The art of downshifting – finding freedom with the simple life

An old tyre protects a self-seeded sapling

Many of the trees in our garden are self-seeded saplings we’ve allowed to grow. We reckon we’ve added as many as 250 trees this way, some of which are now very large.

The problem comes when a seedling appears in areas of grass that we normally mow. If the grass grows too long before the first cut of the year, there’s a danger we won’t see the seedling and it gets cut down. We’ve tried to avoid this by marking seedlings with sticks. But even then, because we don’t have the time to trim around each seedling, and given that it’s difficult to mow very close, the seedling still gets swamped by a clump of grass.

Over the years, we’ve made very effective use of what the French call ‘toile de paillage’ (literally, straw cloth) – permeable plastic sheeting that suppresses growth while allowing water to penetrate. But it’s expensive. And when used in areas that we mow, there’s always a danger of clipping the plastic sheet, winding up with long threads wrapped around the drive shaft of the mower blades. This can cause a surprising amount of damage to the mower.

The plastic sheeting also needs to be held down by something. You can buy expensive spikes for this purpose – we used to have some plastic ones, but they’re all broken now. And with our rock-infested land, they rarely work well.

We’ve tried using rocks – we have plenty of those – or even faced granite stones from the long-demolished buildings that once stood on our land. But hitting them with the mower is no fun either.

One alternative is old carpet, if it consists only of natural fibres. This doesn’t need pinning down, but it presents the same mowing dangers as the plastic, so we use it only in areas well away from those we mow.

This year, we’re taking a recycling approach. I cut circles of the permeable plastic from an old sheet of the stuff we had lying around. These are held down by old tyres. These are easily seen – and thus avoided – when mowing. And if the mower does hit them, it’ll simply nudge them out of the way.

They’re not permanent features around the saplings: they’re needed only until the young trees are high enough to be clear of the grass.

As an alternative to the plastic sheet, we may also try using actual straw inside the tyres – we have an endless supply of this as we have friends who need to dispose of it when they muck-out their donkey enclosures.

End result: free trees that will grow faster because of this (free) protection.

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.