The art of downshifting – finding freedom with the simple life

Art supplies are horribly expensive. I suspect that the manufacturers of paints, pencils, inks etc believe that all artists are secretly making shedloads of money and only look shabby and live in garrets because they’re, you know, artists.

Here’s what you do if you want to make lots of money. Buy an ordinary, cheap, plastic toolbox, stencil the word ‘ArtBin’ on the side and pretend that the compartments sized to take screwdrivers and chisels are actually designed for pencils and brushes. Now sell it for four times the price you paid. (I actually have an ArtBin, bought when I was younger, had more money and was even more stupid.)

Now here’s what you do if you want to save money – especially if you’re a printmaker. Head over to the New Directions in Printmaking blog where Nik Semenoff will tell you how to use everyday materials in your work. It’ll save you a fortune, compared to buying fancy-labelled ‘art’ supplies, and it will open your eyes to new techniques and possibilities.

Even if you’re not into printmaking, take a look anyway. It may give you a new perspective on what materials you might consider suitable for making art.

I was interviewing a woman today who, like many British here, is heading back to the UK, French life not having worked out, and I was struck by some of the things in France that she had found hard. Not having central heating. Having to manage with a wood burner. Not having mains sewage.

She hadn’t experienced this level of ‘deprivation’ since she was a child, she said, and she was taking it very badly.

It struck me then quite how bloody soft a lot of British people seem to have become.

In the ten years since we left the UK, the standard of living there has risen higher and higher. Ipods, Iphones, broadband, master bedrooms ensuite, three cars in the garage. Put the average Brit down on a desert island these days and they’d be wondering what all the wet, salty stuff lapping at their feet was.

Life here in rural France isn’t deprived, I feel, so much as more real than the UK. Certainly, we heat with wood, or if we’re lucky (as we are) we can run oil-fired central heating for a few hours a day. And dealing with wood takes time and effort. But what is the problem with this? Why do British people want to everything without any sort of effort?

There are few things more satisfying than gazing at a couple of cords of wood you’ve just stacked in the barn, ready for winter. Just looking at it warms you up. In burning log after log all winter, you become keenly aware of how much fuel you’re using and how to be efficient with it – lighting the stove later on slightly warm days to make up for lighting it earlier on cold ones.

But the modern westerner wants to buy clothes, not learn to make them. Buy food, not learn to grow it. Click switches for heat and light, without wondering for one moment how it gets there and what it’s costing the environment.

The worst offender is probably sewage – the modern attitude to which is not so very far from those people in Brueghel’s paintings, hanging their arses out of the upstairs window. The attitude that if “I can’t see it, it must be gone…” Well, it’s not gone – it’s just gone somewhere else. It has turned into someone else’s problem. When you own a septic tank, your effluent is your problem.

I wonder if, with peak oil and the energy crisis, global warming and whatnot, we in the west are going to have to rein back our standard of living a notch or two and whether that might not be a very good thing. It will entail a new modus vivendi, probably one where we don’t get whatever we want, whenever we want it all the fucking time, as if we were spoiled children.

Take heating, for instance. Heating is a luxury, and the modern practice of heating all the rooms in the house, all the time, irrespective of whether or not you use them, is something that is frankly unsustainable. We need to focus instead on space heating, on wearing the right clothing and better insulation for housing. If Brits insulated their houses to Scandanavian standards, they would instantly cut their fuel bills by 3o per cent, but with current heating costs so low, there is little incentive. There is no need to indulge ourselves into thinking we can prance around in t-shirts in the middle of winter.

Currently, it is winter in Normandy, as everywhere else, and our temperatures haven’t got above freezing for some days. There’s 4in of snow on the ground and – of course – everything has come to a grinding halt. But we are as prepared as we can be for this, with woodburners and Calor gas and candles and camping-gas lamps, enough dried beans and rice to last a month, thermal underwear and the willingness (in my case) to wear a balaclava in bed until the spring because the bedroom temperature is 5 degrees.

I am not an Eskimo – I like to be warm and comfortable. But warmth and comfort are not ALL there is to life, and a life of endless warmth and comfort is not good for anyone, or for the planet either.

It’s not a new idea, but it’s one that needs reviving. Instead of going shopping when you feel like some new clothes, music or DVDs, why not ask your friends if they’ve got anything to give away?

Here in the depths of the French countryside, retail therapy isn’t really an option. Instead, when the acquisitive itch gets too strong, we get together and share.

Everyone we know has something they no longer need or want – something that is perfectly functional and too good to throw away, but is currently just gathering dust.

