Home Thoughts

George East looks back on living off the land and off his own wits

- George East

In my experience, most people like the idea of living the Good Life, but are not so keen when it comes to actually living it. I should make it clear that by the Good Life, I don’t mean larking around in a fountain in Rome with Anita Ekberg (à la La Dolce Vita). Or swanning around in the azure waters off Nice drinking bubbly on the deck of a luxury yacht which would make Sir Phillip Green’s latest look like a pedalo.

What I am on about is outdoor DIY, or the general delights (or not) of growing your own fruit, vegetables and livestock. I know of what I speak, as I suspect I am the originator of more failed selfsufficiency (or perhaps that should be self-survival) schemes than most. But more of that later.

Of course, the level and scale of activity ranges from keeping a few hens and a modest veg garden to full-blown attempts to live off what you make or grow. I know people in France who do live for almost free, but weaving our own clothes and keeping animals to kill and eat has never been our scene. In all our years in France, we were somewhere around nudging two on a scale of one to 10 as far as living off the land goes. Mind you, it didn’t start out that way.

Our first home in France didn’t even have a garden. Well, it did, but in the way things can be in rural areas, it belonged to the lady next door and, though she never used it and had a few acres elsewhere, she refused to even contemplate selling it.

Frustrated at not having even a corner of a foreign field to call our own, we went from landless to owning 10 acres of fields, orchards and woodlands with a river running through them.