Free The Moneyless Man by Mark Boyle Page B

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6
THE MONEYLESS ROUTINE
     
MY FIRST WEEK OF OFFICIAL POVERTY
     
    Even normal change can be destabilizing; think how you felt when you had to move house, start a new job or make any changes to your usual lifestyle. You can imagine how it feels to wake up one morning and realize that you can neither receive nor spend a single penny for another 364 days. When I was younger I found giving up chocolate or swearing for the thirty days of Lent a real struggle. Happily, swearing was free and I could continue to do it as much as I liked. My Irish upbringing meant it played an important role in expressing both elation and despair; I had a hunch the coming year was going to contain lots of these emotions.
    The morning after the free feast, I woke up at nine o’clock, which was a real sleep-in for me. The adrenaline from the last few days had taken its toll; I felt a little fragile and empty. I ate someof the fruit and bread left from the day before and headed for the Permaculture event at which I was speaking. The last two days had been a circus. The real year now began. Instead of being in the newspapers, I would be wiping my rear end with them.
    Life without money started smoothly, with no major catastrophes in the first few days. I’d always felt that things would get increasingly difficult the further into my year I went. Stuff would break, I’d run out of supplies and accidents would happen. However, at the beginning, I still had a little bit of everything. This was a good thing. After only a couple of days, I realized that time was my most precious commodity. First, going off-grid was very time-consuming. No switches to turn on energy; even charging up my laptop was a mission. In the dark, I had to hold the wind-up flashlight in my mouth as I screwed the cable of the laptop’s car adapter to the solar panel’s charge regulator. It was such a tight space that it frequently took me five minutes to get it plugged in properly.
    To compound my lack of time, I spent far too much time in that critical first week speaking to journalists, filming bits and pieces and writing emails to people who had contacted me with questions, opinions and messages of support. This was neither the slow life of self-sufficiency nor the fast life of the city: it was both. Just as the stream started to dwindle, the
Daily Mirror
sent along a reporter for a day, to see how I lived. This was a very positive thing; ten years ago this newspaper would never have been interested in somebody living without money. In some ways it symbolized how far the environmental movement had come, although the credit crunch had doubtless played a part in their decision to follow the story. The article came out fairly well and was mostly positive, if rather sensational. They quoted me as saying ‘Gandhi blew my mind, man’, when what I had really said was ‘I’ve been inspired by Gandhi in the past’. To convey to the public that I pick nettles every morning for my tea, they wrote,‘Every morning at 7:15 am he crawls on his hands and knees into a field of nettles’. I’m living without money; I’m not crazy!
    When you do an interview for the BBC, usually the
Guardian
or
The Times
follows. From my two-page spread in the
Mirror
(with advertisements for Tesco and Boots juxtaposed beneath), I started getting calls from a section of the media I had never engaged with. The
Trisha Goddard Show
(a UK talk show) wanted me to come on the show with Claire, to ask her how terrible it was to be in a relationship with a man who had no money. I wasn’t interested, but they didn’t stop ringing until I said that conflict really wasn’t my thing and that it didn’t matter what they asked me, I wasn’t going to be negative. They never called again after that.
    I also got offers from other publications, including a women’s weekly magazine. I checked it out to see what I would be letting myself in for and I was appalled at its stories, from the sensational (a man who