The idea of swap parties is catching on among trendy young women in the UK, I understand. But we’ve been doing it for years.

In France, they call it a bourse. It means ‘purse’ (in the British sense – ‘pocketbook’ to Americans), but the word is also used in the context of ‘exchange’ or ‘market’. The Bourse is the French stock exchange, and there are frequent ‘bourse des plantes’ or ‘bourse des vêtements’ events, which range from small, one-off markets to the equivalent of bring-and-buy sales.

In our case, bourses are even more casual affairs. We invite a bunch of friends to the house. Everyone brings stuff that’s cluttering their houses. It’s all laid out on tables and the floor and people help themselves. No money changes hands: it’s not about making cash.

Being friends – and being, mostly, British – we’re all terribly polite about it. There’s never any argument about who gets what. Most of the bourses take place during a Girls’ Night In, when all the wives and girlfriends get together to eat chocolate, drink and scream (at least, that’s what it sounds like from my hiding place in the office). Trish has described just such an evening here. It seems they spend half their time picking clothes for each other.

It’s perfect whichever way you look at it. You get something new. You get to rid yourself of some clutter. Objects get recycled in the best possible way – by simply extending their useful lives. And you get a good evening with friends into the bargain.

A few years back I used to enjoy a very guilty pleasure from watching a TV programme called Escape to the Country.

It was just another one of those estate agency programmes that litter the UK networks (Big Strong Boys, Place in the Sun, Big Strong Boys In The Sun, you know the kind of thing…). Each day, an aspiring couple, tired of the city, would decide to move to the country and task an estate agent with finding the right thing. Three or four properties would be chosen, and the people would view two of them. Brits being Brits, of course – a bunch of whingeing Poms – they’d never like any of them.

One thing that always struck me, though, was the repeatedly expressed opinion (by the women) that moving to the countryside would entail less housework because ‘it’s so much cleaner’.

Hah bloody hah I’d think. Cleaner my backside. You’ll learn, missy.

The countryside is filthy compared with the city. Spiders, spider webs, flies, fly shit, chestnut pollen, poplar fluff, willow seeds, stone dust, barley chaff, arsenic bugs, dead leaves, dust, mud. I wonder which bit of the countryside these women are planning to move to that’s magically cleaner than town. They’re in for a nasty shock.

I know because it was a shock to me. I was thinking about it again this weekend, as I scoured and scrubbed the kitchen and living room (penance for my taking all Saturday off to drive around the region, having a girly good time while the DH was working).

It starts in spring, when the house fills up with pollen and seeds – hazelnut, followed by poplar, followed by willow, which carpets the courtyard (and our ground floor) in white bunnies (called “kittens” in French). Then comes the chestnut pollen, which smells exactly like semen, in case you didn’t know – hence the local name ‘spunk trees’.

Meanwhile, in the gravel courtyard, up comes whatever my farmer neighbour Patrick planted last year, seeded into every crack. Every other year it’s wheat, but we’ve had maize, barley, rye and oats as well. Oats are particularly persistent, being a very natural sort of cereal and if I don’t get them all out, by late summer I’ve lost the path to the woodshed.

In an old stone house like this, the stone constantly sheds. Nobody told me that, did they? This house is ‘granite doux’, and doux (soft) it certainly is. It has to be constantly vacuumed to keep the dust at bay, and the rough, uneven surface provides a lovely home for spiders.

Spiders, of course, are just a way of life. We have to pretend different to visitors, but there are big crawly ones hiding in every crack, and overnight some of them will spin webs across a doorway or over a mirror. I get rid of them with a big brush that looks like a giant loo brush – the best thing ever invented, but you can never stay on top of them. “A happy home has spider’s webs,” say the French, so I’m happy to go with that. They’re at their worst in summer.

I don’t kill them though – being a bit of a Buddhist – so I catch them in a big plastic jar with a lid and put them outside (my job, since the DH is scared witless of them). After all, spiders kill flies, which are much more of a problem. They start as soon as the weather warms up, coming out to feed on the ivy, and by mid-summer most of us here have fly papers (cat-friendly, of course) in every room, buzzing frantically with dying insects. I also have a bead curtain at the doorway. It is pretty useless, but I can’t bear fly screens. We only put these up once the mozzies start in late summer, and only then out of dire necessity.

