The art of downshifting – finding freedom with the simple life

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.

I was thinking the other day about wabi-sabi, which is a Japanese philosophy I follow, and it made me think of my parents’ house and what a lesson it was to me in interior design. For all the wrong reasons.

The house was a council property, built in 1947 and designed by some enlightened architect, who got the entire housing estate right.

I didn’t know how lucky I was, growing up in that house. It wasn’t large, but it was designed in a spacious way. It was brick-built, with solid internal walls. There were big casement windows everywhere that opened out fully. There was crosslight. There were French windows in the living room, giving out onto large gardens and – in our case – woodland right down one side, as we were the last house in a cul-de-sac.

Downstairs, a front door flanked by a frosted glass window that flooded the hallway with light led to stairs to the upper floor and a corridor to the kitchen, and a built-in rack for coats. The kitchen was a masterpiece of design – a coal-burning stove in one corner, raised on a stone dais; a big ceramic Butler sink with teak drainers; a huge north-facing larder with real stone shelves for keeping milk and butter cool (this was in the days before many people had refrigerators).

A door led to a rear corridor and thence to a room that most people used for storage or as a workroom (later, with increasing prosperity, for freezers etc, and later still my father made his wine in here). In front of it was the coal-hole (we still ran on coal then – several tons of it a year), and a cubbyhole for the bins. There was also an outside loo, so you didn’t have to stomp upstairs in your wellies. This section had stable doors, though most people closed it off with full doors for greater security.

The living room, like the whole ground floor, was tiled in terracotta and black tiles, laid in a square pattern, and the deep windowsills were terrazzo. All the doors were panelled oak.

Upstairs, two large bedrooms overlooked the street, with a small back bedroom and a bathroom (cast-iron bathtub) overlooking the garden, all with large casement windows. A massive cupboard for storage was built-in at the top of the stairs, and another, with slatted shelves, was built in as an airing cupboard over the hot water tank in the bathroom. Alcoves in every bedroom were big enough to take wardrobes or to build in closets.

Add the huge attic, and you can see how much space there was in this small house – a workshop, storage for bikes, two toilets. But of course, my parents, being aspirational like most people, proceeded to clutter it up.

The first thing I remember them doing was ripping out the Butler sink. Who could have told them then that these ‘stone’ sinks would one day be so desirable, along with the sturdy brass taps they loathed? In went the shallow stainless steel sink with built-in drainers so beloved of the 1960s (I assume the teak ones went in the fire…). In place of the old wooden worktop, they installed a yellow laminate work surface – laminate being the fresh new thing. Because they’d turned the kitchen around, you now couldn’t reach the windows to open them.

The larder, designed to keep food cold, became home instead to the spindryer (no tumble-dryers in those days) and storage for mountains of crockery, which was always glacial (they did, at least, keep bread in here, where it wouldn’t spoil). Meanwhile, they built a cupboard above the fridge, in the alcove opposite, and kept the canned food and baked goods here, where they suffered from the warmth rising from the heat exchanger.

The kitchen was designed to eat in, near the small coal stove, but instead, my mum and dad set up a huge oak dining table in front of the French windows in the living room, blocking both light and access to the garden. I barely saw those windows open twice a year (in fact, for most of my life they were painted shut). In every place, in every room they placed huge, unwieldy pieces of furniture that you had to squeeze around, and the outside loo was usually home to a lawnmower and completely unusable.

The tile floors, of course, to them were a sign of poverty, so in the living room they laid wall-to-wall carpet. But they couldn’t afford a good wool carpet, so it was an acrylic carpet of unimaginable awfulness – a cream background with a screaming floral pattern.  Nor did it actually meet the wall at one side, so they shoved in another bit of carpet that didn’t match. Later, they would replace this carpet with one even more vomit-inducing, in shades of green and orange. In the hallway, the carpet that covered the tiles was protected in turn with a plastic runner that transformed the corridor into a slipway – lethal on a wet day. In the kitchen, the ceramic tile was covered with floral lino, and then with vinyl tiles in blue and black.

The green and orange carpet in the living room which they laid in the 70s matched the new wallpaper, which was a design of huge green circles in vertical rows – as big as a dinner plate – and, naturally, in wash-down vinyl, as if a house was something that has to be steam-cleaned every five minutes to keep it hygienic. This replaced the simple whitewash with which the house had been supplied and you can imagine the effect of all these enormous patterns crowding in on one another.

Meanwhile, the windowsills became home to pot plants by the dozen, blocking the light and shedding leaves everywhere and making the windows impossible to open. Conforming to the social norms, the three-piece suite (which they retained even when there were only two of them in the house) took up almost the entire floor space.

While downstairs was cluttered beyond belief, especially after my parents began to collect antiques in the late 70s, the upstairs remained almost hostile in its bleakness. Freezing cold for much of the year (no central heating in those days), it did have carpets (though no underlay, as they couldn’t afford it), but my parents never had more than a bare lightbulb handing from the ceiling in their bedroom. I don’t even remember a bedside lamp, though I’m guessing my mum must have had one. Upstairs was not somewhere you hung around – I used to put my clothes in front of the living room fire for the next day, so they’d be warm enough to get into.

It pains me now to think how different the house might have been if my parents had been able to accept what it was instead of fighting it. To have a few simple, plain – perhaps country – things rather than aspiring to middle-class tastes that they could only fall short of. If, basically, the interior had been more wabi-sabi.

