Podcast 5

The rambling podcast.

TV Programme - No Turning Back
Boring Flooring
Bad Backs and starvation
Poor sound quality
Sticky Flooring
Horrible Buses
Matt is a little horse
The Overspent American
I don't want to be famous
I feel a jingle coming on
Canadian Election
Stephen Harper and Same Sex Marriage debate
Martha Stewart and Paul Martin and pumpkins
The dreadful Thatcher Years in the UK
Scott Brison
Lib Dems and BBC Homophobia

Good things:

MSN and Broadband for Matt's mother
Preserving Your Harvest Book cheap from the US

Bad things

First Bus
First Direct

Peace and prosperity

I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about peace. Not the vague ill defined peace that the Barbie clones talk about at pageants, but the peace and more importantly the quiet that many down shifters crave and that so often inspires the move away from the rat race.

I travelled to work today on the bus, not in itself a world shaking event or of any great importance, but today I was shown just how important peace and quiet has become to me. This morning I was surrounded on all sides by people with personal music players - each one, turned up too loud and each one thumping away some indescribable beat and hiss that intruded on my journey. Halfway through, someone at the back of the bus decided that the experience was just not anti social enough, so lit a cigarette and started playing some thrashing tinny music through the loudspeaker on his mobile phone. Needless to say, by the time I arrived at my office I was tense, stressed to the point of having indegestion and feeling severely misanthropic. I would like to say that this was an isolated incident, but I can't. This was a fairly typical journey on the bus for me - out of control kids showing the world that they are tough and that they don't care about anything or anyone, and a bus full of people too tired, too frightened or just too complacent to challenge them.

So we seem now to live in a world obsessed with self, with appearance and with consumption. According to The Overspent American "Twenty-seven percent of all households making more than $100,000 a year say they cannot afford to buy everything they really need. Nearly 20 percent say they "spend nearly all their income on the basic necessities of life." In the $50,000-100,000 range, 39 percent and one-third feel this way, respectively. Overall, half the population of the richest country in the world say they cannot afford everything they really need. And it's not just the poorer half!" Conspicuous consumption seems to be everywhere I look at the moment - perhaps I'm more sensitive to it as we prepare to downshift, but perhaps its because more and more people are buying into the new consumerism of buy now and pay eventually - just so long as they can have it now and its the newest thing.

Now I cannot deny that I will have a wish list of things that will make my new life easier - perhaps I will want that compact tractor, that slightly more up market polytunnel, that goat with the go faster stripes, I think even the most hardened downshifted of us has a desire for a bit new kit to make our lives a little bit easier, I know that I can rarely look through Small Farm Canada or Mother Earth News without drooling over the home saw mills and wind turbines, but I suspect that our wish lists will be based on real rather than imagined needs (yeah, alright, I really don't need the high speed goat) and certainly not to keep up with the neighbours. Ok ok, I know that I'm basically preaching to the converted, after all we are a self selecting minority, we chose our eccentric lives and lets face it, none of us give a stuff what the world outside think, but as the world outside gets greedier we can risk becoming a little smug and a little over critical, and I think it is important that we too want and need things, we are human after all.

Podcast 4

Voluntary Simplicity

As I mentioned in last weekends podcast, downshifting means many different things to different people, and I wanted to clarify what I meant by that. To some its the full escape to the country experience, throw in some chickens and goats, stir and serve, but to others its just the culmination of their growing realisation that they can no longer sustain their current lifestyle and feel the need to slow down.

There is a similarity to voluntary simplicity, in fact most folk who downshift are doing so to live a simpler life, but living a simpler life doesn't necessarily mean eschewing technology - we're not all Luddites. In fact the Luddites actions were driven not by a desire for simplicity but by the threat to their livelihood by the increased mechanisation of the mills. I dream of wind and water turbines on our land, powering our house, heating our animal housing and eventually, charging up our electric landrover. I have no intention of giving up my Xbox, laptop or home entertainment systems, but I plan to produce the energy to run them myself and with minimal cost to the planet . Voluntary simplicity means something else entirely to me, just as it will mean something different to you.

Some people who practice voluntary simplicity act consciously to reduce their need for purchased services or goods and, by extension, their need to sell their time for money. Some will spend the extra free time this generates helping their family or others in a voluntary way. Others may spend the extra free time to improve their own quality of life, without regard for the well being of others and lets face it, growing your own food, tending your animals and knitting your own yogurt takes up a lot more time than nipping down to Tescburys for a pint of milk. Your house cow needs milking twice a day, and all that lovely fresh unpastureised milk needs processing. You need to make sure that you either grow or buy enough fodder for the winter, you need to make sure that your lovely bovine is healthy and she will need to be mated regularly to make sure that she keeps in milk, you then need to make a decision about your calf/s. (a lot of work for your daily pinta!)

Downshifting to smallholding may mean that you are living a simpler life, but it is by no means an easier or less busy one. Its not all roses around the front door and long walks with the dogs, but so very much worth it.

Additional RSS Feed

I have added a second RSS feed to the site. If you have already subscribed to the site information by RSS you will now only be updated with new podcasts and new video. This is to ensure that iTunes does not report errors when you try to subscribe and the last posting was not audio or video.

If you wish to subscribe to a feed which includes all the podcasts plus text postings, please click the link on the right or here.

If you do not understand RSS, the BBC have a reasonable explanation here.

You can of course continue to ignore RSS and just come and look at the site from www.downshiftme.com

Podcast 3

Our third podcast with special guest sound effects from our cat Spencer.

Find us on iTunes

If you use an ipod and load it up using "iTunes" you can now subscribe to our podcast on there.

If you open the iTunes program, select the music store, and search for downshiftme in the search box on the top right.

There is a button to click to subscribe to the podcast to have episodes automagically downloaded to iTunes for you. You can then load your ipod or listen on your PC.

Quote from the film "Fight Club"

The full quote from the character "Tyler Durdan" in the film "Fight Club":

"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off"

Podcast 2

Our second podcast is now recorded. Weighing in at just over 20 minutes and just under 10mb in size. Please let us know what you think.

Our second podcast even includes our new intro tune which is from German band Chronos.

Video - AJ on our last day in NS

Click to watch video

Our last day in Nova Scotia in June. This is the last video from our trip in June. I hope you have enjoyed them and not been too bored. We do tend to repeat ourselves!

Video - AJ later on the fourth day in NS

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At the end of our fourth day in Nova Scotia we stopped off in Digby in the late afternoon. This video is quite long and is almost an 8mb download. You may wish to right click and "save target as" or "save link as" to download the video file to your PC first and then launch it.