scruffian

This blog has a new address: ben.blog.

Also, my daily haiku site has a new address: haiku.blog.

I am part of the team behind get.blog; a place to get your own .blog address; come visit if you’d like one.

If you watch the video carefully you can see that I am already off the ground at the point where I enter the frame.

After reading about Assya Barrette’s 200 days without buying anything, I decided to take on an easier version of the same challenge – to not buy anything for 100 days.

This did not apply to consumables (food, drink etc) or to experiences (staying in a hotel, going out for dinner), or to virtual goods (audiobooks, music subscriptions). The idea was to try to reduce the amount of waste I generate by not buying the things in the first place.

In some way this made life easier. When in those awful gift shops I was faced with difficult questions from the children about what hideous thing they could purchase, the answer was simple – none. When faced with difficult questions about what type of [insert new gadget here] to purchase, I didn’t need to worry – it wasn’t an option.

The one challenge to this was an axe. Since this winter we heated our house using only wood I have chopped myself, an axe is a fairly essential item. I have about four axes. Most of them are old and short handled, or snapped in half. I had been using the same splitting maul for all of our logs for about 18 months, and about halfway into the 100 days the handle snapped in half. I tried continuing with half an axe but it just took way too long, so I cheated and bought this beast:

April 10th was the one hundred and first day of 2016 and my consumerism fast is over. Over these one hundred days there are many things I wanted to purchase that I never did. Now I can’t remember them, so I guess I’ll never buy them. There is one thing that I do remember though. I really need some socks.

Our house has gas fired central heating, but 2 years ago we had a wood burning stove installed, as an alternative means of heating. I made friends with a local tree surgeon who keeps me busy with a constant supply of freshly cut logs. It seems that winter is more or less over now, so I feel confident that we can claim that this winter we didn’t need to use the gas heating once.

Its been more than a year since we used the gas to heat the house; an achievement we are proud of. It takes a lot of work to cut, stack and dry all our fuel. Lighting the fire every day and keeping it burning is a small chore but it requires attention.

There were several factors that made this possible. Firstly this winter was relatively mild. Secondly we had built up a big supply of wood over the last two years which mean we had enough seasoned wood to keep us going.

Relying on the stove as our only means of heating is challenging but also rewarding. By using this free supply of wood for heating our house, we save a money on our fuel bills, and also help the environment but reducing our reliance on fossil fuels.

A few years ago I would commute to work every day by train. Here are some announcements I collected during these journeys:

Short trains

I would like to apologise for the short formation of the train today. This is due to unavailable stock available. I do apologise for the short formation of the coaches this evening.

A regular conductor

We are just arriving at London Bridge where this service will terminate. Please remember to take all your baggage personal belongings with you. Please don’t forget mobile phones, laptop computers, gloves, scarves, bobbly hats, umbrellas, sandwiches, livestock, artificial limbs. and if you have any children, please take them with you as well. Thank you for travelling with Southern. let’s hope the rest of your day is wonderful.

Pigs

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, this is your conductor speaking. I have a brief announcement for you this evening, how can I put it, well, we have pigs on the line this evening. Once the pigs are cleared we can be on our way as soon as possible

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, this is your conductor speaking. We still have no more news on the pig situation. All I can do is apologise for the delay. Hopefully we will be on our way very soon.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, this is your conductor speaking. Once again I do apologise for the delay on this service. We still haven’t sorted out the problem with the livestock running about on our network. Once again i do apologise for the delay on this service but i actually do not know how long we are going to be here

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, this is your conductor speaking. I am just letting you know there is movement up in front so give it a few minutes and we will be on our way. Once again i do apologise for the delay on our service this evening

This was the last we ever heard about the pig situation.

A year ago I started a project to write a haiku every day. These 366 haiku can be found on diurnalhaiku.wordpress.com.

The haiku act as a mini diary. I can remember where I was when I wrote many of them, and what inspired them.

This is a song I wrote with Rebekah. Well, she wrote the words and the music, and I helped when she got stuck.

This was a time in our life when I was out of the house working in the city for 12-14 hours a day, and she was at home in the countryside with the children. The video tries to capture this disconnect in our lives at that time.

It’s also on vimeo if youtube isn’t your cup of tea.

Growing Wild is now on Spotify.