Imagine it with those simple, tiled floors in place, and a few scattered rugs, with rough-plastered walls, with bleached floorboards upstairs and an iron bedstead (instead of my 70s divan with its plastic-covered headboard). With the storage used properly and all the remaining spaces left empty.

The truth was, the house had a wonderful Vermeer-like simplicity about it that my parents just couldn’t recognise (and nor, as a child, of course, could I). I’ve seen it since in Lutyen’s houses and Tudor houses and in farmhouses all over this region of France, houses with an enormous comfort and quietude about them – settings for the fabric of life.

The key elements are that everything is well-made and fit for its purpose, and our house fitted that bill. It used good and honest materials that needed to make no apologies for themselves – brick and stone, terrazzo and tile, wood and glass. There was masses of storage and room to build in more. Above all, it had the two most crucial components any house requires – space and light. But my parents squandered it like many people, by stuffing their home with clutter that they spent their lives cleaning and manoevring around and insuring and repairing. In later years, it was more museum than house and it felt to me as if the house owned them rather than the other way around.

The house is now in other people’s hands. I haven’t seen it in decades and I only hope that it is faring better under new ownership. But Britain being what it is, I’d bet you a tenner that it still has fitted carpets…

I got a fun press release from Lifesworth this morning.

Apparently, in the UK at least, you’re ‘worth’ the most at the age of 46.

They’re talking in terms of personal possessions, of course, not your real worth (don’t get me started…). The average mid-life Brit apparently owns about £40k’s worth of goods and chattels – more than you ever have in your life before or afterwards. Interestingly, though, that same average Brit also believes their personal possessions amount to about £28k and underinsures them accordingly.

This, of course, is Lifesworth’s objective – to get you to up your insurance premiums, but I must confess the idea of being ‘worth’ £40k made me laugh out loud. I doubt I am ‘worth’ half this now, and it’s very definitely by design.

Over the years, I’ve come to the belief that people are at their most free and creative when they’re not burdened by possessions. Sure, it’s great to own things, but once you’ve got them, you have to worry about them. Clean them, dust them, store them, take care of them, insure them. Is this really a good idea? Better to have plates you can afford to break, clothes you can afford to ruin without there being any heartache involved. Then you don’t have to work so hard to support a lifestyle. Maybe you can just have a life instead.

The DH and I, some 10 years ago, were forcibly relieved of much of our burden of possessions by a burglary. After the initial relief that no-one was hurt (the house was empty at the time), came the absolute fury about what had been taken – our wedding presents to each other, the Victorian writing box my parents gave me when I was 16, Steve’s favourite watch, the World War II marching compass I’d bought him in six instalments, his entire collection of aviation memorabilia, my late father’s clock. There were also our computers, all of our coats, the throws off the sofas, the curtain tie-backs – a strange assortment of finds. It was Christmas, and they had gone shopping in our house.

A wealthy friend patted me on the head and said: “Trish, they’re only things,” which only incensed me more because a: his parents subbed his lifestyle and he’d never had to work, and b: many of them were things that I had bought and paid for, worked many hours at a job I hated in order to own. They were MINE, for God’s sake.

And then I thought again. Why exactly was I working all these awful hours in horrible jobs just in order to buy stuff? None of it was necessary stuff – it was pretty, it was nice to have, but it wasn’t the roof over my head, it wasn’t food on the table. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t make a difference. Sure, it’s nice to be surrounded by pretty things, but it’s not necessary to fulfilment.

Some of the items had sentimental value, but this too is an imaginary construct. I didn’t drop dead for the loss of any of them. And the truth may be something else, too. Every time I looked at that clock I remembered that my mother wouldn’t give it to me when dad died but had made me pay £200 for it. Whenever I looked at the writing box, I was chastened by the split it had picked up when I placed it too close to a radiator. Steve had bought his favourite watch the same day as a near-identical one for his ex-wife, which coloured my view of it somewhat.

A couple of years went by and although we sometimes winced when we thought of what had been taken, we found we didn’t need to replace much, other than the work computers. When we did buy, we hit on a strategy of buying only things we could use, not things that were purely ornamental. And gradually, gradually, we began to divest.

I can’t remember now what went first, but every year that goes by, we have sloughed off more of our belongings, and every year we feel better for it. We’ve got rid of clothes, books we’ll never read again, ripped all our CDs into I-Tunes and chucked the discs, put item after item of furniture into the local depot vente. The house feels bigger, emptier, more spacious. There is less cleaning to do, less maneouvring around things. Both our lives and our souls free freer for it, and I hope, in time, to get to a stage where nothing I own has ANY monetary value at all.

I wonder where this would put me on the Lifesworth scale? Probably a complete loser. But I frankly I have no truck with a society where a person’s worth is calculated by what they own and not by what they contribute. If the latter was calculated, where on this scale would the average lawyer, PR executive or stockbroker be? A damn sight further down than the lowly-paid nurse or cleaner or ambulance driver.

If you want to calculate your worth on Lifesworth, click here (only relevant to UK residents).

Average age and value of possessions in the UK
20 - £24,548
30 - £34,823
40 - £40,125
50 - £40,454
60 - £35,810
70 - £26,192

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.