With the flies, comes fly shit – something I’d never encountered before moving to France. Little brown or black dots of velcro-like persistence that coat all your windows, along with every cup, plate or pan you leave out on show. I quickly learned, in our open-plan kitchen, to wash utensils before every use. And after the flies come the wasps, attracted by our calva pear orchard and as insistent as they are dumb. The only things worse are the hornets, the sight of which has me running for cover. With these beasts, I am not going to argue.

Then there’s the pets. Who doesn’t love the little darlings? But with six cats and a big-pawed mud magnet of a spaniel, no surface stays print-free for long, as the cats leap up with fur wet from the grass onto the sideboard and coffee table, and every two weeks there’s a faint brown line right round the sofa where the dog’s rubbed himself dry. Thank heavens for removable covers on all the furniture, and pale grey paint on the woodwork (believe me, it hides a multitude of sins). From spring right through to winter the critters tread either dust or mud into the house in kilos, and you can’t teach them to wipe their feet.

There’s also the question of hair, and if anyone’s allergic to cats, they’d better never come in this house. Yesterday, after a period of neglect while I painted the bedroom, etc, I swept up a small dead animal’s worth of fur from the living room floor. I like sweeping, which is quite contemplative, but I also can’t afford to keep filling hoover bags, so it’s a necessity as well as a choice. A damp rag is the best thing for getting fur off close covers, if anyone’s interested.

Autumn, of course, means the house is full of leaves. Surrounded by orchard and woodland as we are, hundreds of kilos of leaves are shed around the house every year and a fair proportion has to make its way indoors, along with the odd rotting apple brought in by mutley as a toy.

Then, come winter, there’s just as much muck in the house, only it’s a different colour. As anyone with a woodburner will tell you, your house is covered with a fine layer of ash the whole time you use it, along with soot that drops out of the chimney and coats everything around the stove. Ours is peculiarly crystalline and gritty, which is just as well, as we usually get a bird or two down there each season, and you can brush it off a kestrel or an owl relatively well. But it renders housework like the Forth Bridge. I can write my name in the dust an hour after cleaning and whenever it rains, great rivulets of soot and rust pour down the back of the register plate over my freshly painted stonework, which gets whitewashed every summer.

So now you know, country lovers. There’s a reason we country dwellers all have hard floors and no curtains. And in this house at least, we have two rules: never start cleaning, and whatever you do, never look up.

The DH and I were having another one of those discussions over the weekend – how to reduce our bills and at the same time go more eco-friendly.

We are all for being green, as I’m sure most people are, but the primary push is probably going to be forced on all of us. For instance, we stopped using our tumble dryer a year ago in order to reduce our electricity bill, and for the same reason, we now wash up by hand rather than using the dishwasher. (In any case, it broke, and the part was a fortune, and we can’t afford a new machine.) So back we are (or rather, the DH is) washing up with a bowl and soapy water. It is not so bad, really, and at least enables us to use our nice raku dinnerware, which was too delicate for the machine.

A bunch of us girlfriends also wanted to try soap nuts, so we split a 20-euro bag between four of us (giving each of us enough nuts for six months). The verdict so far is pretty positive – the soap nuts seem to get your clothes as clean as old-style washing powders or liquids, and leave no residue in your clothes to irritate sensitive skin. The only drawback is that the clothes don’t smell fresh. They don’t smell dirty either, of course, they just don’t smell at all. Perhaps this is something we’ll all get used to – you can put a few drops of essential oil in the dispenser if you want, but I don’t like to do it too often because we have a septic tank.

Another thing that’s on our minds is lighting, because the old-style incandescent lightbulbs are being phased out now, and that will mean switching over to energy-saving bulbs, like it or not. Which is fine, even though they’re three times the price, because they last virtually forever and they use, say, 11 watts of electricity instead of 60, which will mean a massive reduction in consumption. But in our case, it also remains replacing all our light fittings, because our current ones won’t take eco-friendly bulbs.

We have a dimmer switch for the main lights, and that’s a no-no for energy-saving bulbs, so it will have to come out. This house is also French but the people who restored it from a ruin were British and they brought over British fixtures with them – crucially, these take bayonet-fitting bulbs. Try getting those in France. It’s hard enough to get incandescent ones, but in long-life, it’s virtually impossible. So every British light fitting in the house will have to come out and be replaced with a French one – that’s 14 fittings.

Oh la. It can’t be helped. It is what we call the Montcocher effect – we try to do the simplest thing, like put up a shelf, and it entails some massive palaver with drills and rawlplugs and special screws and I know not what. But once again, when it’s done, it will be done, and I’m sure we’ll be glad of it.

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.