelt, we could just about cope, but our living room is 70sqm – the whole ground floor of the house – and it has quite a high ceiling. Recalculating recently on one of the many websites that now tell you how to do it comes up with a figure of 16kw – even more if you have an open staircase (which we do).

The room is also not insulated – none of these stone houses are. Instead, it relies on something called thermal mass to stay warm. You basically heat up the stone, which radiates heat back out, and the best bet is to do it slowly and gradually. We usually light our first fire on September 1st, well before we really need it, and stoke up the house a bit at a time. This summer’s been so rubbish, though that we actually lit one a day or two ago, more for psychological reasons than anything else.

Just to complicate matters, though possibly in a good way, the French are keen to push wood heating, so you’re entitled to a tax credit of 50 per cent of the cost of the stove if you install one of these whizzy new clean-burn jobs, which the Alsace Turbo is. The trouble is, we have no idea how to claim the tax credit, and I don’t know anyone who’s done it successfully. The criteria for obtaining it seem to vary wherever you look. One government site tells you that it doesn’t matter where you buy the stove, as long as you have it installed professionally. Another says you can only claim if both the supplier and the installer are professionals. Yet another tells you that the supplier and installer have to be the same person.

It is enough to make you tear your hair out, even if it wasn’t all in a foreign language. Though clearly, French people have no more of a clue than I do, as there are questions about it all over the French forums.

I am very nervous about getting this thing wrong, because, you see, I don’t know if we will ever have this kind of money to spend again in one hit, and there are plenty of other things that we need. For instance, I could easily buy a second-hand, more basic version of this stove for half the price and we could install it ourselves. No tax credit, but it would work out about the same in terms of money – a temptation when I’m not absolutely sure we’re going to get this money back. And for the same cost as a new stove, I could refit the bathroom or buy a new floor for this office, plus replace both of our office windows with double-glazed ones. It is a decision I don’t want to get wrong.

Oh la. Back to the drawing board. At least I’ve phoned the plumber already, and he will giving me a quote on installation. A lot depends on what he says, so wish me luck.