Do Good Design

My dream kitchen, circa 1850. This gives you a flavour for the life I’m aiming to have, which is mighty different from what it was only 5 years ago…

Back in 2003, I wore a suit everyday to my corporate job across from the FBI. I got mugged at gunpoint, downed a raft of prescriptions for asthma and allergies, and couldn’t walk to work on Red Alert days, those days in DC when the air is so polluted it’s a health risk to breathe.

I ate out a lot (how I miss sushi), and dined in on Annie’s macaroni and cheese, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and snacks from the Korean corner shop.

That all changed when I came to Scotland on a holiday, met my husband, and didn’t bother to take the return flight home.

Since then, I feel like I’ve been on a steady meander away from city living, or even suburban living (which is what I grew up with in Simsbury, Connecticut). Partially thanks to my husband Malcolm’s interest in bushcraft and all things pre-Industrial Revolution, and partially because it seems to make me happier.

This week, we move to a house 4 miles outside of Stromness, right on the water, and it’s another milestone.

Up till now, we’ve lived in the heart of town where I popped over to the Deli at least once a day to pick up cheese or pizza or snacks. I’ve learned how to cook a bit, but still prefer to pop a deluxe frozen pizza in the oven to the rigamarole of making my own food (Malcolm does most of the cooking).

But like a lot of people, we’re getting fat, tired of all the plastic packaging around food, and less keen on dairy and wheat.

It’s also time to save money.

Both the UK and US are near debt crises, and the price of food and everything else is going up. Rather than take on debt or get jobs that would pay more but make us miserable, we’d like to try an experiment.

Personally, I like to think of Little House on the Prairie or Mrs. Weasley (without the magic, sadly). I’m going to grow our own vegetables, keep some hens, cook a lot more, play my fiddle, knit, spin and dye.

I’ll admit I feel a bit self-conscious about it all. First, that I seem to want to do all the “female” skills like cooking and textiles. I’d love to say I have a hankering for metalsmithing or dry-stone walling. But I don’t, and Malcolm does, and the glory of feminism is we women get to do what we choose.The second reason I feel a bit nervous is that I have little idea what I’m doing, and how many stories do you hear tell of foolish city folk with their romantic notions of country life?

Well I have no doubt I’ll make a right mess of gardening, but one can only try. I’m determined I’ll get there in the end, and I’ve got my trusted friends, books, to help me out.

Most importantly, I’m learning these old-fashioned skills, the ones my ancestors all knew intimately, because I have a deep and abiding love of good design, which means beauty and usefulness in everything that I do and have.

So I’m knitting a bulletin board to hang up inspirational pictures and notes, making a willow basket to gather wild foods, growing food that will taste better and be healthier.

As John Seymour says in The Forgotten Arts & Crafts:

“There never was a time when it was more important for the health and well-being of humankind that men and women should start to make real things with their own hands again. For a human being to spend a life pressing computer buttons, or doing boring and non-creative ‘jobs’ in a factory, is to spend a life in hell.

“Apart from the fact that the huge global monstrosity is not sustainable and is due to come crashing down anyway, the intolerable aridness and boredom for most people will enetually become unbearable and we will all rebel. We will seize the right again to make things of utility and beauty for ourselves, with our own intelligence and our own hands.”

It’s nothing so bold as No Impact Man, or one of many other people out there going the self-sufficiency route. That’s the dream eventually, but you’ve got to start somewhere, and I think now is the time.