Free The Moneyless Man by Mark Boyle Page A

and meet the volunteers. Money-free for only a couple of hours and I was starting to feel the pressure. I quickly amplified that pressure by telling millions of viewers exactly what I was about to attempt. Even Fergus’s sister, who didn’t know we were good friends, sent him a message to say she had just heard on the news about some guy in Bristol who was going to be living without money and that she thought he would be interested. There really was no backing out.
    The good news was that visitor numbers on the Freeconomy Community website were going through the roof, with four or five new members joining every minute, thanks both to the Breakfast interviews and the fact that Yahoo had put the story on their news homepage. Luckily, a local web developer, Matt Cantillon, who had joined the Freeconomy Community months earlier, had offered to host the website for free. This meant no money was needed to keep the site running, no matter how much traffic it got. This wasn’t a one-way transaction; Matt frequently used the site to find free help for the animal rescueproject he had set up the previous year and I suppose hosting was the most useful ‘skill’ he could offer. This summed up the spirit of the community perfectly and Matt and I became good friends during the year.
    Fergus, Claire and I got to the venue pretty late and met the first ten volunteers from the Bristol Freeconomy group, ready to start preparing and chopping the food. We got the food together, ready for head chef, Corrine Whitman, to take on a scaled-up version of the BBC television show,
Ready, Steady, Cook
. On television, the chefs get twenty minutes to create a delicious dish from ingredients they’ve never seen. Likewise, Corinne had no idea what her ingredients were going to be until she arrived. And she had just six hours to turn a couple of tons of food into a delicious meal for what was to be a packed house of more than one hundred and fifty people.
    Although the job of quickly formulating various recipes was extremely challenging at that scale, especially as it was all vegan, she had the luxury of a huge choice. The mix had everything from local vegetables such as rainbow chard, celeriac and kohl rabi to wild mushrooms like chanterelles; from chickweed, nasturtium flowers and rosehips to a plethora of international foods like quinoa, bulgur wheat and couscous, which had traveled thousands of miles from places such as South Africa and New Zealand to end up in Bristolian trash cans. We ended up with so much food that we had to send some of the volunteers into the ‘bear pit’, a large circular underpass where drug addicts and homeless people often find shelter, to give out free food for the entire day. Corrine, backed by a growing army of volunteers, managed fantastically well and within an hour had pots and pans of various concoctions on the go, including Fergus’s amazing field blewit and wild garlic soup. I had to remind myself not to get too excited; my food wasn’t going to be of this standard every day for the next twelve months.
    The day went incredibly well. Inspired people unexpectedly volunteered; some of Bristol’s best acoustic musicians added an ambience to the occasion and the food was ‘to die for’. Everyone got free drinks and full service. They couldn’t believe their palates and, most kindly, told us so. Andy Hamilton, my self-sufficientish friend and home-brewing enthusiast, arrived with one hundred and twenty pints of his best beer, made from locally-foraged yarrow and his allotment-grown hops, as a treat for the volunteers. I finished the last interview of the day, for the
Wall Street Journal
, of all publications, a definite sign that Freeconomy was increasing in popularity. Exhausted and elated, I grabbed a glass of Andy’s finest.
    Seeing freeconomy work so well in action gave me so much confidence and satisfaction. I decided that if I did manage to make it through the year, I’d end it with something even